Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (10 page)

Under the canopy surrounding his
cardboard chaise longue, was Switters’s luggage, consisting of a king-sized
garment bag and the croc valise, as well as his electronic equipment and
Sailor’s unusual cage. There was also a roll of mosquito netting, in which, to
his dismay, he thought he could detect holes broad enough to admit the prima
donna mosquito of the entire world and most of her entourage.

When, an hour out of port, one of the
boys lifted the lid of the rocking basket to disclose a baby ocelot, Switters
forgot his concerns for a moment and begrudgingly gave legs to a smile.

Except for the outboard motor,
pushing the
Virgin
upstream at about six knots per hour against a
seasonally flaccid current, there was little or no sound on the river, so when
a loud, extended, imploring rumble issued from Switters’s stomach, all aboard,
including the ocelot cub and the parrot, cocked heads and took notice. “Lunch
bell,” announced Switters hopefully, to no immediate effect.

Ostentatiously he rubbed his abdomen.
“Comida?”
he suggested simply, not wishing to wax pleonastic. Again,
there was an absence of response.

Taking squinting measure of the sun’s
position, he reckoned the time to be
11
A.M.
, and his customized watch confirmed it. That meant they had been underway
for nearly six hours, without so much as a coffee break. Small wonder his colon
was singing arias from tragic third-rate operas. Apparently, however, the
Indians had a rule against lunching before high noon, and Switters, ever
sensitive about being tagged a soft, coddled Yankee, was disinclined to breach
it. He’d swallow his juices and wait.

In terms of distraction, the
landscape didn’t bring a lot to the table. Along the east bank (the west side
was too distant to examine), the jungle had long ago been cleared to make way
for cattle ranches. Alas, the forest-born, rain-leached soil was too thin to
sustain grass cover for more than a couple of years. When their pastures
expired, the cattlemen cleared more jungle and moved on, leaving the failed
meadows to bake in the tropic sun, where they hardened into wastelands so
lifeless and ugly they would have caused T. S. Eliot to start over and perhaps
shamed the Up With People people into revising their slogan—although human
events in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Beverly Hills hadn’t done much to temper their
enthusiasm for the species. He’d attempt to describe this scene to Suzy the
next time she petitioned to be whisked to McDonald’s. (Arrggh! Neither Suzy nor
McDonald’s—in both cases he favored the fish sandwich—was something he wanted
to be reminded of at the moment.)

Now and then they would pass an
operative ranch: a few acres of temporary pasture dotted with beef, a hastily
built hacienda, and off to one side, a cluster of thatched huts where Indian
workers lived. What would it be like to reside in such a place? Did anyone
think of it as “home”?
Homeless
and
houseless
may not always be
synonymous.
Home,
for example, wasn’t a word Switters often employed
when referring to the apartment in northern
Virginia
where he closeted his numerous suits (his sole
extravagance) and armoired his plenteous T-shirts (not a syllable of product
promotion on any of them), which was understandable, considering he rarely
slept or ate in the place. The CIA had hired him as an analyst, chaining him to
a desk at Langley, but after his supervisors reviewed his rugby tapes they
granted him his wish to dive into the derring-do tank: three years in Kuwait,
during which time he made frequent phantom forays into Iraq, earning a
decoration for an act of valor that he was sworn never to discuss; five years
in Bangkok, during which time his off-duty activities, above and beyond the
C.R.A.F.T. Club even, had so incensed the U.S. ambassador there that the envoy
managed to get him transferred; two years now trotting the globe in a role the
company called “troubleshooter,” but which to Switters’s mind was not much more
than an international errand boy.

The nomadic life had its drawbacks,
but Switters would be the first to cheerfully admit that it cut way down on
maintenance. When he considered that he had not one blade of lawn to tonsure
nor brick of patio to patch; when he considered that no overly friendly
stranger had ever tried to sell him storm windows, aluminum siding, or a
Watchtower
magazine; when he considered all of the condo association meetings he’d avoided
(thereby sparing his poor brain from being quibbled right down to the stem), he
had little choice but to rejoice. And additional joy ensued when he realized
that the sun must now be directly overhead since no fragment of
its
aluminum siding any longer extended beyond the ragged edges of the
Virgin
’s
canopy. Indeed, the hands of his watch were rendezvousing at the top of the
dial for a
midday
quickie (the big
hand chauvinistically on top as usual, as it was even on women’s watches).

