Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

and assist in enforcement operations, but that it might be wise to wait several years before permitting him to run any Joes of his own.

The line between cowboy and angel could be no wider than an alfalfa sprout—Switters, himself, occasionally zigzagged that line—and while Hector gave promise of impending angelhood, Switters was wary of the Latin temperament, suspecting it to be unnecessarily volatile, and thus was hesitant to trumpet too loudly on Hector’s behalf before the fellow proved to him that he actually had wings.

Duty accomplished, and still at his deluxe, state-of-the-art, military quality laptop, Switters set about the task of worming his way into Maestra’s home computer. A trifle rusty at such maneuvering, it took him the better part of an hour, but eventually he crashed her gates, jumped over the guard dogs, and landed in her files, where he proceeded to delete each and every one of the e-mail notes that she had hijacked from Suzy’s mailbox. Assuming that she hadn’t printed it or downloaded it onto a disk, and he was pretty confident she had not, written evidence of his heat for his young stepsister had now been swallowed by an uncaring, nonjudgmental ether.

In its place he left the following announcement: “Don’t fret, Maestra, I’m still escorting Sailor into the Great Green Hell for you—only now I’m doing it out of love.”

And mostly he meant it.

Pucallpa was the Dead Dog Capital of South America. Quite likely, it was the Dead Dog Capital of the world. If any other city lay claim to that title, its mayor and Chamber of Commerce were wisely silent on the subject. Pucallpa did not boast of it, either—but Switters had eyes, had nose. He recognized the Dead Dog Capital when he saw it and smelled it.

Smell alone, however, wouldn’t have tipped him off. There were so many noxious odors, organic and inorganic, in Pucallpa—spoiled fish, spoiled fruit, decaying vegetation, swamp gas, jungle rot, raw sewage, kerosene stoves, wood smoke, diesel fumes, pesticides, and the relentlessly belched mephitis of an oil refinery and a lumber mill—that, on an olfactory level, mere dead dogs could hardly hope to compete.

Still, they were there, on view, concentrated along the riverfront but also in midtown gutters, shanty yards, vacant lots, unpaved side streets, outside the single movie theater, and beside the airport tarmac. It might be fanciful to imagine many varieties: a dead poodle on one corner, a Saint Bernard locked in mammoth rigor mortis on the next, but, alas, the canine corpses of Pucallpa invariably were mongrels, mutts, and curs and, moreover, seemed mainly to come in two colors—solid white or solid black, with only the intermittent spot or two.

To Switters, who cared even less for domestic animals dead than alive, the question was, What was the cause of so much doggy mortality? In his halting Spanish, he posed the question to several residents of that on- again, off-again boom town, but never received more than a shrug. In boom towns one paid attention to those things that might make one rich and, failing at fortune, to those things that made one forget. Since there was neither profit nor diversion in dead dogs, only the vultures seemed to notice them. And for every dead dog, there was a full squadron of vultures. Pucallpa was the Vulture Capital of South America.

“This is a baneful burg,” Switters wailed to Sailor. “I don’t like to complain, you understand, whining being the least forgivable of man’s sins, but Pucallpa, Peru, is polluted, contaminated, decayed, rancid, rotten, sour, decomposed, moldy, mildewed, putrid, putrescent, corrupt, debauched, uncultured, and avaricious. It’s also hot, humid, and disturbingly vivid. Surely, a fine fowl like you is not remotely related to those hatchet-headed ghouls— no, don’t look up!—circling in that stinking brown sky. Sailor! Pal! We must get us out of here at once.”

Easier said than done. As Switters learned from a booking agent soon after completing a walking tour of the town, a contingent of resurgent Sendero Luminoso guerrillas had attacked the local airfield three days earlier, destroying or damaging nearly a dozen small planes. Only two air taxis were presently flying, and both were booked for weeks to come, ferrying engineers, bankers, and high-stake hustlers back and forth between Pucallpa and the projects in which they had interest.

Sorely distressed, Switters was pacing the broken pavement outside the booking office, sweating, swearing, barely resisting the urge to kick a power pole, a trash pile, or the odd dead dog, when, from inside the pyramid- shaped parrot cage that sat with his luggage, there came a voice, high as a falsetto though raspy as a pineapple. “Peeple of zee wurl, relax,” is what it said.

It was the first time the bird had spoken since leaving Seattle. Thirty minutes later, in an overpriced but blessedly air-conditioned hotel room, it spoke again—the same sentence, naturally—and while there are those who may find this silly, the words lifted Switters’s spirits.

The flight over the Andes, the poison air of Pucallpa, the brain-boiling heat and pore-flooding humidity had combined to give him a migraine; and the headache had combined with the disappointment over the unavailability of air taxis to make him depressed. Fortunately, when Sailor squawked his signature line, Switters was instantly reminded of something Maestra had said almost twenty years before: “All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”

At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes.

“The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It’s about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there’s a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which, if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.”

“Yeah, but, Maestra—”

“Don’t interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in turn, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing’ll go wrong and it’ll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it’s playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That’s why, Switters my dearest, every time you’ve shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I’ve played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me—you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but that none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.”

“But what about self-esteem?”

“Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.”

All the while that his grandmother was assuring him that he was merely a cosmic zit, she was also exhorting him never to accept the limitations that society would try to place on him. Contradictory? Not necessarily. It seemed to be her belief that one individual’s spirit could supersede, eclipse, and outsparkle the entire disco ball of history, but that if you magnified the pure spark of spirit through the puffy lens of ego, you risked burning a hole in your soul. Or something roughly similar.

In any case, Sailor Boy’s squawky refrain reminded Switters of Maestra’s counsel. He felt better at once, but to insure that he’d keep things in perspective, that he wouldn’t again tighten up or inflate his minor misfortunes, he opened a hidden waterproof, airtight pocket in his money belt and withdrew a marijuana cigarette. Then, with a tiny special key that was disguised as the stem in his wristwatch, he unlocked the lead-lined false bottom that Langley had had built into his reptilian valise and unwrapped an even more secret piece of contraband: a compilation of Broadway show tunes.

After inserting the clandestine disk into his all-purpose laptop and cranking up the volume, he lay back on the bed, lit the reefer, and sang along zestfully with each and every chorus of “Send in the Clowns.”

He found Inti down at the lagoon—the Laguna Pacacocha—where many Pucallpans moored their boats.