“Just explaining to your wife,” Carr said, “that the senior Fletcher is held up today by a sticky legal problem. Suggesting you both fly up to Turkana with me …”
“Nice of you …” Barbara’s eyes were filled with questions.
“About a two-and-a-half-hour flight each way. Lake Turkana is very interesting. Used to be called the Jade Sea. Plenty of room in the plane. Carries eight passengers and there’s only this one small scientist going. A Dr. McCoy. He won’t mind at all.”
Barbara said, “I’m a little sick of airplanes …”
Carr looked at his watch. “Trouble is, I have to be going. I told Dr. McCoy I’d be ready to take off at ten.”
“You go, Fletch,” Barbara said. “I really need a down day. There’s a swimming pool somewhere here. I’ve never even looked in the aviaries in the courtyard yet.”
“Sure you’ll be all right?” Fletch was eating rapidly.
“If I get bored I can go walk around that mosque near here. I’ve never seen a real mosque.”
“I’ll get the car. You’ll be out front in five minutes, Fletch?”
“Sure.”
After Carr left the breakfast room, Barbara said, “Fletch, darling. There is something about your father that doesn’t make sense.”
Fletch drained his cup of the strong coffee. “We knew that before we arrived.”
Barbara shoved Fletch away from the bathroom mirror. “Is this what life with you is going to be like?”
Fletch was brushing his teeth. “What do you mean?”
She put toothpaste on her own brush. “Always running away? Always being somewhere else?”
She already had changed into her swimsuit.
“Carr invited both of us,” Fletch said. “You said you didn’t want to come. You said you were sick of airplanes, want to spend the day resting by the pool.”
“Lovely,” Barbara said. “You fly me to East Africa, worry my mother frantic, then fly off into the bush, leaving me in some tropical hotel…”
“I agreed to go. I thought you would want to go, too.”
“I said I wanted to stay here. I thought you’d say you wanted to stay here, too.”
“Will you let me rinse my mouth? Please?”
Barbara stepped aside, but not much. “We got married. Big event in life. We flew halfway around the world, totally unprepared. Big event. To meet your father, for the first time, which should be a big event, except he decides he’s got something better to do than meet us. Yesterday, you saw someone get stabbed to death in a bathroom. Big bloody event! And today you want to go flying off into the African bush to someplace we’ve never heard of, with someone we don’t even know!”
“You losing your sense of humor?”
“When is enough enough for you? Can’t you sit still a damned minute?”
“Okay,” Fletch said. “I’ll go downstairs and tell Carr I’m not going. We’ll sit by the pool.”
She had put the cap back on the toothpaste and placed the tube neatly on the counter.
Barbara turned and faced Fletch. “No. You go.” Suddenly her tight fist, much smaller and harder than Fletch had realized, smashed into Fletch’s stomach, low, just inside his right hipbone. “Take that with you.”
Fletch lowered his head. He looked up at her. “No one’s ever hit me there before.”
“First time for everything.”
Fletch walked into the hallway outside the bathroom. “I can’t stay now.”
“That’s a nice excuse.”
“Take it as you like it. See you at dinner.”
“How’s married life so far?” Carr drove the Land-Rover along the left-hand side of Harry Thuku Road.
Half a block from the Hotel Norfolk, on the left, just before the rotary, Fletch noticed a police station/jail.
After a moment, Fletch answered, “There’s a difference between men and women.”
“Yes,” Carr said. “There is. Shall I sing you a few million songs about that? Never mind. You may have only one life to live.” He shifted down.
“Okay. You know Barbara and I had a disagreement.”
Of the men who walked along the road, many were with children.
A few raindrops appeared on the windshield.
“Hope Barbara’s having a nice day by the pool,” Fletch said.
“Never begrudge Africa its rain,” Carr said. “We’ll go a bit out of our way to have lunch at the fishing lodge on Lake Turkana, which is nothing to write home about. But, before that, you can swim in their pool, which is.”
“Which is what?”
“Something to write home about.”
“How can a swimming pool be something to write home about?”
“You’ll want a swim by the time we get there,” Carr was smiling to himself.
Fletch noticed a dog-eared paperback on Carr’s dashboard. Murder by Rote. By Josie Fletcher. Fletch picked it up. “You read my mother?”
“Her biggest fan. Have you read that one?”
Fletch was thumbing through the book. “How can I tell?”
“She must be a very sensible woman, your mother.”
“Sensible?” Adjectives sometimes used to describe his mother always amazed Fletch. Sensible. Observant. Clever about clocks set wrong and dogs that don’t bark. Practical. Wise. Logical. Adjectives used by her few fans. “Yes, she might notice if her house were on fire. But she’d probably finish writing her chapter before doing anything about it.”
Carr shifted in his seat. “Have you seen her lately?”
“Last Saturday. The day I was married.”
“Still, I gather, a woman, without much education, she’s supported herself, and you, at a hard profession …”
“I appreciate it.” Fletch tossed the book back onto the dashboard. “We had a good conversation. I really pinned her down about my father. My hearing from him forced the issue.”
“Oh?” Carr cleared his throat. “What did she say about him?”
“She said she loved him. His disappearance left her in a state of permanent shock. She’s been trying to solve mysteries ever since.”
“Maybe the quality of a writer is determined by the universality of the mystery he’s trying to solve.”
Leaning against his door, right arm over the chair back, Fletch stared at Carr.
