by Tom Robbins
Into view now, its prow piercing his reverie, came a dugout canoe, paddled by five loinclothed Indians with decorated faces and feathered coifs. These feathers had once been the exclusive property of individual parrots and macaws, a particular not lost on old Sailor Boy, whose reaction was anything but relaxed. “Come on, pal,” said Switters to the agitated fowl, “practice what you preach.” The wild canoers neither waved nor nodded at the crew of the Virgin; the Pucallpa clansmen ignored them as well. On the forest-shaded river, the boats passed in silence, twenty feet apart, as if the other did not exist. Switters looked imploringly at Inti, who shrugged and muttered, “Kandakandero.”
Okay, where was he? Staring at Suzy, Suzy staring back, he was captivated to the extent that he failed to hear a word of his mother’s prolonged greeting or to adequately return the maternal embrace; Suzy, openly curious, amused, and more self-conscious about her amusement than about her exposed breastlings, which she eventually covered almost as an afterthought. At twelve, modesty was a custom she had yet to fully assimilate. She stood there vacillating between poise and awkwardness, as if she were unsure just how much she had to protect.
The ghost of the guffaw still clung to her tumid lips, causing them to quiver, and in their quivering fullness they reminded Switters of one of those marine creatures that attach themselves to rocks and dare observers to guess whether they are animals or flowers. Her eyes were so large and moist and aqua they might have been scissored from a resort brochure, and her nose was fine, freckled, and slightly upturned, as if sniffing the air for hints of fun. Because she had experienced neither success nor failure in life to any appreciable degree, her countenance remained unwrenched by society’s dreary tugs but rather was lit by the fanciful phosphors of the mythic universe. Or, so he imagined. It would be no exaggeration to say she struck him as a cross between Little Bo Peep and a wild thing from the woods.
If Suzy viewed her new stepbrother as a glamorous, witty man of the world, scarred of cheek and mesmeric of eye, Switters viewed his new stepsister as a freshly budded embodiment of the feminine archetype, equally adept at wounding a man and nursing his wounds. Her frank gaze and expectant smile, the blithe lewdness of her posture and the resolute piety symbolized by the plain gold crucifix that swung from a chain about her never-hickeyed neck, combined to suggest something timeless, some hidden knowledge, ancient and innate, well beyond her years. Did he perceive in her (or project onto her) a glimmer of primal Eve, parting the original ferns? Of salty Aphrodite, scratching her clam in the surf? Of a callow Salome, naively rehearsing a hootchy-kootch that would rattle a royal household and cost a man his head? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t go that far. Maybe he only appraised her with the dum-dum delight with which the GI Elvis must have appraised the pubescent Priscilla.
What is certain is that he liked her instantly, as she liked him. At that point—it should be said in his favor—his feelings were honestly platonic. (The flutter in his scrotum he attributed to the long flight from Bangkok.) Lust would come later, catching him unaware, intensifying slowly, a lump of hard lard in a skillet over coals, that melted almost imperceptibly, not reaching its current and ongoing maddening sizzle until that past Easter, five months earlier, when, attending a family dinner at a Japanese restaurant, he’d fondled her under the low table while she held a menu in front of her face, pretending to experience difficulty in choosing between the lotus cake and the green tea ice cream for dessert. Arrrgh! Jesus on a pogo stick! Her sea-anemone mouth had fallen agape, and he could still see the way the red neon from the Kirin beer sign had reflected off her orthodontic braces. “For crying out loud, Suzy,” her dad had complained, as she struggled not to cry out loud, “why don’t you just order both.”
Emboldened by the coca, Switters unlocked the false bottom in his valise, an object to which the Indians still gave wide berth, fear-ing, perhaps, that it was inhabited by crocodile familiars, or at least impregnated with a magical essence. Pushing aside esoteric weapons, surveillance equipment, cryptography devices, and his aforementioned secret shame—the reproachful album of Broadway show tunes—he located and then withdrew an even more covert and humiliating item. It had yellowed a bit, and frayed, but was appreciably the same as it had been that day four years ago. (How surprised he’d been to later discover its friendly tail practically wagging from a hamper of unrecyclable clothing that his mother had condemned to the incinerator.)
