the Nacanaca. “They could easily notice. . . .”
“Not if you hurry. And so what if they did? Do you honestly believe anybody in this part of the world would be scandalized? We’re in South America!”
With that, Switters unzipped the fly of his bedraggled linen trousers. The scratchy snickersnee
Then, Smithe turned toward the hammock, a look of grim determination on his face. “Bloody good, then,” he said. Childishly awkward in his flip-flops and quasimilitaristic tan tropical togs, he began to advance. “You’re right. Let’s be done with it.”
“Uh,” said Switters, hurriedly, “uh, now if you have any reason to suppose there’s something to this taboo, that it might actually—”
“No, no.” Smithe paused. “Oh, if a bloke were to accept such superstitious nonsense on faith, it’s quite possible that he would be psychologically susceptible to whatever end the perpetrator of the malediction might have planted in his unsophisticated mind. But no civilized, sensible—”
“Okay, but what if you secretly believe in it, believe in it subconsciously and don’t know that you believe?”
Smithe seemed not to hear. He was advancing again. Thus, wishing to avoid any clumsy, embarrassing, last-minute fumbling, Switters freed his penis from its confinement within the folds of cheerfully patterned boxer shorts and pulled it out into the open. Almost instantly, it commenced, of its own volition, to crane its neck and bob its head about, as if sniffing the air, sensing that something fun—something uplifting, even—might be in the offing.
Smithe took a couple of steps backward. All of the ruddiness drained from his features, and he commenced to pull and pick at his shirtfront, as if involved in floccillation. Then he swayed. Pivoted to the right. And toppled onto the scorched and pitted floor.
For quite a while—it may have been as long as five minutes—Switters swung quietly in the hammock, staring at the heap on the floor, searching for signs of life; signs, more precisely, that Smithe was, as the Brit himself would have put it,
At that point a figure ascended the wobbly ladder, and Fer-de-lance climbed onto the platform. The aspiring witchman glided noiselessly across the room, like one of the creatures for whom he seemed to have such affinity, and looking, in snakeskin cape and Ray-Ban sunglasses, like a Hollywood Boulevard vampire. He knelt beside Smithe’s form.
Part 2
Every taboo is holy.
—Eskimo saying
Except for one shortish but memorable visit to Sacramento, another to Langley, Virginia, Switters spent the next six months in Seattle. It was the strangest period of his life.
It was stranger than his cloak-and-dagger days in and around Kuwait, stranger than his strangest nights of pleasure in the brothels of Southeast Asia, stranger than the annual Bloomsday literary banquets at the C.R.A.F.T. Club of Bangkok (though of these he couldn’t remember a fucking thing); stranger, even, than nine hours of modern poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.
Well and good, but surely, one must ask, was there nothing about that half year, passed largely idle, in Seattle that was not positively humdrum when compared to the calamitous craziness he’d recently undergone in South America or the beatific bumfuzzlements he was soon to undergo in Syria? Yes, as far as Switters was concerned, the Seattle sojourn would always be the stranger of the experiences or, at least, the period when his equanimity was most rigorously challenged. And he was, after all, the final authority on that sojourn, although others were unquestionably involved. These included Maestra, Suzy, and Bad Bobby Case, as well as an assistant deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency called Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald; and, indirectly, from afar, the Kandakandero Indian known, perhaps erroneously, as End of Time. (Fer-de-lance had concluded that the shaman’s name could be more accurately translated to mean End of Future, or more explicitly yet, Today Is Tomorrow. Accent on the verb. Today
The oddness of those months back in the U.S. could be attributed not merely to the major problems implicit in adjusting to life in a wheelchair but also to his efforts to come to terms with the usher—the Ka’dak witchman or Switters, himself—who had assigned him to that mobile yet restrictive seat. Compounding those predicaments, naturally, were the reactions of others, mainly but not exclusively, the friends, relatives, and employers listed above.
During his first week back, he’d had to contend with no one but Maestra. To her, he’d provided only the most ambiguous explanation of his sudden confinement to a wheelchair, claiming that his disability was related to activities that he was not at liberty to discuss; the same activities, he said, that unfortunately had destroyed her camcorder along with its heartwarming record of Sailor Boy’s flight to freedom.
“Right,” said Maestra sarcastically, rolling, behind the huge circular lenses of her spectacles, a pair of bleary, beady eyes. “The old ‘for reasons of national security’ alibi. Heh! I’m a loyal American of long standing, but that doesn’t mean I’m so flag-addled I can’t recognize our favorite euphemism for ‘governmental hanky-panky swept under the rug.’ Anyway,” she continued, “there’s a place where men disabled in the line of duty can go to convalesce. It’s called Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. If you prefer to recuperate at Chez Maestra instead, you’d better be prepared to spill some beans.”
Switters put her off. “In a few days,” he promised. “I’ll be able to talk about it in a few days.” Thereafter, every time she attempted to bring up the subject or even, in passing, shot him an imploring glance, he’d wink, grin, and proclaim, “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates.”
Alas, Maestra was not the type to be charmed more than once or twice by a line from Rimbaud memorized in a long-ago poetry class, no matter how attractively delivered. Faced with her increasing impatience and growing suspicions—”I have to say, buddy boy, you look pretty healthy to me; that camcorder cost twelve hundred bucks, I’m privy to your wanting to milk Suzy’s aphid, and you neglected to bring me a bracelet”—Switters, already in a confounded state and not knowing what else to do, sent for Bobby Case.
“Switters! What the hell? What have you gone and done to yourself?”
The e-message Bobby received in Alaska had stated only that his friend needed urgently to see him and supplied a Seattle address. Having a couple of days off, Case hitched a ride aboard a military transport plane out of Fairbanks bound for McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma. Within twenty-four hours after reading his e-mail, he arrived, noisily, at Maestra’s door on a rented motorcycle.
“Bobby! Wow! Welcome. That was fast.”
“Naw, man. That was slower than snail snot. Must be losing my edge. But you?! What the hell? Fall down the stairs in a whorehouse?”
Switters checked Bobby’s black leather jacket for signs of moisture. “It’s quit drizzling, hasn’t it? Let’s go out on the side deck where we can talk privately—although even the deck could be bugged.”
“Company or offshore bug?”
“Maestra bug.”
“Really? Your granny doesn’t look like no ear artist, although she does appear to have a burr in her britches.”
