Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (17 page)

Before the little safari could
successfully embark, however, Potney Smithe halted it. “I say, Switters. I say.
. . .” But he didn’t say. He stammered indistinctly, searching for the correct
wordage. He had the coloration of a conch shell and the bulk of a bear, so that
a fanciful person could imagine him the offspring of a mermaid and a panda. “I
say. I have something, I
may
have something, of consequence to impart.”

“Then
im
part or
de
part,”
said Switters. “It’s hotter than the soles of Dante’s loafers out here.”
Immediately he regretted the remark, for he heard himself starting to sound
like one of the petty mopers who wasted untold priceless moments of their brief
stay on this planet complaining about its weather. Unless it was about to cause
you bodily harm, rot your rhubarb on the stalk, or carry off your children,
weather ought either to be celebrated or ignored, he felt, one or the other;
although at times such as this, when it was steaming one’s brain like a Chinese
dumpling, it failed to inspire much in the way of celebration, while not
thinking about it was even more difficult than not thinking about . . . Suzy.

Switters softened his tone. “I read
somewhere that each second, four-point-three pounds of sunlight hit the earth.
That figure strikes me as kind of low. What about you, Potney?” He mopped his
brow. “I mean, I realize that sunlight is, well,
light,
but don’t you
suppose they meant four-point-three
tons
?”

Smithe smiled indulgently and wagged
his cigarette. “You aren’t exactly dressed for trekking in the torrid zone, old
boy; now are you?”

“Why, that depends on—”

“Although I must say, the boots are
sensible.” He glanced at the chèvresque sky. “It’s going to be raining soon.”

Switters also glanced skyward. It
didn’t look like rain to him. He’d bet his bottom dollar it wasn’t going to
rain. “So what’s your story, Pot? My little operation here is falling way
behind schedule.”

“You have your errand to run.”

“That I do. You’ve hit the nail on
the head.”

Smithe cleared his throat vigorously,
sending droplets of sweat flying off his Adam’s apple. “A Yank in a business
suit ‘running an errand’ in the Peruvian bush. A bit west of here, one would
automatically think ‘cocaine,’ but there’s precious little if any coca refined
in the immediate vicinity, and the mineral wealth is negligible as well. Yes.
Um. If it’s exotic birds you’re after . . .”

“Listen, pal . . .”

“None of my bleeding business, is it?
No. None. However, if your errand at the colpa is such that it might endure a
nominal delay, well, there’s been a development.” Switters tried to interrupt,
but Smithe waved him off. “These Nacanaca blokes, you see, would like to borrow
your parrot for a bit. They want to take it—and its cage, obviously—into the
jungle a ways. Alarmed, are you? Of course you are. But you see, they’ll bring
it back. They only want to show it to a Kandakandero chap. A most remarkable
chap, I assure you. The Nacanaca believe that this great Kandakandero witchman
will be sufficiently impressed to grant you an audience.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Thanks but no
thanks. My social calendar is filled to the brim right now. Next time I’m in
town, perhaps.” He looked to Inti. “Let’s round ’em up and head ’em out.”

“Oh, righto. Absolutely spot on.”
Smithe had gone from pink to crimson. “I’ve boiled my pudding in this bleeding
hole for five bleeding months, petitioning, pleading, flattering, bribing,
doing everything short of dropping on all fours and cavorting like a
Staffordshire bull terrier to win another interview with End of Time, and you
come along on your bleeding errand, oblivious, unmindful, not caring a
fiddler’s fuck, and fall into it, just bloody stumble into it, roses and
whistles; and, of course, it’s not your cup of tea, it means nothing divided by
zero to a bloke like you, you’re wanting none of it. Well, brilliant, that’s
brilliant. Just my lot, isn’t it? My brilliant bleeding lot.”

Switters regarded him with
astonishment. “Easy,” he cautioned. “Easy, pal. Heed the counsel of our Sailor
Boy over there. Relax. You’re acting like I’m some sort of spoilsport, and I
don’t have an L.A.P.D. clue what sport I’m spoiling. I’m only—”

“Oh, it’s not your fault. Really.
Sorry about that. It’s just my bloody—”

“Stop whining, Potney. Whining’s
unattractive, even when your whine sounds like Kenneth Branagh eating frozen
strawberries with a silver fork. Just tell me specifically what’s on your
burner. What’s this ‘end of time’ stuff? ‘Interviewing the end of time’? Sun
got to you? Sun and gin? Mad dogs and Englishmen syndrome?”

