Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (15 page)

“Your nature ramble.”

“Exactly. But first I’d like to pass
along a short, personal story, because it might explain my hostility toward
your profession and why I may have seemed rude. Aside from the fact that I’m a
Yank.”

“Oh, I say . . .”

“You’re the second anthropologist I’ve
ever met. The first was an Australian—met him in the Safari Bar in
Bangkok
—and he’d done a fair amount of field work deep in the
interior of
New Guinea
. Big juju in there, you know, loads of spooky ol’ magic. Well, this Ph.D.
lived with one of those wild mud tribes for two years, and they sort of took a
liking to him. So when he left, their shaman gave him a little pigskin pouch
with some yellowish powder in it and told him that if he’d sprinkle the stuff
on his head and shoulders, he’d become temporarily invisible to everyone but
himself. He could go into the biggest department store in Sydney, the shaman
promised, and help himself. Steal anything he wanted and nobody would see him.
That’s what the powder was for. The anthropologist is telling me all this, see,
but at that point he just chuckled and went back to his cocktail. So, I said
‘Well?’ And he said, ‘Well, what?’ And I said, ‘How did it work out?’ And he
looked at me kind of haughtily and said, ‘Naturally, I never tried it.’ “

“His response disappointed you, did
it?”

“Potney, I’m not a violent man. But
it taxed my powers of restraint not to slap him silly. ‘Naturally, I never
tried it,’ indeed. I wanted to grab his nose and twist his face around to the
back of his head. The prig! The spineless twit!”

Potney lit another cigarette. “I
appreciate your candor in sharing this anecdote. It does cast your prejudice in
a more favorable light. If rightly viewed, I suppose your peevishness over the
bloke’s . . . the bloke’s
decorum
is somewhat understandable.” He
paused, staring into a bloom of smoke with a botanist’s engrossment.
“Sometimes, however . . . sometimes . . . sometimes it really doesn’t pay to
get too chummy with these primitive magical practices. If they don’t actually
do you physical or psychological harm, they can steer you well off-track. I
myself am proof of that, sorry to say. Had I not allowed myself to become
fascinated with one of those Kandakandero buggers and his bag of tricks, I
wouldn’t be back in this bloody place, waiting around for God knows what,
mucking up my career and my marriage.”

He shoved his teacup aside and in a
loud yet plaintive voice, cried out for gin.

“I’d be interested in hearing more
about that,” said Switters, and he sincerely meant it, “but duty calls.” He
took the saucer of papaya slices and slid off the stool.

“Perhaps I’ll see you later, then?
I’d fancy an earful of errand-boy philosophy. An overview. The big picture, as
you put it. Um.”

“No chance in hell, pal. But I
appreciate the chat. Tell the señorita I’ll dream about her for the rest of my
life. And hang in there, Pot. Ain’t nothing to lose but our winnings, and only
the winners are lost.”

While Sailor pecked at papaya pulp,
Switters, in his new rubber boots now, opened the shutters and parted the
bougainvillea vines that nearly obscured the window. He was hoping for a view
of town, but his room was at the rear of the hotel and looked down upon a
clean-swept courtyard. There, white chickens scratched white chicken poetry
into the sad bare earth, and a trio of pigs squealed and grunted, as if in
endless protest against a world that tolerated the tragedy of bacon. Sudsy
wash-water had been emptied in a corner of the yard, paving the area with
soap-bubble cobblestones that glimmered in the morning sun. A couple of mango
trees had been planted in the center, and though they were probably still too
young to bear fruit, they produced enough foliage to shade the girl, who sat on
an upturned crate, shelling beans into a blue enamel basin balanced on her lap.
Her faded cotton dress was pushed up as far as the basin, affording a vista of
custard thigh and, if he was not mistaken, a pink wink of panty. He sighed.

Tennessee Williams once wrote, “We
all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the
upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us
trapped, locked in it.” In a certain sense, the playwright was correct. Yes,
but oh! What a view from that upstairs window!

What
Tennessee
failed to mention was that if we look out of that
window with an itchy curiosity and a passionate eye; with a generous spirit and
a capacity for delight; and, yes, the language with which to support and enrich
the things we see, then it DOESN’T MATTER that the house is burning down around
us. It doesn’t matter. Let the motherfucker blaze!

