Fletch, Too

“My, my,” said Carr. “What have we here? A crippled Sheila …?”

“…being held up by Juma!” Fletch yelled.

“What happened?” Barbara leaned forward and looked out Fletch’s window.

Flying low over the camp, everything was visible. Sheila was hobbling down from the tents to meet them. A homemade crutch was under her right arm. His arm around her waist, Juma supported her from the left side. Sheila’s right leg was in a long cast. They were both looking up at the airplane, laughing. Behind them hurried Raffles with a pitcher of lemonade and glasses on a tray. Sheila tripped on a tuft of grass. She and Juma nearly collapsed on the ground, laughing.

Carr landed the plane wheels perfectly on the slightly uphill track. “The old dear’s splintered her drumstick.”

Fletch banged the cockpit door open and held it up.

“Poor Sheila,” said Barbara.

Fletch said quietly, “And no Walter Fletcher.”

Raffles was first to the airplane.

Sheila and Juma were rollicking down the slope, holding on to each other, laughing like two roisterers in the wee hours.

Fletch got out of the plane, then Barbara. They jumped off the wing.

Carr emerged from the cockpit just as Sheila and Juma arrived.

“All’s right here,” Sheila called out. “All’s right with you?”

Standing on the airplane’s wing, arms akimbo, Carr said, “Clearly, all’s not right here!”

“But it is!” Sheila waved her crutch. “Juma’s a hero! At least, to me!”

“How did you crack your kicker?” Carr demanded.

“The bloody corkscrew tipped over on me! There I was, alone in the jungle, as they say, leg broken, full weight of the corkscrew on me, no more able to move than Buckingham Palace, while three snakes were exploring closer to me, thinking nasty thoughts, I’m sure, while also hearing hyenas laughing at a few ripe ones not far off, and out pops Juma from the flora like a Masai moran, spear in hand, to stigmatize the snakes, notify the hyenas the show was over, make me as comfortable as possible, run for the Jeep and men to get the bloody corkscrew off me with high alacrity—generally, to save my sanity and my life, in that order!”

“‘Spear in hand’?” Fletch muttered.

“Darling Juma!” Hand around his shoulder, Sheila grabbed him to her and planted a kiss on his ear.

Juma was laughing merrily.

From his elevation on the airplane wing, Carr was studying Sheila’s cast. “Simple or compound?”

“Compound,” Sheila said proudly.

“Juma set it for you?”

Holding up her encased leg, Sheila said, “Juma did a first-class job!”

“Good for Juma!” Carr said. “We all thank you, sir.”

As they were drinking lemonade, Sheila chatted, “When Juma discovered me in the bush, he moved with such speed, brain, and brawn, I was put to right in no time at all!”

Carr shook his head. “Can’t leave you alone for a minute.”

“Oh, rot,” said Sheila. “Next you’ll tell me I spoiled your plans to go dancing tonight!”

“I don’t know, though, Peter.” Over coffee after lunch under the stretched canvas, Sheila looked around at the less than luxurious campsite, walls of jungle three sides, the derelict-looking Jeep, the sluggish river, the corkscrew lying on its side on the riverbank. “Perhaps it’s time to pack it in.”

Carr picked a cracker crumb out of his lap and put it on the table. “Been thinking the same thing, old dear. Enough gets to be enough.”

Still looking around, Sheila said, “Enough is enough.”

Carr, Barbara, and Fletch had flown from the Masai Mara early that morning. They had left the two hôtelières in Nairobi and refueled.

Awaiting them at the camp had been a mother with a baby whose back had been burned, whom Carr tended as well as he could, and an old man being blinded by cataracts Carr had to send away.

Lunch at the campsite was late, bigger than usual, slower. Sheila’s broken leg had prevented her starting the day’s digging, and thus it never did get started. They even had sherry before lunch while Sheila and Juma regaled them again, laughing, about Sheila’s pain, terror, near death in the jungle; Juma’s appearing from the jungle like a moran, slaying the snakes with his spear, dispatching the hyenas, reappearing driving the Jeep, engineering the corkscrew off Sheila quickly and painlessly, then setting her compound fracture and creating a beautiful, smooth cast for it.

