Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

donna mosquito of the entire world and most of her entourage.

When, an hour out of port, one of the boys lifted the lid of the rocking basket to disclose a baby ocelot, Switters forgot his concerns for a moment and begrudgingly gave legs to a smile.

Except for the outboard motor, pushing the Virgin upstream at about six knots per hour against a seasonally flaccid current, there was little or no sound on the river, so when a loud, extended, imploring rumble issued from Switters’s stomach, all aboard, including the ocelot cub and the parrot, cocked heads and took notice. “Lunch bell,” announced Switters hopefully, to no immediate effect.

Ostentatiously he rubbed his abdomen. “Comida?” he suggested simply, not wishing to wax pleonastic. Again, there was an absence of response.

Taking squinting measure of the sun’s position, he reckoned the time to be 11 A.M., and his customized watch confirmed it. That meant they had been underway for nearly six hours, without so much as a coffee break. Small wonder his colon was singing arias from tragic third-rate operas. Apparently, however, the Indians had a rule against lunching before high noon, and Switters, ever sensitive about being tagged a soft, coddled Yankee, was disinclined to breach it. He’d swallow his juices and wait.

In terms of distraction, the landscape didn’t bring a lot to the table. Along the east bank (the west side was too distant to examine), the jungle had long ago been cleared to make way for cattle ranches. Alas, the forest-born, rain-leached soil was too thin to sustain grass cover for more than a couple of years. When their pastures expired, the cattlemen cleared more jungle and moved on, leaving the failed meadows to bake in the tropic sun, where they hardened into wastelands so lifeless and ugly they would have caused T. S. Eliot to start over and perhaps shamed the Up With People people into revising their slogan—although human events in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Beverly Hills hadn’t done much to temper their enthusiasm for the species. He’d attempt to describe this scene to Suzy the next time she petitioned to be whisked to McDonald’s. (Arrggh! Neither Suzy nor McDonald’s—in both cases he favored the fish sandwich—was something he wanted to be reminded of at the moment.)

Now and then they would pass an operative ranch: a few acres of temporary pasture dotted with beef, a hastily built hacienda, and off to one side, a cluster of thatched huts where Indian workers lived. What would it be like to reside in such a place? Did anyone think of it as “home”? Homeless and houseless may not always be synonymous. Home, for example, wasn’t a word Switters often employed when referring to the apartment in northern Virginia where he closeted his numerous suits (his sole extravagance) and armoired his plenteous T-shirts (not a syllable of product promotion on any of them), which was understandable, considering he rarely slept or ate in the place. The CIA had hired him as an analyst, chaining him to a desk at Langley, but after his supervisors reviewed his rugby tapes they granted him his wish to dive into the derring-do tank: three years in Kuwait, during which time he made frequent phantom forays into Iraq, earning a decoration for an act of valor that he was sworn never to discuss; five years in Bangkok, during which time his off-duty activities, above and beyond the C.R.A.F.T. Club even, had so incensed the U.S. ambassador there that the envoy managed to get him transferred; two years now trotting the globe in a role the company called “troubleshooter,” but which to Switters’s mind was not much more than an international errand boy.

The nomadic life had its drawbacks, but Switters would be the first to cheerfully admit that it cut way down on maintenance. When he considered that he had not one blade of lawn to tonsure nor brick of patio to patch; when he considered that no overly friendly stranger had ever tried to sell him storm windows, aluminum siding, or a Watchtower magazine; when he considered all of the condo association meetings he’d avoided (thereby sparing his poor brain from being quibbled right down to the stem), he had little choice but to rejoice. And additional joy ensued when he realized that the sun must now be directly overhead since no fragment of its aluminum siding any longer extended beyond the ragged edges of the Virgin’s canopy. Indeed, the hands of his watch were rendezvousing at the top of the dial for a midday quickie (the big hand chauvinistically on top as usual, as it was even on women’s watches).

“Noon!” he exclaimed, in case the others had missed it. He pointed to the sun. He pointed to the larder. “Who’s the chef on this tub? The sous-chef? The patissier?” His glance took in the three bottles of pisco. “I doubt I need inquire about the sommelier.”

At neither end of the boat was there movement or acknowledgment, so Switters stood up, the better to attract attention.