Did those thoughts constitute an
“errand-boy philosophy”? Possibly not. But for the moment they would have to
do.

Boquichicos proved to be as
different from
Pucallpa
as the dory
Virgin
was different from a tanker
ship. It was considerably smaller, quieter, cleaner, more benign. Switters
recalled Juan Carlos de Fausto’s remark that Boquichicos was a planned
community, founded by the government with “strict environmental
considerations.” Basically, that was true. Whereas
Pucallpa
sprawled in anarchistic abandon, mindlessly fouling,
pillaging, and devouring its natural surroundings, Boquichicos had been
assigned firm parameters beyond which it was forbidden to slop or tentacle. As
a result, the numinous emerald breath of the forest lay gently against the
town’s whitewashed cheeks, while the river here serenaded the citizenry with an
open-throated warble instead of a cancer-clogged rattle of death.

Laid out in classic Spanish style
around a central plaza, every dirt street, of which there were only six, had
been rolled level and smooth, every building except the church uniformly roofed
in palm-frond thatch, giving it an Indian flavor. The walls of the edifices had
been constructed with mud bricks and/or with lumber milled after clearing the
town site, then proudly brushed with a blanching lime solution that had once
made them shine but was now wearing noticeably thin. None of the structures,
including the municipal hall, the hotel, and the church, was anywhere near as
tall as the jungle trees that cast shade on their rear entrances, nor did their
doorways match in breadth some of the trunks of those trees. Far and away the
town’s most significant structure, its crown jewel, its saving grace, was its
modern waste treatment facility. (Were they wise, the inhabitants would float
daily candles of thanksgiving upon the sassafras-colored waters of their nifty
little sewage lagoon.) Certainly
Pucallpa
could boast of no such nicety, and quite likely
Iquitos
couldn’t either.

There were perhaps a half-dozen
trucks in Boquichicos—idle, scabious with rust, tires starting to sag: where
was there to drive?—and not a single car. The town’s short streets, every one a
dead end, were enlivened by pecking chickens, rooting pigs, yapping curs, and
naked children, all of them skinny and soiled, though neither a glimpse nor a
whiff of recently deceased canine intruded upon the Switters sensibility.
Nevertheless, there were vultures circling—patient, confident of the more
certain, and tasty, of life’s two inevitables—their necrophiliac radar sweeping
the weeds.

And weeds there were aplenty. Egged
on by fierce equatorial sunshine and soaking tropic rains, an amazing variety
of plants invaded gutters and yards, threatening to take over the plaza, even,
their bitter nectars slaking the thirst of Day-Glo butterflies and a billion
humming insects of plainer hue.

Built to accommodate an oil boom that
never materialized (geologists had vastly overestimated the potential yield of
the area’s petroleum deposit), Boquichicos blossomed briefly, then shriveled.
It had lost at least half of its peak population. Half stayed on, however,
because housing was pleasant and affordable, and because they believed a more
reliable boom—a timber boom—was right around the corner. It wouldn’t be long,
the enterprising reasoned, before the Japanese had mowed down the great woods
of
Indonesia
,
Borneo
,
Malaysia
,
New Guinea
, and possibly
Alaska
, and would be setting out in earnest to deforest
west-central
South America
. In the Brazilian Amazon, they had already turned
ancient majestic ecosystems into heaps of lifeless orange sawdust (one way to
muffle vividity), and their buyers were becoming active around
Peru
’s
Pucallpa
.
Soon, it was predicted, chainsaws would be snarling monstrous money mantras
within earshot of the Boquichicos plaza (where that morning all manner of
birdsong rang), and once again those forty-odd barstools at the hotel would be
polished night and day by affluent or, at least, ambitious backsides.

