Fletch, Too

Quietly, the policeman said, “Bless you.”

Fletch turned around. “Walter Fletcher? Is the man you are holding named Walter Fletcher, originally an American, Caucasian, somewhere in his forties?”

“Oh, yes,” the policeman said. “We know him well.”

“Distract her hands,” Carr muttered.

Fletch tickled the back of the little girl’s neck.

As her hands flew up, Carr’s huge, strong hands slipped the little girl’s leg bone back into alignment. First she giggled; then she yelped.

“It’s over, sweet. You’ll be a beautiful dancer when you get older.”

Carr slipped a strongly elastic brace over the girl’s foot and up her leg. The cut over the compound fracture was almost healed. The leg had been broken a week or more. He then splinted the leg.

“We do what we can,” Carr said. “Patent medicines.”

They had flown southeast from Nairobi.

At Wilson Airport, Juma had helped carry things from the Land-Rover to the airplane, had helped pack them in, then climbed into the backseat beside Barbara. Fletch had heard nothing said by anyone about Juma’s accompanying them. The snow skis were in the airplane’s aisle, almost the full length of the plane.

On the flight, Juma read a book, Ake, by Wole Soyinka.

Chin in hand, Barbara studied the landscape through the window.

From the air, Carr’s camp was barely noticeable. It was on the west side of the river in a natural clearing north of thick jungle. About twenty-five kilometers east sparkled the blue of the Indian Ocean.

The airstrip was just a two-wheeled track. There was a long cook tent, a small tent each side of it, and, at the front, a rectangular piece of canvas supported by four poles. A derelict Jeep was in the shade of a huge banyan tree.

Carr placed the airplane’s wheels in the ground tracks precisely. Fletch pushed open the door beside him. The heat was immediate, intense, humid.

About fifty people moved slowly from under the trees to greet them.

Watching the people, Carr flipped off the switches on his instrument panel. “Clinic’s open, I guess.”

Monkeys were everywhere, on the ground, in the huge banyan tree, on top of the tents, on the table and chairs under the horizontal canvas. There were papa monkeys with baby monkeys on their backs; mamma monkeys with infant monkeys at their breasts; children monkeys playing their own games up and down and around, everywhere.

“They bite,” Carr said. “They steal. They are no respecter of persons.”

Sheila, in tennis shorts and a preppy shirt opened at the collar, waited for them at the end of the runway track. On the tray she carried was a pitcher of lemonade and glasses. “All’s right here,” Sheila sang out to Carr the minute he stepped out onto the wing. “All’s right with you? Then all’s right with the world.”

“Find anything interesting while I was gone?” Carr asked.

“Yes,” Sheila said. “The spare keys to the Land-Rover you insisted you lost.”

Carr shrugged.

After putting the tray on the ground and pouring out the lemonade, Sheila hugged and kissed Carr. “My sweaty beast,” she said. She hugged and kissed Fletch when she understood who he was. “Good. We need some more brawn.” Hugged and kissed Barbara. “Excellent! A woman to catch me up with the world!”

Juma stood away, looking at Sheila sourly.

When Carr introduced them, Sheila gave a little wave of her hand. “Hello, there, Juma. Glad you came to join us.”

“I actually brought some half-decent steaks,” Carr said.

“I’m sure they were very dear.”

“Not as dear as the chicken.” A monkey was peering into the lemonade pitcher on the ground. Sheila gently guided it away with her boot.

Juma spoke quietly to Fletch. “Listen. Is that Carr’s woman?”

“I guess so. Sheila. Yes.”

Juma said, “I didn’t know that.”

“Nothing Roman turn up?” Carr asked Sheila as they walked toward the tents.

“Just the usual. Spear tips. A tusk. A skeleton.”

“Human?”

“Yes. A child. Fairly recent, I think.”

For much of the afternoon, in the shade of the extended cook tent, Fletch watched Carr doctor the people. Many children had burns, and Carr dressed them. Many, many others had eye infections, which Carr bathed. He put ointment into each infected eye and sent each mother or father away with a small tube and exact instructions. Other people had boils and sores and cuts and broken bones, complained of aching stomachs, and, in each case, Carr questioned, examined, reached into his kit for something that would clean, cure, fix, do no harm anyway. The people knew enough not even to ask him about their many spots of skin cancer. For two old men Carr thought had internal tumors he could do nothing and said so. He told them where he expected the Flying Doctor to be in a week or ten days.

A man who carried himself proudly limped in on a crude crutch made of a tree branch. He said he had dropped a rock and crushed his toes. Carr clipped off two toes with garden shears. He stitched, trimmed, disinfected, dressed them. A third toe, only broken, Carr set.

Carr wrapped the two severed toes in a piece of gauze and solemnly handed them to the man.

“How did these people know when you were coming?” Fletch asked Carr.

Carr didn’t answer.

“How did Juma know all about my father? How did he know Barbara and I were having breakfast on the Lord Delamere Terrace at that moment? He came straight to us, without inquiring or appearing to look around. How did he seem to know we were coming down here before we did?”

Carr said, “Never try to figure out how Africans know things. It’s their magic. But I can give you a clue. Much of their magic is simple observation. They spend what is to us an inordinate amount of time thinking about people. I mean real people, the people around them. They think about people instead of things, possessions, cars, televisions, hair dryers. They think about the people they know instead of thinking about mythical people, politicians, sports heroes, and movie stars; instead of thinking about mythical events, distant wars, currency crises, and meetings of the United Nations.” Carr dropped an empty tube of Neosporin ointment into an oil drum being used as a wastebasket. “Our magic, of course, comes from the pharmacy. Out here we have a beautiful relationship, as long as we respect each other’s magic.”

“But why were they waiting for you?” Fletch was taking off his sneakers and wool socks. “Sheila could have treated their burns and infections …”

Carr opened a fresh roll of gauze. “They don’t trust Sheila. If you didn’t notice, Sheila is an Indian lady. She’s tried to help, but they won’t let her. Magic, everywhere, has to do with the persona. They also wouldn’t trust you to help them, even though you are a white man. The older people would not be able to bring themselves to complain to you, to tell you they have problems, because you are too young. So I get these dirty jobs.”

A young man explained to Carr that he’d had a sore on the back of his hand. So he had stuck his hand in battery acid. Now the hand, wrist, forearm were horribly inflamed.

As Fletch helped Carr, held this, held that, fetched a new box of medical supplies from the airplane, he watched a tent being set up in the clearing under Sheila’s direction. His and Barbara’s knapsacks were carried up from the plane and put into that tent.

Because the snow skis were so long, and so unusual, two men carried them to the tent on their shoulders. Fletch heard the exclamations as Barbara took the skis out of their cases and showed everyone what they were. Standing in the dirt in the tropical sun, the jungle a green wall behind her, Barbara went through the skiing motions