Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (29 page)

“We could speculate.”

“You mean? . . .”

“I mean, extrapolating from her two
published predictions, we could try to guess the content of the final and
missing one. Might be fun. What possible prognostication from a controversial
source could set a modern pope to blubbering for three whole days?”

“But bring joy to some.”

“Exactly. Think about it.”

From the way Suzy screwed up her
face, she was thinking hard about it. “You’re cute when you frown,” said
Switters.

She seemed daunted, perplexed by her
stepbrother’s proposal, and eventually she vetoed it. “No, I just want to tell
the story. You know, tell about the children and Our Lady and all the stuff
that happened. Even Sister Francis doesn’t know much about it. She said she
didn’t. And the class is, like, clueless. It’s kind of a beautiful story, so I
just want to write it down for everybody. Okay?”

Switters shrugged. “It’s your party.
I’ll help you organize the material if you’d like, and you can take it from
there.”

She lowered her eyes. “Switters? Are
you disappointed?”

“Nein,” he lied. “Only thing that
disappoints me is that the authorities haven’t locked you up somewhere. You’re
too damn cute to be at large. You’re a public menace.”

“Switters.”

“I’ll bet your armpits taste like
strawberry ice cream.”

She had just slid onto his lap and
was tightening her tawny arms around his neck, her tongue muscles quivering
like the hamstrings of a cheetah about to spring from its lair, when his mother
made one of her periodic checks of the room. “Now, now, children,” Eunice
admonished.

“Can’t I show my big brother some
gratitude and affection?” Suzy asked. Her tone was defiant.

“You’ve been watching too much TV,
young lady,” said Eunice, somewhat inexplicably.

Reddening, Suzy stood, about to
defend herself, but Switters intervened. “Mother’s right,” he said calmly. From
an end table within his reach, he snatched up a cast-iron ashtray, fashioned to
resemble an Early American hearth skillet, and used it to gesture at the
forty-inch Sony across the den. “There’s the problem right there,” he
announced. “Does it not possess the power of a totem pole and the heart of a rat?
Die, demon box, die!” With that, he hurled the ashtray at the TV, badly
cracking its plastic casing and missing the screen (purposefully or not) by a
fraction of an inch.

As the ashtray, a souvenir of
Monticello, caromed with a loud clanking onto the floor, his mother emitted a
sound midway between a gasp and a shriek, and Suzy regarded him as if he were
the most astounding entity to grace the earth since Fatima, Portugal, 1917.

Choosing to skip the family dinner,
Switters slipped away and drove over toward Rancho Cordova, where he knew there
to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet with a drive-through service window. “I
understand,” he said to the clean-cut, if acne-peppered, hobbledehoy who
dispensed his order (he imagined him to look a lot like Brian), “that KFC still
uses the colonel’s original frying recipe. Is that correct?”

“Uh, yes, sir, it is.”

“Eleven secret herbs and spices. So
I’ve heard.”

“Yes, sir. I believe so.”

“Would you identify them for me,
please?”

“Huh?”

“The eleven secret herbs and spices.
Tell me what they are.”

Bewildered, the boy began blinking
rather frenetically, as if during one of the lid closures, the customer and his
cheeky red convertible might disappear.

“Don’t play dumb,” snarled Switters.
“If you can’t come up with all eleven off the top of your head, nine or ten
will do.”

The boy gathered his composure. “Uh,
I’m sorry, sir. They’re our secret recipe. Would you please pull forward?”

“I’ll pay you forty dollars.” He
wagged two bank notes in the pustulated face.

“No, sir,” said the boy, glancing
over his shoulder with one of those half frightened, half irate
I’m-going-to-send-for-the-manager expressions. “I don’t. . . . You’re gonna
have to pull forward.”

“What if I told you I have your
girlfriend in the trunk of this car?”

His eyes widening until it appeared
his pimples might pop, the young man seemed as if he were about to shout or
retreat or both, yet he did neither for the simple reason that Switters had
fixed him so forcefully with his fierce, hypnotic gaze that he was all but
paralyzed. “I-I don’t—” he stammered weakly. “I’m just a cashier. I don’t know
nothing about the—the cooking side of it.”

