Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“Switters.”

“I’ll bet your armpits taste like strawberry ice cream.”

She had just slid onto his lap and was tightening her tawny arms around his neck, her tongue muscles quivering like the hamstrings of a cheetah about to spring from its lair, when his mother made one of her periodic checks of the room. “Now, now, children,” Eunice admonished.

“Can’t I show my big brother some gratitude and affection?” Suzy asked. Her tone was defiant.

“You’ve been watching too much TV, young lady,” said Eunice, somewhat inexplicably.

Reddening, Suzy stood, about to defend herself, but Switters intervened. “Mother’s right,” he said calmly. From an end table within his reach, he snatched up a cast-iron ashtray, fashioned to resemble an Early American hearth skillet, and used it to gesture at the forty-inch Sony across the den. “There’s the problem right there,” he announced. “Does it not possess the power of a totem pole and the heart of a rat? Die, demon box, die!” With that, he hurled the ashtray at the TV, badly cracking its plastic casing and missing the screen (purposefully or not) by a fraction of an inch.

As the ashtray, a souvenir of Monticello, caromed with a loud clanking onto the floor, his mother emitted a sound midway between a gasp and a shriek, and Suzy regarded him as if he were the most astounding entity to grace the earth since Fatima, Portugal, 1917.

Choosing to skip the family dinner, Switters slipped away and drove over toward Rancho Cordova, where he knew there to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet with a drive-through service window. “I understand,” he said to the clean-cut, if acne-peppered, hobbledehoy who dispensed his order (he imagined him to look a lot like Brian), “that KFC still uses the colonel’s original frying recipe. Is that correct?”

“Uh, yes, sir, it is.”

“Eleven secret herbs and spices. So I’ve heard.”

“Yes, sir. I believe so.”

“Would you identify them for me, please?”

“Huh?”

“The eleven secret herbs and spices. Tell me what they are.”

Bewildered, the boy began blinking rather frenetically, as if during one of the lid closures, the customer and his cheeky red convertible might disappear.

“Don’t play dumb,” snarled Switters. “If you can’t come up with all eleven off the top of your head, nine or ten will do.”

The boy gathered his composure. “Uh, I’m sorry, sir. They’re our secret recipe. Would you please pull forward?”

“I’ll pay you forty dollars.” He wagged two bank notes in the pustulated face.

“No, sir,” said the boy, glancing over his shoulder with one of those half frightened, half irate I’m-going-to- send-for-the-manager expressions. “I don’t. . . . You’re gonna have to pull forward.”

“What if I told you I have your girlfriend in the trunk of this car?”

His eyes widening until it appeared his pimples might pop, the young man seemed as if he were about to shout or retreat or both, yet he did neither for the simple reason that Switters had fixed him so forcefully with his fierce, hypnotic gaze that he was all but paralyzed. “I-I don’t—” he stammered weakly. “I’m just a cashier. I don’t know nothing about the—the cooking side of it.”

“So, you won’t betray the colonel for love or money? Not even to spare your girlfriend’s life?” Switters abruptly relaxed his glare and lit up the boy with a smile that could paint a carousel. “Congratulations! You’ve done it, pal. You’ve passed the test.” He held out his hand, but the boy was too stunned to shake it. “I’m Operative, uh, Poe, Audubon Poe of the Central Intelligence Agency. As you’re doubtlessly aware, the CIA’s main responsibility these days is protecting America’s corporate interests, such as the colonel’s eleven cryptic herbs and spices, from insidious foreign competitors. You play an important role in this struggle, pal. So, well done! Your government’s proud of you, and I’m sure the colonel’d be proud of you, too—if the beloved old motherfucker weren’t as dead as the gravy you counterfeit gastronomes slop on his unsuspecting biscuits.”

Switters tossed the boy a twenty. “Take the night off,” he exhorted. “Badger some phrontifugic adult to buy you a six-pack. Domestic, of course. Sacramento is, indeed, the quintessential American city, and you are a genuine American hero!” He gunned the engine. “I’ll let your girlfriend out at the next rest stop!” he cried, and he squealed out of the KFC lot, laying down enough burnt rubber to blackface the cast of the Amos ’n’ Andy show for most of a season.

With a Cajun-style drumstick between his oft-abused but still pearly teeth, he headed back toward the west, roaring into one of those lurid orangeade sunsets that could qualify as nature’s revenge on Louis XIV.

Shortly before 10 P.M., as Switters sat propped up on the four-poster bed reading from Finnegans Wake, there was a soft knock at his door, and Suzy tiptoed in. “You missed dinner,” she said.

“I dined out. How are things?”

“Daddy’s been kind of gnarly. He wants to know why you, like, attacked his TV set.”

“Yes. Good question. I’ve been wondering about that myself. I suppose you could say that these past few days in suburbia have roused my imp from its slumber.”

“You mean,” she asked, half frowning, half grinning, “the Devil made you do it?”

“Well, no, darling, that’s not it at all. The Devil doesn’t make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn’t make us mean. Rather, when we’re mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world. But all that’s beside the point. I think probably the most truthful thing you can tell your daddy is that I attacked his TV set out of love of life.”

“Love of life,” Suzy whispered almost inaudibly, rolling the phrase around in her mouth and her mind, as if it were a concept so unfamiliar, so novel, it would take awhile to grasp it.

“What,” asked Switters, “did my mother have to say?”

“Oh, she said ‘Dumpling’s’—sometimes she calls you Dumpling—’Dumpling’s a man of mystery, just like his father.’ “ She watched an odd, ironic smile bend his lower lip like a bartender twisting a peel of lemon. “So, like, what did your father do?”

“He was a man of mystery.”

“ ‘Man of mystery,’ “ she repeated in a whisper, as though she were again ruminating on an exotic, esoteric but flavorful notion—and this time she watched the bedside reading lamp illuminate his spray of tiny scars, causing them to resemble a constellation projected on a planetarium ceiling. After a moment or two, she asked politely, “Uh, what’re you doing tomorrow?”

“For one thing, I thought I’d sift through the Fatima detritus and get your outline started for you.”

“Oh my God, Switters, you’re just so fine! I was really hoping you’d do that. Like, I can’t be here tomorrow. My dad’s taking your mom shopping again in San Francisco, and they, I guess, don’t want me to be home alone with you. So, I’m going with my girlfriend after school, and then Brian’s taking me to his football game.”

“Brian’s an athlete, is it?”

“No, he doesn’t play. He’s a cheerleader.”

Switters brightened. “A cheerleader. He doesn’t by any chance moonlight at Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

She moved her buttercup bangs in a negative rotation. “Uh, I’m gonna try to leave early. Like, after the first quarter. I think I can, you know, get a ride home. The parental unit won’t be back from San Francisco until ten o’clock. They told me.”

“But you’re leaving the game early and coming home?”

Lowering her filoplume lashes until they almost swept the blush from her cheeks, she said ever so gravely, “To be with you.” She slid awkwardly onto the bed beside him, kissed him briefly but wetly, removed one of his hands from the binding of Finnegans Wake, and placed it in the general vicinity of her crotch. “I want to get naked with you,” she said, blurting it out, softly but forcefully, like a jet of steam.

Switters swallowed hard, as though he were gulping down a goose egg. When his larynx stopped wobbling, he asked, “Are you sure?”

She nodded soberly. “I . . . think so. You’re my . . . my. . . . But I . . . I’ll be here if I can. I might not.”

The next day Switters had the house to himself. He stayed in bed until he heard the Mercedes sedan pull out of the three-car garage, heading for the boutiques of Maiden Lane. Then he breakfasted on peanut butter and soy