Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Read online

  At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes.

  “The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It’s about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there’s a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which, if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.”

  “Yeah, but, Maestra—”

  “Don’t interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in turn, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing’ll go wrong and it’ll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it’s playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That’s why, Switters my dearest, every time you’ve shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I’ve played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me—you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but that none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.”

  “But what about self-esteem?”

  “Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.”

  All the while that his grandmother was assuring him that he was merely a cosmic zit, she was also exhorting him never to accept the limitations that society would try to place on him. Contradictory? Not necessarily. It seemed to be her belief that one individual’s spirit could supersede, eclipse, and outsparkle the entire disco ball of history, but that if you magnified the pure spark of spirit through the puffy lens of ego, you risked burning a hole in your soul. Or something roughly similar.

  In any case, Sailor Boy’s squawky refrain reminded Switters of Maestra’s counsel. He felt better at once, but to insure that he’d keep things in perspective, that he wouldn’t again tighten up or inflate his minor misfortunes, he opened a hidden waterproof, airtight pocket in his money belt and withdrew a marijuana cigarette. Then, with a tiny special key that was disguised as the stem in his wristwatch, he unlocked the lead-lined false bottom that Langley had had built into his reptilian valise and unwrapped an even more secret piece of contraband: a compilation of Broadway show tunes.

  After inserting the clandestine disk into his all-purpose laptop and cranking up the volume, he lay back on the bed, lit the reefer, and sang along zestfully with each and every chorus of “Send in the Clowns.”

  He found Inti down at the lagoon—the Laguna Pacacocha—where many Pucallpans moored their boats. Suppertime, Inti was aboard his vessel boiling a stew of fish and plantains on a brazier fashioned from palm oil tins. The boat was what was known on the Rio Ucayali as a “Johnson,” meaning that it was a flat-bottomed dory, about forty feet long with a five-foot beam and low gunnels, driven by a seven-horsepower Johnson outboard motor. A quarter of it, amidships, was shaded by a canopy supported on bamboo poles. The canopy had once been all thatch but was now augmented by a sheet of blue plastic.

  Switters was seriously questioning Juan Carlos’s description of it as a “good boat” until he looked around at the other Johnsons in the lagoon and saw that most of them were even more dirty and battered than Inti’s. What sold him on it, however, was its name: Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters. Henceforth, we shall refer to it as she.

  As for her captain, Inti was stocky, gap-toothed, bowl-cut, calmly pleasant if somewhat melancholy, and probably in his late twenties, though with Indians age can be difficult to judge. If Juan Carlos had slightly overstated the worthiness of the boat, he had wildly exaggerated the competence of Inti’s English. Nevertheless, with a verbal and gesticular amalgam of Spanish, English, facial expression, and hand signal, the two men agreed on a voyage to Boquichicos, embarking early the following morning.

  So, thought Switters, as he strolled back to the city center in the cherry-cola monkey-buttocks tropical watch-dial dusk, I’ve got a date with a virgin, even if she does look like an old whore.

  In the hotel bar, the talk was almost exclusively about the raid on the airfield. The men who drank there were capitalists, connected to oil or timber interests (gold prospectors, would-be cattle ranchers, and dealers in exotic birds drank in the less expensive bars, workers in cheaper bars yet, while drug merchants drank in private villas, soldiers and policemen in brothels, and Indians in the street), and corporate sentiments ran hotly against the Marxist raiders. Because he was privy to classified CIA files, Switters knew that any number of the atrocities attributed to the Sendero Luminoso actually had been committed by government forces. In no way did this exonerate the guerrillas, for plenty of innocent blood mittened their hands as well.

  Power struggles disgusted Switters, and usually his contempt for the combatants was distributed equally on either side. At the onset it was easy to favor rebellion because the rebels usually were struggling legitimately against tyranny and oppression. It had become a grotesque cliché of modern history, however, that every rebel success embodied a duplication of establishment tactics, which meant that every rebellion, no matter how successful, was ultimately a failure in that it perpetuated rather than transcended the meanness of man, and in that those innocents who managed to survive its bombardments would later be strangled by its red tape. (Czechoslovakia’s “velvet” revolution, nonviolent and generous of spirit, was so far proving to be a notable exception.)

  Where is Peru’s Václav Havel? Switters wondered, although he supposed he might as well have asked, Where is Peru’s Frank Zappa, where is its Finnegans Wake? He squashed any impulse to pose those questions to his fellows in the bar. He, in fact, refrained from making eye contact with others in the bar. It was part of his training, and though it was a part he regularly ignored, on that occasion he intuited it to be prudent. Quietly, he ordered another beer. As if unwilling to allow his mental focus to shift to fantasies of Suzy, however, he began to silently lecture an invisible audience on the sorrow and betrayal inherent in any insurrection led by the ambitious, the bloodthirsty, or the dull; but since none of the points he made were new to him, he soon grew bored and went up to bed.

