Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

  If it was doom that intrigued them, however, the Fatima faithful got their money’s worth. The white-clad apparition predicted straightaway that a plague would fall upon the land soon after the Great War ended and that two of the shepherd children would be among its victims. In 1919, first Francisco, then Jacinta succumbed to the influenza epidemic that killed twenty million people in Europe and North America. The Lady had hit a chilling bull’s-eye with that one, and she was only slightly off center with her prophecy of approaching famine: almost on cue, a vine fungus spread through Europe, lasted more than three years, and left no grape unspoiled.

  Her forecast in the second set of predictions that Russia would “spread its errors” throughout the world could probably also be considered a hit. Strongly disposed toward threats and scoldings—the Lady repeatedly warned that if people didn’t amend their lives, beg forgiveness, and run marathons on their rosary beads there was going to be hell to pay—she was particularly hard on Communists, obviously viewing Communism as something more amplitudinously evil than a mere inherently flawed economic system. Rather like John Foster Dulles, thought Switters, but he didn’t say as much for fear he might uncontrollably fire a saliva shot at the polished hardwood floor or the antique rag rug that lay upon it. Bobby would never have forgiven him if he hadn’t.

  It was Thursday afternoon, and Suzy, a shade less reluctantly than the day before, had come straight home from school. The two of them were in the den, sorting through the printouts of their Internet research, concentrating, at Switters’s urging, on the Fatima predictions and warnings. Suzy had wanted to change into jeans and a sweatshirt, but at his request she remained attired in her school uniform. Whether his aim was to reduce temptation or to torture himself with it was probably debatable. In any event, he ceased counting her pleats long enough to wave a sheet of paper in the charged air that separated them. “This!” he exclaimed. “Right here. It’s the only tidbit of information we’ve uncovered in three days that could spike the punch at the teddy bears’ picnic.”

  “Hello?”

  “Right here.” The printout, which he now handed her, concerned Our Lady’s third and final prophecy. At the time of its delivery, the children would say nothing of this last prediction except that it was of great consequence and would bring joy to some and sorrow to others.

  Around 1940, some twenty-three years after it was supposedly issued, the nun formerly known as Lucia Santos wrote down the secret prophecy and sealed it in an envelope with instructions that it be opened in 1960, or upon her death should she die earlier than that date. The envelope was locked in the office safe of the bishop of Leiria in Portugal, where Church sources said it remained until 1957, when Pope Pius XII had it brought, under tight security, to Rome. Pius was itching to rip it open, but Lucia was still alive. In fact, Lucia was still breathing in 1997, whereas Pius XII died in 1958 without ever satisfying his curiosity.

  While the Church would neither confirm nor deny it, highly placed Vatican sources claimed that at some point in 1960, Pius’s successor, Pope John XXIII, did, finally, open the mystery envelope—and wept for three days over the “terrible news” it contained. Throughout the remainder of his life, John XXIII adamantly refused to discuss it with anyone, and the message was reputed to rest in a vault at the papal palace, unread by a soul save that sobbing pontiff nearly forty years in the past.

  “Yeah,” said Suzy. “That’s pretty wild. But you know, how could I write about it when, like, I don’t know what it says.”

  “We could speculate.”

  “You mean? . . .”

  “I mean, extrapolating from her two published predictions, we could try to guess the content of the final and missing one. Might be fun. What possible prognostication from a controversial source could set a modern pope to blubbering for three whole days?”

  “But bring joy to some.”

  “Exactly. Think about it.”

  From the way Suzy screwed up her face, she was thinking hard about it. “You’re cute when you frown,” said Switters.

  She seemed daunted, perplexed by her stepbrother’s proposal, and eventually she vetoed it. “No, I just want to tell the story. You know, tell about the children and Our Lady and all the stuff that happened. Even Sister Francis doesn’t know much about it. She said she didn’t. And the class is, like, clueless. It’s kind of a beautiful story, so I just want to write it down for everybody. Okay?”

  Switters shrugged. “It’s your party. I’ll help you organize the material if you’d like, and you can take it from there.”

  She lowered her eyes. “Switters? Are you disappointed?”

  “Nein,” he lied. “Only thing that disappoints me is that the authorities haven’t locked you up somewhere. You’re too damn cute to be at large. You’re a public menace.”

