Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (35 page)

From the start, their boats were
lovelier than his. His, in fact, were pathetically engineered. How inept was
Switters with tools? Had he been assigned to build crosses in Jerusalem, Jesus
would have died of old age. The Art Girls, conversely, made lovely little
vessels; clean, sleek, and well-proportioned, while his were decidedly
otherwise. Yet, when they began to race them (human nature being what it is,
racing was inevitable), his—lopsided, clumsy, cracked, splintery, wobbly of
mast (often no more than a carrot stick)—always won. Always.

Challenged, the Art Girls fashioned
increasingly finer craft. Forsaking those scraps of broken citrus crates that
had provided shipwright fodder in the beginning, and that were now in short
supply and deemed inferior into the bargain, they turned to the art school for
materials, appropriating for hull and deck pieces of wood originally intended
for stretcher bars, frames, maquettes, and the like, while making off with
costly rice paper, parchment, and strips of Belgian linen canvas that could be
cut into little sails. Rather quickly, spurred as much by artistic temperament
and the human love of difficulty as by Switters’s unexplained and undeserved
success, they progressed from catboat to sloop to ketch to yawl to schooner.
They spoke of jibs and mizzensails, added bilge boards, keels, and rudders. And
being artists, they painted their vessels in brilliant blues, whites, and
golds, often inscribing a well-chosen name on the bow such as
Shakti
,
Athena
,
Mermaid Lightning
,
Madame Picasso
, or
Madame Picasso’s Revenge
.

Each and every one of Switters’s
boats was christened
Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters
(scratched on the foredeck with a ballpoint pen), each was of the same primitive
design in which he made no improvements beyond substituting a cabbage leaf sail
for the customary lettuce leaf whenever the breeze was especially stiff or when
he happened to accidentally produce a rat-trap-sized boat rather than the
mousetrap size that was his usual limit. It wasn’t that Switters eschewed
beauty and grace. No, indeed. He was, in fact, a champion of the beautiful in
an age when beauty had been voted out of office by philistines on both the
right and the left. His boats remained raw and rudimentary because he was
incapable of making them differently, the handyman gene having been recessive
for generations in the males of his family (which might well account for their
tendency to become “men of mystery,” borrowing Eunice’s droll phrase). And
anyway, his dumb dinghies continued to triumph.

“Sorry, darlings,” he’d apologize as,
at the finish line, the girls would parade single file past his wheelchair to
plant a victory kiss on his victory grin.

“I don’t get it.”

“He must cheat.”

“Is it some kind of, like,
trick
?”

“Fuck!”

Into the shallow streams of their
racecourse—streams that bore mum petals, sprigs of dried statice, seeds,
spices, crab shell fragments and tossed latte cups; streams shoaled by squashed
apples, rotting lemons, runaway brussels sprouts, and the occasional yeasty
horse turd; streams drizzled with cloud water, tea, lemonade, soup, screwtop
wine, and drool (avian, equine, and human), in addition to a half-hundred
varieties of coffee; streams dredged clean by municipal workers every night
only to be collaged the next day with lurid organic detritus shed by activities
within the Pike, the belly and heart of Seattle—into those cobble-bottomed
streams the girls commenced to shove brigs, brigantines, barks, frigates, and
clipper ships: vessels meant not for sport but for cargo or battle. It was as
if, having despaired of exceeding his vulgar
Virgins
in speed and
endurance, they sought to overwhelm them with scope, intricacy, and grace.

Indeed, they were works of marvel,
those nautical midgets, especially when the clipper ship decks were stacked
with lumber, rum barrels, hogsheads, cotton bales, or sacks of grain; when the
frigates were outfitted with cannon and beaked figureheads for ramming an
enemy. Races were interrupted, delayed, or canceled altogether due to outbreaks
of naval warfare. As the fighting raged around it—”Fuck the torpedoes, full
speed ahead!”—a lumpish Switters
Virgin
, flying a crude Jolly Roger,
would go careening by in awkward audacity and lurch its way (providing it
didn’t run aground on a half-submerged bagel) to the storm drain at the end of
the street. Pretending to ignore him, the Art Girls made plans for a
reenactment of the Battle of Trafalgar, deciding it might be a more interesting
and authentic engagement if the warships were manned.

