They continued to watch what earth came up with the screw.
“Pity we’re not in the well-drilling business,” Carr said. “At least sometimes we find water.”
“Ever find oil?” Fletch asked.
“Not even hair grease.”
Wrestling the corkscrew around, they tried three other places in that clearing that afternoon. Fletch tried a few pleasantries until he realized they weren’t appreciated. They didn’t find a lost Roman city, but he had enjoyed the day.
“Hapana kitu,” Carr said. “Nothing. Let’s go back to camp. There’s always tomorrow.”
“Hello,” Juma said. “Stay where the crocodiles are used to us. They are very territorial, you see.”
Naked, Barbara and Fletch were swimming in the river.
Naked, Juma sat on a rock in the river watching them.
“Crocodiles?” Barbara stood up in the river.
“Haven’t you seen them?” Fletch asked.
“Crocodiles that eat people?”
“I don’t think they’re particular.”
“Fletch,” Barbara whispered. “Juma’s naked.”
“So are we.”
“What does he mean? That there’s nothing sexual between us? Among us?”
“I’ll ask him.”
“Screw crocodiles.” Barbara started for the riverbank in haste. “Never even got to wash my hair.”
Fletch climbed up onto the rock and sat beside Juma.
“Barbara wants to know if there’s nothing sexual among us.”
“What does she mean?”
“Among us three, I guess she means. You and her.”
“Barbara wants a baby by me? That would be odd.”
“No. She doesn’t. We three were just naked together.”
“People put on clothes to be sexual, don’t they?”
“People do many things to be sexual.”
“What else are clothes for?”
“Pockets.”
Juma was rubbing the fingers of his right hand against his leg. “Africans don’t have pockets. We have nothing to put in them.” The red stain on his fingers was not coming off. “People can be sexual with each other whether they wear clothes or not.”
“True.”
Juma was looking at the mark on the lower right side of Fletch’s stomach. Juma said, “So you are partly black.”
“And blue.”
“I have never seen such a thing before. Is that the way a baby would look, if Barbara and I had a baby? I don’t think so.”
“No.”
“It looks odd.”
“Black people do not turn white where they are hit.”
“Who hit you? Did someone in Kenya hit you?”
“Why are your fingers red?”
“Miraa.”
“What’s miraa?”
“You don’t know miraa? It’s a drug we chew. A pleasure drug.”
“Like marijuana?”
“What’s marijuana?”
“A pleasure drug.”
“It leaves the fingers red, and the gums and tongue.” Juma showed Fletch how red his gums and tongue were. “Also, I suppose, our insides. It’s not very good. One of the men gave me some.” Juma nodded up the riverbank toward the cook tent. “You can buy some in any store which has banana leaves over the door.”
“I read some of that book you lent me, Weep Not Child.”
Juma snorted. “Ngugi blames white people for almost everything.”
“Including inventing war.”
“As if they were gods.” Juma put his hand on the back of Fletch’s neck and squeezed. “Are you a god, Fletch?”
“Tell me about my father.”
“He’s all right.” Juma returned to trying to rub the red stain off his fingers. “A bit of a mutata.”
“What’s mutata?”
“Troublesome.”
“He’s a nuisance?”
Juma laughed. “Once he rode into Narok on his motorcycle, slowly, slowly, dragging behind him with a rope around its neck a hyena.”
“He still rides a motorcycle.”
“He insisted some people bet him the night before he could not lasso a hyena and bring it into Narok by the second hour of daylight the next day.” Juma laughed again. “Trouble was, no one remembered having made such a bet with him. No one would admit to such a bet.”
“He sounds crazy.”
“It’s all right. No one likes hyenas much.”
There was a particularly loud chattering from the jungle across the river.
“Juma, when Carr took me to Lake Turkana he told me there’s an elephant skeleton, very, very old, buried near there, at Koobi Fora.”
“Of course it’s very old, if it’s a skeleton.”
“The skeleton of an East Indian elephant.”
“Buried in East Africa?”
“It didn’t swim across the Indian Ocean.”
Juma thought a moment. “You’re talking about Carr’s woman.”
“Her name is Sheila.”
“Well, her skeleton will belong in India.”
“She was born in Kenya. In Lamu.”
“All the borders are colonial. Have you thought that? The borders of all these nations were set by the English and the Germans and the French, not by the tribes.”
“I like Sheila. I like Carr.”
“Perhaps while you are here, I will take you to Shimoni.”
“What’s Shimoni?”
“It means hole-in-the-ground. It’s a place on the coast. I have been there.”
“Sheila worked for a car rental agency when Carr first met her.”
“Perhaps you and I will go to a three-in-one hotel.”
“What’s a three-in-one hotel?”
“You have never been to one?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Three in one bed. They are very popular here. I think they are very good especially for a man who must treat one wife at a time.”
“I see. Are you married, Juma?”
“No. I want to go to school. I want to work in television. Don’t you think it would be very good to work in television?”
“Yes. I do.”
“What is your work?” Juma asked.
“I work for a newspaper.”