“So, you won’t betray the colonel for
love or money? Not even to spare your girlfriend’s life?” Switters abruptly
relaxed his glare and lit up the boy with a smile that could paint a carousel.
“Congratulations! You’ve done it, pal. You’ve passed the test.” He held out his
hand, but the boy was too stunned to shake it. “I’m Operative, uh, Poe, Audubon
Poe of the Central Intelligence Agency. As you’re doubtlessly aware, the CIA’s
main responsibility these days is protecting America’s corporate interests,
such as the colonel’s eleven cryptic herbs and spices, from insidious foreign
competitors. You play an important role in this struggle, pal. So, well done!
Your government’s proud of you, and I’m sure the colonel’d be proud of you,
too—if the beloved old motherfucker weren’t as dead as the gravy you
counterfeit gastronomes slop on his unsuspecting biscuits.”

Switters tossed the boy a twenty.
“Take the night off,” he exhorted. “Badger some phrontifugic adult to buy you a
six-pack. Domestic, of course. Sacramento is, indeed, the quintessential
American city, and you are a genuine American hero!” He gunned the engine.
“I’ll let your girlfriend out at the next rest stop!” he cried, and he squealed
out of the KFC lot, laying down enough burnt rubber to blackface the cast of
the
Amos ’n’ Andy
show for most of a season.

With a Cajun-style drumstick between
his oft-abused but still pearly teeth, he headed back toward the west, roaring
into one of those lurid orangeade sunsets that could qualify as nature’s
revenge on Louis XIV.

Shortly before 10
P.M.
, as Switters
sat propped up on the four-poster bed reading from
Finnegans Wake
, there
was a soft knock at his door, and Suzy tiptoed in. “You missed dinner,” she
said.

“I dined out. How are things?”

“Daddy’s been kind of gnarly. He
wants to know why you, like, attacked his TV set.”

“Yes. Good question. I’ve been
wondering about that myself. I suppose you
could
say that these past few
days in suburbia have roused my imp from its slumber.”

“You mean,” she asked, half frowning,
half grinning, “the Devil made you do it?”

“Well, no, darling, that’s not it at
all. The Devil doesn’t
make
us do
anything
. The Devil, for
example, doesn’t make us mean. Rather, when we’re mean,
we
make the
Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with
compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world. But all that’s
beside the point. I think probably the most truthful thing you can tell your
daddy is that I attacked his TV set out of love of life.”

“Love of life,” Suzy whispered almost
inaudibly, rolling the phrase around in her mouth and her mind, as if it were a
concept so unfamiliar, so novel, it would take awhile to grasp it.

“What,” asked Switters, “did my
mother have to say?”

“Oh, she said ‘Dumpling’s’—sometimes
she calls you
Dumpling
—’Dumpling’s a man of mystery, just like his
father.’ “ She watched an odd, ironic smile bend his lower lip like a bartender
twisting a peel of lemon. “So, like, what did your father do?”

“He was a man of mystery.”

“ ‘Man of mystery,’ “ she repeated in
a whisper, as though she were again ruminating on an exotic, esoteric but
flavorful notion—and this time she watched the bedside reading lamp illuminate
his spray of tiny scars, causing them to resemble a constellation projected on
a planetarium ceiling. After a moment or two, she asked politely, “Uh, what’re
you doing tomorrow?”

“For one thing, I thought I’d sift
through the Fatima detritus and get your outline started for you.”

“Oh my God, Switters, you’re just so
fine! I was really hoping you’d do that. Like, I can’t be here tomorrow. My
dad’s taking your mom shopping again in San Francisco, and they, I guess, don’t
want me to be home alone with you. So, I’m going with my girlfriend after
school, and then Brian’s taking me to his football game.”

“Brian’s an athlete, is it?”

“No, he doesn’t play. He’s a
cheerleader.”

