Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (12 page)

Because low water had exposed many
rocks that in the rainy season would be well submerged, Inti was forced into
almost constant maneuvering, and the
Little Virgin
could no longer
average her customary six knots per hour. The slower pace, combined with the
Abujao’s more abundant attractions, afforded Switters the opportunity for an
unusual riverine interface. Despite his distaste for the incessant teeming that
characterized tropical
South
America
, he was by no means
insensitive to natural wonders, and he felt he ought somehow to take advantage
of this opportunity. There was a fly in the ointment, however.
Simulium
vittatum.

His attentive powers were blunted by
the persistent need to throw wild punches at the proboscises of the diminutive
Durante-esque devils—and to fend off larger, unidentifiable insects who kept
trying to crash the party. In the entomological kingdom, the quest for lunch
was ongoing. Switters could empathize.

No comida.

No concentración.

And
meditación
was out of the
question.

The next morning, when Inti and the
boys returned from the bush with their second empty pisco bottle and facefuls
of sheepish expression, Switters held out his hand.

“Gimme coca,” he said.

Externally, day two on the olive
Abujao mirrored day one. For thirteen more lunchless hours, they zigzagged
among mossy boulders and through sopping streamers of feverish heat, attended
by squadrons of black flies that refused to quit them until a late afternoon
downpour literally drowned the biting bugs in midair.

Internally, the furniture had been
rearranged. Switters was booming with vim. Impervious to hunger, he was
possessed of such a quantity of unvented vigor that he longed to leap into the
river and race the boat to Boquichicos. This he could not do, due to caimans,
spiny catfish, the odd swimming viper, and the fact that he’d put his silk suit
back on in order to expose less of his flesh to those South American things
that would feed upon it.

Energized yet strangely at peace, he
reclined on his rapidly moldering cardboard couch, his face, hands, and feet
impastoed with the root goo that caused him to resemble a comic-book Chinaman
(in real life, Asians were no more yellow in complexion than Caucasians were
truly white), the wad of leaf in his jaw beckoning—reaching out!—to the massive
green rampage of forest spirits along either bank. Or so it seemed. At some
point he commenced to play with the baby ocelot.

That Switters was no pet-lover has
been established. For days he’d paid keener notice to the wild parrots in the
trees than to poor Sailor in his nearby cage. Yet, the truth was, he had sort
of a soft spot for very young animals: for puppies, for bunnies, for small
kitty cats. If only they wouldn’t grow up! He’d sometimes wished there was a
serum with which one might inject pups and kittens, a drug that would arrest
their growth and retard their descent into adulthood. Oddly or not, his liking
for domestic animals was restricted to those months when they were still
frisky, spunky, and playful, before they became cautious and staid, before
their spontaneity was genetically assassinated and their sense of wonder
crushed by the lockstep rigors of the reproductive drive and the territorial
imperative.

During the period when Switters and
Bobby Case were under fire in
Bangkok
, tattletale embassy personnel having observed them on
more than a few occasions in the company of what the ambassador referred to as
“underage” girls, Bad Bobby had addressed their alleged misbehavior. “It’s only
natural,” he’d said, “that I chase after jailbait. I’m a midlife adolescent, I
can’t make commitments, I’m scared of intimacy, and last but not least, I’m a
piece of south Texas white trash who likes his pussy to fit tighter than his
boots. But with you, though, Swit, it’s something different. I get the feeling
you’re attracted to . . . well, I reckon I’d have to call it
innocence
.”

Unwilling to flatly deny it, Switters
had asked, “Attracted to innocence in order to defile it?”

Bobby hooted and threw up his hands
in mock horror. The girls in the Safari Bar all tittered because he was crazed
Bobby Case and he was drinking with his crazed friend Switters. “You’re not
fixing to feign a guilt trip on me, are you? ‘Cause if you are, I’m going on
home and read
Finnegans Wake
.”

