Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (8 page)

“Not for the happiness of a poor old
woman who has so long sacrifice for you, who may soon be call to the side of
Jesus . . .”

“Heh!”

“. . . not for to protect and reward
the old loyal pet?” Juan Carlos went on to explain that what made Boquichicos
special was its proximity—an hour’s walk—to a huge
colpa
or clay lick
that was visited daily by hundreds of parrots and macaws. The guide could not
imagine a more pleasurable or compatible retirement home for Sailor, and
Switters had to admit that such a locale would provide video footage destined
to win Maestra’s personal Oscar. She’d be ever grateful. Briefly, he
entertained a vision of himself lying on a bearskin rug before the Snoqualmie
cabin’s stone fireplace, the Matisse oil—now his own—pulsating like a blue
chromosphere of massive meaty nudity above the mantel. (Dare he include Suzy in
that cozy fantasy? Better not.)

“What about predators? You know, uh,
ocelots, jaguars, big vivid serpents?”

“There are those, Señor Switter, and
also the accurate arrows of the Kandakandero, these Indians who use the bright
color feathers for to decorate their bodies. But with so many birds from to
choose in the big, big forest, it would be like the odds of the national
lottery.”

“Lots of birds, but only one well-fed
white boy from downtown
North
America
.”

Juan Carlos laughed. “Do not worry.
The Kandakandero are the most shy tribe in all
Amazonia
. They will hide from you.”

“Yeah? Too bad. I might interest ’em
in one of our John Deere chicken-pluckers. I’m certain it’ll do its job on
toucans and macaws.”

“So, you will go?”

Switters shrugged. There are times
when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob. Sure,
we can resist. But a knob that won’t turn, a door that sticks and never budges,
is a nuisance to the gods. The gods may kick in the jamb. Worse, they may walk
away in disgust, leaving us to hang dumbly from our tight hinges, deprived of
any other chance in life to swing open into unnecessary risk and thus into
enchantment.

Legend has it that Switters went
into the Amazon wearing a cream silk suit, a Jerry Garcia bow tie, and a pair
of white tennis shoes. To set the record straight, he wore a suit all right, he
wore suits everywhere and saw no reason to make an exception for Amazonia; but
his trouser legs were tucked into calf-high rubber boots, purchased for the
occasion; while his one bow tie, leather, designed not by Garcia but by
Eldridge Cleaver, and which he wore only to meetings and functions attended by
aging FBI men who’d yet to forget or forgive Cleaver’s Black Panther Party, was
in the drawer where he’d left it in Langley, Virginia.

To further straighten the record, he
hadn’t, at that point, the slightest intention of putt-putting to Boquichicos
in a riverboat. Once in
Pucallpa
, he’d
simply hire an air taxi, fly in, release Sailor, fly out. It would dent his
vacation funds but would definitely be worth every cent. With any luck, he’d be
back in
Lima
the following morning. This he did not mention to Juan
Carlos, being by nature and profession a secretive person, though it was
unlikely the guide would have objected.

To the contrary, for all of his
concern about the parrot and its mistress, Juan Carlos expressed equal concern
for the safety and comfort of Switters. “I am happy, señor,” he said as they
parted company in the hotel lobby, “that you have not the big enthusiasm for
our jungle.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because of danger. No, it is not
anymore like the Amazon you see at the cinema, not so wild and savage along the
big rivers, not so many animals anymore, not the headhunters or cannibals. If
you are staying on the river, walking the short walk into the colpa and
returning the same route, then you will be perfectly safe. More safe than
Lima
, to be frank. But some Norteamericanos they want to
leave the river, leave the trail, run into the forest like the movie star, like
the Tarzan. Big mistake. Even today, the jungle she have a thousand ways to
make you sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Juan Carlos, it’s not
my scene,” Switters said sincerely, having no inkling of what lay in store for
him.

In bed, he tried to pray because he
thought it might connect him in some way to Suzy, but he wasn’t adept at it,
being overly conscious of the language, perhaps; not wishing to bore whoever or
whatever was on the receiving end with hackneyed phrases, yet wondering whether
ornamentation and witticisms might be inappropriate or unwelcome. Before he
could get a rhetorically satisfactory prayer on track, his mind wandered to
Gloria—many of Lima’s women were cultured and sophisticated, as he suspected
Gloria might be when she wasn’t rendered crude by excessive alcohol—and he
experienced a pang of regret, in his heart and his groin, that he hadn’t
fetched her there beside him. It was his own fault, of course, for being so
finicky.

The irony of Switters was that while
he loved life and tended to embrace it vigorously, he also could be not merely
finicky but squeamish. For example, what else but squeamishness could account
for his reluctance to accept the existence of his organs and entrails?
Obviously, he knew he had innards, he was not an imbecile, but so repulsive did
he find the idea that his handsome body might be stuffed like a holiday
stocking with slippery, snaky coils of steaming guts; undulating meat tubes choked
with vile green and yellow biles, vast colonies of bacteria, fetid gases, and
gobs of partially digested foodstuffs, that he blocked the fact from his
cognizance, preferring to pretend that his corporeal cavity—and that of any
woman to whom he was romantically attracted—was powered not by throbbing hunks
of slimy, blood-bathed tissue but by a sort of ball of mystic white light. At
times he imagined that area between his esophagus and his anus to be occupied
by a single shining jewel, a diamond the size of a coconut whose brightness
rang in all four quadrants of his torso.

Really, Switters.

He was up by eight and on-line by
nine. (In between, he packed, grudgingly committed acts of bodily maintenance,
and ordered room service breakfasts: poached eggs and beer for himself, a fruit
platter for Sailor.)