“Oh, I see. That would be interesting work. Somewhat the same work as television, I think, except no one can see your face. If you are going to tell people something, don’t you think you should say it so people can see your face?”
“I believe it is easier to find out what to tell people if they do not see your face.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, perhaps that is true.” Juma stood up on the rock. “Well, it is time for you to go have your Scotch whiskey.”
“Why?”
Juma shrugged. “You had a Scotch whiskey last night at this time.”
“They adore him.”
“Who?”
“Carr. The women just eat him up.”
Carr was having an after-dinner beer at the lodge’s bar with the two women hôtelières they had flown up from Nairobi. Carr was sitting sideways to the bar on a stool. The two French women stood with their drinks, facing him. They laughed at everything he said.
Barbara and Fletch were drinking beer at a small table at the side of the veranda.
At the entrance to the veranda, a guard with a flashlight and rifle waited to escort the tourists to their cabins.
“Don’t you find Carr attractive?” Fletch asked.
Barbara looked around at the few remaining tourists who had not yet gone to bed.
“Every woman in the place,” Barbara said, “is just eating him up.”
After clearing trails and digging holes and finding nothing significant one more day, Barbara, Fletch, and Carr had flown to Nairobi, refueled, picked the two women up, and then flown west to the Masai Mara.
Sheila said she preferred to stay in camp and dig holes along the freshly cut trails. She promised she would find a Roman city before they r
eturned.
There was no discussion about whether Juma would accompany them. While they were getting ready to go, he simply did not appear.
The two women hotel executives from France were très chic, très jolie. They were on a business trip, but they were also having a good time. They handed around a bottle of champagne on the airplane. Carr did not drink any.
They marveled happily flying over the Rift Valley, the Loita Hills and Plains, ecologically the Serengeti Plains. Carr flew as low as he decently, legally could, so they could all see the herds of zebras, elands, giraffes grazing. The older woman, who sat in the copilot seat, snapped photographs from the air with a little camera genuinely useless at the distance of more than three meters. She thought she was getting wonderful pictures. Their first sight of elephants from the air sent them into raptures. In fast, stuttering English they were full of questions for Carr.
The women were warmly greeted by management and immediately taken on a tour of Keekorok Lodge. Even Fletch wondered how a lodge so far in the bush could provide such impeccable food and drink, accommodations and service.
Carr organized a safari guari and driver. That night and the next day, sunrise and sunset, while the hotel executives studied the operation of the lodge, Carr, Barbara, and Fletch toured the reserve.
They were to be at the lodge only two nights, before returning to Nairobi, and then Carr’s camp.
The safari guari was a well-spirited, well-sprung, fairly quiet Nissan van, roofless so they could stand in it, the clean, bush-scented African-air wind in their faces, so they could see all sides at once from an elevation of three meters as they rode along. Carr provided binoculars for them. They learned to brace themselves against the van’s frame so they could use the binoculars reasonably well as they joggled along. They also learned from the driver, Omoke, a Kisi, a new way of looking at landscape, of surveying vast areas quickly, mathematically, with just their eyes, going over it in sideways Z’s, spotting anything moving, anything even slightly outstanding in color. Anything remarkable spotted Omoke would drive to, through the bush, quietly, drawing up and stopping at a decent, noninterfering, nonmeddling distance.
Almost immediately Omoke found for them a lion and two lionesses sprawled in the fading sunlight. The tail and the hind legs of the lion were embraced by the forelegs of one lioness; his head and one shoulder were on the shoulder of the other lioness. Their heads were up. They were looking around lazily, the light from the low sun in their eyes. The bellies of all three were so stuffed they lay on the ground almost separately, like suitcases.
Before sunrise the next morning, Omoke, who saw a landscape differently from any painter, any engineer, found a small grassy depression in the ground in the shade of a bush. Lying in the hollow, clearly exhausted, was a cheetah who, just hours before, had given birth to four.
Later that afternoon they watched this same cheetah on uncertain legs hunt, bring down and kill an eland, to feed on and to feed her young. Immediately, hyenas came and took her kill from her. They dragged it a few meters away and devoured it.
The cheetah sat, blinking in the sunlight, watching them, clearly too tired to protest, to go on, just yet, or to go back, foodless, to her young.
From the ground, even more than the beasts, the dik-diks, the zebras, Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelles, topis, tree and rock hyraxes, impalas, leopards, lions, waterbucks, elephants, giraffes, or, down by the Mara River, the vervet monkeys, patas monkeys, olive baboons, were the birds, big and small, fascinating, the marabou storks and sacred ibises, secretary birds, Egyptian vultures, black kites, peregrines, francolins, spur fowl, bustards, plovers, turacos, the white-bellied go-away birds. Omoke had a bird book which he passed around. He knew his birds, but it was fun for Barbara and Fletch to look from this amazing bird in the bush to the book to confirm that such a creature existed and had a name and that one could believe one’s eyes.
