Fletch, Too

“Carr?” Fletch banged his fist on the pilot’s shoulder. Carr shoved the radiophone forward off his right ear. “There’s a body down there. A man on the ground.”

Carr leaned over Fletch and looked through the starboard window of the airplane. He dipped the right wing so he could see better. “So there is.”

The naked man was lying on his side, far from any bush.

Carr said, “I was wondering what the vultures had found for themselves.”

The circling birds had drawn Fletch’s attention to the man on the ground.

They had flown about two hours northwest from Nairobi, over the White Hills and the eastern edge of Lake Naivasha. Looking down, Fletch had seen the enormous, white Djinn Palace at the edge of the lake.

Carr had pointed out the great gash in the land called the Rift Valley. “Someday, we’re told,” Carr shouted over the sound of the engine, “the Red Sea will come flooding down that rift. Hope I’ve got my waders on that day!”

Now, Fletch knew by the chart in his lap, they were somewhere east of the Loichangamata Hills. There were no shambas below them.

The scientist they were transporting to Lake Turkana, Dr. McCoy, had taken a backseat in the airplane. A little, very white man in a seersucker suit, wide-brimmed safari hat, and canvas bush boots, he coughed continuously and spat into his handkerchief frequently. He had not asked why Fletch was accompanying them to Lake Turkana on the doctor’s chartered plane. He had not asked anything or said much.

Carr turned the plane and swooped lower over the figure on the ground.

As Carr did so, Fletch pointed out the body to McCoy in the seat behind him.

“Is he dead?” Fletch asked Carr.

“Look at the hyenas.” Carr could not point while he was turning the plane again. “They’re just waiting. And the vultures are waiting for the hyenas.”

Carr was bringing the plane around to land near the man.

Leaning forward, McCoy said, “Leave him!”

Carr looked over his shoulder at him.

“He was left there to die,” McCoy said.

“Ah, culture clash,” Carr said, facing forward. “He’s an anthropologist or something. I suppose he’s right.”

Carr was still making for a landing.

“I said, leave him!” McCoy shouted. “You’re not to interfere with their nature!”

McCoy began coughing.

Carr turned his head so McCoy could hear him. “I haven’t your education, McCoy. It’s my nature I must sleep with!”

McCoy spat into his handkerchief.

Just after the wheels of the plane touched the ground, Fletch threw up the door next to his seat and held it open. Carr had taught him to do that, taking off from Wilson Airport, to rid the cockpit of the terrible, immediate heat on the ground.

“Poor bastard. He’s been pangaed.”

The man’s skull was split open. Brain matter was visible.

There was the great patience of the nearly dead in the man’s eyes as he watched Carr and Fletch approach.

“How can he be alive?” Fletch asked.

“Tough nut.”

Carr haunched next to the man and spoke with him. The man answered slowly, from a parched throat, through a swollen tongue. He never closed his mouth completely.

McCoy stood coughing under the wing of the plane. He had only gotten out of the cockpit to get out of the heat.

Carr said, “He says he stole six goats.”

“Honest of him to say so.”

“They caught up to him, cut his head open with a machete, and left him to die.” Carr looked at the birds circling above them. “To be eaten.” He looked over to where some hyenas sat next to a bush. “Rude justice.”

“Why did he tell you the truth? Why doesn’t he say he was robbed or something?”

Carr stood up. “Under prevailing circumstances, vultures about to pluck out one’s eyes, hyenas about to begin their feed on one by first cracking off one’s hands and one’s feet, one is probably well advised, happier, if you catch my drift, if one is honest with oneself as to how one fell victim to such circumstances.”

“For six goats?”

“Nothing is more important than goats. They rank right up there with wives in the local economy.” Carr stooped to look into the skull wound. He had brought a medical kit from the airplane. “In every way, goats are the scourge of the third world.”

A little fresh blood continued to trickle onto the dried, crusted blood. Flies were everywhere over the wound and over the naked man. The flies walked on the man’s eyeballs. They probed his nostrils. They walked along his lips and entered and exited his mouth.

“Why didn’t they kill him?” Fletch asked. “Why leave him like this?”

“Having six goats stolen can ruin a family, for at least a generation.”

Carr wrapped gauze around the man’s head. “Just trying to hold his brains in. Although I guess I cleaned up worse things off the cockpit floor. There. Let’s get him up.”

As they lifted the man upright and began to walk/carry him between them to the airplane, the hyenas began to yell angrily. They paced up and down in protest, coming nearer.

“We’re certainly upsetting nature,” Carr said. “May God forgive me.”

McCoy did nothing to help them lift the man onto the rearmost seat of the airplane. Carr buckled him in.

At no point did the man cry out, groan, show pain. Nor did he seem to notice being rescued. He showed nothing but patience.

Buckling himself into his seat, Fletch said, “He seems to accept all this.”

The hyenas surrounded the airplane.

Carr said, “He knows he done wrong.”