Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (13 page)

Switters was not much given to
self-analysis. Perhaps he sensed that it forced the dishonest into even deeper
deception and led the candid into bouts of despair. Consequently, he’d given
little thought to Bobby’s characterization of him that
Bangkok
evening as a seeker after purity. And now, two years
later, aboard a dory in the Peruvian Amazon, rolling a spotted cub back and
forth on its spine and pondering, what he pondered was not so much any alleged
attraction to innocence on his part but his indisputable attraction to Suzy,
reasonably confident they were not the same thing.

Like many modern-day
sixteen-year-olds, Suzy was at a juncture where innocence and sophistication
converged, much as the olive-colored Abujao converged with the cigar-colored
Ucayali
, mingling, chaotically at first, their contrasting hues and oppositional
currents. The time, no doubt, had passed when it might have been effective to
inoculate Suzy with his hypothetical adulthood-prevention serum. Quite likely,
it would have been a mistake at any stage. Human beings were not well served by
permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were
undergoing a series of presumably
desirable
alterations, but in a
universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the
worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn’t fixity the hallmark of the
living dead?

At any rate, to enumerate the ways in
which Suzy had changed, he was obliged to picture how she’d been at the
beginning. Initially, he had to strain to recall the details of their first
meeting. Then, he had to strain to stop recalling them. All this Suzy straining
was amplified, magnified, and possibly provoked, by the coca.

It had been four years. On leave and
destined for
Seattle
, he’d stopped off in
Sacramento
at his mother’s request, to meet her new husband and
stepdaughter. The husband, a well-to-do hardware wholesaler, had admitted him
and after a minute or two of small talk, directed him to his mother’s sitting
room. The door was ajar. Switters could hear voices. He rapped once and was
charging into the room when his mother squealed and blocked his entrance. “No,
you can’t come in! She’s trying on her training bra.”

Switters froze in his tracks,
momentarily startled, then curious and thoughtful. “Oh, really?” he asked with
great interest. “What’s she training them to
do
?”

There had erupted an unrestrained and
altogether delicious giggle—really more of a girlish guffaw—and the slender
figure that had been standing with her back to the door made a silky half-turn
to look at him, swinging in the process a storybook pelt of straight blond
princess hair. She was barefoot, he remembered, toenails twinkling with a
pink-baby varnish. Her longish legs were bare to the brie-like thighs, at which
point they vanished into white cotton shorts, stretched taut over a little rump
so round Christopher Columbus could have employed one of its protuberances as a
visual aid and bowled bocci with the other. Panty outline was in evidence.
Above the waist she was naked, save for a dainty white harness, from which
dangled shop tags of paper and plastic, and which she did not wear but, rather,
clutched loosely at a distance of several inches in front of her chest. In that
position it concealed only the nippled points of mammalian swellings, hard as
quinces, that might have served as helmets for the marionettes in a German army
puppet show—if the toy Huns were outfitted in winter camouflage. They were not
quite in the
tits
category, but they had a running start at it.

Into view now, its prow piercing his
reverie, came a dugout canoe, paddled by five loinclothed Indians with
decorated faces and feathered coifs. These feathers had once been the exclusive
property of individual parrots and macaws, a particular not lost on old Sailor
Boy, whose reaction was anything but relaxed. “Come on, pal,” said Switters to
the agitated fowl, “practice what you preach.” The wild canoers neither waved
nor nodded at the crew of the
Virgin
; the
Pucallpa
clansmen ignored them as well. On the forest-shaded
river, the boats passed in silence, twenty feet apart, as if the other did not
exist. Switters looked imploringly at Inti, who shrugged and muttered,
“Kandakandero.”

Okay, where was he? Staring at Suzy,
Suzy staring back, he was captivated to the extent that he failed to hear a
word of his mother’s prolonged greeting or to adequately return the maternal
embrace; Suzy, openly curious, amused, and more self-conscious about her
amusement than about her exposed breastlings, which she eventually covered
almost as an afterthought. At twelve, modesty was a custom she had yet to fully
assimilate. She stood there vacillating between poise and awkwardness, as if
she were unsure just how much she had to protect.