“I’ll be damned if I sell airplane number two over this project,” Carr said. “I already sold one airplane to finance this.”

“The one your father used to fly,” Sheila said to Fletch. “The one your father now has.”

“Did he finish paying for it?” Barbara asked.

“Oh, yes,” Carr said. “He had that profitable year flying the Uganda border, while the rest of us were refusing to do so.”

“And the house in Karen,” Sheila said. “We sold the house in Karen.”

Juma came and sat at the table with them.

“Hello, hero,” Fletch said.

Juma grinned. “Now it’s a bigger story than almost any other.”

“It wasn’t all that much of a house,” said Carr.

“No. Not that much of a house. But it was ours.”

Juma was looking quite fondly at Sheila. “Sorry you lost your house.”

“With two airplanes flying,” Carr said, “in a few years we should be able to afford another house. With only one plane flying, I’d expect to be an apartment dweller from now until my dotage.”

A man Fletch recognized came out of the jungle toward them. He walked rapidly with a homemade crutch, heeling-and-toeing across the rough ground.

Sheila said, “You do like your peace and quiet.”

“Yes.” Carr looked around the camp and smiled. “I do.”

“Still,” Sheila said. “Enough, as you say …”

“Also the matter of the lost income. I’m not making money while I’m mucking about down here …”

The man on the crutch approached the table. The front of one foot was bandaged. One toe was in a splint. Two other toes Carr had removed with a garden shears a few days before.

In the man’s hand were his two toes still wrapped in the gauze.

“A few more days,” Carr said. “Well give it to the end of the month. If we don’t find anything encouraging by then, I guess it’s back to Nairobi to find an apartment.”

Carr looked up at the man on the crutch. “Habari leo?”

Leaning toward Carr, the man spoke softly in a tribal language. He held out the bloody gauze with the toes in it.

Juma grinned. He put his head down, near Fletch, and said, “The man wants to know where his toes are.” Speaking in Swahili, Carr pointed to the gauze in the man’s hand. “Carr says, ‘There are your toes.’” Grin widening, Juma said, “‘No, no,’ the man says, ‘I mean where are the spirits of my toes?’ Carr asks him what he means. The man says, ‘My toes still pain me, but not the toes in my hand, the toes which are no longer on my feet.’”

“Oh, I see,” said Fletch. “That happens. Nerves still signal pain to the brain from a severed appendage.”

“Now the man wants Carr to cut off the spirit of his toes, so the pain will stop.”

Fletch said, “That makes great sense.”

Carr’s face was looking as if he had just been told he had buried someone who wasn’t dead. Clearly, he did not know how to answer the man.

There was a long silence while Carr looked at the man, the toes in the man’s hand, the man’s bandaged foot, to Sheila, and back to the man.

Juma said, “Witch doctor.”

“Yes, yes,” said Carr. “Witch doctor. Only a witch doctor can remove spirits …”

Carr launched into a long, gentle instruction to the man as to how he must now go to a witch doctor to have the spirits of his toes removed.

“Listen,” Juma said to Fletch. “In three days someone is coming by in a truck. He is going to Shimoni. I would like to take you and Barbara with me to Shimoni in the truck. It is on the coast. We can camp there, and swim, catch fish …”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Very much.”

“And Barbara will want to come?”

“I think so. I’ll ask her.”

“It won’t be such hot work as here.”

“Of course, we’d like to help out Carr and Sheila, for as long as possible.”

“We’ll only go for a day or two.”

“Sounds good.”

Apparently satisfied, the man on the crutch was heeling-and-toeing it back along the jungle path.

Carr sighed. He looked at Sheila. “I don’t know, old dear. Maybe we won’t last the month, what with one thing and another …”