For the next half hour or so, he dangled it just out of reach of the cub, who leapt in the air and swung at it repeatedly with its front paws. Then, on an impulse he’d prefer not to dissect, he pressed the skimpy article against his own face and held it there, as if some olfactory whisper of her might come wafting through the multitudinous stinks of time and space.
It turned out to smell like cordite.
The Indians watched him with complete acceptance. It was unlikely they had ever seen, or even imagined, a training bra and thus were immune to its implications. Moreover, they had come to treat Switters with a respect bordering on reverence. Perhaps that was due to the firepower with which he had dispatched the spider, perhaps it was his willingness to chew coca; or perhaps it was because, as they overcame their shyness and could finally look at him directly, they took notice of his eyes, eyes that it has become tiresome to again depict as “fierce,” etc., but that in point of fact, quite possibly could have stared down John Wayne, unnerved Rasputin, and hypnotized Houdini.
About an hour before sunset, Inti guided the Johnson into an eddy and stalled her motor. This in itself was not unusual. They normally traveled from five in the morning until six in the evening, stopping while there was enough light by which to cook supper. However, the shore alongside this eddy was quite marshy, and caimans as long as coffins lumbered on wicked claws among the reeds. It seemed an unlikely spot for camping.
Inti motioned for Switters to join him in the stern. There, the Indian attempted to communicate something of a relatively complex nature. Not many years earlier, Switters would have spent his time aboard the Virgin learning as much as he could of Inti’s language, a dialect of Campa, and with his linguistic talents, he might have picked up a fair amount of it. Nowadays, though, his interest in languages had shifted away from communicative utility; away, even, from revelatory rhetoric; had moved toward what he regarded as the future of language in the post-historical age: an environment in which words, relieved of some of their traditional burden, might be employed not to describe realities but to create them. Literal realities. Of course, he would have been as hard-pressed to define his proposed contribution to evolutionary linguistics as to define, with exactitude, his ultimate role in the CIA. He had ideas, he had plans, but they were as shadowy as the caimans that barked in the marsh.
Inti, nevertheless, managed to get his point across. The party was, at that moment, about three hours downstream from Boquichicos. They could find a suitable campsite for the night and travel on to Boquichicos in the morning. Or, they could just keep going, which would mean canceling supper (the boys had speared a fine mess of fish) and navigating the boulder-strewn river in darkness without so much as running lights.
Switters hesitated. In the reeds, the caimans rustled like drapery. In the air, thirsty mosquito clans gathered in great numbers, anticipating an uncorking of blood. Somewhere a monkey howled, and Switters’s gut, no longer lullabyed by coca (funny how much noise a ball of mystic white light can make), followed suit. He turned to Sailor for guidance. As usual, the parrot said nothing, but the way it perched—its weight on one foot, one wing slightly forward, its head tilted expectantly—reminded Switters of a bellboy awaiting a tip.
So, “To the Hotel Boquichicos!” he cried, waving like a battle flag Suzy’s peewee brassiere.
There were no bellboys at the Hotel Boquichicos. No bellmen, bellwomen, bellpersons, bellhops, belloids, belltrons, bellniks, bellaholics, bellwethers, belles-lettres, or “bellbottom trousers coat of navy blue.” Nothing of that sort. Inti and the lads were permitted to
tote Switters’s luggage into the lobby (spacious, though virtually devoid of furnishings), but once past the door he was on his own. A mammoth moth (described earlier) had attempted to follow him inside but was dissuaded by a swat from his Panama hat.
A mixture of Creole music and oddly Spanish static (come to think of it, all static sounds vaguely Spanish) trickled from a vintage, nicotine-colored Bakelite radio hooked up to an automobile battery behind the front desk, while the clerk, a haggard, graying mestizo, spent more time examining the gringo’s passport than a pawnbroker might devote to a Las Vegas wedding ring. His scrutiny was illuminated by a pair of kerosene lanterns.
Spreading and flapping his thin arms, as if to encompass the vast jungle that lay outside, the clerk said in English, “You will find no buyers for your tractors here, señor.” Switters had presented his “cover” papers along with his passport. “I think you come very wrong place.” He issued a weaselly laugh.
