Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  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.

  He had just decided to give them ten more minutes before calling the police when the telephone burbled. A table was sideswiped and a floorlamp flattened on his way to the phone. Evidently he needed more practice in the Invacare 9000. He was not yet the starship commander he fancied himself to be.

  “Bobby! What’s happened? Is she all right?”

  “All right? Yeah, she’s fine—except for being stubborn as a frostbit fireplug. We’re having a big fight, to tell you the truth.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re at the video store. I’m dying to see Blade Runner again—you know as good as me it’s the best damn movie ever made—but your granny’s got her mind set on some fou-fou flick about the expatriate art scene in Paris in the twenties. Guys with big noses sitting around in sidewalk cafés arguing over whether Gertrude Stein weighs more than Ernest Hemingway, or some unhappy shit like that.”

  “You must mean The Moderns. It’s a delicious film. You’d lick your chops over it. Why don’t you just rent them both?”

  “Because, Solomon, in case you forgot, we agreed to play CD-ROM Monopoly with her later on, and that game takes longer than the lemonade line in Hell. I got to fly tomorrow night.”

  “In that case,” said Switters, feeling like the vice president at a Senate deadlock, “I cast my deciding vote for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Now come on home.” He slammed down the receiver.

  Bobby left the next morning. As he zipped himself into his leathers at the front door, he said, “We really didn’t dig very deep into your situation. We talked about how to break the curse or whatever it is—and I’m still ready and willing to waltz down to the Amazon and seize any operational opportunity that should arise, you say the word—but we never got into the significance of the thing. What it means, where it came from. Was it a well-thought-out decision, that particular taboo? Is it traditional to ban interlopers and visiting firemen from touching certain things, in your case the earth? Is earth-touching symbolic in some cryptic way, or was it arbitrary, just a matter of a wily ol’ jungle wiseguy having off-the-cuff sport with a city slicker? And how does it tie in with your yopo trip? What’d you see or learn on that trip that was so heavy or precious or privileged that you would have to pay for it by spending the rest of your life with your heels elevated? And just because some goofy limey bush professor keeled over from Kadockywocky juju, does that necessarily mean you would? Boy howdy! There’s a fieldful of stones we left unturned.”

  “I’ve been flipping them like pancakes myself, and suppose I’ll keep at it unless the company creates a major distraction for me.”

  Bobby chuckled. “I’d love to be a fly on the pickle factory ceiling when you report for duty in that hospital hotrod. At least travel for the disabled is easier nowadays. There a direct flight from Seattle to D.C.?”

  “Probably, but I don’t book it. I fly into New York and take the train down, so that I never have to patronize an airport named for John Foster Dulles.” After saying “Dulles,” Switters immediately expectorated, and Bobby did likewise. In such aesthetic harmony was their dual expulsion of salivary projectiles that they could have represented the U.S. in synchronized spitting. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter that we didn’t spend this all too rare reunion dissecting and analyzing my peculiar state of affairs. There’ll be plenty of time to ponder End of Time, even if today is tomorrow. And there’re happenings in this life that simply don’t lend themselves to rational interpretation. To look at them logically can be to look at them wrongly. Logic can distort as well as clarify. What’s important is—well, my psyche was a pregnant mouse at a cat show when you arrived, I was in a fair amount of disarray, but you showed me a good time, gave me some laughs, got me relaxed. Thanks to you, pal, I can now approach my prospects with a relatively clear mind.”

  “Clear enough to stay away from little Suzy?”

  “Well . . .”

  Bobby shook his head reproachfully. “I sure hope Hell has wheelchair access.”

  “If not, I may have to settle for Paradise.” (In his cerebral data base, crammed as it was with etymological privity [some might say pedantry, but there was nothing the least bit trivial about those underpinnings of modern language that were by extension the underpinnings of modern consciousness], he knew the word paradise to be derived from Old Persian for “walled garden” or “enclosed orchard”—but the significance of this, while he was still many months removed from the Syrian oasis, obviously would not have occurred to him.) “Heaven or Hades, as long as Pee-wee Herman’s on the premises I’ll be content. Pee-wee may be becoming my idol.”

  “I can appreciate that,” said Bobby, thinking of the video they had watched before Maestra bankrupted them both at Monopoly. “It’s the innocence.”

  “It’s the joie de vivre.”

  They embraced in the manner that had raised more than a few cowboy eyebrows. Bobby walked down the steps and mounted the Harley. “By the way,” he called, “you don’t have to sweat anymore about what to tell your granny. I talked to her last night on our ride. It’s all taken care of. She’s cool as an ice worm in snow melt.” He roared away.

  Whatever story Bobby had fed Maestra, it proved effective. As Switters wheeled about her spacious house at top speed, slaloming through an obstacle course of furniture, skidding around corners—practicing, honing his skills—she smiled knowingly, approvingly, almost with a wink. If only Capt. Nut Case had given Suzy a similar briefing!