Gradually Smithe was returning to his
natural hue. A weariness moved into his smooth, shiny face like a retired
midwestern farmer moving into a flamingo beach hotel. He shrugged his ursine
shoulders and flicked, halfheartedly, his cigarette into the bug-gnawed weeds.
“Never mind.” He sighed. “Load of flapdoodle, that.”

“Flapdoodle?!” Switters grinned
incredulously, and with a kind of sarcastic delight.

“Yes. Bosh. Nonsense,” explained
Smithe. His tone was defensive.

“I know what flapdoodle means. I just
wasn’t aware that anybody under the age of ninety-five still used the term.
Even in Merry Olde.”

“Don’t mock.”

“So, flapdoodle, is it? Why didn’t
you say so in the first place? I happen to have a soft spot for flapdoodle. And
if you toss in a pinch of the old codswallop or balderdash, why, you could get
me really enthralled.”

“Don’t mock.”

“Not mocking, Pot. Maybe we should
find a patch of shade someplace and talk this over.”

“If you’re serious.”

Switters was humoring the
ethnographer, catering to his agitation, but at the same time he
was
a
wee bit intrigued, he couldn’t help himself. “Flapdoodle,” he practically sang,
as they made their way to the covered side entrance of the nearby infirmary.
“Makes the world go ‘round.”

The Boquichicos infirmary’s side
entrance functioned, somewhat arbitrarily, as an emergency entrance. Bodies
emptying from machete wounds or inflating from snakebite were admitted through
it. The front or main entrance was reserved for those with aches, coughs,
fevers, or one or more of the thirty or so parasites that could bore, burrow,
squirm, swim, or wriggle into the human organism in a place such as this, and
that contributed substantially to the region’s reputation for vivid
superfluity. (A time was approaching when there would be an argument over
exactly which one of those entrances, side or front, was the proper one through
which to admit an immobilized Switters, but that unpleasant quandary was still
a few days away.)

A short path of flagstones led, from
nowhere in particular, to the side door. Above the walkway was a narrow,
thatched roof, supported by whitewashed poles. It was beneath that roof that
Switters and Smithe took refuge, at first from the sun and, no more than five
minutes later, from the rain; for scarcely had Smithe commenced to expound upon
the Nacanaca, the Kandakandero chap, and the request to borrow Maestra’s
parrot, than a few guppy-sized waterdrops began to dash themselves against the
dusty earth or splat with a timid thump against the platterlike leaves of thick
green plants. Quickly there was a population explosion such as was entirely
appropriate in a Catholic country, and the progenitor drops multiplied and
geometrized into a blinding, deafening horde.

At the onset of the torrent, Switters
pulled a scrap of cocktail napkin from his pocket, wrote upon it,
I.O.U. my
bottom dollar,
and handed it matter-of-factly to Potney, who blinked at the
message, folded it absentmindedly in a big rosy fist, raised his voice against
the downpour, and went on with his narration.

On the pretext of keeping Sailor Boy
dry, Inti had joined the two white men under the roof. The
Virgin
crew
and the Nacanacan delegation remained out in the rain, which had grown so dense
it turned them into silver silhouettes, though they stood but a dozen yards
away. The Indians seemed oblivious to the soaking they were getting, and
Smithe, who admittedly had the more comfortable position, was virtually
oblivious to the weather, as well. “Celebrate it or ignore it,” Switters had
maintained, and now he found himself surprised and somewhat shamed that others
so easily practiced what he preached.

That, then, was the setting for
Smithe’s impartation, an unusual if not outright bizarre account, which shall
be summarized in the paragraphs that follow; summarized because to re-create
it, to reproduce it verbatim, isn’t merely unnecessary, it could be construed
as an abuse of both the reader’s patience and posterior. That such abuse can
sometimes be rewarding—consider
Finnegans Wake
or the church-pew
ass-numbing that leads to genital excitation—is beside the point. Or ought to
be.