“
Noon
!”
he exclaimed, in case the others had missed it. He pointed to the sun. He
pointed to the larder. “Who’s the chef on this tub? The sous-chef? The
pâtissier?” His glance took in the three bottles of pisco. “I doubt I need
inquire about the sommelier.”

At neither end of the boat was there
movement or acknowledgment, so Switters stood up, the better to attract
attention.

“Lunch,” he said. His tone was even,
rational, devoid of any knuckle of bellicosity. “That’s what we call it in my country.
L-U-N-C-H. Lunch. I’m fond of lunch. I am, in fact, a lunch aficionado. Give me
liberty or give me lunch. Breakfast comes around too early in the day, and
dinner can interfere with one’s plans for the evening, but lunch is right on
the money, the only thing it interrupts is work.”

His voice rose slightly. “I require
lunch on a daily basis. I’m insured against non-lunch by Blue Cross, Blue
Shield, and Blue Cheese. Finicky? Not this luncher. I eat the fat, I eat the
lean, and I lick the platter clean. Normally, I do shun the flesh of dead
animals. Live animals, as well: bestiality is not a part of my colorful
repertoire, although that is really none of your business. But in the dietary
arena, pals, I have nothing to hide, and would at this juncture gladly
masticate and ingest Spam-on-a-stick if you served some up. All I’m asking is
that you serve
something
up, and speedily. I become grumpy when denied
my noontide repast.”

A hint of the histrionic now entered
his delivery, and he pumped up the volume a decibel or two. “A hearty lunch is
essential for growing bodies. Beyond that, it’s a many-splendored thing. Man
does not live by deals alone. Lunch is beauty. Lunch is truth. The Rubenesque
beauty of chocolate pudding soaking up cream. The truth embodied in the
Brechtian dictum, ‘First feed the face.’ Butter the bread, boys! Split the
elusive pea! Hop to it! Lunch justifies any morning and sedates the worst of
afternoons. I would partake. I would partake.”

Inti and the boys stared at him, to
be sure, but their expressions were closer to indifference than curiosity or
appreciation. Inti’s face, in particular, seemed glazed by those smooth sugars
of inscrutability that are widely, if incorrectly, believed to flavor certain
ethnic types. Frustrated that his rhetoric had inspired not a twitch of
culinary action, Switters, stomach growling all the while, sat back down to
reason things out.

It could be coca leaves,
he
reasoned. A cud of coca was reputed to keep a Peruvian Indian chugging from
dawn to dusk and kill his appetite for lunch in the process.
Another reason,
thought he,
to eschew the toot tree.
He had missed one lunch already in
the past few days due to XTC. Coca was to dining what late-night television was
to sex, and he was about to say as much, to no one in particular, when he
noticed a stalk of midget bananas partially protruding from under a roll of
tattered mosquito netting that lay alongside the provisions. Well, eureka,
then!

Tossing aside the netting, he reached
for the bananas, only to yelp and jump backward in alarm as his fingers came
within an inch of the ugliest spider he’d ever laid orbs on. Now
that
got a reaction from his stoic shipmates. Their faces contorted, their bare feet
stamped, and they issued strange hissing sounds that must have been some
Amazonian equivalent of laughter, persisting in such demonstration while he
backed steadily away from the stalk and its inhabitant, a blondish creature
that resembled, in size and hair-cover, an armpit with legs.

It wasn’t a tarantula. Switters was
familiar with tarantulas. No, this living emblem of evolutionary perversity
wasn’t merely hairy, it was sprinkled with purple spots—an armpit with a
rash—and its pupilless white eyes rolled about the brow of its cephalothorax
like mothballs in a lapidary. Yes, and it was rearing back on its hindmost legs
in a most unfriendly presentation.