The ghost of the guffaw still clung
to her tumid lips, causing them to quiver, and in their quivering fullness they
reminded Switters of one of those marine creatures that attach themselves to
rocks and dare observers to guess whether they are animals or flowers. Her eyes
were so large and moist and aqua they might have been scissored from a resort
brochure, and her nose was fine, freckled, and slightly upturned, as if
sniffing the air for hints of fun. Because she had experienced neither success
nor failure in life to any appreciable degree, her countenance remained
unwrenched by society’s dreary tugs but rather was lit by the fanciful
phosphors of the mythic universe. Or, so he imagined. It would be no
exaggeration to say she struck him as a cross between Little Bo Peep and a wild
thing from the woods.

If Suzy viewed her new stepbrother as
a glamorous, witty man of the world, scarred of cheek and mesmeric of eye,
Switters viewed his new stepsister as a freshly budded embodiment of the
feminine archetype, equally adept at wounding a man and nursing his wounds. Her
frank gaze and expectant smile, the blithe lewdness of her posture and the
resolute piety symbolized by the plain gold crucifix that swung from a chain
about her never-hickeyed neck, combined to suggest something timeless, some
hidden knowledge, ancient and innate, well beyond her years. Did he perceive in
her (or project onto her) a glimmer of primal Eve, parting the original ferns?
Of salty Aphrodite, scratching her clam in the surf? Of a callow Salome,
naively rehearsing a hootchy-kootch that would rattle a royal household and
cost a man his head? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t go that far. Maybe he only
appraised her with the dum-dum delight with which the GI Elvis must have
appraised the pubescent Priscilla.

What is certain is that he liked her
instantly, as she liked him. At that point—it should be said in his favor—his
feelings were honestly platonic. (The flutter in his scrotum he attributed to
the long flight from
Bangkok
.)
Lust would come later, catching him unaware, intensifying slowly, a lump of
hard lard in a skillet over coals, that melted almost imperceptibly, not
reaching its current and ongoing maddening sizzle until that past Easter, five
months earlier, when, attending a family dinner at a Japanese restaurant, he’d
fondled her under the low table while she held a menu in front of her face,
pretending to experience difficulty in choosing between the lotus cake and the
green tea ice cream for dessert. Arrrgh! Jesus on a pogo stick! Her sea-anemone
mouth had fallen agape, and he could still see the way the red neon from the
Kirin
beer sign had reflected off her orthodontic braces. “For crying out loud,
Suzy,” her dad had complained, as she struggled
not
to cry out loud,
“why don’t you just order both.”

Emboldened by the coca, Switters
unlocked the false bottom in his valise, an object to which the Indians still
gave wide berth, fear-ing, perhaps, that it was inhabited by crocodile
familiars, or at least impregnated with a magical essence. Pushing aside
esoteric weapons, surveillance equipment, cryptography devices, and his
aforementioned secret shame—the reproachful album of Broadway show tunes—he
located and then withdrew an even more covert and humiliating item. It had
yellowed a bit, and frayed, but was appreciably the same as it had been that
day four years ago. (How surprised he’d been to later discover its friendly
tail practically wagging from a hamper of unrecyclable clothing that his mother
had condemned to the incinerator.)

For the next half hour or so, he
dangled it just out of reach of the cub, who leapt in the air and swung at it
repeatedly with its front paws. Then, on an impulse he’d prefer not to dissect,
he pressed the skimpy article against his own face and held it there, as if
some olfactory whisper of her might come wafting through the multitudinous
stinks of time and space.

It turned out to smell like cordite.

The Indians watched him with complete
acceptance. It was unlikely they had ever seen, or even imagined, a training
bra and thus were immune to its implications. Moreover, they had come to treat
Switters with a respect bordering on reverence. Perhaps that was due to the
firepower with which he had dispatched the spider, perhaps it was his
willingness to chew coca; or perhaps it was because, as they overcame their
shyness and could finally look at him directly, they took notice of his eyes,
eyes that it has become tiresome to again depict as “fierce,” etc., but that in
point of fact, quite possibly
could
have stared down John Wayne,
unnerved Rasputin, and hypnotized Houdini.