“Fruit flies,” suggested Luna, one of
the more innovative of the girls. “We could rub grape pulp and stuff on the
decks and in the rigging, and next thing you know we’ll have a crew.”

“Hello?” countered Brie, who was Luna’s
heated rival in the talent department. “Did you happen to notice that it’s
winter? There aren’t any fruit flies out.”

“Are, too. There’s always a flock of
’em flitting around that rosy-cheeked brunette who works in the stall over
there.”

“Yeah,” agreed Twila. “Even when she
walks down the street.”

“You mean Dev?” asked Switters
innocently. As one, to a woman, each of the girls swung like a beacon to face
him, their eyes narrowed with suspicion, or rather, some psychic knowledge well
beyond suspicion, a daunting display of feminine intuition in full
efflorescence. He actually blushed.

When they’d had enough of broiling
his marrow under their sarcastic smirks, they returned to preparations for
Trafalgar. “Are we going to have critters aboard or not?”

“Darlings, please!” pleaded Switters,
reclaiming his pallor. “
Critters?
Rarely has a linguistic corruption
stunk so excrementally of willful hayseediness. It’s the sort of ill-bred
mispronunciation associated with barnyard sodomites and greeting-card wits, even
exceeding in déclassé offensiveness the use of
shrooms
when
mushrooms
is the word intended.”

“Life is offensive. Get used to it.”
They had him there.

“Bet Dev says
shrooms
.” There,
too.

Being as fundamentally nonviolent as
they were artistically restless, the girls soon lost their taste for naval
warfare. One day, to everyone’s delight, a lowly garbage scow appeared in place
of a windjammer, and the next day somebody launched an ark. These were followed
by fishing trawlers, tugboats, barges, rafts, kayaks, houseboats, tankers, and
ocean liners. And, as any art historian could have predicted, there eventually
bloomed a period of stylistic mannerism, of art for art’s sake. The girls began
to bring in boats that bore little or no resemblance to boats: impressionistic
boats, expressionistic boats, Cubistic boats, boats more closely resembling
swivel chairs, toupees, bowling trophies, or poodle dogs than anything that
ever plied the seas; boats that wouldn’t steer correctly and in some cases
wouldn’t even float. Anti-boats. Suicides. Sinkers. Bangladesh ferry service.
Then, Luna stopped the show with a miniature Christ who walked on water.
Everyone was stunned, but two days later, during which time she’d neither eaten
nor slept, Brie unveiled a Christ who not only walked on water but also towed
skis. Apparently, the end was near.

Their little regattas had been
attracting an increasing number of kibitzers, so it was hardly a surprise when
a writer for the
Post-Intelligencer
mentioned them in her column. “Regrettable,”
bemoaned Switters. “Any day now we can expect the novelty-greedy snouts of TV
cameras to come sniffing at our pleasures.”

A product of their culture, the Art
Girls could neither share nor understand his objection. An aversion to media
exposure was as incomprehensible to them as would have been in earlier times an
aversion to the favors of a king or the blessings of the Church.

There might have developed a quarrel,
but (naturally enough, since it was well into April) the rains stopped. The sky
went blue on them, the sun bounded on stage like a cut-rate comedian who
doubled as his own spotlight, and within a day the market streets and gutters
were as dry as rye. And dry they remained. With the dawning of spring,
moreover, it dawned on the girls that their school year was drawing to a close,
final exams were imminent, portfolios must be readied for grading; and, so,
with a chirpy panic, they turned their full attention to the paintings,
drawings, sculptures, and photographs that for months they’d been ignoring, to
the faculty’s supreme bewilderment, in favor of maritime models and nautical
whirligigs.

On their rare forays into the market
now, they did, singularly or in pairs, seek out Switters, always with just a
trace of dreaminess in their perky hellos and good-byes. “What are you doing
with yourself these days?” they’d inquire, implying that his life must be
dreary without them.

“The house is on fire,” he’d answer
merrily. “I’m looking out the second-story window. In my case, that happens to
be two inches above the ground. Perfect!”

Whereas in the past it had been an
unspoken rule that no prying was permitted, now they’d ask, “But what are you
doing here in the market? What did you do before? You know, like
before
?”

