Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (3 page)

“Genes, Maestra. Abilities I
inherited from you.”

“Heh!” The old woman beamed in spite
of herself. “You were clever, in
some
areas, but I’m still surprised
they’d recruit you, considering your extracurricular activities and your weak
moral fiber.”

“It’s government service, Maestra.
Morality’s scarcely an issue.”

“You have a point there,
unfortunately. So what monkey business has that agency of yours got your nose
into now? What’re you up to? What’re you doing in
Seattle
? How long before you leave me?”

“Upon the rosy-fingered dawn.”

“Tomorrow? No!”

“I fly to
South America
first thing in the morning—but I’ll be back in a wink.
Actually, I’m supposed to be starting a thirty-day leave, but the yard boss
insisted I postpone it just long enough to dash down to
Lima
and back. Really, I’ll probably only be there
overnight.”

He saw her eyes narrow behind her
spectacles.

“Assassination?”

“I don’t do windows. You’ve been
watching too much TV. Company recruited a very promising young dude down there,
indigenous operative, fronted him a new Honda as a signing bonus, and now he’s
backing out on the deal.”

“You’re going to terminate him with
extreme prejudice.”

“Get real. I’m gonna lobby him, try
to talk him into staying aboard.”

“Why you?”

“I guess because we have similar
backgrounds. He earned a double master’s from the
University
of
Miami
.
Computer science and languages.”

“No modern poetry?” She was needling
him.

“Methinks not, Maestra. But I bet he
can quote a line or two from
Howl
.”

“And what’ll you do on your vacation?
May I expect another intrusion?”

“Absolutely. Another bangle, too.
First thing when I get back. Uh, I was hoping you’d let me use the cabin up at
Snoqualmie
Pass
for a week or two. I’ve sucked way too much cement
this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a
brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees. Then I may hop
over to
Sacramento
briefly, regale the family.”

“Including Suzy?”

“Uh, well, uh, Suzy quite possibly
may be on the premises. I believe she’s going to school.”

“Of
course
she’s going to
school! She’s a
teenager
!”

Maestra fell quiet and remained quiet
for such a lengthy period that Switters wondered if she might have nodded off,
as the elderly are wont to do. Either that or she was truly very angry. He
cleared his throat. He cleared it again. Louder now.

“
South America
,” she said abruptly.

“Yes.”

“Nice.”

“Not nice. No.
South America
holds a minimum of charm for this buckaroo.”

“I suppose. The death squads, the
poverty, the corruption, the destruction of nature.”

“Hmm, well, yes, there’s
that
.”
He scratched himself, as if thinking of
South America
made him itch. “And then there’s the fact that it’s
just too goddamn vivid.”

She regarded him quizzically, but
when she spoke she asked not what he meant by “vivid” but to what country,
exactly, was he traveling in
South
America
?

“
Peru
.”

“
Peru
. Yes. That’s what I understood.
Lima
,
Peru
.”

There followed another long silence,
but this time he could tell she wasn’t drifting in any geriatric ozone. Her
eyes simultaneously narrowed and brightened until they looked like the
apertures through which
Tabasco
droplets enter the world, and the
zing zing zing
of synaptic archery was
very nearly audible.

“Jeez,” he muttered eventually,
shaking his head. “If J. Robert Oppenheimer had thought that hard, he’d have
invented video poker instead of the A-bomb.”

Maestra smiled sardonically. “Prove
to me,” she said, “that chivalry can still eat lunch in this town.” With a
rattle of bracelets, she extended both arms. “I need to be excused.”

Switters was taken aback at how light
she was, how frail. Her body was a husk compared to the meaty pulp of her
spirit and her voice. Yet once he had helped her to her feet, she left the room
rather briskly, barely relying on the rustic mahogany cane that she seemed to
sport mainly for effect. He heard her rat-a-tatting it along the banister posts
as she climbed the stairs.

After tossing his trench coat over a
modem (underneath, he wore a gray Irish tweed suit and a solid red T-shirt), he
strolled to the library windows. Maestra’s house sat high on the bluffs of the
Magnolia District, so called because a botanically challenged early explorer
had mistaken its profusion of madrona trees for an unrelated species that
graced more southerly climes. Magnolia’s cliffs overlooked the shipping lanes
through which all manner of vessels, from warships to oil tankers to funky
little salmon-snaggers, sailed from the Pacific to
Seattle
’s docks by way of the
Strait of Juan de Fuca
and
Puget
Sound
. Maestra’s second
husband had been a sea captain and owner of tugboats, and he liked to keep an
eye on the tides. On this drizzly day, the captain wouldn’t have seen very
much. The sky and the water looked like separate panels of the same
chalk-fogged blackboard. Nature had erased the diagrammed sentences and
multiplication tables, leaving a view that was all pan and no orama.

Switters turned from the misty void
and was instantly confronted with its opposite: namely, a well-defined object
of lurid coloration. It was the pumpkin, only its orangeness had become so
intense it seemed to be undergoing spontaneous combustion right there on the
library table. Switters didn’t know whether to reach for a fire extinguisher or
fall down and worship. The thing was blazing—and spinning, as well. At least,
it appeared to be, for a minute or two. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Then he
remembered.

He had forgotten about ingesting the
XTC. It was starting to come on, and come on strong. Knowing that 150
milligrams of 3, 4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, to call it by its rightful
name, would not produce hallucinations, he figured that his present-moment
awareness must be substantially heightened. With that in mind, he pulled up a
chair and sat directly facing the gourd. It was no longer afire, but it was
very
pretty and
very
friendly, and Switters felt compelled to caress its
haptic contours.

“We search for the door in the side
of the pumpkin,” he whispered, “but unlike Cinderella’s coach, it is drawn only
by its own slow ripening.” (Where was this coming from?) “Distracted by the
toothy glitter of corn, mice leave it to round, to orange: a globe of lost
continents, a faceless head, its true identity known only to the Halloween
knife and certain deputies of the pie police. O pumpkin, pregnant squaw
bladder, hardiest of moons, scarecrow’s beachball, in the name of farmers’
daughters everywhere, remove your hood and—”

“Switters!” Maestra had entered the
room behind him. “What the hell are you saying to that poor fruit? Is this 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.”