Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (53 page)

Switters studied her, fighting to
keep his focus off the wart. “Expecting more trouble?” he asked.

“No, no. The nearest village is in
the hills, thirty kilometers away over rough terrain. Men do not come here
easily. The Syrians in general are sympathetic people, nice people. It is only
the Muslim Brotherhood that makes the problem for Christians, but, then,
fundamentalists are the same everywhere, are they not?”

“Yeah. Their desperate craving for
simplicity sure can create complications. And their pitiful longing for
certainty sure can make things unsteady.”

“I imagine that word somehow has
spread about our excommunication, and that has inflamed those who are already
disposed toward fanatical piety.”

“Maybe, but I saw on the Net that the
U.S. military recently retaliated against terrorist operations in Sudan and
Afghanistan, and you can bet that’s put a bee up many a djellabah. Good thing
our visitors mistook me for a Frenchman.”

“A mistake no Frenchman would ever
make,” she said, referring both to his accent and his grammar. “Now, what I
wish to investigate is—”

The abbess was interrupted by a
knock, and they glanced up to see Bob standing in the open doorway, wearing an
expression that was almost as fritzed as her hair. Generally, Bob appeared as
if she’d been sired by one of the Marx Brothers—perhaps all four—and now she
was alternating between looks of sheepish contrition, like Harpo after striking
a sour note on his instrument of choice; popeyed incredulity, like Chico
watching the diva disgorge the aria in
A Night at the Opera
; waggy
disgust, like Groucho learning that his best jokes had once again been
eviscerated by network censors; and peevish indignation, like Zeppo sensing
that it was his fate to be perpetually upstaged by his three siblings.

Bob apologized profusely for the
interruption, but,
mon Dieu,
she hadn’t asked to be put in charge of
livestock, she wasn’t a farmgirl, if only Fannie had fared better at the hands
of some she could name; but Fannie had fled, and what was she, Bob, supposed to
do in such a crisis, et cetera, et cetera. Masked Beauty calmed her with
reassuring clucks and waves of her veil, and eventually they drew from Bob the
source of her fluster. It seemed that the donkey had hiccups. Had had them for
forty-eight hours, give or take an hour. Bob kept thinking they’d go away, as
her own hiccuping always had, but they’d persisted, maybe even worsened, and
the poor dumb creature couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, was becoming unsteady and
weak, and if something wasn’t done, surely it would hiccup itself to death.

As Bob appealed to Masked Beauty,
Masked Beauty appealed to Switters, and Switters, without stopping to consider
how it might come across in French, said, “People of the world, relax. I’ll
give it a shot.”

First, he stilted over to the little
stableyard, where the donkey was tethered. Sure enough, the beast was racked
with spasms. They were occurring about every other second, and each time its
diaphragm contracted, its skinny sides would inflate and deflate, as if it had
strayed into the product inspection line at a whoopee cushion factory, forcing
from its epiglottis a jerky sound somewhere between a cough, a sneeze, a fairy
choking on fairy dust, and a socially prominent dowager trying to stifle a
belch. Repeatedly the donkey’s donkey larynx was issuing the first quarter-note
of a bray, a hee-haw from which the
haw
and most of the
hee
had
been scrunched and extinguished.

“Pathological,” muttered Switters,
surveying the scene with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Then, gathering his
wits, he sent Bob to the kitchen for sugar. “Tell Maria Une I want . . .” He
surveyed the animal. “Tell her I’ll need most of a small sack. You know: at
least a kilo.” Next, he dispatched Pippi (who’d come over from her shop to see
what was the matter) to fetch a pail of water.

When the sisters returned (Bob was
followed by Maria Une, who was demanding to know what was to become of her
precious sweetener), Switters spilled the sugar into the water bucket and
stirred it with a rake handle. He set the solution under the donkey’s
convulsive muzzle, but the beast was too distressed to take more than a few
laps of it. They waited. The donkey hicced, then lapped again. It obviously
liked the taste but simply couldn’t consume the mixture with enough speed or in
sufficient quantity for it to be therapeutically effective. “Okay, Bob, you
restrain the noble jackass. Pippi, prepare to pour.”