  Alas, as Bobby had hinted it might, the wheelchair had a dampening effect on Suzy’s presumed and anticipated passions. When she came home from school (rather late, he thought) on Monday afternoon to find him chair-bound in his mother’s parlor, she emitted a sharp cry of dismay and approached him tentatively, with grave concern. “Had a minor mishap in South America,” he quipped, and she brightened. But when he, foolishly perhaps, confessed that his confinement might be long-term, if not permanent, her horrified frown reappeared.

  Not that she was unsympathetic. Au contraire. From that moment on, she was solicitous and attentive nearly to a fault, but her ministrations were those of a nurse, not a nymph. His condition had awakened in her maternal and nurturing instincts, altogether admirable qualities in their place, but hardly the emotions for which he yearned. Although those big sea-squirt eyes of hers, poker chips in Neptune’s deep casino, still regarded him adoringly, the coquetry in them had given way to pity. Pity. Lust’s worst enemy.

  There was something else. When on Tuesday, Suzy again was late from school, Switters inquired of his mother, Eunice, of her possible whereabouts. “Oh,” said Eunice, “she’s probably hanging out with Brian.”

  “Who’s Brian?”

  His mother smiled. “I think our little Suzy has a boyfriend.”

  It took every Asian breathing technique he’d ever learned, and one or two he improvised for the occasion, to rescue his brain from the Tabasco-filled birdbath into whose crimson waters it had suddenly fallen. When the searing and flopping finally abated, he felt a measure of relief at the way things were turning out. Almost concurrently, he felt a disappointment so profound he thought he might weep. It was similar to the mixture of relief and disappointment a moth must feel at the extinguishing of a candle.

  If he thought he was free of the exquisite torture o
f obsession, however, if he believed fate had dictated he lay that shining burden down, he was mistaken. When, at about six o’clock, she came down the hall to his room with a can of Pepsi and a plate of brownies, came in her school uniform (pleated blue skirt and loose white blouse), came with her tiny gold crucifix twinkling like an eastern star above the twin mosques of her breasts (my, how they’d grown! that old training bra couldn’t begin to corral them now), came with her round rump ticking like two casseroles in an oven, came with her smart smile and guileless gaze, he could sense the want spreading throughout his organism like a cotton-candy cancer, and his mania once more had the wind to its back.

  Suzy kissed him on the mouth, but without tongue or duration. “Don’t eat all these brownies now, and spoil your dinner.”

  “Did you bake them?” In his mind he licked the spoon, her fingers, knuckles, wrists, forearms. . . .

  “Yeah, but, like, not from scratch.” She sat down on a hassock. “If you’re going to hang in your room like this, you ought, you know, to be in the bed.”

  “No, I oughtn’t. But I’d be delighted to jump into bed if you’d jump in with me.”

  She blushed, though only lightly. “Oh, Switters! You’re so-oo bad.”

  “That isn’t bad, that’s good. Don’t they teach you anything at your penguin academy?”

  “Next year, I’m transferring to public school. Catholic school . . . I mean, I love the religious training and stuff, but a lot of the rules are just so lame.” She closed her fingers around her throat to illustrate in some fashion the lameness of parochial regulations. “My dad doesn’t mind, ‘cause he got excommunicated for, you know, divorcing my mom and marrying your mom. Switters, has your mom been married lots of times?”

  “Let’s put it this way: my mother’s on a first-name basis with the staff at several honeymoon hotels. I believe she may get a discount. Now, speaking of honeymoons, darling, don’t you think it’s time we started practicing for ours?” He inched the wheelchair closer to her hassock.

  Giggling nervously, she shook her head. She had cut her hair and wore it now in a bob that, while better shaped and slightly longer, was not unlike a blonde version of the Amazon coif. The effect was somewhat childish, somewhat boyish. “You shouldn’t even talk like that. You being injured and stuff.”

  “Nothing wrong with me that your pretty little sushi roll wouldn’t improve.”

  “Switters! That’s not what your grandmother says.”

  He blinked. “My grandmother? What did she say? When?”

  “Last night. Remember when we were eating dinner and the phone rang? I ran to get it ‘cause I thought it might be Bri . . . like, this friend of mine, you know. Well, it was your grandma up in Seattle. She told me how delicate your condition is and that, like, if I should ever be tempted to, like, let you do anything romantic or nasty, I should bear in mind that it could kill you. ‘It’d probably be the death of him,’ she said. So, you see.”

  Damn that Maestra! “That meddling old. . . . She’s lying through her teeth, and even her teeth are false.”

  Suzy stood. “She’s just trying to protect you.”

  “I don’t need protection. I’m sturdy as a Budweiser draft horse.”

  “You are, are you? In that wheelchair? Hello?” She moved toward the door. “You behave yourself. I’ll come get you when dinner’s ready. We’re both just trying to take care of you, you know. I think your grandmother’s way cool.” Suzy blew him a quick kiss and left the room.

  “She cheats at Monopoly!” he called after her. It was all he could think to say.

