Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

office.”

Maestra thoroughly agreed, although she was undecided whether it was because full-fledged humans simply had more interesting things to do with their lives than marinate them in the torpid waters of the public trough or if it was because only missing links, in the reassuring blandness of their banality, could expect to attract the votes of a missing link majority. In any event, of the six qualities that distinguished the human from the subhuman, both grandmother and grandson agreed that Imagination and Humor were probably the most crucial.

The finer points of their reasoning were vague to him now. There was something, to be sure, about how only those with imagination could envision improvements and only those with a sense of humor could savor a good laugh when those improvements backfired or turned to crap. The idea of focusing on the laugh itself—on the grounds that of all our different expressions of beingness, only laughter was pure enough, complex enough, free enough, endowed with enough mystery of meaning, to accurately reflect the soul—surely did not occur to them. But now Switters could see that while it was extremely unlikely that End of Time would ever be able to differentiate between, say, wise laughter and the yuks of jackasses braying at refinements they were too coarse to comprehend, the young shaman, nevertheless, might have stumbled on to something. Wondering what Maestra would make of it all, and thinking, though not for the first time, how in the CIA, the terms cowboy and missing link could easily be interchangeable, he fell asleep.

He was awakened about three hours later by a politely urgent rapping at his door. Employing his Panama hat as a fig leaf, he cracked the door to find R. Potney Smithe, breathing hard from the two flights of stairs and bubbling over with gin and news.

Word had reached Boquichicos—whether by drumbeat, smoke signal, or telepathy, Smithe couldn’t discern— that the Nacanaca delegation was already on its way back from the way station. It had left the parrot and its cage behind. Switters voiced alarm, but Smithe brushed aside his protests.

“End of Time will see you,” Smithe announced. “The bloody bugger won’t see me, but he’ll see you. I say, old boy, you look enormously ornamental in that hat. Um. Yes. In relation to the matter at hand, however, you’d best get clothed. He’s sent for you. He wants to see you tonight.”

And so it came to pass that at approximately four o’clock on that sultry November afternoon, Switters walked into the jungle. He was wearing his last clean white suit (Potney could not persuade him otherwise) and a tie-dyed T-shirt (Potney agreed that the Ka’daks might take to its variegated colors). This garb was accessorized with rubber boots, Panama hat, and a belt of khaki webbing, into which, hidden by the jacket, the Beretta had been handily stuck. Completing the ensemble was a day pack (Potney lent it) containing dry socks, a flashlight, mosquito root, salt tablets, migraine tablets, drinking water, a notebook, pencils, the camcorder, matches, and a snake-bite kit. “And would you fancy a tin of biscuits?” Potney had asked as they stuffed the little rucksack, but Switters could not entertain the notion of a biscuit unadorned by red-eye gravy.

In addition to the five tireless Indians who would lead and escort him, he was accompanied by Fer-de-lance. The product of a Nacanaca mother and a Spanish petroleum geologist, Fer-de-lance (then called Pedro) had been removed by Jesuit missionaries at the age of nine from the Nacanaca village where he was born and taken to Lima to be educated. The Jesuits had been correct in their assessment of the boy’s intelligence. Their mistake, perhaps, was in exposing such native keenness to too much uncensored information, for in college, he began to seriously question the Catholic faith, eventually dropping out of classes to join the Sendero Luminoso. Gradually he had become disenchanted with leftist dogmatism, as well, and returned to Boquichicos to reconnect with his roots.

“That’s often a false path, too,” muttered Switters, referring to a contemporary U.S. penchant for tracking down one’s ethnic identity and then binding oneself to its trappings and traditions, no matter how irrelevant, rather than, say, liberating and transforming oneself by inventing an entirely fresh identity. Nevertheless, he welcomed Fer-de-lance—animal trader and aspiring shaman—for his linguistic abilities: English, Spanish, Nacanacan, and even Kandakanderoan. “He should make an ideal interpreter for me,” said Switters, “as long as he doesn’t get sidetracked by any damn snakes.”

The plan was for Smithe to hike in as far as the chacara on the following day. From the garden plot, where Smithe had Nacanacan acquaintances, they would return together to Boquichicos, unless Switters was able to convince End of Time to grant the Englishman another interview.

