Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Switters also glanced skyward. It didn’t look like rain to him. He’d bet his bottom dollar it wasn’t going to rain. “So what’s your story, Pot? My little operation here is falling way behind schedule.”

“You have your errand to run.”

“That I do. You’ve hit the nail on the head.”

Smithe cleared his throat vigorously, sending droplets of sweat flying off his Adam’s apple. “A Yank in a business suit ‘running an errand’ in the Peruvian bush. A bit west of here, one would automatically think ‘cocaine,’ but there’s precious little if any coca refined in the immediate vicinity, and the mineral wealth is negligible as well. Yes. Um. If it’s exotic birds you’re after . . .”

“Listen, pal . . .”

“None of my bleeding business, is it? No. None. However, if your errand at the colpa is such that it might endure a nominal delay, well, there’s been a development.” Switters tried to interrupt, but Smithe waved him off. “These Nacanaca blokes, you see, would like to borrow your parrot for a bit. They want to take it—and its cage, obviously—into the jungle a ways. Alarmed, are you? Of course you are. But you see, they’ll bring it back. They only want to show it to a Kandakandero chap. A most remarkable chap, I assure you. The Nacanaca believe that this great Kandakandero witchman will be sufficiently impressed to grant you an audience.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Thanks but no thanks. My social calendar is filled to the brim right now. Next time I’m in town, perhaps.” He looked to Inti. “Let’s round ’em up and head ’em out.”

“Oh, righto. Absolutely spot on.” Smithe had gone from pink to crimson. “I’ve boiled my pudding in this bleeding hole for five bleeding months, petitioning, pleading, flattering, bribing, doing everything short of dropping on all fours and cavorting like a Staffordshire bull terrier to win another interview with End of Time, and you come along on your bleeding errand, oblivious, unmindful, not caring a fiddler’s fuck, and fall into it, just bloody stumble into it, roses and whistles; and, of course, it’s not your cup of tea, it means nothing divided by zero to a bloke like you, you’re wanting none of it. Well, brilliant, that’s brilliant. Just my lot, isn’t it? My brilliant bleeding lot.”

Switters regarded him with astonishment. “Easy,” he cautioned. “Easy, pal. Heed the counsel of our Sailor Boy over there. Relax. You’re acting like I’m some sort of spoilsport, and I don’t have an L.A.P.D. clue what sport I’m spoiling. I’m only—”

“Oh, it’s not your fault. Really. Sorry about that. It’s just my bloody—”

“Stop whining, Potney. Whining’s unattractive, even when your whine sounds like Kenneth Branagh eating frozen strawberries with a silver fork. Just tell me specifically what’s on your burner. What’s this ‘end of time’ stuff? ‘Interviewing the end of time’? Sun got to you? Sun and gin? Mad dogs and Englishmen syndrome?”

Gradually Smithe was returning to his natural hue. A weariness moved into his smooth, shiny face like a retired midwestern farmer moving into a flamingo beach hotel. He shrugged his ursine shoulders and flicked, halfheartedly, his cigarette into the bug-gnawed weeds. “Never mind.” He sighed. “Load of flapdoodle, that.”

“Flapdoodle?!” Switters grinned incredulously, and with a kind of sarcastic delight.

“Yes. Bosh. Nonsense,” explained Smithe. His tone was defensive.

“I know what flapdoodle means. I just wasn’t aware that anybody under the age of ninety-five still used the term. Even in Merry Olde.”

“Don’t mock.”

“So, flapdoodle, is it? Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I happen to have a soft spot for flapdoodle. And if you toss in a pinch of the old codswallop or balderdash, why, you could get me really enthralled.”

“Don’t mock.”

“Not mocking, Pot. Maybe we should find a patch of shade someplace and talk this over.”

“If you’re serious.”

Switters was humoring the ethnographer, catering to his agitation, but at the same time he was a wee bit intrigued, he couldn’t help himself. “Flapdoodle,” he practically sang, as they made their way to the covered side entrance of the nearby infirmary. “Makes the world go ‘round.”

