Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“Damn shame.”

“Yeah. Potney was a fine fellow. An aristocrat, I suspect, although the kind inclined to wear black business shoes and dress socks with Bermuda shorts.”

“Every country club in the state of Texas has got a few of them. And you believe the Indian’s curse killed him?”

“Well . . .” Switters, too, was making an effort to behave matter-of-factly. “I believe he chomped an apple he couldn’t—”

Bobby’s eyes narrowed. “An apple?” he asked archly.

“Yeah. Eve’s apple. The fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

“Oh? Thought for a second you were referring to the head of your—”

“Bobby! For Christ’s sake! No, no tooth marks on that fruit, which, anyway, I would’ve modestly described as a crab apple or a plum. Jesus, pal! He only jabbed it. What I’m saying is that Potney took a bite out of the old forbidden Winesap and could neither assimilate it nor eliminate it. A cruel dilemma. As Hesse said, ‘The magic theater is not for everyone.’ “

“Bought a ticket to a show his rigid background hadn’t prepared him to handle? But once seen, couldn’t forget? Alrighty. How, exactly, did that kill him?”

Switters shook his head silently, slowly.

“More to the damn point, you? You’re a horse of a different feather.”

Switters just kept shaking his head.

Some gulls screeched by, sounding, as usual, in a state of barely controlled hysteria. Wondering if his friend wasn’t close to being in the same condition, Bobby decided he ought to experiment with empathy. “If it was anybody but you, podner, I’d say you were haunting your own house. Like that uncle of mine in Jasper who still thinks Fidel Castro’s hiding under his rose bushes. Raggedy ass roses, too. Never prunes ’em right. But knowing you’re telling the truth, and after the crazy shit you saw down there, well, I’m trying to put myself in your place, and I have to say, if it was me who went through it and saw what you saw, I reckon I’d be lying on my back with my feet in the air like some upended June bug. At least, ‘til I figured it all out.”

Switters lit a Havana panatela, Cuban cigars being an occasional perk of CIA employment. On the out-puff (he never inhaled), he said, “Figuring it out is the rub.”

“Yep, and I don’t know if I can help you much with that end of it. For the time being, at least, I’m going to let you wrassle with the psychological aspects. As for me . . . we’re in agreement that you’ve got good reason to be keeping your tootsies off the pavement. You got no choice right now but to scoot around in that wheelchair. The first order of business is to find a way to get you out of it.”

“That would probably entail lifting the taboo.”

“There you go.” Bobby sucked on his beer bottle like a tot on a lollipop or a tout on a pencil. After a minute or two, he said, “We’re both company men. Even if I am just a contractual flyboy and you’re stuck below supergrader because of your personal proclivities. We’re still company. So let’s approach this problem like company. How would the geniuses back at the pickle factory deal with it?”

“Depends on the level of White House involvement.”

“You got that straight, son. President’s men the biggest damn cowboys on the planet, and we take the heat for ’em. Democrats bad as Republicans.”

“Worse, maybe.”

“Yep. That beloved JFK. More dirty tricks than a whore in a coal mine. By the time he supposedly ate acid and saw the evil truth about Vietnam, his karmic boomerang was already winging home to roost. Live by the cowboy, die by the cowboy, I reckon. But we digress. Now. The company. First thing, they’d dispatch some Joe to meet with that would-be giggle box of a shaman and buy him out. Bribe him to call off the bugaboo. Right?”

“Quite likely. But End of Time—or Today Is Tomorrow—has no use for money. In fact, I can’t imagine what you might possibly bribe him with.”

“Everybody has a price. ‘Cept for you and me. On second thought, ‘cept for you. I know all too well what mine’d be. But, alrighty, let’s say we can’t buy him off. Next thing, the company would send in some disinformation Joes, plant evidence, try to discredit him. Rile up the populace against him. Pressure him, blackmail him, get him run out of office.”

“Near as I can tell, except maybe for a noninfluential outsider named Fer-de-lance, he has no rivals. If he ever had any, I suspect he may have eaten them.”

Bobby burst out laughing.

“I’m not so sure that’s far-fetched. You find it amusing?”

“Nope, nope,” said Case. “I was just thinking about you eating granny’s parrot.” He grinned from sideburn to sideburn.

“Shhh,” Switters shushed him, glancing around furtively.

“Sorry. But we did sweep for bugs. Which in itself is pretty funny. Anyhow, if all else failed, company’d dispatch an operative to smack the witchman. If the cowboys had a hand in it, they would.”

“Well, they don’t. And in the Amazon forest? I’m not sure they could. They couldn’t even smack Castro. In seven attempts.”

“All they had to do was go to Jasper, spray Uncle Jerry’s roses.”

“Besides, who would do it?”

Bobby didn’t hesitate. “Me.”

“You must be cartooning!”

“Nope. Not if it came to that. Not if it was the only way to release you.”

Simultaneously touched and appalled, Switters asked, “You’d actually? . . .”

“If it came to that. As Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, it’s permissible to—”

“I know what Krishna is alleged to have said in the Gita: ‘If your cause is just,’ et cetera. And like the ‘eye for an eye’ crap Yahweh is alleged to have thundered in the Bible, it’s been twisted to excuse and justify every vile sort of opportunistic bloodletting. Anyway—and I sincerely appreciate your offer—the threat of death, or even death itself, is unlikely to produce the desired results. Today Is Tomorrow and his pals have a different slant on mortality than we so-called civilized types. The overly oxygenated who like to think all peoples are the same have never crossed paths with a Kandakandero.”

“Hell, they’ve never crossed paths with a Frenchman. One-worldism is just a disguised brand of xenophobia. Even your cousin Potney from cousinly Merry Olde laid a bodacious cultural difference or two on the table. Otherwise, you mighten not be in this mess. Now, as for getting you out of it . . . I see your point. Eliminating the laughing shaman wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the taboo.”

“Not unless he died in some arcane manner that you and I couldn’t even guess at.”

“Hmm.” Bobby filled his throat with Sing Ha. Switters followed suit. Out on Puget Sound, an aging freighter filled its stack with steam. The noise, long and mournful, set a neighbor’s dog to yowling a canine version of a country western tune, which in turn set off the gulls, those graceful but grabby scavengers who wouldn’t have hesitated to pick Hank Williams cleaner than a Cadillac full of agents and a courtroom full of ex-wives. Then, everything went quiet again, the sun let itself be bound and hooded by strato-terrorists, and Switters returned to shaking his head. As the ambience, sky and water alike, gradually turned a single shade of teal, Bobby slumped low in his patio chair, his battered boots propped on the ice chest. He appeared lost in thought.

Teal is an unfriendly color, and the air had an unfriendly feel. Chill, at last, found Switters’s bones. He tapped the toe of Bobby’s left boot with the toe of his own right sneaker. “Park Place, Illinois Avenue, and a Get-Out-of- Jail-Free card for your thoughts,” he said.

“Make that a Boardwalk hotel full of blondes and fried chicken and you got a deal.” He bolted upright and grinned his boyish hardpan grin. “I was thinking,” he said, “that wheelchair or no wheelchair, I’m taking you dancing tonight.”

They did go dancing. Even Switters danced, after a fashion, careening his Invacare 9000 around the floor of the Werewolf Club, more or less in time to the energetic rock of Electric Baby Moses, moving, more or less in concert, with one of the several young women Bobby had attracted to their table. Or, perhaps, Switters had attracted them on his own. “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates,” he practically shouted at one point in the evening.