Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“Case, I rest my Switters,” countered Switters, and the pair convulsed with such silly, stupid laughter that even the bar girls shook their heads and looked the other way.

Bobby Case was soon to be reassigned to a U2 base in Alaska. It was rumored that upon his departure, the gutters of Patpong (Bangkok’s “entertainment” district) had run with women’s tears. Incidentally, despite Bobby’s description of himself as a “midlife adolescent,” he was several years Switters’s junior, a fact underscored by his twenty-seven-inch waist and boyish shock of skunk-black hair, and contradicted by the purplish crescents beneath his glint-and-squint aviator’s eyes. His last hours in Bangkok were spent in deep meditation at a Buddhist shrine, although in balance it should be reported that the evening prior, he’d addressed the C.R.A.F.T. Club for forty minutes on the first sentence of Finnegans Wake, which happened to be the only sentence of that book he’d ever read.

Switters was called home to Langley. He spent his last hours in Bangkok in the company of an actual adolescent. He bought her a new silk dress, jeans, and a compact disk player. Then he put her on a bus back to her native village with six thousand dollars in her pink plastic purse, her brief career as a whore at an end. She would rescue her family financially, and—since sexual shame was nonexistent in Thailand and he’d seen to it that she was free of disease—eventually marry her childhood sweetheart in a jolly public ceremony beside a field apop with ripening rice. The six thou he’d won from some Japanese businessmen in a baka hachi game that nearly sparked an international incident. As for Switters’s farewell presentation to the C.R.A.F.T. Club, his lecture on the Wake went on until nearly daybreak and is said to have concluded with him bleeding, in the nude, and crooning “Send in the Clowns,” a song the membership was shocked to learn he knew.

Switters was not much given to self-analysis. Perhaps he sensed that it forced the dishonest into even deeper deception and led the candid into bouts of despair. Consequently, he’d given little thought to Bobby’s characterization of him that Bangkok evening as a seeker after purity. And now, two years later, aboard a dory in the Peruvian Amazon, rolling a spotted cub back and forth on its spine and pondering, what he pondered was not so much any alleged attraction to innocence on his part but his indisputable attraction to Suzy, reasonably confident they were not the same thing.

Like many modern-day sixteen-year-olds, Suzy was at a juncture where innocence and sophistication converged, much as the olive-colored Abujao converged with the cigar-colored Ucayali, mingling, chaotically at first, their contrasting hues and oppositional currents. The time, no doubt, had passed when it might have been effective to inoculate Suzy with his hypothetical adulthood-prevention serum. Quite likely, it would have been a mistake at any stage. Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn’t fixity the hallmark of the living dead?

At any rate, to enumerate the ways in which Suzy had changed, he was obliged to picture how she’d been at the beginning. Initially, he had to strain to recall the details of their first meeting. Then, he had to strain to stop recalling them. All this Suzy straining was amplified, magnified, and possibly provoked, by the coca.

It had been four years. On leave and destined for Seattle, he’d stopped off in Sacramento at his mother’s request, to meet her new husband and stepdaughter. The husband, a well-to-do hardware wholesaler, had admitted him and after a minute or two of small talk, directed him to his mother’s sitting room. The door was ajar. Switters could hear voices. He rapped once and was charging into the room when his mother squealed and blocked his entrance. “No, you can’t come in! She’s trying on her training bra.”

Switters froze in his tracks, momentarily startled, then curious and thoughtful. “Oh, really?” he asked with great interest. “What’s she training them to do?”

There had erupted an unrestrained and altogether delicious giggle—really more of a girlish guffaw—and the slender figure that had been standing with her back to the door made a silky half-turn to look at him, swinging in the process a storybook pelt of straight blond princess hair. She was barefoot, he remembered, toenails twinkling with a pink-baby varnish. Her longish legs were bare to the brie-like thighs, at which point they vanished into white cotton shorts, stretched taut over a little rump so round Christopher Columbus could have employed one of its protuberances as a visual aid and bowled bocci with the other. Panty outline was in evidence. Above the waist she was naked, save for a dainty white harness, from which dangled shop tags of paper and plastic, and which she did not wear but, rather, clutched loosely at a distance of several inches in front of her chest. In that position it concealed only the nippled points of mammalian swellings, hard as quinces, that might have served as helmets for the marionettes in a German army puppet show—if the toy Huns were outfitted in winter camouflage. They were not quite in the tits category, but they had a running start at it.

