Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (24 page)

“Worse, maybe.”

“Yep. That beloved JFK. More dirty
tricks than a whore in a coal mine. By the time he supposedly ate acid and saw
the evil truth about Vietnam, his karmic boomerang was already winging home to
roost. Live by the cowboy, die by the cowboy, I reckon. But we digress. Now.
The company. First thing, they’d dispatch some Joe to meet with that would-be giggle
box of a shaman and buy him out. Bribe him to call off the bugaboo. Right?”

“Quite likely. But End of Time—or
Today Is Tomorrow—has no use for money. In fact, I can’t imagine what you might
possibly bribe him with.”

“Everybody has a price. ‘Cept for you
and me. On second thought, ‘cept for you. I know all too well what mine’d be.
But, alrighty, let’s say we can’t buy him off. Next thing, the company would
send in some disinformation Joes, plant evidence, try to discredit him. Rile up
the populace against him. Pressure him, blackmail him, get him run out of
office.”

“Near as I can tell, except maybe for
a noninfluential outsider named Fer-de-lance, he has no rivals. If he ever had
any, I suspect he may have eaten them.”

Bobby burst out laughing.

“I’m not so sure that’s far-fetched.
You find it amusing?”

“Nope, nope,” said Case. “I was just
thinking about you eating granny’s parrot.” He grinned from sideburn to
sideburn.

“Shhh,” Switters shushed him,
glancing around furtively.

“Sorry. But we did sweep for bugs.
Which in itself is pretty funny. Anyhow, if all else failed, company’d dispatch
an operative to smack the witchman. If the cowboys had a hand in it, they
would.”

“Well, they don’t. And in the Amazon
forest? I’m not sure they could. They couldn’t even smack Castro. In seven
attempts.”

“All they had to do was go to Jasper,
spray Uncle Jerry’s roses.”

“Besides, who would do it?”

Bobby didn’t hesitate. “Me.”

“You must be cartooning!”

“Nope. Not if it came to that. Not if
it was the only way to release you.”

Simultaneously touched and appalled,
Switters asked, “You’d actually? . . .”

“If it came to that. As Krishna told
Arjuna in the
Bhagavad-Gita
, it’s permissible to—”

“I know what Krishna is alleged to
have said in the
Gita
: ‘If your cause is just,’ et cetera. And like the
‘eye for an eye’ crap Yahweh is alleged to have thundered in the Bible, it’s
been twisted to excuse and justify every vile sort of opportunistic
bloodletting. Anyway—and I sincerely appreciate your offer—the threat of death,
or even death itself, is unlikely to produce the desired results. Today Is
Tomorrow and his pals have a different slant on mortality than we so-called
civilized types. The overly oxygenated who like to think all peoples are the
same have never crossed paths with a Kandakandero.”

“Hell, they’ve never crossed paths
with a Frenchman. One-worldism is just a disguised brand of xenophobia. Even
your cousin Potney from cousinly Merry Olde laid a bodacious cultural
difference or two on the table. Otherwise, you mighten not be in this mess.
Now, as for getting you out of it . . . I see your point. Eliminating the
laughing shaman wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the taboo.”

“Not unless he died in some arcane
manner that you and I couldn’t even guess at.”

“Hmm.” Bobby filled his throat with
Sing Ha. Switters followed suit. Out on Puget Sound, an aging freighter filled
its stack with steam. The noise, long and mournful, set a neighbor’s dog to
yowling a canine version of a country western tune, which in turn set off the
gulls, those graceful but grabby scavengers who wouldn’t have hesitated to pick
Hank Williams cleaner than a Cadillac full of agents and a courtroom full of
ex-wives. Then, everything went quiet again, the sun let itself be bound and
hooded by strato-terrorists, and Switters returned to shaking his head. As the
ambience, sky and water alike, gradually turned a single shade of teal, Bobby
slumped low in his patio chair, his battered boots propped on the ice chest. He
appeared lost in thought.

Teal is an unfriendly color, and the
air had an unfriendly feel. Chill, at last, found Switters’s bones. He tapped
the toe of Bobby’s left boot with the toe of his own right sneaker. “Park
Place, Illinois Avenue, and a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for your thoughts,” he
said.