  In the hallway, around the corner from his room, he spotted a pair of calf-high rubber boots sitting outside a door as if waiting for a valet to give them a polish. They looked to be nearly new, and they looked to be his size. I could sure use those babies where I’m headed, he thought, but because he liked to fancy himself morally superior to both the appropriators in government and the appropriators seeking to overthrow government—he had, after all, just attended his own lecture—Switters left the equivalent of thirty dollars rolled up in a condom and knotted around the doorknob. He even uttered a polite “muchas gracias” under his breath.

  Cigar soup. That’s how Switters would have descri
bed the river. Campbell’s broth of stogie. It was the color of cigar tobacco, it smelled like the butt of a cheap cheroot, and every now and then an actual cigarlike entity would break the oily sheen of its surface to glide among the citrus rinds, plastic cartons, and Inca Cola cans that dotted the waters. These small torpedoes were, of course, neither waterlogged double coronas jettisoned by a listing Cuban freighter nor a species of blind Amazon trout but, rather, a sampling of the ocherous projectiles fired into the river night and day from the fundaments of Pucallpa. “A regular turd de force,” muttered Switters, who was, characteristically, repulsed.

  No sooner were they upward of Pucallpa than the pollution cleared, as if the city’s garbage and sewage were thronging to a hu-man filth festival somewhere downstream: Dead Dogs Welcome. Like all jungle rivers, the Ucayali was perpetually silty, though less so in the so-called “dry” season (as Switters was soon to learn, it still rained once or twice a day), and two hours out, he could see fish and turtles and, occasionally, the bottom, for the Rio Ucayali was not especially deep. It was wide, however; more than a mile wide in places. A flat, broad, meandering stream, it bent, coiled, and doubled back on itself again and again, causing its length to exceed, many times over, a straight line drawn from its source in the southern Andes to the place where it jumped in bed with River Amazon way up north at Iquitos. All in all, the Ucayali was as great or greater than the Mississippi. The fact that few North Americans had ever heard of it should not be shocking, since a survey conducted in 1991 revealed that 60 percent of U.S. citizens could not find New York City on a map.

  The knowledge that he could have flown to Boquichicos and back in an active afternoon instead of chasing his tail in slow motion around the loops of a giant liquid pretzel might have fattened his resentment toward the insurgents, with their special talent (typical of such groups) for lowering their boom-boom upon inappropriate targets, but by then Switters was resigned to a magical mystery tour, going so far as to consider (influenced, perhaps, by his halfhearted flirtation with Catholicism) that it could be deserved punishment for a particular sin that he’d rather not ponder.

  Undoubtedly the heat was a salient feature of that hypothetical retribution, offering as it did a foretaste of the afterlife steam-cleaning promised in certain quarters to the morally gritty. (Surely there would be humidity and plenty of it in Hell. Hard to imagine a condemned sinner saying cheerfully, “Well, yes, it’s two hundred and sixty degrees down here, but it’s a dry heat.”) Switters lounged upon a cardboard couch fashioned for him beneath the canopy, but though he was kept shaded, he was not kept cool. Off the gleaming surface of the river, heat bounced like vectors from a microwave oven, bounced right into the boat, shady spot and all. As the day progressed it grew hotter yet, and Switters could feel if not actually hear streams of sweat gushing down his legs and into his rubber boots. The following day he would travel as nearly naked as Inti and the crew. Or, he would until the black flies struck.

  The gap-toothed skipper of the Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters sat in the stern, his hand on the tiller/throttle arm of the outboard motor, his eyes rolled so far back in his head he might have been inspecting his own brain. Spot anything interesting or unusual, Inti? Frontal lobe seems a tad distended from here.

  In the bow were two other Indians, boys of about fourteen. Or twenty-four. During rainy season, when the Ucayali was more often than not at flood stage, there were limbs, stumps, logs, entire trees (branches, bird nests and all) in the water, not to mention sudden rapids, and whirlpools mammoth enough to swallow a Johnson and not spit it out until closing time. Now, however, with the river as sleepy and sullen as pupils in ninth-grade algebra, there wasn’t a whole lot to look out for—only rarely did the Virgin meet another boat—but the crew stood its watch anyway, practicing, maybe, for more lively excursions.

  Lashed in the stern with Inti were several cans of gasoline, the proximity of which seemed to have no bearing on the captain’s practice of chain-smoking misshapen hand-rolled cigarettes. Up front with the crew were such items as fishing gear, machetes, a tin of palm oil, a brazier made from empty tins, a couple of pots (heavily blackened, as if for a culinary minstrel show), and woven food baskets containing corn, beans, and plantains. There also were three bottles of pisco, and as Switters looked from the booze to Inti and back again, a dark puff of worry scudded his inner sky. Likewise mildly troublesome was the manner in which one of the food baskets rocked and jiggled. Switters hoped that it contained nothing more vivid than a chicken or two.