As Switters continued to retreat,
finally reseating himself on his cardboard divan, the Indians continued to
express amusement.
Maybe I should open my own comedy club in
Pucallpa
,
mused Switters.
Call it Arachnophobia.
Instead, he opened his valise. Rummaged among his shorts and socks and
handkerchiefs. And fished out the automatic pistol.

“Nothing personal,” he said, as he
stood facing the stalk. “I respect all living things, and I’m aware that to
you, I, myself, must appear a monstrosity. But you’ve got my goddamn bananas,
pal, and this is the law of the jungle!”

With that, he fired off about a dozen
ear-splitting rounds, blowing bits of spider and banana all over the bow.
“Anyone for fruit salad?” he asked politely.

Indeed, when the smoke cleared there
wasn’t much left of the bunch. Green shreds, yellow dollops, hairy confetti.
Digging around in the organic debris, he did, however, find four and a half
survivors. The half-banana, he presented to Sailor. The remainder he calmly
peeled and devoured, one after the other, smiling with humble satisfaction.

“Now,” he said to the Indians, who
had become very still and very respectful (even the ocelot looked upon him with
awe when it finally came out of hiding), “how about a soupçon of after-lunch
conversation? It’s my opinion—expressed before the C.R.A.F.T. membership in
Bangkok on February 18, 1993, and reiterated here for your consideration—that
the syntactic word-clusters in
Finnegans Wake
aren’t sentences in the
usual sense, but rather are intermediate states in a radiating nexus of
pan-linguistic interactions, corresponding to—”

He broke off abruptly and did not
continue. There were two reasons for this:

(1) Despite experiencing an acute
craving for some intellectual stimulation, even if he had to supply it
himself—and from Maestra he’d inherited a tendency to become periodically
enraptured with the wheeze of his own verbal bagpipes—it did not long escape
his notice that his monologue was not merely masturbatory but condescending.

(2) He couldn’t remember a fucking
thing.

About that time the rain came.

A rank of ample black clouds had been
double-parked along the western horizon like limousines at a mobster’s funeral.
Rather suddenly now, they wheeled away from the long green curb and congregated
overhead, where, like overweight yet still athletic Harlem Globetrotters, they
bobbed and weaved, passing lightning bolts trickily among themselves while the
wind whistled “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

Then they merged into one sky-filling
duffel bag, which unzipped itself and dumped its contents: trillions of
raindrops as big as butter beans and as warm as blood. His protective canopy
notwithstanding, Switters thought he might drown.

In twenty minutes or less, the
downpour was over. It took the boys twice that long, using Inti’s cooking pots,
to bail out the boat.

If, during the interval in which it
was obscured from view, the sun had seized the opportunity to do something
un-sunlike, there was no lingering evidence. The sun was pretty much in the
same position as where they’d left it a deluge ago, and it rapidly resumed
wilting them with its nuclear halitosis. The sun, however, might generate
radiation until it was red in the face, might stoke its furnace until it
reached twenty million degrees Fahrenheit, it still could not begin to
demoisturize the Amazon. Switters wouldn’t be truly dry again until he was back
in
Lima
, and even there he would find himself dampened—from
the exertion of muscling a wheelchair.

That night, after a surprisingly
delicious dinner of corn and beans, Switters slept in the
Virgin
. She
had been beached on a sandbar. The sand would have made a softer mattress, but
it was subject to visitation by reptiles. There was even worry that a myopic or
excessively lonely bull crocodile might try to mate with his valise.

The stars were as big and bright as
brass doorknobs, and so numerous they jostled one another for twinkle space.
Because the mosquito population was equally dense, Switters spent the night
rolled up in his netting like a pharaonic burrito, a crash-test mummy who
couldn’t see the stars for his wrapping. Visual deprivation was compensated for
by auditory glut. From the sewing-machine motors of cicadas to the beer-hall
bellows of various amphibians, from the tin-toy clicks and chirps and whirs of
countless insects to the weight-room grunts of wild pigs, from the sweet
melodic outbursts of nocturnal birds (Mozarts with short attention spans) to
the honks and whoops and howls of God knows what, a rackety tsunami of
biological rumpus rolled out of the jungle and over the river, which stirred
its own sulky boudoirish murmur into the mix.