Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (25 page)

“So, son, what’re you gonna tell ’em
back at the pickle factory?”

“Excellent question. My leave’s up in
ten days. I’ll concoct something before I go rolling into the spookmeister’s
oracle. He certainly couldn’t accommodate anything remotely resembling the
truth. Not Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, I have to decide on what to
tell Maestra.” He paused. “And Suzy.”

“Suzy?”

“Yes.”

“Your little stepsister?”

“Yes. I’ve decided to fly down to see
her on Monday.” (It was then Saturday afternoon.)

“To get in her pants?”

“To help her write her first
high-school term paper.” He paused. He smiled. “And . . .” He broke off.

“And what?”

“And get in her pants.” Instantly, he
regretted the statement, not because it was false—he had every intention of
consummating their relationship and believed she felt the same—nor because he
was especially embarrassed by sharing his intent with his best friend, but,
rather, because the crudeness of the remark, the casual male baldness of it,
misrepresented the depth of his feeling for her. His beach-blanket buttercup.
His dewy wolverine.

As for Bobby, he failed to respond
right away. He, in fact, gave every indication of being pensive. Lost not only
in thought but in vastness of sweater, he looked as small as an offscreen movie
actor, and not many years older than Suzy herself. “Oh, you Switters,” he said
at last. “You poor bastard. Do you know what you’re messing with here? Do you
know you’re giving your address out to something that’ll make a shaman’s curse
seem like a get-well card from Mother Teresa?”

Switters was mute, his beer arm
stalled in midair between ice chest and mouth, so Bobby continued: “Do you know
you’re messing with the single biggest taboo in our culture? A taboo worse than
taxing the church and burning the flag rolled up in one, a taboo that’ll get
your balls handed to you on a paper plate and every doctor in America’d break
his Hippocratic oath and three golf dates rather than sew ’em back on?” He set
down his beer and leaned forward toward the wheelchair. “I’m talking, of
course, about the taboo against the sexuality of adolescent girls.

“Yes, son. The taboo of taboos in the
United States of America, and I’m sticking my scrawny Texas neck out even to
mention it. Good thing we swept for bugs.” Bobby retrieved his Sing Ha, took a
long, unsatisfying swig, and leaned back. “It’s an indisputable, observable
fact that even infants have sex lives—purely recreational, mindless, and
self-centered, obviously: a simple matter of being pleasured by genital
stimulation—but it continues kinda marginally throughout childhood until by the
time puberty hits ’em full force, they’re masturbating at such a rate it’s a
wonder they don’t develop repetitive motion syndrome. Girls as well as boys,
por
favor.
In fact, because human females mature faster, they get there first,
and it’s doubtful if we slow boats to China ever catch up.”

Half-closing his eyes, Switters,
perversely, tried to imagine Suzy masturbating, but it was beyond him, and,
besides, Bobby was pressing on.

“The unadorned truth is, adolescent
girls are horny as jackrabbits. It’s not their fault, nature designed it that
way. For the protection of the species. And there’s nothing politics or
religion can do to alter that physical reality, short of drugging the girls
with medical depressants or siphoning off their hormones with rubber tubes. But
because modern society is by nature unnatural, we’re in a state of absolute denial
over it. Absolute denial. That our daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and
little sisters might be highly charged sexual dynamos makes us so
uncomfortable, so queasy, that we, men and women both, have to lie to ourselves
and each other and pretend it doesn’t exist.

“Well, that which you deny sooner or
later rises up and bites you in the ass. That ol’ boy Miller dealt with this
very subject in
The Crucible
, but we applauded the play and pretended it
was about witchcraft or some such shit and went right on with our denial. And
with our witchhunts. It’s the witchhunting that worries me. For Suzy’s sake as
much as yours.”

“Uh-huh.” Switters nodded dumbly, but
his beer bottle remained stationary midway between the Styrofoam container that
had lowered its temperature and the organic container that would empty its
contents and warm them up again.