“Make that a Boardwalk hotel full of
blondes and fried chicken and you got a deal.” He bolted upright and grinned
his boyish hardpan grin. “I was thinking,” he said, “that wheelchair or no
wheelchair, I’m taking you dancing tonight.”

They did go dancing. Even Switters
danced, after a fashion, careening his Invacare 9000 around the floor of the
Werewolf Club, more or less in time to the energetic rock of Electric Baby
Moses, moving, more or less in concert, with one of the several young women
Bobby had attracted to their table. Or, perhaps, Switters had attracted them on
his own. “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates,” he
practically shouted at one point in the evening.

Even so, they taxied home alone.
Alone, and more than meagerly intoxicated. So intoxicated, in fact, that an
incautious Switters sang in the cab a medley of refrains from Broadway shows,
included among them a seemingly poignant rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”
Bobby, fortunately, thought his friend was merely waxing ironic—and to a
certain extent irony
was
involved. The stiff-witted and academic seem
not to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be ironic and sincere at the
same instant; that a knowing tongue in cheek does not necessarily preclude an
affectionate glow in heart.

They awoke the next morning wound in
the rusty anchor chains of hangover, but Maestra fixed them a delicious late
breakfast of ham biscuits with red-eye gravy, surprising because they’d roused
her noisily at 3
A.M.
, Switters lacking a key to the house, and because Maestra
never had been what she contemptuously referred to as a “kitchen chicken.”
Bobby told her she made the Galloping Gourmet look like he was stuck in cement
and kissed her on the cheek, and although she waved him off as if he were some
kind of hopeless lunatic, Switters could tell she was pleased.

Arriving on the side deck just as the
mist was lifting (they’d paused on the way to admire the Matisse), Switters
suggested a tuft of hair of the dog. “Nope,” countered Bobby, “nothing doing.
First, we’re gonna sit. I have a sneaking suspicion you haven’t sat in a coon’s
age.”

“However the hell long
that
is,” said Switters. “I don’t believe small arboreal carnivores are exactly
famous for lavish longevity, not judging from the frequency with which they
show up as road kill.”

“Mock the folk wisdom of your
ancestors if you must, ain’t no concern of mine, but I can sense you haven’t
been sitting, son; and while meditation wasn’t designed as therapy, it might do
more for you than gravy does for biscuits—at this weird troubling time in your
life.”

They sat.

They sat for nearly two hours, in the
course of which Switters lost himself so that his essence passed into what some
are wont to call, perhaps unrealistically, the Real Reality: that realm of
consciousness beyond ego and ambition where mind becomes a silver minnow in a
great electric lake of soul, and where the quarks and the gods pick up their
mail on their way from nowhere to everywhere (or is it the other way around?).

Afterward, tranquilized and centered
by the meditation, and enheartened by the previous evening’s coed recreation,
Switters felt better than he had in a fortnight; felt so good that he came to
an optimistic decision concerning his next course of action. His instinct,
however, was not to share this with Bobby immediately. Instead, he focused on
loosening the last remaining loops of hangover’s iron turban. “Young buck like
you might not notice,” he said, decapping a beer, “but I find piper inflation
to be on the rise.”

“Yep. The bastard’s been charging me
twice the price for half the fun. When I avail myself of his services, that is.
Since the excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages is the state sport of
Alaska—they’d challenge for the gold at the Drunkard Olympics, but’d lose major
points to Ireland in the charm category—I’ve been pretty much teetotaling, out
of sheer contrariness, not wanting to be just another shitface in the crowd.”
Accepting a wet bottle from Switters, he examined it at some length.
“Nostalgia’s nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on
the hard ass of history, but I’d be lying like a cop in court if I was to tell
you Sing Ha was anything but sucky beer.”

Switters nodded. “It went down well
enough in Bangkok, where there was hardly any choice, but here in the land of a
thousand brewskies, it does come across as rather weak-kneed and effete.”

“Tastes like butterfly piss. Of
course, it’s brewed by Buddhists. Guess it takes a Christian to put some muscle
in a liquid refreshment.”

