Fletch, Too

Suddenly, Fletch’s eyes were wide open. The low light from the kerosene lamp had not changed. The box on which the lamp stood, as well as the wet towel on the box, was suddenly clearer in Fletch’s eyes. The seams of the tent over his head were more distinct.

The air seemed cleaner in his nostrils. The ache in his head was gone, until he moved his head too quickly.

His arms were happy to move, lightly, as they were ordered.

He was free, free of the fever.

Through the sound of the rain he heard men talking. Two men. Their voices came and went under the sound of the rain.

No one was in the tent with him.

Realizing how heavy, wet the blankets were, he pushed them off him, to the bottom of the cot. Lying down again, he raised his legs, brought his knees to his chest, straightened them, let them down.

Free.

A decision had been made.

Bare feet in the mud, Fletch sat on the edge of the cot and tried to think about the decision. He listened to the rain. He felt cool, normal. There was nothing to think about.

The decision had been made.

This was right. This was normalcy. This was health. This was being alive. If he wanted to be open to life, health, normalcy, rightness, he also had to be open to the decision, commit himself to it, act on it, because the decision was based upon decisions made by everybody, everywhere, a long, long time ago, in the beginning, and those decisions, once made, determined how everything worked, life, health, defined normalcy, and if one, anyone, did not act basically within those deductions, or acted against them, or decided something else, then legs, which hold us up, support us, permit basic movement, progress, shatter, and shortly we are sitting in the dust, all of us, corrupt and cracked-headed, corrupting, awaiting the jackals.

Tired rising from the cot, dizzy at first, Fletch stood a moment sucking in the jungle air, heavy with rain. He could smell the jungle, the rotting roots and the slashed green leaves. He could hear the noises of the animals as they moved around in their world, acting within decisions, what was normal, what was health, what was life for them.

Making choices is the ultimate freedom in a world in which decisions have been made to permit such freedom. Failure to see that sometimes no choice can be made, that there is no personal decision, is the ultimate folly, the absolute destruction of self and all.

Fletch took the wet towel and tucked it around his waist.

Pushing aside the tent flap, he looked outside. There were signs of dawn in the sky. The rain was a nearly solid, straight-down torrent, hitting so hard it made the ground look almost jumping.

From which direction was the sound of two men talking coming? Two men, talking loudly over the sound of the rain, in English. Laughing. Listening through the opened tent flap, just inside his tent, Fletch could not make out what they were saying.

A tent across the way, newly put up, showed dim light around the edges of its flap.

Unsteadily, the rain beating on him, feeling good, feeling weary, feeling fresh, feeling slightly dizzy, Fletch splashed and slithered across the campside mud barefooted.

Do I have to do this? Am I sure I have nothing to decide? The decision has been made. We exist within context. That is our first, our only, our last decision. Making choices is the ultimate freedom. There is no freedom without basic decisions having been made. Self-discipline is the greatest exercise of freedom.

He pulled aside the tent flap and looked in.

Inside, Peter Carr and Walter Fletcher sat in canvas, wood-framed camp chairs. Each had a glass in hand. On the box beside the kerosene lamp was a nearly empty bottle of whiskey.

They stopped talking. They stared at Fletch.

The lines in their faces moved up from around their mouths to around their eyes.

Fletch said to Walter Fletcher: “Thanks for coming to the airport to meet us.”

The two men sitting in the tent staring up at Fletch through the dim light of the kerosene lamp said nothing.

“Do you speak Portuguese?” Fletch asked the man with the thinning, combed hair, pencil moustache.

“What do you mean?” asked Walter Fletcher.

Fletch stood just inside the open tent flap. Behind him, rain poured with a steady roar.

“I saw you,” Fletch said. “At the airport. In the men’s room.”

“Oh, my God!” Carr sat forward in his camp chair. “Say it isn’t so.”

On the box beside Carr, next to the kerosene lamp, next to the whiskey bottle, were the pottery shard and the Roman coin.

Walter Fletcher stared full-eyed at Fletch. He put his whiskey glass on the box. He resettled himself in his chair.

Ankles crossed, boot heels in the mud, hands folded in his lap, for a long moment Walter Fletcher studied Fletch’s face.

Slack-jawed, Carr was staring at Walter Fletcher.

For only a second, Walter Fletcher glanced at Carr.

Then he looked at Fletch, for another long moment.

“Well.” Abruptly, Walter Fletcher stood up. His boots were flat in the mud. He patted down the pockets of his safari jacket. Using both hands, he smoothed back his hair from his temples.

Chin up, not looking into Fletch’s face, he brushed by Fletch. He walked out of the tent into the storm.

“Where is he going?” Fletch asked.

“Nowhere he can go.” Carr remained hunched over in his camp chair. “What a box of rocks. All this time, you’ve been thinking the murderer at the airport could have been Walter Fletcher.”

Fletch shrugged. “The murderer was a local who came to meet someone at the airport … whom he did not meet.”

“Don’t you think you’d better sit down?”

“Jesus, Carr!”

“What now?”

Fletch had heard an airplane engine ignite. Carr had not.

They both heard the roar of the engine as gasoline was pushed into it.

Carr jumped up.

Together, Fletch and Carr stood outside the tent looking through the heavy rain in the dawn across the campsite at the yellow airplane with green swooshes. The cockpit lights went off. The wing and tail lights were on.

The airplane was turning around over the rough, wet ground. Wings rocking, it skittered around Carr’s plane and jounced onto the landing track.

“A plane that light can’t take off in this heavy rain,” Fletch shouted. “Can it?”

The glass in Carr’s hand had a centimeter of rainwater in it already.

Carr said, “I wouldn’t try it.”

The airplane almost made it. It splashed and swayed down the track. Its engine roared through the sound of the rain. Throwing water behind it, it lifted off the track. It rose against the tree line. For a moment it looked as if it were above the treetops.

The left wing dipped. The plane fell.

The plane’s left wing cracked against the top of a tree. The treetop shook. The tip of the wing fell into the woods. As if pivoting, engine roaring, the plane swung left around the top of the tree.