With that, Switters destilted onto
the scrawny back, straddling it as though he were Don Quixote about to ride
into war. “Bring on the windmills!” he yelled, as he grasped the slobbery
muzzle, top and bottom, and pried the greenish-yellow teeth apart. “Whew! I’m a
model of dental elegance compared to you, buckaroo. Come on, Pippi, pour.
Pour!”

“Assez?”

“No. More. The whole damn bucket. But
not so fast, you don’t want to drown the thing.”

The donkey was struggling mightily,
causing Switters, atop it, to resemble a rodeo clown, but they eventually succeeded
in emptying most of the sugar water down the creature’s gullet. Masked Beauty
held the stilts for Switters, and, with considerable difficulty, he transferred
onto them. The little ass was braying now, genuinely braying, and retching as
if it might spew out every drop with which they’d flooded its tank. In a minute
or two, however, it settled down, seeming dimly to notice that its demon had
been exorcised. The humans, too, noticed that the hiccuping had ceased, and as
the healed patient squeezed its head into the bucket to lick up residual sugar,
they applauded.

Joining in the applause was Domino,
who had come upon the scene about the time that Switters was mounting his
spasmodic steed.

“Incroyable!”
she called. “Do
your talents have no end?” She was abeam with mock adulation.

Shuffling the poles, he hopped
awkwardly around to face her. “Switters,” he growled, as if, with gruff
modesty, introducing himself. “Errand boy, acquired taste; roving goodwill
ambassador for the Redhook Brewing Company, Seattle, Washington; and”—doffing
his hat, he attempted a courtly bow, an exercise not easily performed on
stilts—”large-animal veterinarian.”

(Sometime, perhaps that evening at
dinner, he would confess that his grandmother had taught him the hiccup remedy.
Was it before or after she taught him to cure childhood moodiness with Bessie
Smith, Muddy Waters, and Big Mama Thornton? He couldn’t remember.)

Whether disposed to savor the passing
moment or with a view toward advancing himself further in Domino’s good graces,
he swept his hat in an ironic parody of a knightly gesture, as though, with
ostentatious ceremony, he was dedicating his triumph to her, his lady. His
backside happened to be to the donkey—rather too close to the donkey for the
donkey’s liking—and at that exact, fastuous instant, the ungrateful creature
lashed out with its hind legs, one of its hooves kicking thin air but the other
dealing Switters’s right stilt a blow that sent him flying.

Domino dove forward to catch him. She
underestimated his momentum, however, and they both ended up on the ground, he
on top of her. She was flat on her back. He lay facedown, his manly jut of a
chin resting just above her darling little jut of a nose. In that uneven
alignment, their eyes could not meet, so he stared for a few seconds, while
recovering his wind, at the rocky soil just beyond the crown of her head. “Are
you okay?” he asked, afraid to move a muscle.

“Oui. Yeah. Ooh-la-la!” She laughed
nervously. “I was trying to keep your feet from touching the earth.”

And she had. The toes of his sneakers
rested upon her shins.

“So!” he said. “You do believe in the
curse.”

Still not moving, he could feel her
half-face flushing beneath his half-face. He could also feel her body,
flattened and yet somehow buoyant, under the weight of his body. She was as
soft as a marshmallow bunny, he thought, yet simultaneously as firm as a futon.
Most of the words that she stammered about her action being intended only for
his peace of mind were lost in the folds of his throat—and in the concerned
chatter of those Pachomians who’d clustered around them.

It was at about that point—and no
more than ten seconds had passed—that he became aware of his pen of
regeneration and of the red ink rushing into its inkwell. It was positioned against
her belly, not far from where the concave yolk of her umbilicus simmered in its
downy poacher, and an equal distance, more or less, from that vital area and
favored masculine destination that is known in the Basque language (Switters
could verify this) as the
emabide
and sometimes as the
ematutu
.
Whatever the proximities, and no matter what
it
was called in Basque,
Switters’s rod of engenderment was growing more rigid, more perpendicular, by
the moment; was behaving, in fact, like a hydraulic jack, threatening, he
imagined, to lift him right off her, suspending him above her prone body as if
he were a plate on a shaft, a bobbin balanced on a spindle.

