Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Page 8

  At any rate, there was a strong sense of riverness, now, and that much was good. Rivers were the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men’s dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could. Rivers had transported entire cultures, absorbed the tears of vanquished races, and propelled those foams that would impregnate future realms. Everywhere dammed and defiled, they cast modern man’s witless reflection back at him—and went on singing the world’s inexhaustible song.

  Switters guessed that they had left the Ucayali and entered the Abujao. Inti confirmed that they were on a secondary river, but Abujao was not a name he recognized.

  The last signs of cattle ranching had petered out. The forest, thick, wet, and green, vine-snarled and leaf-tented, towered to nearly two hundred feet, walling them in on both sides. An impenetrable curtain, menacing, unrelieved, the jungle vibrated in the breezeless heat, dripped in the cloying humidity, and except for flights of parrots and the occasional flash of flower—a cascade of leopard-spotted orchids, a treeful of red blossoms as big as basketballs—grew quickly monotonous.

  The river, on the other hand, was agurgle with antics. In exhibitions of reverse surfing, flying fish and freshwater dolphins leapt from the water to catch brief rides on shafts of sunlight. Then, putting a spin on that feat, cormorants, wings folded like a high-diver’s arms, would plunge beak-first into the water, presumably, since they rarely speared a fish, for nothing but cormorant kicks. On benches of gravel, heavy-lidded caimans did Robert Mitchum imitations, seeming at once slow and sinister and stoned. Cabbage-green turtles that must have each weighed as much as a wheelbarrow load of cabbages slid off of and onto mud banks and rocks, while frogs of various hues and sizes plopped on every side like fugitives from mutant haiku. (“Too damn vivid,” Bash¯o might have complained in seventeenth-century Japanese.) Around a bend, three tapirs, the mystery beast from Kubrick’s 2001, waded the stream. According to Juan Carlos, most of Peru’s tapirs had been killed off by hunters, depriving the animal of its right to inhabit the world and depriving the world of living proof of what would result were a racehorse to be mated with Porky Pig.

  Because low water had exposed many rocks that in the rainy season would be well submerged, Inti was forced into almost constant maneuvering, and the Little Virgin could no longer average her customary six knots per hour. The slower pace, combined with the Abujao’s more abundant attractions, afforded Switters the opportunity for an unusual riverine interface. Despite his distaste for the incessant teeming that characterized tropical South America, he was by no means insensitive to natural wonders, and he felt he ought somehow to take advantage of this opportunity. There was a fly in the ointment, however. Simulium vittatum.

  His attentive powers were blunted by the persistent need to throw wild punches at the proboscises of the diminutive Durante-esque devils—and to fend off larger, unidentifiable insects who kept trying to crash the party. In the entomological kingdom, the quest for lunch was ongoing. Switters could empathize.

  No comida.

  No concentración.

  And meditación was out of the question.

  The next morning, when Inti and the boys returned from the bush with their second empty pisco bottle and facefuls of sheepish expression, Switters held out his hand.

  “Gimme coca,” he said.

  Externally, day two on the olive Abujao mirrored day one. For thirteen more lunchless hours, they zigzagged among mossy boulders and through sopping streamers of feverish heat, attended by squadrons of black flies that refused to quit them until a late afternoon downpour literally drowned the biting bugs in midair.

  Internally, the furniture had been rearranged. Switters was booming with vim. Impervious to hunger, he was possessed of such a quantity of unvented vigor that he longed to leap into the river and race the boat to Boquichicos. This he could not do, due to caimans, spiny catfish, the odd swimming viper, and the fact that he’d put his silk suit back on in order to expose less of his flesh to those South American things that would feed upon it.

  Energized yet strangely at peace, he reclined on his rapidly moldering cardboard couch, his face, hands, and feet impastoed with the root goo that caused him to resemble a comic-book Chinaman (in real life, Asians were no more yellow in complexion than Caucasians were truly white), the wad of leaf in his jaw beckoning—reaching out!—to the massive green rampage of forest spirits along either bank. Or so it seemed. At some point he commenced to play with the baby ocelot.

