Fletch, Too

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “Are you going to Masai Mara?”

  “I’m not sure where we’re going. Someplace south. Near a river.”

  “You should go, to Masai Mara,” the cashier said. “It’s nice there.”

  Fletch slid the billing card and pen back under the grille. “And I want to thank the hotel for the new sneakers.”

  The cashier smiled. “Nice time.”

  “Good grief.” In their room, Barbara was stuffing ski suits, mittens, earmuffs, thermal underwear, and woolen socks into the big, framed knapsacks. “If you’d told me a week ago we’d be heading off today to search for a lost Roman city on the East African coast today, I wouldn’t think you were crazy, I’d know it!”

  “I wouldn’t be so crazy as to predict such a thing.”

  “Do you think there’s anything to it? Is there any chance of our finding such a place? I mean, my God, Carr’s best source of information seems to be a witch doctor!”

  Fletch shrugged. “It’s Carr’s thing. It’s what he wants to do. He’s inviting us into his life. I appreciate it.”

  “Daft,” Barbara said. “How could the Romans have built a city here in East Africa without its being a known, established, historical fact by now?”

  “I don’t think very much of history is known,” Fletch said. “Percentage wise, I mean. Look how hard it is to find out the facts of my own, personal history.”

  “Going into the African jungle to dig holes,” Barbara said. “Are we sure we want to do this?”

  “I just got a look at our hotel bill,” Fletch said. “It’s in shillingi, of course, but many thousands of shillingi. Carr says my father is not rich. I don’t think we should stay here racking up such a bill, if we have a choice. Carr has given us a choice.”

  “Your blue jeans and T-shirt are back from the laundry. They’re hanging in the closet.”

  “Great. I can dress like a bum again, instead of a streetwalker.”

  “Fletch, are you sure you and Carr aren’t related?”

  Hanger in hand, Fletch was looking at his jeans. “You mean, is Carr my father?”

  “At the pool last night, when you came back from Lake Turkana, I don’t know, watching you enter, the way you both walked, the way you sat, the way you both spoke …”

  “We had both just been sandblasted, kept awake all night by a raging storm, deafened in the airplane … ‘course we moved and sounded alike.”

  “He’s being awfully nice to us.”

  “My jeans have been pressed. Look! My jeans have been pressed!”

  “Oh, dear. That won’t do.” She took the jeans from him and started to rough them up in her hands.

  “I’ve thought about this,” he said. “Want the hard evidence?”

  “About what?”

  “While we were out at Thika and Karen with Carr, someone came to the hotel, identified himself as Walter Fletcher, and inquired for us.”

  “Couldn’t do that by phone?”

  “The man at the reception desk said that someone came to the hotel. He said it was Walter Fletcher.” Barbara was kicking his jeans around the floor. “When we met Juma, he said he knows my father.”

  “He sounded regretful about Walter Fletcher, too.”

  “Juma identified Walter Fletcher as a pilot. Carr was with us. Juma knows Carr, and he knows a man here named Fletcher. When he came to the hotel this morning, before Carr, he knew Walter Fletcher is in jail.”

  “My father-in-law the jailbird.”

  “Please, Barbara.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Is hitting below the belt a characteristic of yours?”

  “A man who starts a fight in a bar! And gets arrested for it! Mother will love that one. I married the son of a jailbird!”

  “God damn it, Barbara!” Fletch snatched his jeans off the floor. “Is this what marriage to you is? You’re nice to me in public and vicious in private. Downstairs, on the terrace, you were full of Oh, dear! Poor Fletch! and up here you call me the son of a jailbird!”

  “Well, I’ve had time to think.”

  “I’m not in control of the facts, here, regarding my own life.” Fletch was falling over trying to get into his jeans. “Sorry. We just have to go along discovering what we can discover.”

  “You said, ‘Maybe he got a flat tire.’ Really, Fletch. Yesterday, Carr said your father was delayed by some ‘legal difficulty.’ You call those facts?”

  Fletch zipped his jeans. “I knew there’d been some unpleasantness in a café. I didn’t know he was in jail. Clearly, I didn’t know that.”

  Barbara said, “I don’t want any of this to be true!”

  “At least he turned himself in.”

  “Why wouldn’t it have been natural for your father to meet us at the airport?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “I guess he didn’t.”

  Fletch was pulling on his T-shirt.

  “You ‘guess’? What is this with you and the word guess? When you married me, you didn’t say I do, you said, I guess I do.”

  “I guess I did.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, Fletch was pulling on his socks and sneakers.