With a weary sigh, Switters indicated the parrot cage and set about to explain, as succinctly as possible, his intentions in the fair city (he’d been unable to make out a bit of it in the darkness) of Boquichicos. Cautiously, but with surprising speed, the clerk handed him a rusty key and pointed to the staircase. The clerk wished to deal no further with what was obviously a madman.
“Electricity make from six to nine,” he called out, as if that were information to which even a visiting loco was entitled. Presumably, he meant in the evening.
The stairs were adjacent to what must surely have been one of the world’s longest bars. To walk its length in under nineteen seconds would no doubt qualify one for a place in some special Olympics. Had there not been a lamp flickering at its far end, it might have been perceived as extending into infinity. There were, Switters guessed, a minimum of forty barstools. Only one of these was occupied, it by a middle-aged foreigner. The man had sandy hair and a pink complexion, and wore pressed khaki shorts and a khaki shirt with military epaulets. Flip-flops dangled at an angle from his large pink feet, and a bottle of English gin kept him company. No bartender was in view. It took Switters two trips to lug his belongings up to his third-floor room (the third floor was the top floor: the second floor, Switters was to learn, was wholly unoccupied), and each time that he passed the solitary drinker, the fellow nodded and smiled encouragingly, hoping, it seemed, that Switters might join him.
Switters yawned ostentatiously, a signal that he was too tired for barroom conviviality. Indeed, he could barely wait for a hot shower and clean sheets.
The shower water, predictably, was tepid at best, and the sheets, while clean enough, were damp and smelled pungently of elf breath. Since the ceiling fan only rotated between the hours of six and nine (the river was presently so low that Boquichicos’s tiny hydroelectric plant could operate no more than that), the air in the room was thick and still. The air was like a flexed muscle, the bicep, perhaps, of some macho swamp thing showing off for a female swamp thing, green in both cases. So heavily did it weigh down on Switters that he felt he couldn’t have gotten out of bed had he wanted to. Despite the bed’s slimy texture and toadstool aroma, he didn’t want to. He reached out from under its mosquito netting and snuffed the bedside candle.
“Sweet dreams, Sailor Boy. This time tomorrow, if all goes well, you’ll be a free Sailor Boy. In fact, you won’t be Sailor Boy at all, you’ll be a wild thing without a name.”
Unable to decide whether or not he envied the parrot, Switters turned his thoughts, as he often did at bedtime, to the ways in which word and grammar had interfaced with action and activity during the day; had collided with, piqued, mirrored, contrasted, explained, enlarged, or directed his life. It so happened that something most unexpected, maybe even important, had occurred in the linguistic interface that very evening. To wit:
Athapaskan is the name given to a family of very similar languages spoken by North American Indians in the Canadian Yukon, as well as by tribes in Arizona and New Mexico, although the groups are separated by more than two thousand miles and have evolved various markedly different cultures. Now, astonishingly, it appeared that a dialect of Athapaskan might have migrated as far south as the Peruvian Amazon. As they parted company at the hotel entrance, Switters had first glanced hard at the pisco bottle in Inti’s hand and then at the boys huddled shyly behind him. Showing his coca-ruined teeth, Inti had smacked the nearest boy on the buttocks and, turning away, muttered, “Udrú.” It was intended as a private joke. Inti, in his wildest jungle dreams, could not have imagined that Switters would have recognized udrú as the Athapaskan word for “vagina.”
Ah, but Switters knew the word for vagina in seventy-one separate languages. It was kind of a hobby of his.
He grinned in the dark at the scope of his own expertise.
In the morning he managed a cold-water toilet, donned a clean white linen suit over a solid green T-shirt (its hue matched the air in the room), and went downstairs. The sandy-haired, baby-faced gent from the evening before still sat at the bar. Although he was perched on the very same stool, he presumably had not been there all night, for he, too, looked freshly shaved, and the gin bottle had been replaced by a pot of tea.
“I say,” he called to Switters in a decidedly British accent. “Searching for a spot of breakfast?”
