Card Sharks

possible.'

She didn't miss my hesitation before I said the word doctor. She gave me a look, and I had a feeling my smart mouth had just shoveled me out another hole, but she did lead me though the doors to the right of the desk, and down the hall lined with examination rooms. I conconcluded (correctly as I later found out), that the doors to the left led to the small fifty bed hospital.

As we walked I realized that what I'd taken for stains on the linoleum was actually dirt. It bugged me so I said, sharper than I should have, 'Doesn't anybody know how to use a mop around here?'

'It is long rain season, we are understaffed, and Doctor thinks it best if we concentrate our energies on patient care.'

'I didn't mean to imply that one of us health care professionals should sully our hands with menial labor. I was thinking about some kid. Pay him a little each week. That sort of thing.' Her flat, implacable stare was starting to get to me. I shut up.

'You have a lot to learn about Africa, Dr. Finn,' she said as she opened the door to Faneiul's office, and gestured me in.

She shut the door so fast and hard she almost caught my tail.

***

It took the French Schweitzer forty-five minutes to get around to me. By then I'd read all of his diplomas and citations three times, and perused the out of date medical journals twice, and decided I couldn't bear to look at pictures of him shaking hands with famous assholes again. Not that he didn't deserve all the kudos. His professional life had been an example of service and self-sacrifice spanning three continents. It was why I wanted to work with him. I'm just a typical American, and I hate to be kept waiting.

He wasn't what I'd expected even though I'd just finished looking at photos. He was much taller in person, an improbably long and lanky figure whose thin legs scissored along like a wading heron. A shaggy mop of grey brown hair, a small, receding chin that combined with thin, almost transparent eyebrows to give his face a naked look. That made the jutting beak of a nose all the more incongruous on that unfinished face.

His smile, however, was warmth itself. A big relief after the popsicle out front. He strode across the room with that sharp, jerking walk, his hand aggressively outthrust.

'Doctor Finn, how pleased I am to meet you at last.'

'And I you, sir.' He had a good shake, and there was none of that almost imperceptible withdrawal which you get from most nats.

'You have met Margaret?' I correctly gleaned that he meant the nurse, and nodded. 'Invaluable, but terrifying woman. She keeps me straightly in line,' he concluded with a laugh.

My response was the epitome of tact and diplomacy. 'I can see how she might,' I said, and then added. 'Well, I'm eager to get started.' I let my voice trail away suggestively.

'You don't want to see your, how do you American's put it, your digs first?'

'Digs is British, actually, but thanks no. They'll still be there tonight, and I've got the whole afternoon ahead of me. I'd rather work, check out the clinic, get acquainted with our patients.'

He laughed, a high whinnying sound. 'Good, an 'eager beaver' and that is an American idiom, yes?'

'Absolutely.'

'We will put you to work.'

'Good.'

So I began my life at Kilango Cha Jaha. Southwest of Nairobi our village was close enough to the city to obtain supplies with relative ease, but far enough away that the nats didn't have to look at us, and it was a real effort for Fundies to come out and raid the ghetto for fun.

My home was a traditionally shaped African hut, a rondavel. I bedded down on a mattress thrown on the dirt floor, and surrounded by mosquito netting. Thatch roofs are imminently practical, but unfortunately they are also great homesteads for bugs of every kind, shape and variety. And they grow them big in Africa. Mosquitoes the size of B-52's, bedbugs the size of bisons, roaches like touring limousines. I was especially tormented by critters with too many legs because I have a lot of hide, and it's naked to their assaults. I went through gallons of bug repellent, but I always managed to miss a place because it's tough to maneuver back across the entire length of my back and hindquarters. I considered trying the rhino's approach — find a big mud hole, wallow, and cake myself — but I didn't think the AMA would approve.

Housing might lack even the simplest of amenities, poverty and disease were rampant, but God, did we have scenery! Our setting was magnificent; rising up almost directly from the western edge of Kilango were the Ngong Hills. 'Hills' don't really do them justice; while the incline on the west was relatively gentle, when you reached the ridge top you were gazing down several thousand feet into the Great Rift Valley. Slither and skitter down this escarpment to the floor of the valley, and you were in the Ololkisalie Game Reserve.

It was there I met J.D. and Mosi. I had been mooching about the reserve when I came across the startling sight of a small herd of elephants calmly breaking down trees and masticating them. These were the first elephants I'd managed to find, and I quickly hid in the brush to watch. About a quarter of an hour later I was returned to my surroundings by a gun barrel being screwed into my left ear. I jumped, hollered, the elephants went pounding away, ears flying like sails, and trunks upraised, and a disgusted voice with a pronounced Aussie accent said, 'Well, I guess you aren't a poacher, but I'm damned if I know what you are.'

I risked a glance, and observed a stocky man of indeterminate years, a bush hat crammed down over his thinning fair hair, and a face so seamed and lined with wrinkles and old scars that he looked as if he'd been tied to the tracks, and toy trains had been run back and forth across his phiz for, oh, six or seven years.

Another man arose like a waking god from the brush off to my right. Well over six feet tall, he looked as if he'd been carved from a single block of obsidian.

'J.D.,' said the God of the Night. 'You are such an ignorant sod, I am sometimes ashamed to work with you.' J.D.'s response to this was to seize his left buttock, and shake it at his partner.

Eventually introductions were made. The elegant Zulu with the Oxford accent was Mosi Jomo, and the Aussie J.D. Snopes. They escorted me back to Kilango, and stayed for dinner and a few hands of poker. As they were leaving J.D. peered between my hind legs at my equipment, and said with a snort that I might want to stay out of Ololkisalie. I didn't understand so he carefully explained that with huevos like mine I might get shot so my parts could delight the palates of Arab or Chinese gourmands, or be ground up and fed to some Japanese businessman to improve his potency. When I refused to curtail my rambles, Mosi mildly suggested that I might want to fly an American flag off my tail, and be very, very careful. I said I would, we parted, and I'd made my first friends in Kenya.

Thereafter it became a weekly ritual to gather at either my hut or the wardens house in Ololkisalie for dinner and poker. I learned that Mosi played classical clarinet, and read Proust for fun. J.D. introduced me to Australian Rules Football, and proved to be a working man's philosopher. His comments on governments in general, and third world governments in particular, I have shamelessly incorporated as my own. They also consistently beat the … er … pants off me in poker.

During those first months my admiration for Dr. Faneuil grew until I was like some kind off primitive worshiper at the altar of a loving and mournful god. I had never seen a man work so tirelessly to ease the passing of the dying. If I came in to make late rounds I would hear his deep voice murmuring in Swahili or Kikuyu, and never platitudes. His bedside manner left his patients feeling valued and respected; not jokers, not dying meat, but human beings. When the struggle for another breath ended, he would walk away to weep alone. I ached to comfort him, to help him, to ease his and their pain. The only way I could think of was to stop the hemorrhage, and I didn't have a clue how to accomplish that. My first day I'd thought I'd be vaccinating happy babies, caring for minor injuries encountered in the fields, assisting Faneuil in surgery; in short, being a healer. Instead I had joined him as a ticket taker for Erebus. Death reveled in Kilango despite our best efforts.

I knew we were taking all possible precautions given the lack of funds, but I had done my residency at Cedar Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, and I was used to practicing medicine with the best that money could buy. Medicine in the third world is a whole other ball game. I'm convinced it was some doctor in Uganda, or Belize, or Cambodia who coined the phrase about necessity and mothers of invention.