“You will take good notes, won’t you?” Smithe almost pleaded. “In the event he continues to reject me. I must have something to show for this folly, besides a possible sacking and a probable divorce.” Sincerely, yet with a degree of embarrassment, as if it were comportment upon which his peers might frown, he commenced to pump Switters’s hand. “Can’t thank you enough, old boy. Can’t thank you enough.”

“Forget it, pal. Errands ‘r’ me. Just make sure my Pucallpa mariners don’t weigh anchor without me. I’m needed Stateside on the double, help a young friend with her homework.”

With that, Switters turned and strode into the rain forest, vanishing almost immediately in a sea of titanic trees, a jumpy mosaic of light and shadow, a tunnel of filtered sunshine and violet penumbras, a funhouse with dripping green walls and slippery linoleum, a leaf-happy music hall set vibrating by sudden unpredictable animal soloists and steadily thrumming insect choirs. He quickly became a minor figure in a dense, tattered tapestry that was shagged with Shavian whiskers of moss, loosely stitched with long, loopy threads of vine, and fluttered by spirits and unseen Indian sentinels; while here, there, and sometimes everywhere this rank, spooky tableau visually popped with blubber-lipped frogs, festive sparks of bird flitter, and orchids the size of boxing gloves; with monkey shines, butterfly stunts, phosphors, fruits, belted white worms that resembled the severed fingers of the Michelin tire man, and lumps of suspect nougat that could be toad or toadstool, either one. Yes, and as if layering on yet another dimension, this whole scene seemed scented by syrupy petal pies and bubbling ponds of decaying plant muck, a nose-puzzling mixture of contradictory aromas (floral to fecal) perfectly befitting an environment where cure-all juices coursed alongside poisonous saps, where the gorgeous and the marvelous repeatedly alternated with the hideous and the dire, where brimming Life and pertinacious Death held hands at the chlorophyll cinema; where Heaven and Hell intermingled as they did at no other place on earth, except, perhaps, in the daily emotions of poor fools in love.

This wasn’t quite what Switters had had in mind when he told Maestra he needed to get away from cities for a while. Nevertheless, he went forward. With the air of a man trying to eat the coating off a chocolate-covered grasshopper, he walked into that very forest.

He would not walk out.

R. Potney Smithe was lounging in the shade beside the garden patch, swatting flies, smoking cigarettes, and attempting to coax residual gin molecules out of his own saliva, when he was summoned to the ceremonial lodge by a Nacanaca runner. It was midmorning, and he’d been at the chacara since the previous afternoon.

The summons surprised him. At first, Switters’s lengthy absence had made him hopeful, but as the night passed, and then the morning, he’d lost faith. Whatever was transpiring at that crude structure he called a way station—a station on the way from a primitive yucca patch to Christ knew what—there was scant cause to believe it might advance his fortunes in any considerable direction. Both the mysterious American (Ediberto at the hotel said he was a tractor salesman: not bloody likely!) and the grotesque shaman had their own special approaches to existence, and in those approaches, neither the traditions upon which Smithe had been nurtured nor the discipline in which he’d been schooled held any sway. One of those blokes was as indifferent as the other. But now he’d been sent for, and if not to interview End of Time, then what? Hope swelled anew, it could be said, though to Smithe, the phrase “swelled anew” always suggested the recurrence of a hemorrhoidal tribulation.

The trail was overgrown, and in places, slick and steep. It took Smithe more than an hour to reach the lodge, a three-sided sort of raised longhouse, supported by poles and blackened by smoke. Upon his arrival, he found that End of Time was gone. The place, in fact, was deserted, except for Switters, who lay peacefully asleep in Fer-de- lance’s hammock, slung between two poles, and a couple of Nacanaca bucks who seemed to be watching over him.

Disheartened and a bit perplexed, the anthropologist climbed the unsteady ladder to the main platform and seated himself on a mat beside the hammock. “Where are the Kandakandero?” he asked in Nacanacan.

“Gone,” the Indians answered.

“Coming back?”

“No.”

“Where’s Fer-de-lance?”

“Went to see great snake.” They were referring to an anaconda, reputedly forty feet in length, that was said