“We ain’t in Thailand anymore, son.
Remember that. It ain’t Denmark or Sweden, neither. Here, a girl’s got to sweep
her natural biological urges under the rug. Keep ’em to herself and feel guilty
about ’em. If not, she’ll be charged a stiff price, socially and
psychologically. Our girls are culturally unprepared for the . . . the, uh,
emotional
intricacies
of fucking. Although, at sixteen, your Suzy’ll be
getting there pretty damn quick. In the meantime, though, I know you wouldn’t
want to muddy her sweet waters. Not you, who’s got such a thing about
innocence.”

“That again,” grumbled Switters.

“And you also have your own self to
consider. Listen. Any adult male heterosexual who says he isn’t never turned on
by pubescent girls is a liar or a geek, and you can tell him Bad Bobby said so.
But we’re in denial over that, too. Serious denial. A man go Humbert-Humberting
around in America, he’ll find himself thrown into the volcano, a sacrifice to
appease the gods who’ve blighted humanity with all these nasty, unwanted,
upsetting transgenerational cravings. The morality police’ll tar a romantically
smitten fool like you with the same wire brush they use, justifiably, on the sicksacks
and twisttops who actually prey on children and injure ’em out of a psychotic
need to exercise power over somebody weaker than their own weak selves. The
smut sniffers from the victimization industry are also into exercising power,
remember, and drawing fair and intelligent distinctions has never been one of
their long suits. Some of ’em, sad to say, are only seeking revenge for hurtful
things that happened to
them
as children—but, then, the same could be
said of the child molesters. Two sides of the same unlucky coin. At any rate,
we got us a climate where normal men are scared to admit, even in the mirror,
that they occasionally get bit by the lust bug whilst gandering at a junior
miss. And I reckon society’ll go right on lying about it until the day it
reaches enlightenment.” In one swift gulp, he finished off his beer. “ ‘Course,
as long as it keeps lying to itself about itself, there ain’t much chance of it
ever becoming enlightened. Anyhow. Don’t do it, Swit. That’s my advice. For a
dozen good reasons, don’t do it.”

When Bobby stood up and stretched,
Switters said, “That was quite a speech, pal. Thanks. I’ll chew every bolus of
it many times I’m sure, and I’ll carefully consider your counsel. But . . .”

“But?”

“But you haven’t met Suzy.”

“No, and I don’t want to, neither.
‘Cause every word I said, though true, was hypocritical to the core. If it was
me in your place and she was willing, and I thought she knew what she was
doing, I’d be in her pants quicker than she could bring ’em home from The Gap.
But I’m white trash from Hondo and don’t have the morals of a flea.”

Like chip dip with a short shelf
life, the imported Scandinavian sunshine had commenced to degenerate, reverting
to the cod paste from which it was synthesized. Scud blew by close to the
surface of the sound like dank puffballs of bacterial fuzz, and the men could
almost taste mildew in the air. The atmosphere was leaden and thin
simultaneously, as if composed of some new element that defied known laws of
atomic weight and could be properly breathed only by lifelong residents of the
Pacific Northwest. Feathery and innocuous on one hand, sodden and ill-willed on
the other, it was the meteorological equivalent of Pat Boone singing heavy
metal.

Switters was actually quite fond of
Seattle’s weather, and not merely because of its ambivalence. He liked its
subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if
not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush
dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently
primal, and mystically suggestive. It was all those things and more—but it was
never vivid.

The vivid excesses from which he
recoiled in nature Switters found irresistible in language. Bobby’s pointed
rhetoric, the platitudinousness of its content notwithstanding (that teenage
girls were sexual beings and society didn’t like it wasn’t exactly news), had
left Switters lightly hypnotized. It was Bobby who broke the spell by abruptly
asking, “You worried about how little Suzy’s gonna react to finding your ol’
butt stuck in a chair? Meals on wheels? Not the most virile of images, I
wouldn’t reckon.”

“What? Oh. No. No.” Switters smiled
confidently. “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates.”

