Fletch, Too

down the beach. Without changing pace, they walked into the ocean, ducked, broke handclasp, and swam about, playing quietly, going away from each other, and coming back to each other, again and again.

It was a wonderfully important time in that Barbara and Fletch were having a honeymoon beyond any expectation.

Later, on their way back to their tent, they were widely circumnavigating a tall, broad boulder at the edge of the beach. They had been quiet for some time.

As they walked, the moon came to be behind the boulder, slightly above it.

Barbara gasped. She jerked Fletch’s hand.

They stopped still.

“Is that a statue?” Barbara whispered.

Standing on the boulder in profile in the moonlight, absolutely still, stood a slim, male figure, feet together, arms at sides, head held high, perfectly erect, in every way.

“It wasn’t there before.”

“Fletch. I think it’s Juma!”

“It is Juma.”

Juma’s erect penis was a straight rod extending at a perfect ninety-degree angle from the straight, slim rod of his figure. The stillness of Juma’s silhouette on the boulder in the moonlight was stunning.

“What’s he doing there?” Barbara whispered.

“Just standing.”

“He’s so beautiful!”

“Yes. He is.”

They couldn’t help staring at Juma’s silhouette a short while.

Finally, silently, Barbara and Fletch returned to their tent.

Again, just before dawn, they crawled out of their tent, to go to the ocean, to swim, to awake fully, to play. The birds had awakened them. The heat, the heavy air under their low-slung mosquito net kept them awake.

In the morning, returning to the tent, hand in hand, they were walking around a bush when they nearly tripped over a tableau of human bodies.

Juma, naked, was asleep on the ground. Two girls, naked except for their necklaces, bracelets, anklets, hair beads, were asleep with him. Juma’s head was on the stomach of one girl. One of his legs was sprawled sideways, not heavily, across the hips of the other. Each of the three faces seemed concentrating on the contentment of sleep.

Juma’s penis was rising before him.

“The arithmetic of Africa,” Barbara whispered. “I’ll never figure it out.”

A fly was walking up the cheek of one of the girls, toward her eye. Her hand, across Juma’s chest, did not rise to brush it off.

Fletch had the strong instinct to brush the fly off the girl’s face.

Instead, he pulled Barbara away, silently, by the hand.

Barbara said, “Just like the lion we saw, his body sprawled comfortably over two lionesses.”

Not much later, Juma found them at the ducca where Barbara and Fletch had bought bottles of Coca-Cola and a box of biscuits for breakfast.

Juma had organized the day for them.

Two Italian couples were all that were to sail on the dhow for that day’s excursion. The dhow could take eight passengers comfortably.

The Italians and the dhow’s crew had assured Juma that he and Barbara and Fletch were most welcome to join them.

Sailing away from the mainland in the dhow, Fletch asked Barbara, “Do you feel grungy?”

Barbara said, “I feel like Carr’s Jeep.”

Two husbands and one wife of the Italian couples were medical doctors; the second wife said she was the madonna of three children. The Italians spoke little or no English; Juma, Barbara, and Fletch had no Italian: they all came to be jolly together with gestures and patois.

At first, Barbara and Fletch were shy of the Italians. Sunburned, bug-bitten, their skin also scraped and cut from clearing jungle trails and digging holes, their hair washed only in salt water and conditioned with sand, dressed in cutoff and now ripped-to-shreds nylon ski pants, already they were seeing the healthy, wealthy Italian tourists as being from a different world altogether. They boarded the dhow in well-cut sunsuits, stripped to even better cut swim-suits. Their bodies were strong but pampered. The skin of each of them was unblemished from either sun or bugs. Each recently had had the attention of a good hairdresser. As the dhow approached the reef they all were to swim, the Italians pulled out of nylon sacks equipment which looked fabulous: masks and snorkels, tight-fitting rubber boots, rubber flippers, two underwater cameras. One man even strapped a sheathed knife to his ankle.

Barbara said, “Already I’m suffering culture clash.”

“That’s okay,” Fletch consoled. “Back at Carr’s camp, we have some wonderful skiing equipment.”

“Shall I try to tell them?” Barbara asked.

“I think not.”

Instantly, Juma was open to the Italians. He asked from them and learned the Italian for sails and ship and wheel and islands, water, fish. One doctor proudly showed Juma how the underwater cameras worked.

Fletch had the great tempation to ask Juma, Where did the two girls got Where did they come from? but he didn’t.

The dhow’s crew of two were wonderful, full of good cheer and humor for everybody, in English, Italian, Swahili, and one other language they kept to themselves. As a joke, they kept offering to the well-equipped Italians the cheap, worn-out, torn goggles and snorkels they had for rent aboard the dhow. They pretended to be insulted when the Italians, laughing, insisted they preferred their own equipment.

The reefs along the Tanzania coast have been blasted and picked dead by entrepreneurs collecting fish and coral souvenirs for “tourist goats.” The reefs just north and south of Mombasa are dying rapidly. So the reefs of Kisite are forcibly protected.

The dhow anchored just outside Mako Kokwe Reef.

The non-Kenyans swam for hours back and forth along the reef. Except for the two men with cameras they just goggled the sculptured coral magnified in the sunlight by the water. They were mesmerized by the lacy coral fans waving in the slight, shifting currents, their shadows moving from side to side on the coral or sand floor.

Swimming slowly in the warm water, not even disturbing the surface of the ocean much, Fletch toured the small schools of fish, many more brightly colored than any birds. Best he liked to look at and follow the bright yellow surgeons with the black lines drawn up from their mouths in an apparent, Nice time grin. Always, when he first saw these fish, Fletch inhaled too much, too quickly, to laugh, and would flood his mouth and nose with water. He would have to pull his head up above water to laugh happily at the appearance of the fish, at himself, to recover.

Barbara banged Fletch on the shoulder with her hand.

Treading water, she said, “Juma went back to the dhow.”

Fletch looked at the dhow. He guessed he saw Juma’s head amidship. The crewmen were in the stern.

“When?”

“Some time ago.”

“Is he all right?”

“I was with him at first. He doesn’t seem at all comfortable in the water. He kept thrashing about and coughing. At first, I thought he was kidding, then I thought he was drowning.”

“He can swim?”

“He works too hard at it. He swims like he feels he’s being pulled down more than we are.”

“He’s just catching his breath.”

“He went back almost right away.”

“He’s all right.”

“Maybe we ought to go back, too.”

“Yeah. In a minute. In a while.”