“You desert me in my hour of need,
I’ll follow you home and read
Finnegans Wake to
you.”

“Oh no you don’t!” Bobby exclaimed,
signaling frantically for another round of Sing Ha. The girls wanted to join
them—the Safari girls
loved
Bobby and Switters—but the men bought them
champagne and shooed them away. They were under fire and needed to talk.

“There’s folks,” said Bobby, “who
think sex is filthy and nasty, and they’re spooked by it and mad at it and
don’t want anything to do with it and don’t want anybody else messing with it,
either. And there’s folks who think sex is as natural and wholesome as Mom’s
apple pie and they’re relaxed about it and can’t get enough of it, even on
Sunday.”

“Personally,” said Switters, “I think
sex
is
filthy and nasty—and I can’t get enough of it. Even on Sunday.”

“Uh-huh. Yes indeedy. And it’s
particularly nasty when it’s all sweet and fresh and innocent. Isn’t that how
it strikes you, Switters? I believe you lingo jockeys refer to this as
paradox
.”
He yelled “Paradox!” at the top of his lungs, and the girls laughed merrily.
“Or, we could say that innocence and nastiness enjoy a symbiotic relationship.
Symbiotic! For the connoisseurs among us. Also for young folks, who’re just
busting with nastiness night and day, and have a completely innocent kind of
awe of it.”

“You’re a troubled man, Captain Case.
There’re dark forces at work in you, and I will neither sanction them nor be a
party to their rationalization.”

“Yeah, well, don’t forget who your
employer is. If you and me didn’t rationalize our butts off, we couldn’t look
in the mirror to shave.”

“You haven’t shaved in a week.”

“Beside the point. What I’m trying to
get at here—and I’m doing it on your behalf and in your defense, since I’m not
fit to be defended—is that consensual, non-abusive, good-hearted fucking is not
in and of itself defiling, not even to the very young.”

“It’s often a matter of cultural
context.”

“There you go. Look at the ladies in
this very room.” Bobby gestured wildly at a gaggle of chic bar girls huddled
around the jukebox. They giggled and waved back at him. “At least half of ’em
are as innocent as rosebuds.”

“Because their minds are still
curious and their hearts are still pure.”

“There you go. Sure, the shadow of
the big A is hovering over ’em like Death’s own helicopter, and they have to
put up with the bedside manners of snockered Sony executives and unhappy shit
like that, you know, and sleeping with jerks can definitely numb a person’s
heart, but frequent fucking hasn’t traumatized ’em or even cheapened ’em, not
these ladies or anyone else, except maybe in those unfortunate blue-nosed
societies that are uptight about the body in general. It’s a matter of
attitude.”

“Cultural context.”

“There you go. I read somewhere that
in the olden days, when a girl reached a certain age—puberty, I reckon—she’d be
initiated into sex by one of her uncles. Same with a boy, only an aunt would do
the job. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. It was considered a highly
important learning experience, the uncle and auntie were teachers, and it was a
serious though evidently smiley-faced family duty. And the thing is, you know,
there’s no evidence that this hands-on brand of sex education was anything but
beneficial or that it ever left even the most itty-bitty psychological scar.”

“Well, that was then and this is now.
Today, it’d land the kids in therapy and the adults in jail. For decades in
both instances.”

“Different cultural context, if I can
coin a phrase. And precisely why we should avoid
America
like the mumps.
Thailand
is perfect for an ol’ boy like me, who’s into sitting
and hankers to be every niece’s uncle; and it’s perfect for a cat like you,
who’s got this deep secret Jones for innocence.”

“Yeah, so deep and secret even I
don’t know about it. Maybe you ought to consider, pal, that you might be
indulging in a simple-minded supposition.”

“Supposition!” hollered Bobby,
eliciting the usual amused response. “Okay, son. Forget it. You don’t
appreciate my support, I withdraw it. I wouldn’t want to sully the Patpong
night with any supposition.”

