Juma grinned. “Now it’s a bigger story than almost any other.”
“It wasn’t all that much of a house,” said Carr.
“No. Not that much of a house. But it was ours.”
Juma was looking quite fondly at Sheila. “Sorry you lost your house.”
“With two airplanes flying,” Carr said, “in a few years we should be able to afford another house. With only one plane flying, I’d expect to be an apartment dweller from now until my dotage.”
A man Fletch recognized came out of the jungle toward them. He walked rapidly with a homemade crutch, heeling-and-toeing across the rough ground.
Sheila said, “You do like your peace and quiet.”
“Yes.” Carr looked around the camp and smiled. “I do.”
“Still,” Sheila said. “Enough, as you say …”
“Also the matter of the lost income. I’m not making money while I’m mucking about down here …”
The man on the crutch approached the table. The front of one foot was bandaged. One toe was in a splint. Two other toes Carr had removed with a garden shears a few days before.
In the man’s hand were his two toes still wrapped in the gauze.
“A few more days,” Carr said. “Well give it to the end of the month. If we don’t find anything encouraging by then, I guess it’s back to Nairobi to find an apartment.”
Carr looked up at the man on the crutch. “
Leaning toward Carr, the man spoke softly in a tribal language. He held out the bloody gauze with the toes in it.
Juma grinned. He put his head down, near Fletch, and said, “The man wants to know where his toes are.” Speaking in Swahili, Carr pointed to the gauze in the man’s hand. “Carr says, ‘There are your toes.’” Grin widening, Juma said, “‘No, no,’ the man says, ‘I mean where are the spirits of my toes?’ Carr asks him what he means. The man says, ‘My toes still pain me, but not the toes in my hand, the toes which are no longer on my feet.’”
“Oh, I see,” said Fletch. “That happens. Nerves still signal pain to the brain from a severed appendage.”
“Now the man wants Carr to cut off the spirit of his toes, so the pain will stop.”
Fletch said, “That makes great sense.”
Carr’s face was looking as if he had just been told he had buried someone who wasn’t dead. Clearly, he did not know how to answer the man.
There was a long silence while Carr looked at the man, the toes in the man’s hand, the man’s bandaged foot, to Sheila, and back to the man.
Juma said, “Witch doctor.”
“Yes, yes,” said Carr. “Witch doctor. Only a witch doctor can remove spirits …”
Carr launched into a long, gentle instruction to the man as to how he must now go to a witch doctor to have the spirits of his toes removed.
“Listen,” Juma said to Fletch. “In three days someone is coming by in a truck. He is going to Shimoni. I would like to take you and Barbara with me to Shimoni in the truck. It is on the coast. We can camp there, and swim, catch fish …”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Very much.”
“And Barbara will want to come?”
“I think so. I’ll ask her.”
“It won’t be such hot work as here.”
“Of course, we’d like to help out Carr and Sheila, for as long as possible.”
“We’ll only go for a day or two.”
“Sounds good.”
Apparently satisfied, the man on the crutch was heeling-and-toeing it back along the jungle path.
Carr sighed. He looked at Sheila. “I don’t know, old dear. Maybe we won’t last the month, what with one thing and another …”
“How do you know this truck is coming?” Fletch asked.
“It is coming.”
“Can you hear it?”
“No.”
Before dawn, Barbara, Juma, and Fletch went out to the jungle track west of Carr’s camp and waited. They stood silently in the dew almost an hour, hearing the jungle noises turn from nocturnal to diurnal. They had one knapsack among them, which Fletch kept on his back. After a while, Barbara sat down on the dry track. Fletch lowered the knapsack onto the grass. Only after Fletch sat down did Juma.
After the sun was well up, they moved into the shade. Fletch left the knapsack in the middle of the track.
“Thirsty,” Barbara said.
Juma disappeared into the jungle. He returned with two grapefruit, which they shared.
“It will come,” Juma said.
“You sure you have the right day?”
No vehicle came along the track.
“Yes.”
“It’s almost noon,” Fletch said. “We could have walked to the coast.”
“Yes,” Juma allowed. “We could walk to Shimoni.”
Juma, Fletch, and Barbara had put in two more long days of clearing brush, digging holes, looking for Carr’s lost Roman city. Muscle-weary, tired of being slick with sweat, tired of being thirsty, even Fletch had begun to believe, to wish that there was an ancient Roman city underfoot, that some evidence of a different time, a different people, a different civilization would surface. To himself, as he worked, he marveled more and more at Sheila and Carr selling their house, selling an airplane, a part of Carr’s business, and devoting eighteen months rooting about in the bush on just hope.
They had started out that morning clean and cool and fed. Watching the birds and the monkeys sporting about near and across the jungle track, they were again glistening with sweat, even in the shade. They were developing a hunger and thirst grapefruit slices did not address.
Fletch said, “I feel guilty just sitting here. I feel we ought to be back helping Sheila and Carr. They said they’re going to give up their search soon.”
“The truck will come,” Juma said.
Fletch said, “Juma. You seem to have become fond of Sheila.”
“Yes.” Juma’s eyes danced in his head. “Nice lady. Good-spirited.”
Barbara asked, “Did you actually talk to this friend of yours with the truck?”
“He’s not a friend. Not an enemy, either, I don’t think.”
Fletch sighed. “Are we friends?”
Juma smiled. “Well see.”
“Did you talk to whoever this is who is supposed to be coming by in a truck?” Barbara asked.
“No.”
“Then how do you know he’s coming?”
“He is coming.”
“Do you know the driver at all?” Fletch asked.
Juma said, “I don’t know. Probably.”
“‘Probably’?”
“Then what are we doing here?” Barbara asked.
“Waiting for the truck,” Juma said. “There is nothing to decide about.”