Domino had round cheeks. She had the
kind of nice round cheeks that made a person want to press one of their own
cheeks against one of hers, to hold it there, slide it around a bit, the way an
affectionate mother might lay a cheek against her baby’s bare bottom, or a boy
put his cheek to a cold, ripe cantaloupe, sniffing its lush, musky fruitiness
out of the corner of his nostrils. Domino had those kind of cheeks, and
Switters admittedly had sometimes had that kind of reaction to them, but,
naturally, had never yielded to the temptation, nor, alas, could he really
yield to it now, despite this unusual opportunity, for his cheeks had landed a
few inches to the north of her cheeks, and cheek-to-cheek congruency could be
attained only were he to slide downward, a southerly migration that, to phrase
it crudely, would have put the carrot dangerously close to the rabbit hole.

As it was, he was pronged against her
lower abdomen in such a spring-loaded fashion that he could feature himself,
without use of hands or feet, vaulting over the henhouse. Undoubtedly, she was
aware of the protuberance—she was practically run through by it: nun on a
stick—and that awareness must account for the fact that she was silent, tense,
and seemed to be holding her breath. As his own embarrassment turned gradually
to panic, he rejected the notion of trying to collapse the bulb by mentally
picturing radically anti-erotic images (his mother with the stomach flu, for
example, or a Pomeranian humping a sofa leg) and, instead, dug the heels of his
hands into the earth and flipped himself off her, onto his back. His talents
had no end?

Gasping slightly from the effort, he
lay there beside her with his feet in the air, looking like an advertisement
for an aerosol insecticide. (Of course, a dead bug wouldn’t be sporting an
erection. Or would it? Hanged men are reputed to be so affected, why not a
zapped beetle? Perhaps there was a reason why they were called “cockroaches.”
And think of the Spanish fly.)

The sisters assisted Domino to an
upright position, whereupon she brusquely brushed off her blue chador (which is
what Syrian women called their long cotton gowns), and retreated, muttering
that there were important matters that required her immediate attention. The
others then attempted to hoist Switters back onto his stilts, but the
ex-linebacker’s bulk was too much for them. Bob, understandably grateful, and
seemingly oblivious to the accidental subtext of his topple onto Domino,
volunteered to go fetch his wheelchair. “Merci, Madame Bob,” he said weakly.

For the nearly ten minutes that it
took Bob to return with the chair, he lay there like a yogi in the dead-bug
asana, growing slowly flaccid; shielding his eyes from the pulsating radiation
of a sun, now directly overhead, that resembled a phoenix egg laid in a
campfire and impaled on a laser; and talking to his abnormally elevated feet. “Be
patient, ol’ pals,” he whispered to his feet. “Please. Another month, that’s
all. Then we’re hot-footing it—that’s just a figure of speech—to
South-goddamn-America. And one way or another, feets, I’m gonna set you free.”

For the next couple of weeks, Domino
and Switters were shy around each other. In fact, without it being overly
obvious, even to themselves, and without going to any great lengths to achieve
it, they were in avoidance of each other. Cloistered in the confines of an
eight-acre oasis, it was, of course, impossible that their paths wouldn’t cross
several times daily, but when such encounters occurred, they’d smile, exchange
a polite nod or two, fidget, squirm, and hasten on their separate ways before
the headless chicken—the totem bird of discomposure—could find hemorrhage space
in their cheeks. Inevitably, one or the other would steal a backward glance.
Switters, having been trained as a sneak, was more adept at this than she.

Their lone conversation during this
period concerned the round, mud tower that rose above the compound like a silo
for a Scud of manna, a missile with a warhead of milk and honey. He’d been
stilting past the decrepit wooden door in the tower’s base when Domino and ZuZu
exited through it, carrying pails, brooms, and mops. “Oh, hi,” said Domino,
straining to sound casual. “Uh, now that we’ve finally given the tower room a
cleaning, you might want to spend some time up there.”

“Why would I want to do that?”