Fletch, Too

by Gregory Mcdonald

When Barbara’s face turned back toward them, toward the light, her cheeks glistened with tears.

  “How afraid they must have been,” she said.

  Juma said, “For hundreds of years.”

  “The terror,” Barbara said. “The utter despair.”

  Juma said, “The smell, the sweat, the shit of hundreds, maybe thousands of bodies. The crying that must have come from this cave, day and night, year after year.”

  The entrance to the cave was wide, but not so wide it could not be sealed by a few men with swords and guns, clubs and whips. The rear of the cave was total darkness. That damp, reeking, weeping darkness extending twelve miles underground, no way out from under the heaviness of the earth, however frantic, however intelligent, however energetic the effort, to light, to air, to food, back to their own realities, existences, their own lives, loves, expectations …

  There was only one way out of that cave: docile, enslaved.

  Juma asked, “Did your ancestors buy slaves, do you think?”

  “No,” Fletch answered.

  “I’m pretty sure not,” said Barbara.

  Juma ran his bare foot over the smoothness of the floor stone. “You see, that is how we must think of things.”

  “What do you mean?” Fletch asked.

  “I’m pretty sure my ancestors sold slaves. Do you see? Which is worse—to buy people or to sell them?”

  They bought a couple of handsome fish at the ice/trading house just after the fishing boats came in, and cooked them on the beach as the sun dropped into the jungle.

  Just before full dark one of the casual officials found them. He brought them to a small tent among the palm trees just off the exposed beach, not far from the dock. There was scarcely room for the official, Fletch, Barbara, and Juma to crawl into the tent, but they all did.

  Later, standing outside the tent, Fletch asked Juma, “Where will you be?”

  The official had wandered off.

  Juma said, “I’ll be here.”

  Deciding everything like that, all the time … is very hard. Do you mean difficult? … or harsh? … Does he mean have a nice time? … Or we had a nice time?… You said we’d be picked up by a truck which would take us to Shimoni, and, after six and a half hours, we were … but was it the truck you were expecting…?… What is worse—to buy people or to sell them? … I’ll be here…

  In fact, after being in the tent together awhile, Barbara and Fletch were too hot to stay there. Their skin was sticky from the salt water, abrasive with sand, wet with sweat.

  They crawled out of their tent in the dark. Hand in hand, naked in what moonlight there was, they ambled 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 equipme
nt.

  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.”

  Sailing along then, in early afternoon, the dhow attracted dolphins which swam along with them for a long while, escorting them, appearing to race the dhow, torpedo it from the sides. Definitely they were relating to the dhow and the people on it, making noises back at them, and all the people on the dhow were relating to them, like friends unseen for too long.

  After crossing intersecting currents among the islands, enjoying a short, rough ride in the dhow, the crewmen anchored off Wasini Island. The dinghy took the passengers into shallow water.

  From shallow water, the passengers walked over ow-ow up to Ras Mondi.

  “Hey.” Barbara clutched Fletch’s hand as they walked carefully over the ow-ow. “We’re having a nice time.”

  “Things are beginning to come together,” Fletch said.

  Only the party from the dhow was at the restaurant.

  Because of the language barrier, the Italians sat at one table; Juma, Barbara, and Fletch at another.

  After the sail and the swim they were thirsty for fresh water and only a little beer. Their hunger made them compete playfully for the first food they saw, sesame-ball appetizers. They thought the enormous steamed crabs were a big enough lunch, all there was, and ate them slowly, savoring them. When plates piled high with changa and rice cooked in coconut sauce were set before them, they all rolled their eyes, and then cheered.

  “Sheila and Carr will be right disappointed if they don’t find anything,” Barbara said. “Can’t we think of something that might help out? At least to console them?”

  “All over Africa, people are looking for their pasts,” Juma said. “Digging up bones, and pots, and spear tips. You’d think Africa is nothing but a museum.”

  Fletch asked, “How come there are fish, perch, from the Nile River in Lake Turkana? The two bodies of water are hundreds of miles away from each other. Nothing, no river, flows from one to the other.”

  Barbara said, “They must have been joined at one time.”

  “Why are people so interested in their pasts now?” Juma asked. “Why do people come to Africa from all over the world to search for their ancestors, first man, first bone, first fossil?”

  “‘Mild curiosity,’” Barbara said.

  “What difference does it make?” Juma asked. “The way to the future is the present, not the past.”

  “It doesn’t make a difference?” Fletch asked. “It doesn’t make a difference to you that an East Indian elephant was found buried at Koobi Fora?”

  “No,” Juma said. “What difference does it make?”

  Barbara said, “It suggests that at one time Africa and India might have been joined together. Doesn’t that mean anything to you, Juma?”