Switters brightened. “A cheerleader.
He doesn’t by any chance moonlight at Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

She moved her buttercup bangs in a
negative rotation. “Uh, I’m gonna try to leave early. Like, after the first
quarter. I think I can, you know, get a ride home. The parental unit won’t be
back from San Francisco until ten o’clock. They told me.”

“But you’re leaving the game early
and coming home?”

Lowering her filoplume lashes until
they almost swept the blush from her cheeks, she said ever so gravely, “To be
with you.” She slid awkwardly onto the bed beside him, kissed him briefly but
wetly, removed one of his hands from the binding of
Finnegans Wake
, and
placed it in the general vicinity of her crotch. “I want to get naked with
you,” she said, blurting it out, softly but forcefully, like a jet of steam.

Switters swallowed hard, as though he
were gulping down a goose egg. When his larynx stopped wobbling, he asked, “Are
you sure?”

She nodded soberly. “I . . . think
so. You’re my . . . my. . . . But I . . . I’ll be here if I can. I might not.”

The next day Switters had the house
to himself. He stayed in bed until he heard the Mercedes sedan pull out of the
three-car garage, heading for the boutiques of Maiden Lane. Then he breakfasted
on peanut butter and soy bacon sandwiches, taking them out by the swimming pool
to eat. The pool had been emptied for the season and covered with a blue
plastic tarp that for a zip of an instant transported him back to Inti’s
Virgin
and the tattered canopy with which the dory had tried in vain to hold back the
Amazon sun. In November, the Sacramento sun needed no such restraint, although
it was certainly warmer there than in Seattle, and drier, as well. The golf
course that bordered the stucco ranch house that Eunice had won in the marriage
lottery was as green as Socrates’s last cocktail, but everything between it and
the coastal range to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east was so amber,
dusty, flea-bitten, and buff it reminded him of the lion population in a
second-rate zoo. It was visual cereal that, milkless, crunched in his eyes, and
he realized that were he to strike out across those stubble fields where wheat
and barley had recently been sheared, he’d be better off in a wheelchair than
on foot. Even the steely soles of Inti’s feet would have been diced.

Done with breakfast, he decided to
attempt meditation. It was never easy to commence—his internal river of thought
and verbiage had a velocity that overflowed or crumbled Buddha’s dams—and on
that morning it was particularly difficult to get started. Bobby had taught him
not to wrench the valves, however, so he sat passively, neither fostering
thought nor trying not to think, and gradually the flow subsided—except for one
unstemmable trickle, and that trickle’s source was Suzy. After about an hour of
that, he thought
What the hell!
, and gave it up. He hadn’t made it into
the medulla of the medulla, but he’d gotten closer to the Void than airports
are to most major cities; he’d glimpsed its invisible skyline, breathed its
odorless smokes; and since it was eternal, knew it’d be there the next time he
bought a ticket. Just not today. Today, for better or worse, was a day to think
about Suzy.

There is something so sweet about
a young girl’s sexual longings,
he thought.
There’s a sad and happy
sweetness in them.
Her longing was not for orgasmic release: that would
come with the years. Her longing was not even for an amplification of the
genital quaver that her body for some time would have been softly trilling; nor
was it strictly a longing for love and affection: in fact, the more love and
affection a girl was receiving from her family and friends, the less that was a
part of it. As much as anything else, it was a longing for
information
.
There was information about men; about being with men, alone, in dark places,
that she sensed she must access in order to navigate the mysterious vastness of
her life-to-be. Her subconscious mind was signaling to her that such
information was essential to her very survival in the adult world, and her
hormones, for reasons of their own, were augmenting those signals with a
barrage of swelling itches and tingles. Implicit in most sexual yearning was a
deep-seated desire to connect somehow with the mystery of being, but the
yearning of the young was overlaid with a scary yet optimistic desire to solve
the smaller (though they’d hardly seem small at the time) mysteries of the
adult universe, a universe in which the penis seemed to cast a long shadow and
the vagina formed a gateway to both shame and salvation. If the longing of many
older women lacked that sweetness, it was because they already had gleaned the
information for which young girls were so shyly desperate, and may have found
it disappointing and unsatisfactory, particularly where men were concerned.