R. Potney Smithe first came to
Boquichicos in 1992. His aim had been to conduct ethnographic fieldwork among
the Nacanaca, a wild tribe that had been “pacified” by Peruvian government anthropologists
in the mid-1980s as a precautionary measure for the new town that authorities
were about to establish, and then semi-civilized by contact with that town and
its imported values. The Nacanaca were a transitional people, no longer feral
but not quite tame, and were in danger of abandoning, forgetting, or being
robbed of their traditional manners and ways. Christian missionaries were doing
all they could, naturally, to assist in that dispossession. Smithe’s purpose
was to catalogue as many of the old customs and beliefs as possible before they
disappeared. It was fulfilling work.

Alas, even while he immersed himself
up to his skimpy beige eyebrows in Nacanacan culture, or what was left of it,
he felt the hot point of his interest slowly, unintentionally, even unhappily,
shifting to another tribe, a people with whom he had no direct communication;
who, indeed, he’d never glimpsed except as shadows gliding silently among other
shadows in the forest, a phantom race whose magic and indomitability held a
great influence over the Nacanaca and, eventually, over Potney, himself.
Kandakandero.

The principal Nacanaca village was a
mile east of Boquichicos, on the opposite side of the river. It was on high
ground, close to good fishing holes. However, its
chácara
—its garden—was
located across the stream on the Boquichicos side, but several miles deeper
into the jungle. Oddly enough, in an environment so relentlessly profuse in
vegetation, good garden plots were few and far between. The jungle topsoil was
as thin as varnish, and although immense trees had learned how to utilize it to
staggering advantage, cassava, gourds, peppers, and other cultivated crops were
there akin to orphaned children, whose thin gruel was watered down a bit more
each year until it no longer provided the sustenance necessary for life.
Biological and/or geological accidents sometimes produced rare pockets of
fecundity, however, and such was the case with the Nacanacan chácara. It was
quite possibly the largest, most perennially fertile garden patch in the
Peruvian Amazon.

Some said this chácara had once
“belonged” to the Kandakandero or, at least, that they had tended it for
generations, only to abandon it when oil exploration and an influx of outsiders
caused them to fade ever farther into the forest: the Kandakandero had not
suffered Boquichicos gladly. Others claimed that the chácara had always been
cultivated by Nacanaca and that the fiercer Kandakandero simply forced the
Nacanaca to share its bounty, as if exacting tribute. In any event, Smithe knew
from firsthand experience that once each month, on the new moon, a delegation
of Kandakandero braves would show up at the garden to have their baskets filled
with produce by compliant Nacanaca.

“Whether charity or extortion, I
wouldn’t know,” said Smithe, “but I do know they come only at night, when there
is little moon, and that there’s a kind of ‘way station’ a few miles farther
into the bush, a lodge where they remain overnight or occasionally longer in
order to perform certain rituals having to do with the newly acquired produce.
Nacanaca elders often participate in those ceremonies as invited guests, and
finally, I, myself, after two solid years of jungle diplomacy. . . . Worth the
bother? Well, it’s a show that would strike any Christian as dreadfully
malodorous, to be sure; but I’d already developed a tolerance for pagan
proclivities; some such immunity is required in my profession. Yes. Um. What
separates these jejune jollifications from others I’ve witnessed, either in
person or on film, is that they’re presided over by the Kandakandero’s
witchman, their shaman: a most remarkable chap.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” said Switters.
“That’s the buzz. And what, pray tell, is so damned remarkable about him?”

Smithe didn’t answer right away. He
stared for a while at the rippling wallpaper of rain, and when at last he
spoke, he could barely be heard above its din. “It’s his head, you see.”

“Did you say ‘head’? What about his
head?”

“Its shape.” The Englishman abruptly,
inexplicably, beamed. “His head,” he said, louder now, almost triumphantly,
“his head is a pyramid.”

Switters had been around the block.
He had even, one might say, been around the block within the block within the
block within the block (depending upon his or her own experience, the reader
will or will not know what this suggests). Aware that the world was a very
weird place, he was no more prone to automatically scoff at unusual information
than he was disposed to unquestioning acceptance. (The narrow, no-nonsense
skeptic is every bit as naive as the breezy-brained New Age believer.)
Nevertheless, Switters’s open-mindedness was sorely tested by Potney’s report,
especially when the anthropologist insisted that the head he was describing did
not merely suggest some vague outline of a pyramid, that it was neither a
variation of hydrocephalus nor a particularly pronounced example of Down’s
syndrome, but actually
was
a pyramid (which was to say, a quadrilateral
mass having smooth, steeply sloping sides meeting at a pointed apex), and in
every other way except its shape, constituted a healthy, functioning human
noggin.