Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Page 5

  She looked so puzzled that he regretted at once having broached the subject. Suzy was a “babe in Christ,” as the Bible refers to them, and “babes in Christ” become quite unhappy when asked to actually think about their faith. “Whatever,” she said cryptically, and smashed a shot past his outstretched paddle.

  “I guess it wouldn’t matter whether we could comprehend angel talk or not,” he conceded. “They’ve got those trumpets and flaming swords, and glow-in-the-dark accessories, they’d find a way to get their point across. I’m multilingual, so I’ve been told, but I spend a lot of time in countries where I can’t understand the language at all. And you know, Suzy, I’m coming to prefer it that way. It’s uplifting. When you go for a while without being able to understand a word of what anybody around you is saying, you start to forget what banal bores our blathering brethren be.”

  Suzy found that highly amusing, and when they traded ends of the table for the next game, she allowed him a fleeting fondle—which, of course, assured her of victory in the match.

  Incidentally, Switters and his friends lumped all CIA agents into one of two categories: cowboys or angels. They spoke the same language, the cowboys and the angels, but with different emphasis and to far different ends.

  It was approaching 2 A.M. when he reached the Gran Hotel Bolívar, and the lobby was not surprisingly shadowy and quiet. No sooner had he walked in, however, than a figure shot from one of the overstuffed chairs and began walking toward him. His hand slid to the pistol in his belt.

  The figure was stoop shouldered and a little gimpy.

  “Señor Switter. Who do you find to buy your tractors at this late hour?”

  “Why, Juan Carlos, I’ve been to midnight mass.” He shook hands with the guide. “Didn’t see you there. The priest was asking about you. He’s worried you aren’t getting enough rest.”

  “Do not joke, señor. I could not rest for the thinking of your situation. You have changed your mind about breaking the heart of your dear grandmama?”

  “No, my plans are firm. But don’t worry, pal. My grandmother’s tough as a plastic steak. And she’s adamant about giving that cracker-snapper its freedom.”

  Juan Carlos looked as downcast as a busted flowerpot. “If you take it to Iquitos,” he said, “it will not be free for long.” The guide explained that despite its romantic reputation as an exotic jungle town and the capital of Amazonia, Iquitos had grown into a city of nearly four hundred thousand residents, and logging and farming were pushing the rain forest farther and farther from its streets. “You must go fifty kilometers from Iquitos in any direction to find the primary jungle, and even there your bird may not be safe. The parrot market in Iquitos is very big, señor, very extensive. Your grandmama’s friend will only be captured and put in another cage. Eventually, some stranger will buy it and take it away—perhaps to the U.S. again.”

  Well, that would never do. And Juan Carlos went on to warn of cholera germs that were currently careening through Iquitos like a soccer mob. “Your inoculation, I fear, will offer only minimal—”

  “Okay. I get the picture. Iquitos is gonna wrinkle my rompers, gonna squeak my cheese. So, what’s the alternative? I have the distinct feeling that there’s an option up your sleeve.”

  “For your own safety, señor, and for the peace of mind of your grandmama.”

  “I understand, Juan Carlos. You’re a good man.”

  “I have taken the liberty to cancel Iquitos and arrange for you the noon flight to Pucallpa.”

  “Pucallpa?!”

  “Sí. Yes. It is the much more small city, and, guess what, do you know?—it is the more shorter flight from Lima.”

  “That may be true, but from what I’ve heard, Pucallpa’s not exactly Judy Garlandville. And it hasn’t been kind to the forest, either.”

  A couple of Policía de Turismo had stirred from their doze and were giving them the old law-enforcement stink-eye. Switters was hardly intimidated, but Juan Carlos nodded toward a space by the elevator, and the two men strolled over there to continue their talk more privately.

  “Pucallpa is more rough but is also more gentle. Is that sounding crazy?”

  “Not at all. Only the obtuse are unappreciative of paradox.”

  “Yes, but you will not wish to remain in Pucallpa, for, you see, it is a city also and is also having a parrot market.”