  “What do you mean, you guess your father wasn’t at the airport to meet us? You know damn right well he wasn’t.”

  “Do I?” Fletch headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “That’s the point, Barbara. I don’t.”

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Yes.” He opened the door to the corridor.

  “Where?”

  “Out.”

  “Carr’s waiting for us.”

  “He said he’ll pick us up at noon.”

  “You’re disappearing again because you’re mad at me.”

  “I’m going out…” Hand still on the door handle, Fletch hesitated. “… to answer your question; to find out something for myself: maybe to find out too much.”

  “Fletch …”

  “If I’m not back by the time Carr gets here, you’ll just have to wait for me.”

  “Hello.” Fletch waited for the young policeman behind the high counter to look up, notice him, answer him.

  “Hello,” the policeman answered after only a glance.

  Fletch sneezed. “How are you?”

  “Well, thank you. And yourself?”

  “I’m fine.”

  The policeman glanced at Fletch again. “What do you want at a police station?”

  Fletch swallowed. “I want to see my father. My name is Fletcher. Is he here?”

  “Oh, yes.” The policeman checked the second sheet of paper on a clipboard. “Awaiting trial.”

  “May I see him?”

  “That’s not the way it’s supposed to be,” the policeman said. “He is being punished, you see.”

  “He is being punished before his trial?”

  The policeman’s forehead creased. “What is the point of keeping him here if we let everyone see him?”

  “I have come from America,” Fletch said. “Arrived two days ago. I don’t know how long I will be able to stay here. I have come to see him.”

  “Oh, I see.” Moving around behind the counter, the policeman fiddled with papers. His brow remained creased.

  Fletch said nothing more.

  After a few moments, the policeman went through a door behind the counter.

  Trying to clear his eyes and his nose and his throat of sand, Fletch had walked the half block from the Norfolk Hotel to the police station. The sidewalk was busy with people his age carrying books to and from Nairobi University. He passed an older, Caucasian couple in plaid shorts and straw hats looking exhausted and confused.

  No one else was in the lobby of the police station. The place was absolutely quiet.

  Fletch sneezed again.

  The policeman returned alone.

  He said nothing. Behind the counter, he started to sort some papers.

  Fletch said, “Well? An
y chance of my seeing him?”

  “Mr. Fletcher is not in.”

  “What?”

  “He says to tell you he is not in.”

  “Did you tell him I’m his son? His son is here to see him?”

  “Oh, yes. He asked me to say he is not in.”

  Going toward the door to the street, Fletch sneezed.

  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 jungl
e a green wall behind her, Barbara went through the skiing motions with the ski poles, knees bent, hips sashaying, slaloming down a snow-sided mountain, from the looks of her.

  Juma, in pretending to ski, pretended to lose his balance. On one leg, arms pinwheeling for a long time, he pretended to be trying to regain his balance. Finally, he let himself fall. Dust rose around him.

  A large monkey, scolding angrily, tried to take one of the ski poles from Barbara.

  After Carr treated the people, they wandered back into the jungle or the bush on narrow footpaths.

  “Terrible eye troubles.” Carr said. “So close to the equator, without protection from the sun. And there are always the flies.” He waved a dozen flies away from a child’s face. “And burns. The children try to help out with the cooking. They play too close to the fires. Or they fall out of their mother’s breast-slings or back-slings into the fire. The mothers, you see: most of them are children themselves.”

  Most of the mothers were long-legged girls, skirted this way and that with kangas, wearing uncomfortably tight-looking metal bracelets and anklets, their breasts covered, if at all, with arrangements of necklaces. Whatever their troubles, all seemed in good spirits. They were attractively shy with Fletch, never looking directly at him, that he saw, but clearly talking about him, and Juma, and Barbara.

  “Is this meddling?” Carr was getting tired. “I should ask the good Dr. McCoy if what we ordinary folks do here in the bush is meddling. What some of these bloody science chaps would like to do is put a glass case over Africa and view it all as history.”

  Looking across the compound, Fletch said, “Couldn’t put Juma under a glass case. He’d break it.”

  “I believe he would,” Carr said.

  “By the way, Carr, I’m remembering that Barbara and I didn’t take any medical shots before we left the States.”

  “You’ll be all right,” Carr said. “Be sure and take your whiskey.” He glanced out to see where the sun was. “But, first, let’s walk the riverbanks. I’ll show you how far I haven’t gotten with my crazy idea. Lost Roman city,” Carr said. “Pah! I’m crazy!”