Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

what nine hours of modern poetry does to a man?”

“My queen. You have returned.”

“Christ, boy! I see the frost is off your pumpkin. Have you finally gone around the bend?”

He smiled at her sweetly. Shyly, he studied his white sneakers. “Maestra, would you mind putting on some music? I feel like dancing.”

“Never mind the damn music. Sailor Boy and I want your undivided attention.”

It was then that he noticed the parrot.

How his grandmother, in her fragility, had managed to fetch Sailor’s cage from her upstairs sitting room, Switters could not imagine. Although airily constructed of wicker and copper wire, it was spacious, as birdcages go, and probably none too light. Normally a skeptic, Maestra had become convinced that pyramids possessed the power to refresh and preserve organic tissue, whether of a plucked apple or a fully feathered bird, and inspired by an article on the subject in a reputable science magazine, she had long ago commissioned a craftsman to build her parrot a cage in the model of the Great Pyramid, although whether its geometric shape added to or subtracted from its total weight was something that had never been considered. Its impact on Sailor Boy’s health was likewise unproven, yet no observer could dispute the salubrious sheen of his plumage.

“I’m aware,” she said, “of your antipathy toward animals.”

“Why, that’s slander, Maestra. I cherish all God’s creatures, great and small.” It was the XTC talking. The XTC grinning.

“Okay, pets then. I have it on good authority, namely you yourself, that you don’t like pets. Why are you acting so goofy?”

He scratched his jaw in a pensive manner. “It’s cages I dislike. Cages and leashes and hobbles and halters. It’s the taming I dislike. I appreciate that a pet can be a comfort to one such as yourself, but domesticity shrinks the soul of a beast. If God had meant for animals to live indoors, he would have given them second mortgages.”

“It’s the wild kingdom that you fancy.”

“Well, sometimes nature has a tendency to go over the top, lay it on a bit thick with the creeping and crawling and sliming and hissing and stinging and ceaseless reproducing. But generally speaking, yes, my respect is for the thing that sniffs its prey instead of sniffing my crotch, the thing that shits in the elephant grass instead of shitting in a box in my kitchen.”

“Your phrasing is indelicate, but your meaning is clear. You prefer your creatures wild and free. That’s good. That’s very good.”

“Is it good, Maestra?” His expression was that of a proud child who has just been praised for some trivial if heartfelt achievement.

“Yes, it’s very damn good because it means that you’re philosophically disposed to undertake the little mission I’m about to assign you.”

Switters blinked. He was in a drug-induced neurologically based state of blissful benevolence, a state in which ego was softened, fear dissolved, and trust expanded, yet through it all he sensed that he was about to be conned.

It turned out that his grandmother wanted Switters to take Sailor the parrot with him to South America and release the bird in the jungle there. At her advanced age she faced the inevitable, and while its life expectancy was almost certainly greater than her own, the parrot, too, was no spring chicken. She wanted her pet to spend its remaining years flying free in the forest of its birth.

“But, but, uh,” Switters sputtered, “you’ve had Sailor for about as long as I can remember. . . .”

“Thirty-four, thirty-five years. And he was at least that old when I acquired him.”

“Sounds right. I’m thirty-six. So, why at this late date . . . ?”

“Don’t pretend to be a knucklehead. You know why. I’ve always assumed that he was leading a good life, but that may have been a chauvinistic presumption. I mean, he’s behind bars, isn’t he? You might recall that he used to be loose in the house, but in recent years he’s taken to ripping up the draperies with his beak and committing other disagreeable and destructive deeds. He’s undergone a personality change. You’re the one who’s claimed that all pets eventually become anthropomorphically neurotic. Correct? Anyway, I’ve had to keep him locked up. You have no idea how guilty I’ve felt. So it’s for my conscience as well as for his ‘shrunken soul’ that I want you to liberate him.”

“But, but I thought Sailor was from Brazil. He’s a Brazilian parrot. I’m going to Peru.”

“Quit speaking to me like I’m senile. Brazil, Peru—the Amazon jungle’s the Amazon jungle. Birds and beasts don’t recognize national boundaries. They have better sense.”

“Okay, but I’m not going to the Amazon jungle. I’m going to Lima.” His voice was fuzzy, and muffled by faux nonchalance. “Lima’s on the coast. There’s desert around it. It’s hundreds of kilometers from the Amazon.” He turned to face the cage. Sailor was tearing at a bunch of grapes, but his head was cocked to the side, with one shiny orb trained on Switters, as if he could detect the man’s abnormal state. “Sorry, ol’ birdy, ol’ pal, but if you expect to wing home to the emerald forest, you’re gonna have to redeem your frequent-flyer miles.”

Maestra was neither amused nor dissuaded. “Your tone disappoints me,” she said. The pupils of his aforementioned fierce, hypnotic green eyes were so dilated they looked like the burners on a dollhouse stove. She stared into them without trepidation. “A quick detour, that’s all I’m asking. It may widen the pinhole in your travel map, but you’re going to have to do it for me.”

“Oh, no. No, no. It wouldn’t be anywhere near quick enough for me. If I’m not out of South America within forty-eight hours, I will have forfeited all claim to future happiness. Can’t do it, Maestra. It’s an ordeal in the making, and it’s too much to ask.”

She clapped her age-spotted hands together with such a sharp pop that it caused the parrot to start and flutter. “Then I’m no longer asking. I’m insisting.”

Switters grinned. He loved the whole world at that moment, South America and a demanding old matriarch included, but he wasn’t going to let himself be manipulated. “You forget, I’m the only member of our family you’ve never been able to intimidate or control. That’s why you adore me. So, you might as well—”

“Heh! The reason I tolerate you, to the extent that I do tolerate you, is that you’re the only one of us left with any tricks in his bag. In this case, I’m afraid, those very tricks of yours are your undoing.” She paused briefly for the theater that was in it. “You see, buddy boy, I happen to have on file every e- mail mash note you’ve posted to Suzy in the past six months.”

“No, you don’t!” he blurted out confidently, but somehow he knew she wasn’t bluffing.

“Want to bet?” She went directly to the smaller and older of her two computers, the Mac Performa 6115, and within a few minutes had pulled up a text. “All right, this one is dated thirty, September. Ahem. It reads, and I quote, ‘I long to greet your delta like a rooster greets the dawn.’ “

“Oh, dearie me.” Blushing, he slumped in his chair and began to croon very softly, “Send in the Clowns.”

In the discussion that followed, the word blackmail fell many times from Switters’s lips. He said it without rancor, she responded without guilt.

“I can’t believe my own grandmother would stoop to blackmail.” He shook his dark blond curls. He was bemused.

“Nobody else will believe it, either. But they’ll have no choice but to believe the sordid evidence of Suzy’s e- mail. I ask you again: Do you want your mother and stepfather to read those messages? Want your superiors in Virginia to read them? Mull it over.”

“Blackmail most foul. No pun intended.”

“It’s for a good cause. Don’t take it so hard. And you know, I’ve been contemplating updating my will. The Sierra Club probably wouldn’t know what to do with the cabin at Snoqualmie, so I’m now considering, only considering, leaving it to you.”

“I . . .”

“Hush. Just listen. My Matisse that you’ve always been kind of gaga about? At present it’s destined for the Seattle Art Museum, but I might be persuaded to keep it in the family. If Sailor was sprung free and my heart was at peace.”

“Blackmail wasn’t sin enough. Now you’ve added bribery.”