Besides these specific observations, the general observation of African arithmetic is impressive. The social unit of many, if not most, species of birds and beasts is dominated by a single male. He has two wives, five wives, ten wives, fifty wives, seventy wives. Besides bearing the children, the wives do the work of hunting and feeding. All these wives and children belong to the single male, at least as long as he can fight off whatever young male would like to take his place. The only way this stupefying arithmetic can work out is if a shocking number of young males die trying. Or so Barbara and Fletch worked out in the back of the guari.
Giraffes stretch their long necks to graze off the top of trees, their four slim legs, bodies, long, graceful necks making something architectural out of whatever tree they graze/grace.
On the way back to the lodge that second night, they stopped to watch elephants graze through a stand of long, coarse grass. An elephant uses its tusk like a spoon, its trunk like a fork. With its tusk, an elephant digs down into the earth, loosens and lifts whatever it is eating. His trunk grabs it and swings it into his mouth, grass, root, soil, all together, all the while making this wonderful, rhythmical swaying movement, as if inviting someone to dance, or to box.
“The women are giving up,” Barbara said. At the bar, the two French hotel executives had put down their empty glasses. “They are going to bed. Seeing we need an askari to escort us, I might as well leave with them.”
“Okay. I’ll have a nightcap with Carr.”
After she stood up, Barbara said, “You might not find your father on this trip. But it looks to me as if you may have found your father figure.”
“Barbara says every woman around is eating you up with her eyes,” Fletch said.
Carr had brought two fresh beers to the table. “Occupational hazard. Women can think bush pilots attractive, but, for the most part, they’d never think of marrying one,” He touched his glass to Fletch’s. “Home tomorrow to the camp, and Sheila.”
They drank.
Fletch said, “Barbara and I are very grateful to you, Mr. Peter Carr. Seeing the Masai Mara has been a most memorable treat.”
“Then perhaps you’ll permit me a personal question?”
“Of course.”
Carr took another swallow of his beer before speaking. “You’ve got me a bit confused, young Fletcher. I’m speaking of the murder you saw, or half saw, at the airport.”
“Yes.”
“I understand your not running out of the men’s room yelling bloody murder, or I guess I do. Jet-lagged, deeply shocked, sick, newly arrived in a country foreign to you, knowing no one here, unsure of your father, his invitation, all that.”
“Did he ever indicate to you he might meet us at the airport?”
“But in the days since then, why haven’t you come forward? Granted, the authorities here would want you to testify, might hold you over, and, sooner rather than later you want to get back to your own lives in the States … but something could be worked out, don’t you think?”
Fletch cleared his throat. “My ace in the hole.”
“You’re playing poker?”
“There are those who say life is poker.”
“What’s in the pot?”
“My father.”
“Oh, I see. I think I see.”
“I’m talking about a trade-off, Carr.”
Carr’s eyes narrowed. “The senior Fletcher for a murderer.”
“Carr, I’ve been listening to you all. That’s what a reporter does: he listens. I’m in a country, however you love it, where a tourist is jailed, fined, and expelled for tearing a hundred-shillingi note in half; where a government driver is jailed for eighteen months for parking a government car outside a bar; where an Indian lawyer is sentenced to seven years in prison for having thirteen U.S. dollars in his pocket. My father got into a drunken bar brawl and may or may not have slugged a cop. What’s that worth in Kenyan prison time?”
“I see. You’re looking forward to doing a deal.”
“If it comes to it, I know a deal is possible. No police in the world would fail
to forgive what is essentially a misdemeanor for an eyewitness account of a murder.”
“You’re not just playing Hamlet.”
“I see my father’s ghost, and that’s about all.”
Quietly, Carr said, “You don’t even know the chap.”
“He’s my father.”
“And that means something to you?”
“I don’t know what it means to me.”
“He ran off on you and your mother. He seems to have ignored you all your life. A few days ago, in prison, he refused to see you.”
“Am I crazy?”
“I don’t know.”
“He also arranged for Barbara and me to come out here to meet him, spend some time with him, get to know him. There must be some feeling there. At least ‘mild curiosity.’”
“There’s a moral question here somewhere.”
“Is there? How do I know what morals there are within a family, between a father and a son? No one ever taught me.”
“I see.”
“I know I don’t want to see anyone who is my father spend months, years in an African prison for getting pissed and blindly swinging out at someone.”
“Not quite what I mean. You can identify a murderer, someone who has murdered and is still at large.”
“You mean you think he may murder again?”
“Exactly. Don’t you have the responsibility to get the chap off the streets?”
Fletch shook his head. “No. That was a murder of impulse, of rage. I was there.”
“The police aren’t so sure,” Carr said. “I made a phone call while we were in Nairobi.”
“Dan Dawes?”
“The same.”
Fletch chuckled. “The police informant.”
“Right. The police inform him of everything. Bringing hard currency into Kenya isn’t illegal; in fact, it’s rather appreciated. Failing to declare the money upon arrival is illegal. In getting as far as the men’s room without declaring this extraordinary number of deutsche marks, Louis Ramon, who, by the way, was on your airplane, had committed a crime.”
“So?”
“So the Kenyan police are looking for a Kenyan financial acrobat who had desperate need for that much hard currency.”
“Wrong. The man who killed, what’s-his-name, Louis Ramon?”
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