“Oh, I gave up a proctology practice
to go live in the Ural Mountains. Or did I give up a urology practice to go
work for Procter and Gamble? Hmm?”

“You can’t remember whether you were
a proctologist or a urologist?”

“Alas. All I know is that if you
could sit on it, I was interested in it.”

At least half the girls made it
clear, largely through body language, that anything they sat on could be his
for the asking. Yet, he did not ask. He was, in some oblique fashion, paying
off a debt to Suzy, who, he kept reminding himself, was but three or four years
their junior, and for whose sake he seemed to feel he owed more than a modicum
of retribution. He lusted maniacally for the Art Girls, of course, and, in all
frankness, might never have let remorse over Suzy stand in the way of getting to
know them more intimately had not his sunrise visits from Dev been so carnally
extracting.

It was spring. There was no
mistaking it. The air had become like cotton candy, spun not from sugar but the
sex glands of meadowlarks and dry white wine. In the Pike Place Market, green
sprouts popped up between the cobblestones. When he ventured out of a morning,
freshly if resentfully groomed, yet bearing Dev’s funky signature like a
laundry mark on a shirt, Switters left his topcoat at home.

Pale sunlight warmed the “starship,”
the “second-story window,” the “throne of enlightenment” from whose eminence he
kept watch on the world. Because spring brought with it, as it does each year,
quiet spasms of longing that may be interpreted as
sad
, he found himself
thinking of the sad-faced little mercado down in Boquichicos, so woefully
wanting in goods and goods-buyers compared to the overstuffed market in which
he parked his “one-man tilt-a-whirl.” And because in the high stalls (including
Dev’s), oranges, onions, potatoes, and so forth were stacked in pyramid piles,
he was repeatedly reminded of the shaman of the Kandakandero. Was it around
Today Is Tomorrow’s cranial apex that Sailor Boy’s plumage had come to rest?
And what of Fer-de-lance? The boy was out of vivid South America, but vivid
South America was not quite out of the boy.

Bereft of Art Girl yachting parties,
Switters again had lots of time to think, and while he thought often of Suzy
and what he might have done to protect their relationship, thought of the CIA
and what he might have done to preserve his job, he focused his thinking on his
South American affliction, specifically on the question raised by Bobby Case,
to wit: What had he been shown by the witchman’s ayahuasca, his yopo, that was
so privileged and precious that he’d be expected to pay for it by spending the
rest of his life with his feet off the ground?

Was his predicament in any way a
distant echo of Adam and Eve’s? Had he, with a chit supplied by a creepy
trickster, bought lunch at the Tree of Knowledge Bar & Grill, where only
the cosmic elite were supposed to eat? If so, what forbidden information,
exactly, had he ingested? That every daisy, sparrow, and minnow on the planet
had an identity just as strong as his own? That all flesh was slowed-down light
and physical reality a weird dance of electrified nothingness? That at a
certain level of consciousness, death ceased to become a relevant issue? As did
time? Today
is
tomorrow? Okay. But hadn’t he known those things all
along?

In Genesis 3:22, a peevish voice
attributed to Yahweh said of Adam (caught with pip on his lip), “Behold, the
man is become as one of us.”
Us?
More than one god, then? Goddesses,
perhaps: a Ms. Yahweh? Was Yah’s collective pronoun meant to include his
beaming lieutenant, Lucifer? Or, for that matter, the Serpent? How about the
community of angels (an apolitical faction of which might already have been
disposed toward neutrality)? Or might God possibly—and this was pretty
far-fetched—have been referring to the bulbs? The coppery pods, the shiny,
trash-talking siliques who had boasted that they were running the show?
Ridiculous, maybe, but what
were
those damn bulbs? Were they intrinsic
to the plants from which ayahuasca and yopo were derived, an example of an
abiding botanical intelligence amplified and made comprehensible by an
interfacing of vegetative alkaloids with human neurons? Were they, rather,
projected manifestations of his own psyche, hallucinated totems from the
collective unconscious? Or were they actual independent entities, a life-form
residing, say, one physical dimension away from our own, reachable at a kind of
supercharged Web site accessed through chemical rather than electronic means?