“You, pal, have read my mind.” He hadn’t eaten since the previous dawn. “All those damned roosters crowing me awake before sunup, there’s got to be an egg or two on the premises. And if not, fruit will do. Or a bowl of mush.”
“Euryphagous, are we?” asked the man, instantly winning Switters’s friendship on the strength of his vocabulary. “And a Yank, into the bargain! Last night I took you for Italian. Your suit was a frightful mess, but it was a suit. Then, just now, I thought you might be a fellow subject of the Queen. Never expected to run across a Yank in a suit in bloody Boquichicos.”
“Yeah, well, as for Yanks, the old colony’s a variety pack, I’m afraid. You never know which or what is gonna show up when or where.” Switters settled onto the next barstool. “Tell me something: Is it cool—is it acceptable—to ask for papaya around here?”
The man raised a pair of sandy eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well, uh, in the dialect of Spanish spoken in Cuba, they refer to that particular fruit as a bombita. ‘Little bomb.’ Which makes sense, considering its shape and everything. But in Cuban Spanish, the word papaya means ‘vagina.’ Which has a certain logic, as well, I guess. However . . .”
“Oh, yes, I see,” said the Englishman. “If one asks for a jugo de papaya in Havana, one gets a rather funny look.”
“Or a glass of juice that’ll put hair on your chest. So to speak.” When the Englishman slightly grimaced, Switters added, “Gives a whole new meaning to ‘bottoms up.’ “
“Rather. And afterward, I suppose, a chap would want a cigarette.” The man spoke dryly and without overt levity.
“Personally, I only got the funny look.”
“I see. Well. Have no fear. Unless I’m much mistaken, papaya in these parts will give offense to none.”
At that moment a disturbingly pretty mestizo girl, not much older than Suzy, emerged from the gloom with a tray of cornbread and tropical jams, which she set before the Brit. When she looked questioningly at Switters, he became flustered and blurted, “Bombita,” simply lacking the nerve to ask for papaya in the unlikely event that here, too, it might possibly mean . . .
“You’re wanting bombita, you better go see Sendero Luminoso,” she said, giving him the kind of wary, patronizing smile one might give a known lunatic. He blushed and quickly ordered eggs. Sailor would have to wait for his breakfast fruit.
Apparently too well-mannered to commence eating before the other was served, the Englishman retrieved from somewhere on his person a fine leather case. Embossed in gold upon its lid was a coat of arms and the legend, Royal Anthropological Society. “Oh, bugger!” he swore, after opening the case. “I seem not to have a one of my bloody cards. A chap gets
lax in a place like this.” He wiped his large pink hand on his shirt and then extended it. “R. Potney Smithe,” he said. “Ethnographer.”
“Switters. Errand boy.”
They shook hands. The hand of Smithe (it rhymed with knife) was neither as damp nor as soft as Switters had feared.
“I see. I see. And are you running an errand in Boquichicos, Mr. Switters?”
“Most assuredly.”
“Contemplating a lengthy, um . . . errand run?”
“Au contraire.” Switters checked his watch. It was 6:13. “In about an hour, I’m scheduled to take a little nature walk. Then, provided I’m not overwhelmed by some aspect of the local fauna . . .”
“As well you might be. From this outpost to the Bolivian border, there exist twelve hundred species of birds, two hundred species of mammals, ninety or more frog species, thirty-two different venomous snakes—”
“. . . or flora . . .”
“A most immoderate vegetative display, you may be sure.”
“. . . I expect to depart here in midafternoon. Tomorrow morning at the very latest.”
“Pity,” said R. Potney Smithe, though he didn’t say why.
The girl reappeared with a plastic plate of fried eggs and beans. Switters worked his smile on her. If there was any reason to tarry in Boquichicos . . .
After they had eaten, Smithe lit a cork-tipped cigarette, inhaled deeply, and said, “No offense, mind you, and I hope you won’t think me cheeky, but isn’t it, um, difficult finding yourself an ‘errand boy’? I mean, a chap of your age and with your taste in attire.”
“Ain’t no shame in honest labor, pal. You must have had the occasion to observe honest labor, even if you’ve never actively participated.”
“And why wouldn’t I have done?”
“Well, no offense to you, either, Mr. Smithe . . .”