videotaping the event. Now, Juan Carlos was telling him that the parrot wouldn’t be safe within miles of either city and, furthermore, that the outskirts of those jungle towns would not provide a scenic backdrop for Maestra’s viewing pleasure, being littered with oil drums, lengths of abandoned pipe, and the rusting remains of dead machinery.
“This is the ideal,” confided Juan Carlos. “You hire the boat in Pucallpa. Boat with the good motor. A boy named Inti has the good boat and a little English. This boat takes you up the Rio Ucayali. South is upriver. Before you reach Masisea, a tributary will branch off to the east. Is named Abujao, I think. These rivers in the Amazon basin are changing like the traffic lights, like the moon, like the currency. Inti will find it. If you come to Masisea you have come too far.”
“What am I looking for?”
“For the village named Boquichicos. On the Rio Abujao near the Brazil frontier. Boquichicos was one of the new towns founded by our government for the oil business, but they founded it with the strict environmental considerations. The oil business did not prosper, but the town, she is still there. Very small, very nice. Remote.”
“Yeah, I got the feeling you were talking serious boondocks.
“Oh, is merely three days.”
“It is now at the end of the dry season. The rivers run low. So, maybe four days.”
“
“Not for the happiness of a poor old woman who has so long sacrifice for you, who may soon be call to the side of Jesus . . .”
“Heh!”
“. . . not for to protect and reward the old loyal pet?” Juan Carlos went on to explain that what made Boquichicos special was its proximity—an hour’s walk—to a huge
“What about predators? You know, uh, ocelots, jaguars, big vivid serpents?”
“There are those, Senor Switter, and also the accurate arrows of the Kandakandero, these Indians who use the bright color feathers for to decorate their bodies. But with so many birds from to choose in the big, big forest, it would be like the odds of the national lottery.”
“Lots of birds, but only one well-fed white boy from downtown North America.”
Juan Carlos laughed. “Do not worry. The Kandakandero are the most shy tribe in all Amazonia. They will hide from you.”
“Yeah? Too bad. I might interest ’em in one of our John Deere chicken-pluckers. I’m certain it’ll do its job on toucans and macaws.”
“So, you will go?”
Switters shrugged. There are times when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob. Sure, we can resist. But a knob that won’t turn, a door that sticks and never budges, is a nuisance to the gods. The gods may kick in the jamb. Worse, they may walk away in disgust, leaving us to hang dumbly from our tight hinges, deprived of any other chance in life to swing open into unnecessary risk and thus into enchantment.
Legend has it that Switters went into the Amazon wearing a cream silk suit, a Jerry Garcia bow tie, and a pair of white tennis shoes. To set the record straight, he wore a suit all right, he wore suits everywhere and saw no reason to make an exception for Amazonia; but his trouser legs were tucked into calf-high rubber boots, purchased for the occasion; while his one bow tie, leather, designed not by Garcia but by Eldridge Cleaver, and which he wore only to meetings and functions attended by aging FBI men who’d yet to forget or forgive Cleaver’s Black Panther Party, was in the drawer where he’d left it in Langley, Virginia.
To further straighten the record, he hadn’t, at that point, the slightest intention of putt-putting to Boquichicos in a riverboat. Once in Pucallpa, he’d simply hire an air taxi, fly in, release Sailor, fly out. It would dent his vacation funds but would definitely be worth every cent. With any luck, he’d be back in Lima the following morning. This he did not mention to Juan Carlos, being by nature and profession a secretive person, though it was unlikely the guide would have objected.
To the contrary, for all of his concern about the parrot and its mistress, Juan Carlos expressed equal concern for the safety and comfort of Switters. “I am happy, senor,” he said as they parted company in the hotel lobby, “that you have not the big enthusiasm for our jungle.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of danger. No, it is not anymore like the Amazon you see at the cinema, not so wild and savage along the big rivers, not so many animals anymore, not the headhunters or cannibals. If you are staying on the river, walking the short walk into the colpa and returning the same route, then you will be perfectly safe. More safe than Lima, to be frank. But some Norteamericanos they want to leave the river, leave the trail, run into the forest like the movie star, like the Tarzan. Big mistake. Even today, the jungle she have a thousand ways to make you sorry.”
“Don’t worry, Juan Carlos, it’s not my scene,” Switters said sincerely, having no inkling of what lay in store for him.
In bed, he tried to pray because he thought it might connect him in some way to Suzy, but he wasn’t adept at it, being overly conscious of the language, perhaps; not wishing to bore whoever or whatever was on the receiving end with hackneyed phrases, yet wondering whether ornamentation and witticisms might be inappropriate or unwelcome. Before he could get a rhetorically satisfactory prayer on track, his mind wandered to Gloria—many of Lima’s women were cultured and sophisticated, as he suspected Gloria might be when she wasn’t rendered crude by excessive alcohol—and he experienced a pang of regret, in his heart and his groin, that he hadn’t fetched her there beside him. It was his own fault, of course, for being so finicky.
The irony of Switters was that while he loved life and tended to embrace it vigorously, he also could be not merely finicky but squeamish. For example, what else but squeamishness could account for his reluctance to accept the existence of his organs and entrails? Obviously, he knew he had innards, he was not an imbecile, but so repulsive did he find the idea that his handsome body might be stuffed like a holiday stocking with slippery, snaky coils of steaming guts; undulating meat tubes choked with vile green and yellow biles, vast colonies of bacteria, fetid gases, and gobs of partially digested foodstuffs, that he blocked the fact from his cognizance, preferring to pretend that his corporeal cavity—and that of any woman to whom he was romantically attracted—was powered not by throbbing hunks of slimy, blood-bathed tissue but by a sort of ball of mystic white light. At times he imagined that area between his esophagus and his anus to be occupied by a single shining jewel, a diamond the size of a coconut whose brightness rang in all four quadrants of his torso.
Really, Switters.
He was up by eight and on-line by nine. (In between, he packed, grudgingly committed acts of bodily maintenance, and ordered room service breakfasts: poached eggs and beer for himself, a fruit platter for Sailor.)
At the computer he dispatched an encoded report to the economic secretary at the U.S. embassy, who happened also to be Langley’s station chief in Lima. Switters’s report was entirely professional, devoid of literary japes or sarcastic references to the irony of an “economic secretary” being ultimately devoted to undermining the host economy, the Peruvian economy being a sickly system whose sole vitality, top to bottom, was generated by the very coca drug trade the CIA was commanded to help eradicate. To the chief, a cowboy through and through, Switters merely reported that the lost sheep had returned to the fold, adding, for what it was worth, that in his opinion Hector Sumac (he used his code name) probably could be relied upon to engage in second-level espionage