  That Switters was no pet-lover has been established. For days he’d paid keener notice to the wild parrots in the trees than to poor Sailor in his nearby cage. Yet, the truth was, he had sort of a soft spot for very young animals: for puppies, for bunnies, for small kitty cats. If only they wouldn’t grow up! He’d sometimes wished there was a serum with which one might inject pups and kittens, a drug that would arrest their growth and retard their descent into adulthood. Oddly or not, his liking for domestic animals was restricted to those months when they were still frisky, spunky, and playful, before they became cautious and staid, before their spontaneity was genetically assassinated and their sense of wonder crushed by the lockstep rigors of the reproductive drive and the territorial imperative.

  During the period when Switters and Bobby Case were under fire in Bangkok, tattletale embassy personnel having observed them on more than a few occasions in the company of what the ambassador referred to as “underage” girls, Bad Bobby had addressed their alleged misbehavior. “It’s only natural,” he’d said, “that I chase after jailbait. I’m a midlife adolescent, I can’t make commitments, I’m scared of intimacy, and last but not least, I’m a piece of south Texas white trash who likes his pussy to fit tighter than his boots. But with you, though, Swit, it’s something different. I get the feeling you’re attracted to . . . well, I reckon I’d have to call it innocence.”

  Unwilling to flatly deny it, Switters had asked, “Attracted to innocence in order to defile it?”

  Bobby hooted and threw up his hands in mock horror. The girls in the Safari Bar all tittered because he was crazed Bobby Case and he was drinking with his crazed friend Switters. “You’re not fixing to feign a guilt trip on me, are you? ‘Cause if you are, I’m going on home and read Finnegans Wake.”

  “You desert me in my hour of need, I’ll follow you home and read Finnegans Wake to you.”

  “Oh no you don’t!” Bobby exclaimed, signaling frantically for another round of Sing Ha. The girls wanted to join them—the Safari girls loved Bobby and Switters—but the men bought them champagne and shooed them away. They were under fire and needed to talk.

  “There’s folks,” said Bobby, “who think sex is filthy and nasty, and they’re spooked by it and mad at it and don’t want anything to do with it and don’t want anybody else messing with it, either. And there’s folks who think sex is as natural and wholesome as Mom’s apple pie and they’re relaxed about it and can’t get enough of it, even on Sunday.”

  “Personally,” said Switters, “I think sex is filthy and nasty—and I can’t get enough of it. Even on Sunday.”

  “Uh-huh. Yes indeedy. And it’s particularly nasty when it’s all sweet and fresh and innocent. Isn’t that how it strikes you, Switters? I believe you lingo jockeys refer to this as paradox.” He yelled “Paradox!” at the top of his lungs, and the girls laughed merrily. “Or, we could say that innocence and nastiness enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Symbiotic! For the connoisseurs among us. Also for young folks, who’re just busting with nastiness night and day, and have a completely innocent kind of awe of it.”

  “You’re a troubled man, Captain Case. There’re dark forces at work in you, and I will neither sanction them nor be a party to their rationalization.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t forget who your employer is. If you and me didn’t rationalize our butts off, we couldn’t look in the mirror to shave.
”

  “You haven’t shaved in a week.”

  “Beside the point. What I’m trying to get at here—and I’m doing it on your behalf and in your defense, since I’m not fit to be defended—is that consensual, non-abusive, good-hearted fucking is not in and of itself defiling, not even to the very young.”

  “It’s often a matter of cultural context.”

  “There you go. Look at the ladies in this very room.” Bobby gestured wildly at a gaggle of chic bar girls huddled around the jukebox. They giggled and waved back at him. “At least half of ’em are as innocent as rosebuds.”

  “Because their minds are still curious and their hearts are still pure.”

  “There you go. Sure, the shadow of the big A is hovering over ’em like Death’s own helicopter, and they have to put up with the bedside manners of snockered Sony executives and unhappy shit like that, you know, and sleeping with jerks can definitely numb a person’s heart, but frequent fucking hasn’t traumatized ’em or even cheapened ’em, not these ladies or anyone else, except maybe in those unfortunate blue-nosed societies that are uptight about the body in general. It’s a matter of attitude.”

  “Cultural context.”