Into view now, its prow piercing his reverie, came a dugout canoe, paddled by five loinclothed Indians with decorated faces and feathered coifs. These feathers had once been the exclusive property of individual parrots and macaws, a particular not lost on old Sailor Boy, whose reaction was anything but relaxed. “Come on, pal,” said Switters to the agitated fowl, “practice what you preach.” The wild canoers neither waved nor nodded at the crew of the Virgin; the Pucallpa clansmen ignored them as well. On the forest-shaded river, the boats passed in silence, twenty feet apart, as if the other did not exist. Switters looked imploringly at Inti, who shrugged and muttered, “Kandakandero.”

Okay, where was he? Staring at Suzy, Suzy staring back, he was captivated to the extent that he failed to hear a word of his mother’s prolonged greeting or to adequately return the maternal embrace; Suzy, openly curious, amused, and more self-conscious about her amusement than about her exposed breastlings, which she eventually covered almost as an afterthought. At twelve, modesty was a custom she had yet to fully assimilate. She stood there vacillating between poise and awkwardness, as if she were unsure just how much she had to protect.

The ghost of the guffaw still clung to her tumid lips, causing them to quiver, and in their quivering fullness they reminded Switters of one of those marine creatures that attach themselves to rocks and dare observers to guess whether they are animals or flowers. Her eyes were so large and moist and aqua they might have been scissored from a resort brochure, and her nose was fine, freckled, and slightly upturned, as if sniffing the air for hints of fun. Because she had experienced neither success nor failure in life to any appreciable degree, her countenance remained unwrenched by society’s dreary tugs but rather was lit by the fanciful phosphors of the mythic universe. Or, so he imagined. It would be no exaggeration to say she struck him as a cross between Little Bo Peep and a wild thing from the woods.

If Suzy viewed her new stepbrother as a glamorous, witty man of the world, scarred of cheek and mesmeric of eye, Switters viewed his new stepsister as a freshly budded embodiment of the feminine archetype, equally adept at wounding a man and nursing his wounds. Her frank gaze and expectant smile, the blithe lewdness of her posture and the resolute piety symbolized by the plain gold crucifix that swung from a chain about her never-hickeyed neck, combined to suggest something timeless, some hidden knowledge, ancient and innate, well beyond her years. Did he perceive in her (or project onto her) a glimmer of primal Eve, parting the original ferns? Of salty Aphrodite, scratching her clam in the surf? Of a callow Salome, naively rehearsing a hootchy-kootch that would rattle a royal household and cost a man his head? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t go that far. Maybe he only appraised her with the dum-dum delight with which the GI Elvis must have appraised the pubescent Priscilla.

What is certain is that he liked her instantly, as she liked him. At that point—it should be said in his favor—his feelings were honestly platonic. (The flutter in his scrotum he attributed to the long flight from Bangkok.) Lust would come later, catching him unaware, intensifying slowly, a lump of hard lard in a skillet over coals, that melted almost imperceptibly, not reaching its current and ongoing maddening sizzle until that past Easter, five months earlier, when, attending a family dinner at a Japanese restaurant, he’d fondled her under the low table while she held a menu in front of her face, pretending to experience difficulty in choosing between the lotus cake and the green tea ice cream for dessert. Arrrgh! Jesus on a pogo stick! Her sea-anemone mouth had fallen agape, and he could still see the way the red neon from the Kirin beer sign had reflected off her orthodontic braces. “For crying out loud, Suzy,” her dad had complained, as she struggled not to cry out loud, “why don’t you just order both.”

Emboldened by the coca, Switters unlocked the false bottom in his valise, an object to which the Indians still gave wide berth, fear-ing, perhaps, that it was inhabited by crocodile familiars, or at least impregnated with a magical essence. Pushing aside esoteric weapons, surveillance equipment, cryptography devices, and his aforementioned secret shame—the reproachful album of Broadway show tunes—he located and then withdrew an even more covert and humiliating item. It had yellowed a bit, and frayed, but was appreciably the same as it had