The Boquichicos infirmary’s side entrance functioned, somewhat arbitrarily, as an emergency entrance. Bodies emptying from machete wounds or inflating from snakebite were admitted through it. The front or main entrance was reserved for those with aches, coughs, fevers, or one or more of the thirty or so parasites that could bore, burrow, squirm, swim, or wriggle into the human organism in a place such as this, and that contributed substantially to the region’s reputation for vivid superfluity. (A time was approaching when there would be an argument over exactly which one of those entrances, side or front, was the proper one through which to admit an immobilized Switters, but that unpleasant quandary was still a few days away.)

A short path of flagstones led, from nowhere in particular, to the side door. Above the walkway was a narrow, thatched roof, supported by whitewashed poles. It was beneath that roof that Switters and Smithe took refuge, at first from the sun and, no more than five minutes later, from the rain; for scarcely had Smithe commenced to expound upon the Nacanaca, the Kandakandero chap, and the request to borrow Maestra’s parrot, than a few guppy-sized waterdrops began to dash themselves against the dusty earth or splat with a timid thump against the platterlike leaves of thick green plants. Quickly there was a population explosion such as was entirely appropriate in a Catholic country, and the progenitor drops multiplied and geometrized into a blinding, deafening horde.

At the onset of the torrent, Switters pulled a scrap of cocktail napkin from his pocket, wrote upon it, I.O.U. my bottom dollar, and handed it matter-of-factly to Potney, who blinked at the message, folded it absentmindedly in a big rosy fist, raised his voice against the downpour, and went on with his narration.

On the pretext of keeping Sailor Boy dry, Inti had joined the two white men under the roof. The Virgin crew and the Nacanacan delegation remained out in the rain, which had grown so dense it turned them into silver silhouettes, though they stood but a dozen yards away. The Indians seemed oblivious to the soaking they were getting, and Smithe, who admittedly had the more comfortable position, was virtually oblivious to the weather, as well. “Celebrate it or ignore it,” Switters had maintained, and now he found himself surprised and somewhat shamed that others so easily practiced what he preached.

That, then, was the setting for Smithe’s impartation, an unusual if not outright bizarre account, which shall be summarized in the paragraphs that follow; summarized because to re-create it, to reproduce it verbatim, isn’t merely unnecessary, it could be construed as an abuse of both the reader’s patience and posterior. That such abuse can sometimes be rewarding—consider Finnegans Wake or the church-pew ass-numbing that leads to genital excitation—is beside the point. Or ought to be.

R. Potney Smithe first came to Boquichicos in 1992. His aim had been to conduct ethnographic fieldwork among the Nacanaca, a wild tribe that had been “pacified” by Peruvian government anthropologists in the mid- 1980s as a precautionary measure for the new town that authorities were about to establish, and then semi- civilized by contact with that town and its imported values. The Nacanaca were a transitional people, no longer feral but not quite tame, and were in danger of abandoning, forgetting, or being robbed of their traditional manners and ways. Christian missionaries were doing all they could, naturally, to assist in that dispossession. Smithe’s purpose was to catalogue as many of the old customs and beliefs as possible before they disappeared. It was fulfilling work.

Alas, even while he immersed himself up to his skimpy beige eyebrows in Nacanacan culture, or what was left of it, he felt the hot point of his interest slowly, unintentionally, even unhappily, shifting to another tribe, a people with whom he had no direct communication; who, indeed, he’d never glimpsed except as shadows gliding silently among other shadows in the forest, a phantom race whose magic and indomitability held a great influence over the Nacanaca and, eventually, over Potney, himself. Kandakandero.

The principal Nacanaca village was a mile east of Boquichicos, on the opposite side of the river. It was on high ground, close to good fishing holes. However, its chacara—its garden—was located across the stream on the Boquichicos side, but several miles deeper into the jungle. Oddly enough, in an environment so relentlessly profuse in vegetation, good garden plots were few and far between. The jungle topsoil was as thin as varnish, and although immense trees had learned how to utilize it to staggering advantage, cassava, gourds, peppers, and other cultivated crops were there akin to orphaned children, whose thin gruel was watered down a bit more each year until it no longer provided the sustenance necessary for life. Biological and/or geological accidents sometimes produced rare pockets of fecundity, however, and such was the case with the Nacanacan chacara. It was quite possibly the largest, most perennially fertile garden patch in the Peruvian Amazon.

Some said this chacara had once “belonged” to the Kandakandero or, at least, that they had tended it for