  “There you go. I read somewhere that in the olden days, when a girl reached a certain age—puberty, I reckon—she’d be initiated into sex by one of her uncles. Same with a boy, only an aunt would do the job. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. It was considered a highly important learning experience, the uncle and auntie were teachers, and it was a serious though evidently smiley-faced family duty. And the thing is, you know, there’s no evidence that this hands-on brand of sex education was anything but beneficial or that it ever left even the most itty-bitty psychological scar.”

  “Well, that was then and this is now. Today, it’d land the kids in therapy and the adults in jail. For decades in both instances.”

  “Different cultural context, if I can coin a phrase. And precisely why we should avoid America like the mumps. Thailand is perfect for an ol’ boy like me, who’s into sitting and hankers to be every niece’s uncle; and it’s perfect for a cat like you, who’s got this deep secret Jones for innocence.”

  “Yeah, so deep and secret even I don’t know about it. Maybe you ought to consider, pal, that you might be indulging in a simple-minded supposition.”

  “Supposition!” hollered Bobby, eliciting the usual amused response. “Okay, son. Forget it. You don’t appreciate my support, I withdraw it. I wouldn’t want to sully the Patpong night with any supposition.”

  They went quiet for a while, pulling on their frosty Sing Has. Then Switters said, “In regards to my personal proclivities, you’re generating considerable flapdoodle.” Immediately he bawled, “Proclivities! Flapdoodle!” in a voice more thunderous than Bobby’s. He nodded at his friend and said softly, “To save you the trouble.”

  “You’re a gentleman and I thank you. The ladies thank you, too.”

  “However,” Switters resumed, “I have to say you’re correct when you suggest that loss of virginity is in no way equivalent to loss of innocence. Unless, of course, innocence is defined as ignorance.”

  “In which case,” put in Bobby, “every sum bitch in the state of Texas is innocent as a snowflake. I share this with you as a fellow Texan.”

  “You won’t find the term ‘Texan’ on a single document in my resumé.”

  “Only because you’ve doctored your damn files. All-region linebacker at Stephen F. Austin High School. Or do I have you confused with some other, more studly, guy?”

  “We only lived in Austin two years. And I spent both those summers with my grandmother in Seattle.”

  “Well, let’s see: factoring in your age, that makes you one-eighteenth of a Texan. Woefully inadequate, I admit, but it probably accounts for your good looks.”

  “And my appreciation of red-eye gravy.”

  “Praise the Lord!” Bobby called for more beer. “By the way, I been meaning to ask you: how come you never went on to play football in college?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Seems every campus I visited on those, uh, recruiting trips, all the players ever talked about was money. Football was a business to them, even at the college level, and the lone dream they had in life was to be let loose in the NFL gold mine with an agent and a shovel. So, I decided to give rugby a whirl. Rugby’s every bit as rough and every bit as challenging, and a lot more fun because in America, at least, there’s never been a chance anybody could make a nickel on it. I guess I liked it because it was beyond the reach of commerce and hype. In rugby you were just a guy laying his teeth on the line for the sport of it, you were not a commodity.”

  “Uh-huh!” Bobby crowed, with a triumphant smirk. “There you go. Attracted to purity. Switters, I rest my case.”

  “Case, I rest my Switters,” countered Switters, and the pair convulsed with such silly, stupid laughter that even the bar girls shook their heads and looked the other way.

  Bobby Case was soon to be reassigned to a U2 base in Alaska. It was rumored that upon his departure, the gutters of Patpong (Bangkok’s “entertainment” district) had run with women’s tears. Incidentally, despite Bobby’s description of himself as a “midlife adolescent,” he was several years Switters’s junior, a fact underscored by his twenty-seven-inch waist and boyish shock of skunk-black hair, and contradicted by the purplish crescents beneath his glint-and-squint aviator’s eyes. His last hours in Bangkok were spent in deep meditation at a Buddhist shrine, although in balance it should be reported that the evening prior, he’d addressed the C.R.A.F.T. Club for forty minutes on the first sentence of Finnegans Wake, which happened to be the only sentence of that book he’d ever read.