  Switters’s intention was to fly into a jungle town—Iquitos had been his original choice, but Pucallpa would do—and hire a vehicle to take Sailor and him to the edge of the forest for the release ceremony. He thought of it as a ceremony because Maestra had stuffed her camcorder into his crocodile-skin valise and insisted upon his videotaping the event. Now, Juan Carlos was telling him that the parrot wouldn’t be safe within miles of either city and, furthermore, that the outskirts of those jungle towns would not provide a scenic backdrop for Maestra’s viewing pleasure, being littered with oil drums, lengths of abandoned pipe, and the rusting remains of dead machinery.

  “This is the ideal,” confided Juan Carlos. “You hire the boat in Pucallpa. Boat with the good motor. A boy named Inti has the good boat and a little English. This boat takes you up the Rio Ucayali. South is upriver. Before you reach Masisea, a tributary will branch off to the east. Is named Abujao, I think. These rivers in the Amazon basin are changing like the traffic lights, like the moon, like the currency. Inti will find it. If you come to Masisea you have come too far.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “For the village named Boquichicos. On the Rio Abujao near the Brazil frontier. Boquichicos was one of the new towns founded by our government for the oil business, but they founded it with the strict environmental considerations. The oil business did not prosper, but the town, she is still there. Very small, very nice. Remote.”

  “Yeah, I got the feeling you were talking serious boondocks. How remote? How long’s the dream cruise from Pucallpa?”

  “Oh, is merely three days.”

  “Three days?!”

  “It is now at the end of the dry season. The rivers run low. So, maybe four days.”

  “Four days? Each way? Forget it, pal. I don’t have that kind of time, and if I did I wouldn’t spend it up some damn creepy river.” Switters was about to lift his T-shirt to display the number of insect wounds he’d managed to suffer right there in metropolitan Lima, but a glance at the tourist cops made him think the better of it.

  “Not for the happiness of a poor old woman who has so long sacrifice for you, who may soon be call to the side of Jesus . . .”

  “Heh!”

  “. . . not for to protect and reward the old loyal pet?” Juan Carlos went on to explain that what made Boquichicos special was its proximity—an hour’s walk—to a huge colpa or clay lick that was visited daily by hundreds of parrots and macaws. The guide could not imagine a more pleasurable or compatible retirement home for Sailor, and Switters had to admit that such a locale would provide video footage destined to win Maestra’s personal Oscar. She’d be ever grateful. Briefly, he entertained a vision of himself lying on a bearskin rug before the Snoqualmie cabin’s stone fireplace, the Matisse oil—now his own—pulsating like a blue chromosphere of massive meaty nudity above the mantel. (Dare he include Suzy in that cozy fantasy? Better not.)

  “What about predators? You know, uh, ocelots, jaguars, big vivid serpents?”

  “There are those, Señor Switter, and also the accurate arrows of the Kandakandero, these Indians who use the bright color feathers for to decorate their bodies. But with so many birds from to choose in the big, big forest, it would be like the odds of the national lottery.”

  “Lots of birds, but only one well-fed white boy from downtown North America.”

  Juan Carlos laughed. “Do not worry. The Kandakandero are the most shy tribe in all Amazonia. They will hide from you.”

  “Yeah? Too bad. I might interest ’em in one of our John Deere chicken-pluckers. I’m certain it’ll do its job on toucans and macaws.”

/>   “So, you will go?”

  Switters shrugged. There are times when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob. Sure, we can resist. But a knob that won’t turn, a door that sticks and never budges, is a nuisance to the gods. The gods may kick in the jamb. Worse, they may walk away in disgust, leaving us to hang dumbly from our tight hinges, deprived of any other chance in life to swing open into unnecessary risk and thus into enchantment.

  Legend has it that Switters went into the Amazon wearing a cream silk suit, a Jerry Garcia bow tie, and a pair of white tennis shoes. To set the record straight, he wore a suit all right, he wore suits everywhere and saw no reason to make an exception for Amazonia; but his trouser legs were tucked into calf-high rubber boots, purchased for the occasion; while his one bow tie, leather, designed not by Garcia but by Eldridge Cleaver, and which he wore only to meetings and functions attended by aging FBI men who’d yet to forget or forgive Cleaver’s Black Panther Party, was in the drawer where he’d left it in Langley, Virginia.