  “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 bacon sandwiches, taking them out by the swimming pool to eat. The pool had been emptied for the season and covered with a blue plastic tarp that for a zip of an instant transported him back to Inti’s Virgin and the tattered canopy with which the dory had tried in vain to hold back the Amazon sun. In November, the Sacramento sun needed no such restraint, although it was certainly warmer there than in Seattle, and drier, as well. The golf course that bordered the stucco ranch house that Eunice had won in the marriage lottery was as green as Socrates’s last cocktail, but everything between it and the coastal range to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east was so amber, dusty, flea-bitten, and buff it reminded him of the lion population in a second-rate zoo. It was visual cereal that, milkless, crunched in his eyes, and he realized that were he to strike out across those stubble fields where wheat and barley had recently been sheared, he’d be better off in a wheelchair than on foot. Even the steely soles of Inti’s feet would have been diced.

  Done with breakfast, he decided to attempt meditation. It was never easy to commence—his internal river of thought and verbiage had a velocity that overflowed or crumbled Buddha’s dams—and on that morning it was particularly difficult to get started. Bobby had taught him not to wrench the valves, however, so he sat passively, neither fostering thought nor trying not to think, and gradually the flow subsided—except for one unstemmable trickle, and that trickle’s source was Suzy. After about an hour of that, he thought What the hell!, and gave it up. He hadn’t made it into the medulla of the medulla, but he’d gotten closer to the Void than airports are to most major cities; he’d glimpsed its invisible skyline, breathed its odorless smokes; and since it was eternal, knew it’d be there the next time he bought a ticket. Just not today. Today, for better or worse, was a day to think about Suzy.

  There is something so sweet about a young girl’s sexual longings, he thought. There’s a sad and happy sweetness in them. Her longing was not for orgasmic release: that would come with the years. Her longing was not even for an amplification of the genital quaver that her body for some time would have been softly trilling; nor was it strictly a longing for love and affection: in fact, the more love and affection a girl was receiving from her family and friends, the less that was a part of it. As much as anything else, it was a longing for information. There was information about men; about being with men, alone, in dark places, that she sensed she must access in order to navigate the mysterious vastness of her life-to-be. Her subconscious mind was signaling to her that such information was essential to her very survival in the adult world, and her hormones, for reasons of their own, were augmenting those signals with a barrage of swelling itches and tingles. Implicit in most sexual yearni
ng was a deep-seated desire to connect somehow with the mystery of being, but the yearning of the young was overlaid with a scary yet optimistic desire to solve the smaller (though they’d hardly seem small at the time) mysteries of the adult universe, a universe in which the penis seemed to cast a long shadow and the vagina formed a gateway to both shame and salvation. If the longing of many older women lacked that sweetness, it was because they already had gleaned the information for which young girls were so shyly desperate, and may have found it disappointing and unsatisfactory, particularly where men were concerned.

  Switters went back indoors and rolled about the house for a while, maneuvering around utterly obsolete churns and spinning wheels and uncomfortable wooden rocking chairs. Were he ever offered a voyage in a time machine, Colonial America would be far down his list of preferred destinations, although he suspected that Jefferson, Franklin, and the lot would be worthy drinking companions, maybe even deserving of C.R.A.F.T. Club membership, which was not something one could say of a single governmental leader of the past hundred and fifty years.

  In contrast to the harsh pragmatism of the Early American decor, the contents of his mother’s closets, which he examined now in some detail, were stylish and luxurious. Hanging there, bereft of the flesh whose silhouettes they mimicked, were soft, powdery pantsuits, slithery black cocktail dresses, and matte suede jackets trimmed with lamb, each flying an inconspicuous but haughty little flag emblazoned with an Italian name (Oscar de la Renta, Dolce & Gabbana) that he’d have recognized if he read Vogue or even Newsweek instead of Tricycle and Soldier of Fortune. Eunice did them justice, too, he had to admit, though he failed to find her, at fifty-seven, hair in a hennaed bun, face in a brittle tuck, to be as buzzy with allure as he remembered her mother, Maestra, to be at that age. Dwayne’s closet, which he also examined, was filled with goofy golfing garb and shiny suits Switters wouldn’t have worn to a Chiang Mai cockfight.

  Gradually he made his way to the door of Suzy’s room, but although he went so far as to grasp the knob, he just could not allow himself to violate its sanctity. He’d never been that kind of spy. He sat there for a long time, however. Thinking.