  Switters was called home to Langley. He spent his last hours in Bangkok in the company of an actual adolescent. He bought her a new silk dress, jeans, and a compact disk player. Then he put her on a bus back to her native village with six thousand dollars in her pink plastic purse, her brief career as a whore at an end. She would rescue her family financially, and—since sexual shame was nonexistent in Thailand and he’d seen to it that she was free of disease—eventually marry her childhood sweetheart in a jolly public ceremony beside a field apop with ripening rice. The six thou he’d won from some Japanese businessmen in a baka hachi game that nearly sparked an international incident. As for Switters’s farewell presentation to the C.R.A.F.T. Club, his lecture on the Wake went on until nearly daybreak and is said to have concluded with him bleeding, in the nude, and crooning “Send in the Clowns,” a song the membership was shocked to learn he knew.

  Switters was not much given to self-analysis. Perhaps he sensed that it forced the dishonest into even deeper deception and led the candid into bouts of despair. Consequently, he’d given little thought to Bobby’s characterization of him that Bangkok evening as a seeker after purity. And now, two years later, aboard a dory in the Peruvian Amazon, rolling a spotted cub back and forth on its spine and pondering, what he pondered was not so much any alleged attraction to innocence on his part but his indisputable attraction to Suzy, reasonably confident they were not the same thing.

  Like many modern-day sixteen-year-olds, Suzy was at a juncture where innocence and sophistication converged, much as the olive-colored Abujao converged with the cigar-colored Ucayali, mingling, chaotically at first, their contrasting hues and oppositional currents. The time, no doubt, had passed when it might have been effective to inoculate Suzy with his hypothetical adulthood-prevention serum. Quite likely, it would have been a mistake at any stage. Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn’t fixity the hallmark of the living dead?

  At any rate, to enumerate the ways in which Suzy had changed, he was obliged to picture how she’d been at the beginning. Initially, he had to s
train to recall the details of their first meeting. Then, he had to strain to stop recalling them. All this Suzy straining was amplified, magnified, and possibly provoked, by the coca.

  It had been four years. On leave and destined for Seattle, he’d stopped off in Sacramento at his mother’s request, to meet her new husband and stepdaughter. The husband, a well-to-do hardware wholesaler, had admitted him and after a minute or two of small talk, directed him to his mother’s sitting room. The door was ajar. Switters could hear voices. He rapped once and was charging into the room when his mother squealed and blocked his entrance. “No, you can’t come in! She’s trying on her training bra.”

  Switters froze in his tracks, momentarily startled, then curious and thoughtful. “Oh, really?” he asked with great interest. “What’s she training them to do?”

  There had erupted an unrestrained and altogether delicious giggle—really more of a girlish guffaw—and the slender figure that had been standing with her back to the door made a silky half-turn to look at him, swinging in the process a storybook pelt of straight blond princess hair. She was barefoot, he remembered, toenails twinkling with a pink-baby varnish. Her longish legs were bare to the brie-like thighs, at which point they vanished into white cotton shorts, stretched taut over a little rump so round Christopher Columbus could have employed one of its protuberances as a visual aid and bowled bocci with the other. Panty outline was in evidence. Above the waist she was naked, save for a dainty white harness, from which dangled shop tags of paper and plastic, and which she did not wear but, rather, clutched loosely at a distance of several inches in front of her chest. In that position it concealed only the nippled points of mammalian swellings, hard as quinces, that might have served as helmets for the marionettes in a German army puppet show—if the toy Huns were outfitted in winter camouflage. They were not quite in the tits category, but they had a running start at it.

  Into view now, its prow piercing his reverie, came a dugout canoe, paddled by five loinclothed Indians with decorated faces and feathered coifs. These feathers had once been the exclusive property of individual parrots and macaws, a particular not lost on old Sailor Boy, whose reaction was anything but relaxed. “Come on, pal,” said Switters to the agitated fowl, “practice what you preach.” The wild canoers neither waved nor nodded at the crew of the Virgin; the Pucallpa clansmen ignored them as well. On the forest-shaded river, the boats passed in silence, twenty feet apart, as if the other did not exist. Switters looked imploringly at Inti, who shrugged and muttered, “Kandakandero.”