Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (22 page)

“Um.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Oh, it should. It should. Yes.”

For reasons not entirely clear,
Switters felt his heart sinking. He made an effort to nail Potney with his
infamous glare. “Let’s have it, pal.”

“Sorry?”

“Your taboo, goddamn it! Let’s have
it.”

Smithe’s wan smile was even more
sheepish than Switters’s own. “A bit off the bean, I’m afraid.” He shuffled his
flip-flops.

“Never mind the fucking bean!”
Although still basically on his back, he managed to look menacing.

“If you must know,” said Smithe,
clearing his throat, “and there’s little reason why you shouldn’t, End of Time
warned me that as penalty for having journeyed with him to so-called secret
places, I would face instant death—in much the mode you, yourself, described—were
I ever to touch another man’s penis.”

Switters didn’t know whether to laugh
or cry. He lay there, mute, listening as the creak of the hammock twine blended
with the rustling of jungle foliage on all sides of them.

“Rubbish, obviously,” said Smithe,
trying to sound blasé. “One must contend with a sometimes maddening lack of
rational—”

“You’ve tested it?” Switters
interrupted.

“When dealing with the primitive
mind—”

“So, you’ve tested it?”

“Why, no, no,” Smithe almost
sputtered. “Naturally, I haven’t actually put it to the test. That’s silly.”

“But you’re supposed to be a
scientist. Were you
afraid
to test it?”

“Fear has had nothing to do with it.
I might have tested it, probably would have, but, well, you know, the
nature
of the thing involved.”

“You mean the penis thing?”

“Of course, I do. I jolly well do
mean that. What do you take me for? I’m a married man. Christ!”

“Easy, big fellow. No inference
intended. But you’ll agree, will you not, that scientists must occasionally
undertake experiments they find personally distasteful? You speak of
rationality, yet how can you for a damn second rationally contend that this
taboo is rubbish when you haven’t subjected it to experiment?”

Smithe snorted.

“You’ve got to test it, pal. For your
sake as well as my own—and I can’t deny I have a stake in this. In the outcome,
I mean.”

“You’re not suggesting? . . .
Surely.”

“Hey, it’s not my cup of tee-hee,
either. I’m as straight as you are. Probably straighter. From what I hear, your
lads in the fancy schools of Merry Olde can get pretty chummy with one another
when the lights are low.”

“Of all the biased—”

“Okay, forget I said that. It’s no
big deal one way or the other. What’s the big deal? Women don’t have this
problem. They’re more evolved.” He paused. “R. Potney Smithe. What’s the
R
for?”

“I fail to see . . .”

“What’s the
R
for?”

“Reginald.”

“Reginald. Okay. You very easily
could have gone by Reggie. Couldn’t you have? Reggie Smithe. A moniker mundane
by any standard. But, no, you elected to be called
Potney
. A fairly
brave choice there, pal. I admire you for it. I’m serious. I mean it. Says
something about your character. And here you are in this jungle juju joint when
you could have been snapping petits fours with the vicar of Kidderminster or
some damn such. You’ve got guts.” (Switters spoke in the abstract, of course,
since the image of
guts
as an actual physical mass was seldom permitted
to invade his consciousness.)

“I fail to see . . .”

“Come on, Pot. Let’s get it over
with.”

Smithe glanced around him, as if
looking for support, but the long, narrow, platformed room was empty except for
the two of them.

“Just a touch. One brief touch,
that’s it. You needn’t grab hold of anything. I’d object if you did.
Strenuously.”

Smithe’s hide, at all times richly
hued, looked now as if it had been rolled in paprika. He seemed on the verge of
spontaneous combustion. “Down there,” he said, nodding his teddy bear head in
the direction of the firepit and the Nacanaca. “They could easily notice. . .
.”

“Not if you hurry. And so what if
they did? Do you honestly believe anybody in this part of the world would be
scandalized? We’re in South America!”

With that, Switters unzipped the fly
of his bedraggled linen trousers. The scratchy snickersnee
swoosh
produced by the swift separation of metal teeth was a sound more ominous to
both men than any hiss or shriek or howl that might emanate from the unknown
forest. Briefly, each of them froze, as if paralyzed by stun rays from an
advanced technology.

Then, Smithe turned toward the
hammock, a look of grim determination on his face. “Bloody good, then,” he
said. Childishly awkward in his flip-flops and quasimilitaristic tan tropical
togs, he began to advance. “You’re right. Let’s be done with it.”

“Uh,” said Switters, hurriedly, “uh,
now if you have any reason to suppose there’s something to this taboo, that it
might actually—”

“No, no.” Smithe paused. “Oh, if a
bloke were to accept such superstitious nonsense on faith, it’s quite possible
that he would be psychologically susceptible to whatever end the perpetrator of
the malediction might have planted in his unsophisticated mind. But no
civilized, sensible—”

“Okay, but what if you secretly
believe in it, believe in it subconsciously and don’t know that you believe?”

Smithe seemed not to hear. He was
advancing again. Thus, wishing to avoid any clumsy, embarrassing, last-minute
fumbling, Switters freed his penis from its confinement within the folds of
cheerfully patterned boxer shorts and pulled it out into the open. Almost
instantly, it commenced, of its own volition, to crane its neck and bob its
head about, as if sniffing the air, sensing that something fun—something
uplifting, even—might be in the offing.
Oh, Christ Almighty, no! This can’t
be happening!
In a panicky effort to quell the unwanted alertness, the
independent impetus toward active participation, Switters strained to think of
the most repulsive, unsexy things he could mentally conjure. He thought of an
overflowing cat box and buckets of offal, thought of gift shoppes, TV game
shows, and the time George Bush had addressed the employees at
Langley
. Just as he squeezed his eyes shut, the better to
picture these anti-aphrodisiacs, R. Potney Smithe extended a forefinger and
jabbed Switters’s half-erect member the way a shy but righteously purposeful
Jehovah’s Witness might press an agnostic’s doorbell. Switters felt an electric
jolt, although later he conceded that he might only have imagined it.