About an hour before sunset, Inti
guided the Johnson into an eddy and stalled her motor. This in itself was not
unusual. They normally traveled from five in the morning until six in the
evening, stopping while there was enough light by which to cook supper.
However, the shore alongside this eddy was quite marshy, and caimans as long as
coffins lumbered on wicked claws among the reeds. It seemed an unlikely spot
for camping.

Inti motioned for Switters to join
him in the stern. There, the Indian attempted to communicate something of a
relatively complex nature. Not many years earlier, Switters would have spent
his time aboard the
Virgin
learning as much as he could of Inti’s
language, a dialect of Campa, and with his linguistic talents, he might have
picked up a fair amount of it. Nowadays, though, his interest in languages had
shifted away from communicative utility; away, even, from revelatory rhetoric;
had moved toward what he regarded as the future of language in the
post-historical age: an environment in which words, relieved of some of their
traditional burden, might be employed not to describe realities but to create
them.
Literal
realities. Of course, he would have been as hard-pressed
to define his proposed contribution to evolutionary linguistics as to define,
with exactitude, his ultimate role in the CIA. He had ideas, he had plans, but
they were as shadowy as the caimans that barked in the marsh.

Inti, nevertheless, managed to get
his point across. The party was, at that moment, about three hours downstream
from Boquichicos. They could find a suitable campsite for the night and travel
on to Boquichicos in the morning. Or, they could just keep going, which would
mean canceling supper (the boys had speared a fine mess of fish) and navigating
the boulder-strewn river in darkness without so much as running lights.

Switters hesitated. In the reeds, the
caimans rustled like drapery. In the air, thirsty mosquito clans gathered in
great numbers, anticipating an uncorking of blood. Somewhere a monkey howled,
and Switters’s gut, no longer lullabyed by coca (funny how much noise a ball of
mystic white light can make), followed suit. He turned to Sailor for guidance.
As usual, the parrot said nothing, but the way it perched—its weight on one
foot, one wing slightly forward, its head tilted expectantly—reminded Switters
of a bellboy awaiting a tip.

So, “To the Hotel Boquichicos!” he
cried, waving like a battle flag Suzy’s peewee brassiere.

There were no bellboys at the
Hotel Boquichicos. No bellmen, bellwomen, bellpersons, bellhops, belloids,
belltrons, bellniks, bellaholics, bellwethers, belles-lettres, or “bellbottom
trousers coat of navy blue.” Nothing of that sort. Inti and the lads were
permitted to tote Switters’s luggage into the lobby (spacious, though virtually
devoid of furnishings), but once past the door he was on his own. A mammoth
moth (described earlier) had attempted to follow him inside but was dissuaded
by a swat from his Panama hat.

A mixture of Creole music and oddly
Spanish static (come to think of it, all static sounds vaguely Spanish)
trickled from a vintage, nicotine-colored Bakelite radio hooked up to an
automobile battery behind the front desk, while the clerk, a haggard, graying
mestizo, spent more time examining the gringo’s passport than a pawnbroker
might devote to a Las Vegas wedding ring. His scrutiny was illuminated by a
pair of kerosene lanterns.

Spreading and flapping his thin arms,
as if to encompass the vast jungle that lay outside, the clerk said in English,
“You will find no buyers for your tractors here, señor.” Switters had presented
his “cover” papers along with his passport. “I think you come very wrong
place.” He issued a weaselly laugh.

With a weary sigh, Switters indicated
the parrot cage and set about to explain, as succinctly as possible, his
intentions in the fair city (he’d been unable to make out a bit of it in the
darkness) of Boquichicos. Cautiously, but with surprising speed, the clerk
handed him a rusty key and pointed to the staircase. The clerk wished to deal
no further with what was obviously a madman.