  Under the canopy surrounding his cardboard chaise longue, was Switters’s luggage, consisting of a king-sized garment bag and the croc valise, as well as his electronic equipment and Sailor’s unusual cage. There was also a roll of mosquito netting, in which, to his dismay, he thought he could detect holes broad enough to admit the prima donna mosquito of the entire world and most of her entourage.

  When, an hour out of port, one of the boys lifted the lid of the rocking basket to disclose a baby ocelot, Switters forgot his concerns for a moment and begrudgingly gave legs to a smile.

  Except for the outboard motor, pushing the Virgin upstream at about six knots per hour against a seasonally flaccid current, there was little or no sound on the river, so when a loud, extended, imploring rumble issued from Switters’s stomach, all aboard, including the ocelot cub and the parrot, cocked heads and took notice. “Lunch bell,” announced Switters hopefully, to no immediate effect.

  Ostentatiously he rubbed his abdomen. “Comida?” he suggested simply, not wishing to wax pleonastic. Again, there was an absence of response.

  Taking squinting measure of the sun’s position, he reckoned the time to be 11 A.M., and his customized watch confirmed it. That meant they had been underway for nearly six hours, without so much as a coffee break. Small wonder his colon was singing arias from tragic third-rate operas. Apparently, however, the Indians had a rule against lunching before high noon, and Switters, ever sensitive about being tagged a soft, coddled Yankee, was disinclined to breach it. He’d swallow his juices and wait.

  In terms of distraction, the landscape didn’t bring a lot to the table. Along the east bank (the west side was too distant to examine), the jungle had long ago been cleared to make way for cattle ranches. Alas, the forest-born, rain-leached soil was too thin to sustain grass cover for more than a couple of years. When their pastures expired, the cattlemen cleared more jungle and moved on, leaving the failed meadows to bake in the tropic sun, where they hardened into wastelands so lifeless and ugly they would have caused T. S. Eliot to start over and perhaps shamed the Up With People people into revising their slogan—although human events in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Beverly Hills hadn’t done much to temper their enthusiasm for the species. He’d attempt to describe this scene to Suzy the next time she petitioned to be whisked to McDonald’s. (Arrggh! Neither Suzy nor McDonald’s—in both cases he favored the fish sandwich—was something he wanted to be reminded of at the moment.)

  Now and then they would pass an operative ranch: a few acres of temporary pasture dotted with beef, a hastily built hacienda, and off to one side, a cluster of thatched huts where Indian workers lived. What would it be like to reside in such a place? Did anyone think of it as “home”? Homeless and houseless may not always be synonymous. Home, for example, wasn’t a word Switters often employed when referring to the apartment in northern Virginia where he closeted his numerous suits (his sole extravagance) and armoired his plenteous T-shirts (not a syllable of product promotion on any of them), which was understandable, considering he rarely slept or ate in the place. The CIA had hired him as an analyst, chaining him to a desk at Langley, but after his supervisors reviewed his rugby tapes they granted him his wish to dive into the derring-do tank: three years in Kuwait, during which time he made frequent phantom forays into Iraq, earning a decoration for an act of valor that he was sworn never to discuss; five years in Bangkok, during which time his off-duty activities, above and beyond the C.R.A.F.T. Club e
ven, had so incensed the U.S. ambassador there that the envoy managed to get him transferred; two years now trotting the globe in a role the company called “troubleshooter,” but which to Switters’s mind was not much more than an international errand boy.

  The nomadic life had its drawbacks, but Switters would be the first to cheerfully admit that it cut way down on maintenance. When he considered that he had not one blade of lawn to tonsure nor brick of patio to patch; when he considered that no overly friendly stranger had ever tried to sell him storm windows, aluminum siding, or a Watchtower magazine; when he considered all of the condo association meetings he’d avoided (thereby sparing his poor brain from being quibbled right down to the stem), he had little choice but to rejoice. And additional joy ensued when he realized that the sun must now be directly overhead since no fragment of its aluminum siding any longer extended beyond the ragged edges of the Virgin’s canopy. Indeed, the hands of his watch were rendezvousing at the top of the dial for a midday quickie (the big hand chauvinistically on top as usual, as it was even on women’s watches).

  “Noon!” he exclaimed, in case the others had missed it. He pointed to the sun. He pointed to the larder. “Who’s the chef on this tub? The sous-chef? The pâtissier?” His glance took in the three bottles of pisco. “I doubt I need inquire about the sommelier.”

  At neither end of the boat was there movement or acknowledgment, so Switters stood up, the better to attract attention.