“Lunch,” he said. His tone was even, rational, devoid of any knuckle of bellicosity. “That’s what we call it in my country. L-U-N-C-H. Lunch. I’m fond of lunch. I am, in fact, a lunch aficionado. Give me liberty or give me lunch. Breakfast comes around too early in the day, and dinner can interfere with one’s plans for the evening, but lunch is right on the money, the only thing it interrupts is work.”

His voice rose slightly. “I require lunch on a daily basis. I’m insured against non-lunch by Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and Blue Cheese. Finicky? Not this luncher. I eat the fat, I eat the lean, and I lick the platter clean. Normally, I do shun the flesh of dead animals. Live animals, as well: bestiality is not a part of my colorful repertoire, although that is really none of your business. But in the dietary arena, pals, I have nothing to hide, and would at this juncture gladly masticate and ingest Spam-on-a-stick if you served some up. All I’m asking is that you serve something up, and speedily. I become grumpy when denied my noontide repast.”

A hint of the histrionic now entered his delivery, and he pumped up the volume a decibel or two. “A hearty lunch is essential for growing bodies. Beyond that, it’s a many-splendored thing. Man does not live by deals alone. Lunch is beauty. Lunch is truth. The Rubenesque beauty of chocolate pudding soaking up cream. The truth embodied in the Brechtian dictum, ‘First feed the face.’ Butter the bread, boys! Split the elusive pea! Hop to it! Lunch justifies any morning and sedates the worst of afternoons. I would partake. I would partake.”

Inti and the boys stared at him, to be sure, but their expressions were closer to indifference than curiosity or appreciation. Inti’s face, in particular, seemed glazed by those smooth sugars of inscrutability that are widely, if incorrectly, believed to flavor certain ethnic types. Frustrated that his rhetoric had inspired not a twitch of culinary action, Switters, stomach growling all the while, sat back down to reason things out.

It could be coca leaves, he reasoned. A cud of coca was reputed to keep a Peruvian Indian chugging from dawn to dusk and kill his appetite for lunch in the process. Another reason, thought he, to eschew the toot tree. He had missed one lunch already in the past few days due to XTC. Coca was to dining what late-night television was to sex, and he was about to say as much, to no one in particular, when he noticed a stalk of midget bananas partially protruding from under a roll of tattered mosquito netting that lay alongside the provisions. Well, eureka, then!

Tossing aside the netting, he reached for the bananas, only to yelp and jump backward in alarm as his fingers came within an inch of the ugliest spider he’d ever laid orbs on. Now that got a reaction from his stoic shipmates. Their faces contorted, their bare feet stamped, and they issued strange hissing sounds that must have been some Amazonian equivalent of laughter, persisting in such demonstration while he backed steadily away from the stalk and its inhabitant, a blondish creature that resembled, in size and hair-cover, an armpit with legs.

It wasn’t a tarantula. Switters was familiar with tarantulas. No, this living emblem of evolutionary perversity wasn’t merely hairy, it was sprinkled with purple spots—an armpit with a rash—and its pupilless white eyes rolled about the brow of its cephalothorax like mothballs in a lapidary. Yes, and it was rearing back on its hindmost legs in a most unfriendly presentation.

As Switters continued to retreat, finally reseating himself on his cardboard divan, the Indians continued to express amusement. Maybe I should open my own comedy club in Pucallpa, mused Switters. Call it Arachnophobia. Instead, he opened his valise. Rummaged among his shorts and socks and handkerchiefs. And fished out the automatic pistol.

“Nothing personal,” he said, as he stood facing the stalk. “I respect all living things, and I’m aware that to you, I, myself, must appear a monstrosity. But you’ve got my goddamn bananas, pal, and this is the law of the jungle!”

With that, he fired off about a dozen ear-splitting rounds, blowing bits of spider and banana all over the bow. “Anyone for fruit salad?” he asked politely.

Indeed, when the smoke cleared there wasn’t much left of the bunch. Green shreds, yellow dollops, hairy confetti. Digging around in the organic debris, he did, however, find four and a half survivors. The half-banana, he presented to Sailor. The remainder he calmly peeled and devoured, one after the other, smiling with humble satisfaction.

“Now,” he said to the Indians, who had become very still and very respectful (even the ocelot looked upon