“That’s it. It’s the fear and anger
that’s missing in Sing Ha. Bereft of those punitive and vindictive qualities we
Christers have come to respect and love. No bops in the hops. No assault in the
malt. But, Captain Case, if you’re a no-show at Alaska’s finer watering holes,
how do you spend your time up there? Needlepoint? Laboring to reach page two of
Finnegans Wake
?”

“Fly more than you might think.”

“Really? I wouldn’t have thought.
With our increased satellite capabilities, why do we fly manned spy missions at
all?”

The crosshatched crinkles around
Bobby’s eyes stiffened slightly. “Can’t rightly address that, son.”

Caught off guard, Switters very
nearly flinched. “Oh. Not my need to know?”

“There you go.”

In the CIA, there existed a pervasive
and perpetual rule that a company employee, no matter how light his or her
cover, no matter if coverless, must never divulge to anyone—spouse, parent,
lover, friend, or even fellow CIAnik—more about his or her job than that person
had a need, not an abiding interest but an actual
need
, to know. With
Maestra and to a lesser extent with Suzy, Switters had been somewhat lax in
adhering to that rule, which was why he may have been so surprised to find Bad
Bobby, flaunter of a fair number of society’s more firmly held conventions and
active critic of the multinational commercial entities to whose Muzak the
company, with escalating frequency, now danced, strictly obeying it. Switters
had long ago come to accept if not appreciate the fact that he himself was a
study in contradictions, blaming the incongruities in his personality on his
having been born on the cusp between Cancer and Leo, pulled in opposite
directions by lunar and solar forces (that he maintained severe reservations
about the reliability of astrology only reinforced the evidence). Now, he was
starting to notice glaring inconsistencies in Bobby, as well. Maybe most people
were fundamentally contradictory. The
real
people, at any rate. Maybe
those among us ever steadfast and predictable, those whose yang did not
intermittently slop over into their yin, maybe those were candidates for
Maestra’s subhuman category of “missing link.”

“Well. Then. Forgetting your official
duties, in which I was only feigning a polite interest in the first place, can
I ask if you’ve got anything drawn up on the monkey wrench board, anything that
might be causing John Foster Dulles to rotate in his sarcophagus?” Upon
uttering the name, Dulles, Switters spat. Upon hearing it, Bobby spat as well.
Two molten pearls of Dulles-inspired spittle shimmered on the tiles. (It may or
may not be instructive to note that the Dulles who stimulated this derogatory
salute was the so-called statesman, John Foster, and not his brother, Allen,
the very first director of the CIA.)

“You mean angelic aces up my sleeve?
Nothing new. Cook some books, so to speak; jam a few signals here and there,
and then the usual archival stuff. Still collecting data on Guatemalan smack
squads, on company drug running, the Manson setup, UFO coverups, et cetera. Not
much corporate, which is where the dirt is nowadays. Got more than enough,
though, to make ’em think twice about ever sacking me. Otherwise, I’m not sure
when or if I’ll play them cards.”

“You wouldn’t want to end up like
Audubon Poe.”

“Aw, ol’ Audubon Poe’s doing fine and
dandy, for a man with a blue sticker on his head. Leading a more productive
life than me or you. At this flaccid moment of our personal histories.”

Before Switters could inquire after
ex-agent Poe, Maestra appeared at the French doors to remind the two men that
they’d promised to play her newest video games with her as soon as they’d
finished their post-breakfast breather. It was now past noon, and Apocalyptic
Ack-Ack was set up and ready to roll.

Bobby proved to be unbeatable at
Apocalyptic Ack-Ack, but Switters was victorious at New World Order and Maestra
creamed them both at Armies of Armageddon, so everyone was cheerful and
devoured an extra large vegetarian pizza garrulously together before Maestra
retired for a nap. The men peed, washed up, and changed clothes: Switters into
his ginger Irish tweeds, Bobby into Wrangler jeans and a sweater so bulky and
thick it must have taken a woolly mammoth and two Shetland ponies to make it.
Then, after stopping once again to approve the brushwork of Henri M., they
returned to the safety of the deck. There, in a grayish November glow that
might have been filtered through frozen squid bladders, a kind of sunlight
substitute invented by Norwegian chemists, Switters sat wondering how to broach
the subject of his next move. It wasn’t long before Bobby provided a segue.