  To further straighten the record, he hadn’t, at that point, the slightest intention of putt-putting to Boquichicos in a riverboat. Once in Pucallpa, he’d simply hire an air taxi, fly in, release Sailor, fly out. It would dent his vacation funds but would definitely be worth every cent. With any luck, he’d be back in Lima the following morning. This he did not mention to Juan Carlos, being by nature and profession a secretive person, though it was unlikely the guide would have objected.

  To the contrary, for all of his concern about the parrot and its mistress, Juan Carlos expressed equal concern for the safety and comfort of Switters. “I am happy, señor,” he said as they parted company in the hotel lobby, “that you have not the big enthusiasm for our jungle.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because of danger. No, it is not anymore like the Amazon you see at the cinema, not so wild and savage along the big rivers, not so many animals anymore, not the headhunters or cannibals. If you are staying on the river, walking the short walk into the colpa and returning the same route, then you will be perfectly safe. More safe than Lima, to be frank. But some Norteamericanos they want to leave the river, leave the trail, run into the forest like the movie star, like the Tarzan. Big mistake. Even today, the jungle she have a thousand ways to make you sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, Juan Carlos, it’s not my scene,” Switters said sincerely, having no inkling of what lay in store for him.

  In bed, he tried to pray because he thought it might connect him in some way to Suzy, but he wasn’t adept at it, being overly conscious of the language, perhaps; not wishing to bore whoever or whatever was on the receiving end with hackneyed phrases, yet wondering whether ornamentation and witticisms might be inappropriate or unwelcome. Before he could get a rhetorically satisfactory prayer on track, his mind wandered to Gloria—many of Lima’s women were cultured and sophisticated, as he suspected Gloria might be when she wasn’t rendered crude by excessive alcohol—and he experienced a pang of regret, in his heart and his groin, that he hadn’t fetched her there beside him. It was his own fault, of course, for being so finicky.

  The irony of Switters was that while he loved life and tended to embrace it vigorously, he also could be not merely finicky but squeamish. For example, what else but squeamishness could account for his reluctance to accept the existence of his organs and entrails? Obviously, he knew he had innards, he was not an imbecile, but so repulsive did he find the idea that his handsome body might be stuffed like a holiday stocking with slippery, snaky coils of steaming guts; undulating meat tubes choked with vile green and yellow biles, vast colonies of bacteria, fetid gases, and gobs of partially digested foodstuffs, that he blocked the fact from his cognizance, preferring to pretend that his corporeal cavity—and that of any woman to whom he was romantically attracted—was powered not by throbbing hunks of slimy, blood-bathed tissue but by a sort of ball of mystic white light. At times he imagined that area between his esophagus and his anus to be occupied by a single shining jewel, a diamond the size of a coconut whose brightness rang in all four quadrants of his torso.

  Really, Switters.

  He was up by eight and on-line by nine. (In between, he packed, grudgingly committed acts of bodily maintenance, and ordered room service breakfasts: poached eggs and beer for himself, a fruit platter for Sailor.)

  At the computer he dispatched an encoded report to the economic secretary at the U.S. embassy, who happened also to be Langley’s station chief in Lima. Switters’s report was entirely professional, devoid of literary japes or sarcastic references to the irony of an “economic secretary” being ultimately devoted to undermining the host economy, the Peruvian economy being a sickly system whose sole vitality, top to bottom, was generated by the very coca drug trade the CIA was commanded to help eradicate. To the chief, a cowboy through and through, Switters merely reported that the lost sheep had returned to the fold, adding, for what it was worth, that in his opinion Hector Sumac (he used his code name) probably could be relied upon to engage in second-level espionage and assist in enforcement operations, but that it might be wise to wait several years before permitting him to run any Joes of his own.

  The line between cowboy and angel could be no wider than an alfalfa sprout—Switters, himself, occasionally zigzagged that line—and while Hector gave promise of impending angelhood, Switters was wary of the Latin temperament, suspecting it to be unnecessarily volatile, and thus was hesitant to trumpet too loudly on Hector’s behalf before the fellow proved to him that he actually had wings.