Smithe took a couple of steps
backward. All of the ruddiness drained from his features, and he commenced to
pull and pick at his shirtfront, as if involved in floccillation. Then he
swayed. Pivoted to the right. And toppled onto the scorched and pitted floor.

For quite a while—it may have been as
long as five minutes—Switters swung quietly in the hammock, staring at the heap
on the floor, searching for signs of life; signs, more precisely, that Smithe
was, as the Brit himself would have put it,
ragging
him, putting him on,
pushing to an extreme his occasional dry fondness for jest.

At that point a figure ascended the
wobbly ladder, and Fer-de-lance climbed onto the platform. The aspiring
witchman glided noiselessly across the room, like one of the creatures for whom
he seemed to have such affinity, and looking, in snakeskin cape and Ray-Ban
sunglasses, like a Hollywood Boulevard vampire. He knelt beside Smithe’s form.

“Muy muerto,”
Fer-de-lance
whispered.
“Muy muerto.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Switters, who
was struggling to inconspicuously fasten his fly. “This mister is very, very
dead,” said he.

Part 2

Every taboo is holy.

—Eskimo saying

Except for one shortish but
memorable visit to
Sacramento
, another to
Langley
,
Virginia
, Switters spent the next six months in
Seattle
. It was the strangest period of his life.

It was stranger than his
cloak-and-dagger days in and around
Kuwait
, stranger than his strangest nights of pleasure in the
brothels of
Southeast Asia
, stranger than the annual Bloomsday literary banquets
at the C.R.A.F.T. Club of
Bangkok
(though of these he couldn’t remember a fucking thing); stranger, even, than
nine hours of modern poetry at the
University
of
California
,
Berkeley
.

Well and good, but surely, one must
ask, was there nothing about that half year, passed largely idle, in Seattle
that was not positively humdrum when compared to the calamitous craziness he’d
recently undergone in South America or the beatific bumfuzzlements he was soon
to undergo in Syria? Yes, as far as Switters was concerned, the
Seattle
sojourn would always be the stranger of the
experiences or, at least, the period when his equanimity was most rigorously
challenged. And he was, after all, the final authority on that sojourn,
although others were unquestionably involved. These included Maestra, Suzy, and
Bad Bobby Case, as well as an assistant deputy director of the Central
Intelligence Agency called Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald; and, indirectly, from
afar, the Kandakandero Indian known, perhaps erroneously, as End of Time.
(Fer-de-lance had concluded that the shaman’s name could be more accurately
translated to mean End of Future, or more explicitly yet, Today Is Tomorrow.
Accent on the verb. Today
Is
Tomorrow.)

The oddness of those months back in
the U.S. could be attributed not merely to the major problems implicit in
adjusting to life in a wheelchair but also to his efforts to come to terms with
the usher—the Ka’dak witchman or Switters, himself—who had assigned him to that
mobile yet restrictive seat. Compounding those predicaments, naturally, were
the reactions of others, mainly but not exclusively, the friends, relatives,
and employers listed above.

During his first week back, he’d had
to contend with no one but Maestra. To her, he’d provided only the most
ambiguous explanation of his sudden confinement to a wheelchair, claiming that
his disability was related to activities that he was not at liberty to discuss;
the same activities, he said, that unfortunately had destroyed her camcorder
along with its heartwarming record of Sailor Boy’s flight to freedom.

“Right,” said Maestra sarcastically,
rolling, behind the huge circular lenses of her spectacles, a pair of bleary,
beady eyes. “The old ‘for reasons of national security’ alibi. Heh! I’m a loyal
American of long standing, but that doesn’t mean I’m so flag-addled I can’t
recognize our favorite euphemism for ‘governmental hanky-panky swept under the
rug.’ Anyway,” she continued, “there’s a place where men disabled in the line
of duty can go to convalesce. It’s called
Walter
Reed
Army
Medical
Center
in
Bethesda
,
Maryland
. If you prefer to recuperate at Chez Maestra instead,
you’d better be prepared to spill some beans.”

Switters put her off. “In a few
days,” he promised. “I’ll be able to talk about it in a few days.” Thereafter,
every time she attempted to bring up the subject or even, in passing, shot him
an imploring glance, he’d wink, grin, and proclaim, “Women love these fierce
invalids home from hot climates.”

Alas, Maestra was not the type to be
charmed more than once or twice by a line from Rimbaud memorized in a long-ago
poetry class, no matter how attractively delivered. Faced with her increasing
impatience and growing suspicions—”I have to say, buddy boy, you look pretty
healthy to me; that camcorder cost twelve hundred bucks, I’m privy to your
wanting to milk Suzy’s aphid, and you neglected to bring me a
bracelet”—Switters, already in a confounded state and not knowing what else to
do, sent for Bobby Case.

“Switters! What the hell? What have
you gone and done to yourself?”

The e-message Bobby received in
Alaska
had stated only that his friend needed urgently to see
him and supplied a
Seattle
address. Having a couple of days off, Case hitched a
ride aboard a military transport plane out of
Fairbanks
bound for McChord Air Force Base near
Tacoma
. Within twenty-four hours after reading his e-mail, he
arrived, noisily, at Maestra’s door on a rented motorcycle.