  “Sure,” Juma answered. “You want me to say East Indians belong here, in Africa.”

  Fletch asked the air, “Why did I come to Africa to meet my father?”

  “‘Mild curiosity,’” Barbara repeated.

  “Why did you come, Fletch? You are who you are. What does your father have to do with you? You don’t even know him.”

  “Cultural flow.” Fletch spoke to his plate. “Moral flow.”

  Barbara said, “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When people look into the past,” Juma said, “they only expect to find good, good things. Supposing they find bad, bad things?”

  Fletch asked, “Am I going to find bad, bad things, Juma? You know my father. I don’t.”

  “I think maybe people are better off going into their futures without worrying about, carrying bad, bad things that might be in their pasts.”

  “I think you’re trying to warn me,” Fletch said.

  “There are people here,” Juma said, “people my age, who insist on living the way their ancestors did thousands of years ago. Like that moran you saw near Carr’s camp. That’s too much of a burden, on all of us. You can’t run a computer with a spear.”

  “Spears come in handy, too,” Fletch said. “There are still snakes. You used a spear to rescue Sheila.”

  “And a Jeep,” Juma said.

  “Here’s something about the future,” Fletch said. “Carr told me that someday the Rift Valley is going to rip open at the top, and the Red Sea is going to come flooding down. There will be a sea where there is now a valley.”

  Barbara said, “They know the future, in this case, from studying the past.”

  “Things change,” Fletch said.

  “Yes,” Juma said. “Things change. Nomads know that. Constantly we move away from our pasts, because things change.”

  Fletch said, “Things change …”

  “You’ve stopped eating,” Barbara said to him.

  Juma asked Barbara, “You like leather fish?”

  “Leather fish?” Barbara asked. “I’m eating leather fish?”

  “Changa,” Juma said. “Leather fish.”

  “Oh, my God.” Barbara looked at the little left on her plate. “I’m eating something called leather fish.”

  Fletch said, “I’m thinking about the Mississippi River.”

  “There are no leather fish in the Mississippi River,” Barbara said. “Catfish. I don’t like to eat catfish, either.”

  Fletch said, “It is also said the Mississippi River is going to change course.”

  “Right,” said Barbara. “Then New Orleans will really be blowin’ the blues.”

  “Rivers change course, sometimes,” Juma said.

  Fletch shook his head, as if to clear it. “I’m beginning to have an idea. All these things I’ve heard, rattling around in my head—”

  Juma said, “Carr and Sheila are digging along a river that exists now.” He laughed.

  Fletch said, “Thousands of years ago …”

  Barbara put down her fork. “… the river might have been somewhere else.”

  “So Carr’s theory might be right …”

  “… but the river might have moved,” Juma chuckled.
<
br />   “Oo, wow,” said Barbara.

  “Of course the river might have moved,” Juma laughed. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “Nice time,” Fletch said. “Let’s go back to Carr’s camp.”

  “Can’t move,” Juma said. “Ate too much.”

  “Absolutely!” Swooping the airplane through the sky in joy, Carr dipped the wings.

  “No doubt about it!” Barbara was in the seat behind Carr.

  Juma was beside her, trying to look out all the airplane’s windows at once. “Looks good!”

  “Carr,” Fletch said, “I need to be set gently on the ground.”

  “You mean, it’s true?” Her encased leg stuck out into the airplane’s aisle, Sheila had to shout from the rearmost seat. “There was another river?”

  “Naam, Momma!” Juma shouted. “Indio!”

  Everyone was shouting over the noise of the engine.

  “Damn!” Carr swooped the plane lower for another horizontal look, this time from the west. “All the times I’ve flown over this area, and I never noticed. Damn me!”

  “Soon,” Fletch said.

  “That line of trees, all the way to the ocean, is distinctly different,” Barbara said.

  “The whole line is indented,” Juma said. “You see? A different growth. Deeper in the ground. Greener, too.”

  “Absolutely.” Looking through his side window, Carr was flying just above treetop level. “From this level, you can see the gap.”

  “Carr…” Fletch moaned.

  Juma, Barbara, and Fletch stayed at Kisite/Mpunguti one more night. It was late when they returned to the mainland. Juma said one did not start a long trek into the jungle an hour before sundown.

  “Only superstition, of course”—Juma smiled—“but the ancient belief is that people might, just might, get lost in the jungle after dark, might just get hurt, might not be able to protect themselves so well from snakes, zebras, warthogs, cheetahs, and lions.” He lowered his head as if ashamed. “Just an ancient African superstition.”

  “Then I guess I’m superstitious,” Barbara said.

  “Anyway,” Juma said. “After eating so much we are too stupid and lazy-sick to do anything but trip around in circles until we fall down. We deserve to be snacked up by hyenas.”