They went quiet for a while, pulling
on their frosty Sing Has. Then Switters said, “In regards to my personal
proclivities, you’re generating considerable flapdoodle.” Immediately he
bawled, “Proclivities! Flapdoodle!” in a voice more thunderous than Bobby’s. He
nodded at his friend and said softly, “To save you the trouble.”

“You’re a gentleman and I thank you.
The ladies thank you, too.”

“However,” Switters resumed, “I have
to say you’re correct when you suggest that loss of virginity is in no way
equivalent to loss of innocence. Unless, of course,
innocence
is defined
as
ignorance
.”

“In which case,” put in Bobby, “every
sum bitch in the state of
Texas
is
innocent as a snowflake. I share this with you as a fellow Texan.”

“You won’t find the term ‘Texan’ on a
single document in my resumé.”

“Only because you’ve doctored your
damn files. All-region linebacker at
Stephen
F.
Austin
High
School
. Or do
I have you confused with some other, more studly, guy?”

“We only lived in
Austin
two years. And I spent both those summers with my
grandmother in
Seattle
.”

“Well, let’s see: factoring in your
age, that makes you one-eighteenth of a Texan. Woefully inadequate, I admit,
but it probably accounts for your good looks.”

“And my appreciation of red-eye
gravy.”

“Praise the Lord!” Bobby called for
more beer. “By the way, I been meaning to ask you: how come you never went on
to play football in college?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Seems every campus
I visited on those, uh, recruiting trips, all the players ever talked about was
money. Football was a business to them, even at the college level, and the lone
dream they had in life was to be let loose in the NFL gold mine with an agent
and a shovel. So, I decided to give rugby a whirl. Rugby’s every bit as rough
and every bit as challenging, and a lot more fun because in America, at least,
there’s never been a chance anybody could make a nickel on it. I guess I liked
it because it was beyond the reach of commerce and hype. In rugby you were just
a guy laying his teeth on the line for the sport of it, you were not a
commodity.”

“Uh-huh!” Bobby crowed, with a
triumphant smirk. “There you go. Attracted to purity. Switters, I rest my
case.”

“Case, I rest my Switters,” countered
Switters, and the pair convulsed with such silly, stupid laughter that even the
bar girls shook their heads and looked the other way.

Bobby Case was soon to be reassigned
to a U2 base in
Alaska
. It was rumored that upon his departure, the gutters
of Patpong (
Bangkok
’s “entertainment” district) had run with women’s
tears. Incidentally, despite Bobby’s description of himself as a “midlife
adolescent,” he was several years Switters’s junior, a fact underscored by his
twenty-seven-inch waist and boyish shock of skunk-black hair, and contradicted
by the purplish crescents beneath his glint-and-squint aviator’s eyes. His last
hours in Bangkok were spent in deep meditation at a Buddhist shrine, although
in balance it should be reported that the evening prior, he’d addressed the
C.R.A.F.T. Club for forty minutes on the first sentence of
Finnegans Wake,
which happened to be the only sentence of that book he’d ever read.

Switters was called home to
Langley
. He spent
his
last hours in
Bangkok
in the company of an actual adolescent. He bought her
a new silk dress, jeans, and a compact disk player. Then he put her on a bus
back to her native village with six thousand dollars in her pink plastic purse,
her brief career as a whore at an end. She would rescue her family financially,
and—since sexual shame was nonexistent in Thailand and he’d seen to it that she
was free of disease—eventually marry her childhood sweetheart in a jolly public
ceremony beside a field apop with ripening rice. The six thou he’d won from
some Japanese businessmen in a
baka hachi
game that nearly sparked an
international incident. As for Switters’s farewell presentation to the
C.R.A.F.T. Club, his lecture on the
Wake
went on until nearly daybreak and
is said to have concluded with him bleeding, in the nude, and crooning “Send in
the Clowns,” a song the membership was shocked to learn he knew.