“A pilot has lots of time to think,” Carr said, as if excusing himself. “Literally, his head is in the clouds. Why does human life take the forms it does? Families, friends … What are these institutions humans keep creating, destroying, and re-creating for ourselves? Religions, nations, families, businesses, clubs … What are they for? Given the uniqueness of life, how can one person purposely take the life of another, for any reason?”
“My mother supports herself by writing detective stories,” Fletch said. “There’s nothing mysterious about it.”
They were stuck in traffic.
“What are we?” Carr mused.
Fletch said, “We are all mysteries waiting to be solved.”
“Now you’ve got the beat.” Carr beat out a little rhythm with his fingers on the steering wheel. “One has to think something.” The traffic began to move. “Odd, though, that your mother never told you much about your father. She must be articulate.”
“She really hasn’t known all these years whether he’s dead or alive.”
“She had him declared dead?”
“She had to, to get on with her own life.”
“Therefore you thought he was dead.”
“Kids believe what they’re told. When the courts say, ‘Your daddy is dead,’ the kid says, ‘Okay. My daddy is dead. What’s for lunch?’”
“What was for lunch?”
“Usually the question, ‘How do you spell hors d’oeuvres?’ My mother never could spell hors d’oeuvres. It’s a wonder she kept serving ‘em up in her books.”
“All this is more of a suprise to you than I thought.”
“You don’t get used to not having a father. T
hen again, you do.”
“Then someone comes along and says, ‘Here’s Papa!’”
“Where is Papa?”
Carr swung out to pass. “Walter Fletcher has screwed up.”
“She also told me she never told me much about Walter because Walter wasn’t there to defend himself.”
Carr breathed a whistle through his teeth. “Nice lady.”
“Sometimes, any news is better than no news.”
“I’m not so sure.” Carr turned left onto the airport road. “Barbara’s not missing much of a trip. Too murky really to see the green hills of Africa. Still, she’s getting her rest by the sunless pool. And your company is pleasant. I guess you’re the one person in the world I don’t have to worry about stealing Murder by Rote before I finish it.”
“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.”
“Strip and dip,” Carr said.
Fletch already had his sneakers and wool socks off. Carr had said he did not want to guess the temperature in either degrees centigrade or Fahrenheit. He said figuring such an astronomical number would thin his hair.
It was hot.
The other side of the none-too-serious fence, behind the fishing lodge’s cabins, were a few of the Turkana tribe. Not all wore clothes.
Fletch dropped his cutoff ski pants. He plunged into the swimming pool.
“YOW!”
Standing on the pool edge, Carr laughed. “Something to write home about?”
“This is impossible! It’s freezing! Is it just the contrast, because I’m so hot?”
“No. The water temperature really is near freezing.”
Fletch’s teeth were chattering. “How do they do it?”
The fishing lodge at Lake Turkana was a terrace, an open wooden lodge, and a half-dozen wooden cabins on a sand bluff overlooking the lake.
“They don’t do it. The rate of evaporation in this heat is so rapid the water in a pool like this gets very cold indeed. Would you believe it?”
Hugging his own shoulders, Fletch said, “I believe it. You coming in?”
“Not on your life. You think I’m crazy?”
Fletch did a fast crawl to the ladder and pulled himself out of the pool.
“Swimming pools are for tourists,” Carr said.
“This one sure is.”
Fletch stood shivering on the pool ledge. Ca
rr looked down Fletch’s body and frowned. “Is that a birthmark?”
Fletch looked down at himself. The lowest right side of his stomach was blue. The mark was bigger than a fist. It was as big as an outstretched hand.
Fletch said, “I must have been born again.”
Carr leaned over and prodded Fletch’s flesh with his fingers. “First birthmark I ever saw that’s swollen.”
“I didn’t even feel it,” Fletch said. “I must have bumped into something in the hotel room. A strange hotel room. In the dark …”
“Sorry,” Carr said. “None of my business.”
Fletch prodded with his own fingers the great blue welt where Barbara had hit him. It didn’t hurt.
Carr said, “I’ll be on the terrace, when you’re ready. I’ll buy us shandies before lunch.”
For a moment, Fletch sat on the pool edge, his feet in the cold water.
Then he dropped forward into the water. He thought of drowning.
Shortly he climbed out of the pool. He pulled on his cutoff ski pants, his socks, laced his sneakers, and went to join Carr on the terrace.
Fletch sat with Carr at the little table on the terrace on the sand bluff overlooking Lake Turkana. “A lake in the middle of a desert,” Fletch said.
Carr said, “The lake is down about a mile from its edges since I’ve known it.”
In the airplane coming in, Fletch had watched the Kerio River wandering over sand toward Lake Turkana. The river dried up miles before it reached the lake. A sad, empty landscape surrounded the lake, miles and miles in every direction. The only marks upon the landscape, besides the few, widely separated shambas, were water catchments, which were empty.
“The lake of many names.” Carr gazed over it. “Aman, Galana, Basso Narok, Jade Sea, Lake Rudolf, Lake Turkana. There are Nile River perch in it. Explain that to me. They used to grow to as much as two hundred pounds. Nowadays, they run thirty, forty pounds.”
Naked men on logs were fishing the lake.
A waiter brought two glasses, two bottles of premium beer, two bottles of lemon carbonated drink. “Thank you, Fred,” Carr said. He poured some of the beer and some of the lemon drink in each glass to make the shandies.
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