Incidentally, some might wonder what
a relatively small nation such as
Japan
could find to do with so much timber. Switters knew.
CIA reports confirmed that millions of imported logs had been submerged in bays
all along
Japan
’s coastline, salted away, so to speak, for that time
in the not-too-distant future when much of the world had run out of trees.
Switters also knew—and he thought about it with a mirthless smile as he
strolled across the plaza lugging Sailor Boy’s unusual cage—that a brother
operative stationed in Tokyo was busily scheming to foil the Japanese gambit.
Not under company orders but surreptitiously, on his own. This Goliath-hexing
David was, of course, an angel.

Also incidentally, Switters had once
been under the impression that the term
angel
, as applied to certain
evolved mavericks within the CIA, was an entirely ironic reference to a dopey
book by the evangelist Billy Graham, entitled
Angels: God’s Secret Agents
.
Not so, said Bad Bobby Case. Bobby claimed that the term referred to a little
known scriptural passage recounting the existence of “neutral angels,” angels
who refused to take sides in the Heaven-splitting quarrel between Yahweh and
Lucifer, and who chided them both for their intransigence, arrogance, and
addiction to power. How a hotshot from Hondo knew such things (Case was
graduated second in his class at Texas Tech, but that was aeronautical
engineering), Switters couldn’t guess, nor could he guess where the spy pilot
might be that morning or what he was doing, but he would have given a vat of
red-eye gravy to have Bobby with him there, sharing an early-bird beer in the
somber little marketplace of far Boquichicos.

The market was right next to the
plaza. It consisted of a dozen or so irregularly spaced stalls with thatched
awnings, as well as several rows of unshaded tables covered with ragged, faded,
roach-eaten oilcloth. On display were a skimpy assortment of fruits and
vegetables, dominated by plantains, chili peppers, and pale piles of yucca or
cassava root; eggs, live poultry, smoked fish, animal and reptile hides; woven
mats and baskets; dry goods and clothing (including shoddy cotton T-shirts
adorned with unauthorized portraits of the most familiar face on the planet,
more familiar, and perhaps better loved, than Jesus, Buddha, or Michael
Jordan—the face of a bland, candy-assed cartoon rodent with a hypocoristic
Irish moniker); and, at the stall where Switters currently stood, pisco,
homemade rum, and warm beer.

Switters sipped slowly—the wise do
not gulp warm beer—and looked around for Inti. The Indian was late. Maybe he’d
had difficulty hiring a guide to escort Switters to the colpa, the clay lick
where the parrots and macaws were said to gather every day to coat their tiny
tastebuds with a nutritious mineral slick. Maybe he’d gotten into trouble over
the noisy nocturnal fellowship he enjoyed with his lads. It wasn’t feasible
that Inti could have headed back to
Pucallpa
for the very practical reason that so far he’d only
been paid a 40 percent deposit on his services. As unlikely as it was, however,
the faintest fleck of suspicion that Inti might have abandoned him in this
moldy, weedy, hell-for-lonesome outpost was enough to freeze the sweat on
Switters’s brow. He began to drink faster and faster, until the beer erupted in
froth and its spume filled his sinus passages. Foam was still trickling out of
his nostrils when, a minute later, he thought he spotted Inti at the opposite
end of the market.

Some sort of commotion was in
progress, and the captain of the
Virgin
seemed to be at the center of
it. “Watch my beverage,” Switters said to the parrot. “I’ll be right back.”

The argument proved to be between
Inti and a sinewy, gold-toothed, young mestizo man in Nike basketball sneakers
and a spooky anaconda-skin cape. Several of the mestizo’s friends were
supporting him, mainly with their physical presence, although they became
vocally exhortative from time to time. Inti looked quite relieved to see
Switters. Impressed by the latter’s fine suit and hat, the mestizo jumped to
the conclusion that he was an important señor, a lawyer(!), perhaps, and he,
too, welcomed the intervention of a reasonable authority. Hope of an objective
opinion in the mestizo’s favor quickly drained, however, when Inti pointed to
the Yankee, made a symbolic pistol of his fist and forefinger, and, jabbering
aggressively all the while, fired a volley of imaginary shots into his
adversary’s sternum. Inti was urging Switters to obliterate the Boquichicosian
exactly as he had the banana-hogging spider, and from the way the man stepped
back, his face turning as gray as his wild snaky cloak, he obviously had some
fear that Switters might comply.