At the computer he dispatched an
encoded report to the economic secretary at the
U.S.
embassy, who happened also to be
Langley
’s station chief in
Lima
. Switters’s report was entirely professional, devoid
of literary japes or sarcastic references to the irony of an “economic
secretary” being ultimately devoted to undermining the host economy, the
Peruvian economy being a sickly system whose sole vitality, top to bottom, was
generated by the very coca drug trade the CIA was commanded to help eradicate.
To the chief, a cowboy through and through, Switters merely reported that the
lost sheep had returned to the fold, adding, for what it was worth, that in his
opinion Hector Sumac (he used his code name) probably could be relied upon to
engage in second-level espionage and assist in enforcement operations, but that
it might be wise to wait several years before permitting him to run any Joes of
his own.

The line between cowboy and angel could
be no wider than an alfalfa sprout—Switters, himself, occasionally zigzagged
that line—and while Hector gave promise of impending angelhood, Switters was
wary of the Latin temperament, suspecting it to be unnecessarily volatile, and
thus was hesitant to trumpet too loudly on Hector’s behalf before the fellow
proved to him that he actually had wings.

Duty accomplished, and still at his
deluxe, state-of-the-art, military quality laptop, Switters set about the task
of worming his way into Maestra’s home computer. A trifle rusty at such
maneuvering, it took him the better part of an hour, but eventually he crashed
her gates, jumped over the guard dogs, and landed in her files, where he
proceeded to delete each and every one of the e-mail notes that
she
had
hijacked from Suzy’s mailbox. Assuming that she hadn’t printed it or downloaded
it onto a disk, and he was pretty confident she had not, written evidence of
his heat for his young stepsister had now been swallowed by an uncaring,
nonjudgmental ether.

In its place he left the following
announcement: “Don’t fret, Maestra, I’m still escorting Sailor into the Great
Green Hell for you—only now I’m doing it out of love.”

And mostly he meant it.

Pucallpa
was the Dead Dog Capital of South America. Quite
likely, it was the Dead Dog Capital of the world. If any other city lay claim
to that title, its mayor and Chamber of Commerce were wisely silent on the
subject.
Pucallpa
did not boast of it, either—but Switters had eyes, had
nose. He recognized the Dead Dog Capital when he saw it and smelled it.

Smell alone, however, wouldn’t have
tipped him off. There were so many noxious odors, organic and inorganic, in
Pucallpa—spoiled fish, spoiled fruit, decaying vegetation, swamp gas, jungle
rot, raw sewage, kerosene stoves, wood smoke, diesel fumes, pesticides, and the
relentlessly belched mephitis of an oil refinery and a lumber mill—that, on an
olfactory level, mere dead dogs could hardly hope to compete.

Still, they were there, on view,
concentrated along the riverfront but also in midtown gutters, shanty yards,
vacant lots, unpaved side streets, outside the single movie theater, and beside
the airport tarmac. It might be fanciful to imagine many varieties: a dead
poodle on one corner, a Saint Bernard locked in mammoth rigor mortis on the
next, but, alas, the canine corpses of Pucallpa invariably were mongrels,
mutts, and curs and, moreover, seemed mainly to come in two colors—solid white
or solid black, with only the intermittent spot or two.

To Switters, who cared even less for
domestic animals dead than alive, the question was, What was the cause of so
much doggy mortality? In his halting Spanish, he posed the question to several
residents of that on-again, off-again boom town, but never received more than a
shrug. In boom towns one paid attention to those things that might make one
rich and, failing at fortune, to those things that made one forget. Since there
was neither profit nor diversion in dead dogs, only the vultures seemed to
notice them. And for every dead dog, there was a full squadron of vultures.
Pucallpa
was the Vulture Capital of South America.

“This is a baneful burg,” Switters
wailed to Sailor. “I don’t like to complain, you understand, whining being the
least forgivable of man’s sins, but Pucallpa, Peru, is polluted, contaminated,
decayed, rancid, rotten, sour, decomposed, moldy, mildewed, putrid, putrescent,
corrupt, debauched, uncultured, and avaricious. It’s also hot, humid, and
disturbingly vivid. Surely, a fine fowl like you is not remotely related to
those hatchet-headed ghouls—no, don’t look up!—circling in that stinking brown
sky. Sailor! Pal! We must get us out of here at once.”

Easier said than done. As Switters
learned from a booking agent soon after completing a walking tour of the town,
a contingent of resurgent Sendero Luminoso guerrillas had attacked the local
airfield three days earlier, destroying or damaging nearly a dozen small
planes. Only two air taxis were presently flying, and both were booked for
weeks to come, ferrying engineers, bankers, and high-stake hustlers back and
forth between
Pucallpa
and the projects in which they had interest.

Sorely distressed, Switters was
pacing the broken pavement outside the booking office, sweating, swearing,
barely resisting the urge to kick a power pole, a trash pile, or the odd dead
dog, when, from inside the pyramid-shaped parrot cage that sat with his
luggage, there came a voice, high as a falsetto though raspy as a pineapple.
“Peeple of zee wurl, relax,” is what it said.

It was the first time the bird had
spoken since leaving
Seattle
.
Thirty minutes later, in an overpriced but blessedly air-conditioned hotel
room, it spoke again—the same sentence, naturally—and while there are those who
may find this silly, the words lifted Switters’s spirits.

The flight over the
Andes
, the poison air of
Pucallpa
, the
brain-boiling heat and pore-flooding humidity had combined to give him a
migraine; and the headache had combined with the disappointment over the
unavailability of air taxis to make him depressed. Fortunately, when Sailor
squawked his signature line, Switters was instantly reminded of something
Maestra had said almost twenty years before: “All depression has its roots in
self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”

At the time Switters had disputed her
assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical
causes.