Title:Fletch, Too
Author(s): Gregory Mcdonald
Publisher(s): Vintage Books
Pages: 256
Year: 2002
Format: Mobi
Language: English
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For much of the afternoon, in the shade of the extended cook tent, Fletch watched Carr doctor the people. Many children had burns, and Carr dressed them. Many, many others had eye infections, which Carr bathed. He put ointment into each infected eye and sent each mother or father away with a small tube and exact instructions. Other people had boils and sores and cuts and broken bones, complained of aching stomachs, and, in each case, Carr questioned, examined, reached into his kit for something that would clean, cure, fix, do no harm anyway. The people knew enough not even to ask him about their many spots of skin cancer. For two old men Carr thought had internal tumors he could do nothing and said so. He told them where he expected the Flying Doctor to be in a week or ten days.
A man who carried himself proudly limped in on a crude crutch made of a tree branch. He said he had dropped a rock and crushed his toes. Carr clipped off two toes with garden shears. He stitched, trimmed, disinfected, dressed them. A third toe, only broken, Carr set.
Carr wrapped the two severed toes in a piece of gauze and solemnly handed them to the man.
“How did these people know when you were coming?” Fletch asked Carr.
Carr didn’t answer.
“How did Juma know all about my father? How did he know Barbara and I were having breakfast on the Lord Delamere Terrace at that moment? He came straight to us, without inquiring or appearing to look around. How did he seem to know we were coming down here before we did?”
Carr said, “Never try to figure out how Africans know things. It’s their magic. But I can give you a clue. Much of their magic is simple observation. They spend what is to us an inordinate amount of time thinking about people. I mean real people, the people around them. They think about people instead of things, possessions, cars, televisions, hair dryers. They think about the people they know instead of thinking about mythical people, politicians, sports heroes, and movie stars; instead of thinking about mythical events, distant wars, currency crises, and meetings of the United Nations.” Carr dropped an empty tube of Neosporin ointment into an oil drum being used as a wastebasket. “Our magic, of course, comes from the pharmacy. Out here we have a beautiful relationship, as long as we respect each other’s magic.”
“But why were they waiting for you?” Fletch was taking off his sneakers and wool socks. “Sheila could have treated their burns and infections …”
Carr opened a fresh roll of gauze. “They don’t trust Sheila. If you didn’t notice, Sheila is an Indian lady. She’s tried to help, but they won’t let her. Magic, everywhere, has to do with the persona. They also wouldn’t trust you to help them, even though you are a white man. The older people would not be able to bring themselves to complain to you, to tell you they have problems, because you are too young. So I get these dirty jobs.”
A young man explained to Carr that he’d had a sore on the back of his hand. So he had stuck his hand in battery acid. Now the hand, wrist, forearm were horribly inflamed.
As Fletch helped Carr, held this, held that, fetched a new box of medical supplies from the airplane, he watched a tent being set up in the clearing under Sheila’s direction. His and Barbara’s knapsacks were carried up from the plane and put into that tent.
Because the snow skis were so long, and so unusual, two men carried them to the tent on their shoulders. Fletch heard the exclamations as Barbara took the skis out of their cases and showed everyone what they were. Standing in the dirt in the tropical sun, the jungle a green wall behind her, Barbara went through the skiing motions with the ski poles, knees bent, hips sashaying, slaloming down a snow-sided mountain, from the looks of her.
Juma, in pretending to ski, pretended to lose his balance. On one leg, arms pinwheeling for a long time, he pretended to be trying to regain his balance. Finally, he let himself fall. Dust rose around him.