“Heh! So I keep hearing. Sounds like
a slogan from a recruiting poster.” The voice was not Bobby’s but Maestra’s.
She was standing on the threshold of the French doors, which she had managed to
open undetected. How long she’d been there, how much she’d overheard, how an
octogenarian widow with a walking stick had sneaked up on a couple of
swashbucklers from the Central Intelligence Agency were questions of immediate
concern. “What does a woman have to do to gain some attention around this
place?”

“Dreadful sorry, ma’am,” said Bobby,
in his most courtly manner. “We’ve been pining away for your companionship but
assumed you were enjoying a soothing respite from the likes of us two
polecats.”

“I was, indeed,” she said, “until it
reached the stage where I felt the two polecats were ignoring me.”

“Never,” Bobby assured her.
“Impossible. Say, how’d you like to take a little spin?”

“A spin? Me? You mean on your
motorcycle?”

Switters jumped in. “Not a good idea.
It’ll be dark before you know it.” He was right about that. It was not yet five
o’clock, but in Seattle in November, the diurnal house band played very short
sets.

“Let’s ride!” said Maestra, waving
her left arm in the air until its bracelets rang out like an Afro-Cuban rhythm
section in a bus wreck. “Unless Herr Alzheimer is playing tricks on me, I’ve
got an old leather jacket in the hall closet.”

There was no stopping them. She even
refused to wear a helmet, not wishing to look like a wimp next to Bobby, who
consistently violated the helmet law on the grounds that his head was his own
affair, cowlick and all. With some misgiving, Switters saw them off, then
wheeled into the living room and parked below the Matisse. The big blue nude
rose like a mountain range, an azure Appalachia of loaves, humps, and knobs, a
topographical maquette constructed from huckleberry jelly, a curvaceous cobalt
upland where clumps of wild asters clung precariously to the hillsides and the
bluebirds all sipped curaçao. Matisse’s nude was nude but not really naked,
which is to say, though she was beyond shame or embarrassment, she was far from
brazen. Her purpose was not to titillate but to inspire awe at the infinite
blueness of our finite world.

In her way, she was more innocent
than Suzy, wiser than Maestra; a woman such as Switters had never known nor
would ever know—or so he thought—and as such, perfectly suited to preside over
his musings of the moment.

Bobby is correct,
he mused. To
deny that young girls were throbbing hives of sexual honey was to be both
sexist and ageist. On the other hand, to steal samples of that honey or dupe
them out of it, or to view them as
only
hives or even as
primarily
hives was an equal or perhaps greater wrong. The big blue nude seemed to nod in
agreement. Taboos, however, were not good, either. Taboos were superstitions
with fangs on them, and if not transcended, they punctured the brain and
drained the spirit. A taboo was a crystallized knot of societal fear and must
be unraveled, cut through, or smashed if a people were to set themselves free.
Ancient Greeks had a concept they called “eating the taboo,” and the
agorhi
sect in India took a similar approach. As a path to liberation, these golden
Greeks and holy Hindus would deliberately break any and all of their culture’s
prevailing taboos in order to loosen their hold, destroy their power. It was an
active, somewhat radical method of triumphing over fear by confronting that
which frightened: embracing it, dancing with it, absorbing it, and moving past
it. It was a casting out of demons.

Wouldn’t it be to his betterment and,
perhaps, to society’s as well, to go on down to Sacramento and, in one way or
another, stare that taboo in the eye? Wouldn’t it? Or was this merely some
elaborate Swittersesque rationalization? (The big blue nude gave nary a sign.)

At 6
P
.
M
. he began to worry. At quarter
past, he revved up the fret machine. It was darker than the clam beds of Styx
out there, and a needle-nose rain had commenced to fall. Where could they be?
Certainly, something had gone wrong. In her frail condition, Maestra might have
lost her grip and fallen off. Bobby, hardly the most cautious of bikers, might
have skidded them into a lumber truck. Or a driver, typically unmindful of
motorcycles and further handicapped by the gloom and the rain, might have
plowed into them or run them over a curb. There
must
have been an
accident. What else would have delayed them? Switters dismissed any notion of
hanky-panky. There were limits to Bobby’s gallantry. She was a grandmother, for
God’s sake! She was older than salt.