  Duty accomplished, and still at his deluxe, state-of-the-art, military quality laptop, Switters set about the task of worming his way into Maestra’s home computer. A trifle rusty at such maneuvering, it took him the better part of an hour, but eventually he crashed her gates, jumped over the guard dogs, and landed in her files, where he proceeded to delete each and every one of the e-mail notes that she had hijacked from Suzy’s mailbox. Assuming that she hadn’t printed it or downloaded it onto a disk, and he was pretty confident she had not, written evidence of his heat for his young stepsister had now been swallowed by an uncaring, nonjudgmental ether.

  In its place he left the following announcement: “Don’t fret, Maestra, I’m still escorting Sailor into the Great Green Hell for you—only now I’m doing it out of love.”

  And mostly he meant it.

  Pucallpa was the Dead Dog Capital of South America. Quite likely, it was the Dead Dog Capital of the world. If any other city lay claim to that title, its mayor and Chamber of Commerce were wisely silent on the subject. Pucallpa did not boast of it, either—but Switters had eyes, had nose. He recognized the Dead Dog Capital when he saw it and smelled it.

  Smell alone, however, wouldn’t have tipped him off. There were so many noxious odors, organic and inorganic, in Pucallpa—spoiled fish, spoiled fruit, decaying vegetation, swamp gas, jungle rot, raw sewage, kerosene stoves, wood smoke, diesel fumes, pesticides, and the relentlessly belched mephitis of an oil refinery and a lumber mill—that, on an olfactory level, mere dead dogs could hardly hope to compete.

  Still, they were there, on view, concentrated along the riverfront but also in midtown gutters, shanty yards, vacant lots, unpaved side streets, outside the single movie theater, and beside the airport tarmac. It might be fanciful to imagine many varieties: a dead poodle on one corner, a Saint Bernard locked in mammoth rigor mortis on the next, but, alas, the canine corpses of Pucallpa invariably were mongrels, mutts, and curs and, moreover, seemed mainly to come in two colors—solid white or solid black, with only the intermittent spot or two.

  To Switters, who cared even less for domestic animals dead than alive, the question was, What was the cause of so much doggy mortality? In his halting Spanish, he posed the question to several residents of that on-again, off-again boom town, but never received more than a shrug. In boom towns one paid attention to those things that might make one rich and, failing at fortune, to those things that made one forget. Since there
was neither profit nor diversion in dead dogs, only the vultures seemed to notice them. And for every dead dog, there was a full squadron of vultures. Pucallpa was the Vulture Capital of South America.

  “This is a baneful burg,” Switters wailed to Sailor. “I don’t like to complain, you understand, whining being the least forgivable of man’s sins, but Pucallpa, Peru, is polluted, contaminated, decayed, rancid, rotten, sour, decomposed, moldy, mildewed, putrid, putrescent, corrupt, debauched, uncultured, and avaricious. It’s also hot, humid, and disturbingly vivid. Surely, a fine fowl like you is not remotely related to those hatchet-headed ghouls—no, don’t look up!—circling in that stinking brown sky. Sailor! Pal! We must get us out of here at once.”

  Easier said than done. As Switters learned from a booking agent soon after completing a walking tour of the town, a contingent of resurgent Sendero Luminoso guerrillas had attacked the local airfield three days earlier, destroying or damaging nearly a dozen small planes. Only two air taxis were presently flying, and both were booked for weeks to come, ferrying engineers, bankers, and high-stake hustlers back and forth between Pucallpa and the projects in which they had interest.

  Sorely distressed, Switters was pacing the broken pavement outside the booking office, sweating, swearing, barely resisting the urge to kick a power pole, a trash pile, or the odd dead dog, when, from inside the pyramid-shaped parrot cage that sat with his luggage, there came a voice, high as a falsetto though raspy as a pineapple. “Peeple of zee wurl, relax,” is what it said.

  It was the first time the bird had spoken since leaving Seattle. Thirty minutes later, in an overpriced but blessedly air-conditioned hotel room, it spoke again—the same sentence, naturally—and while there are those who may find this silly, the words lifted Switters’s spirits.

  The flight over the Andes, the poison air of Pucallpa, the brain-boiling heat and pore-flooding humidity had combined to give him a migraine; and the headache had combined with the disappointment over the unavailability of air taxis to make him depressed. Fortunately, when Sailor squawked his signature line, Switters was instantly reminded of something Maestra had said almost twenty years before: “All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”