  This is ridiculous. I know life, the way humans live it, is absurd more often than not, and I don’t particularly mind. I rather like the smell of absurdity in the morning. At the onset of a potentially dull day, a whiff of the genuinely ludicrous can be exhilarating. But this situation is too much. It’s too much for me. It’s stupid. I admit, I kind of enjoyed it at first, the sheer unexpected outlandishness of it, but now the novelty has definitely worn off, it’s become a prime-time drag, it’s drying up my syrup of wahoo.

  I’m going to stand and walk away from this geriatric golf cart. I’m going to bound down the hall like an impala with a pack of hyenas on its butt and snatch Suzy up in my arms, which have toned up quite nicely, thank you, since I’ve been pushing these hand rims; I’m going to sweep her off her feet and chew the buttons right off her blouse, I don’t care if the whole family sees me do it. I can’t take any more of this. It’s silliness worthy of the U.S. Congress, it’s estúpido supremo.

  Bracing the heels of his hands on the chair’s Naugahyde arms, Switters lifted himself off its seat, extending and bending, simultaneously, his right leg until the tip of his black sneaker was a mere centimeter or less above the oval rag rug, one of many such carpets that contributed to the Early American decor of the rambling suburban ranch house. R. Potney Smithe’s death was undoubtedly a result of the power of suggestion—a kind of extreme version of the tactics of Hollywood and Madison Avenue—and only the mentally weak are susceptible to such psychological manipulation. Hey, even if Today Is Tomorrow possesses some cause-and-effect magical faculty totally unfamiliar to science, its reach surely is geographically restricted, it can’t extend thousands of miles to north-central California.

  He wiggled his toes until he could almost feel the molecular interaction of foot with floor. Yet he didn’t quite make contact. Suppose it’s real, the Kandakandero magic, suppose I touch this ugly rug and it strikes me dead: so what? I certainly can’t go on in this manner for the rest of my life. Under such a cloud. It’s oppressive. I’m a prisoner in an invisible jail. Worse, I’m an object of pity to the opposite sex. Rimbaud was wrong! I’m not putting up with it. Fuck your taboo and the snake it rode in on. I’m free! Kill me if you can, pal. Go ahead. I dare you.

  Although he pressed down harder on the chair arms, however, although he raised his buttocks higher and waggled his toes faster, he remained a quarter centimeter from actual contact with the floor. Chickpeas of sweat popped out on his brow, arteries popped out in his eyeballs. His Adam’s apple turned into an Adam’s grapefruit, and the ringing in his ears sounded uncomfortably like the whine Potney Smithe emitted immediately before keeling over. Whew!

  His biceps started to quiver—perhaps he had misjudged the extent to which they’d recently firmed up—and his right leg quivered, too. Yet, like a model threatened with loss of employment, he held the pose.

  The thing about death, though, is that it eliminates so many options. At least, in terms of the personality game. As long as I’m alive, there’s always a chance that something extremely interesting will develop from all this. Who can guess where it might eventually lead or what I might learn from it? Doesn’t the infinite emerge from the fiasco? And any time I want to test it or bring it to resolution, that option is only two inches away. What’s the big hurry? There may be red-eye gravy for dinner.

  And there may be other ways to woo the darling Suzy. Indeed, no sooner had he relaxed his posture and settled back into his seat, with a long breath and a frangible whimper, than he began to formulate . . . well, if not a cunning strategy at least a fresh approach. He would, he told himself, concentrate his energy upon assisting her with her term paper. In the process, he’d open the charm taps, let her see how vigorous and entertaining he could be, treat her to displays of pith and pluck that would gradually dispel any image she might have of him as sickly or incomplete. He’d turn her pity inside out, kick it off its ivory perch, feed it to the foxes of ecstasy, and, while he was at it, feed Brian baby to the pterodactyls of oblivion. And if that course went awry, if it backfired, if the fact that he was no longer pantingly petitioning for consensual copulation succeeded only in confirming to Suzy that his “injuries” had rendered him feeble and fruitless, then he would consider telling her the truth. All of it: Sailor Boy to penis poke.

  He sighed again, massaged his arms, and, like a railyard dick chasing hobos off a flatcar, swept the beans of sweat f
rom his brow.

  After dinner, under the semiwatchful eye of his mother, her stepmother, Switters and Suzy huddled in the den to discuss her paper, the subject of which was to be Our Lady of Fatima. Since there was a gap in Switters’s erudition where this particular virgin was concerned, Suzy filled him in.

  It seems that on May 13, 1917, three shepherd children from Fatima, Portugal, were visited (allegedly visited, though Suzy did not qualify it thusly) by a woman (Suzy said lady) in a white gown and veil while tending their sheep in the hills outside of the village. The children said that the woman—the vision of the woman—told them to return to that place on the thirteenth of each month until the following October, at which time she would reveal her identity. The kids complied, she dropped in on them briefly each month as promised, and on October 13, she spoke dramatically and at some length, disclosing, among other things, that she traveled under the name of the Lady of the Rosary. She bade the little sheepherders to recite the rosary every day and asked that a chapel be built in her honor. Switters suggested that this last smacked of raw egoism, but Suzy only frowned at him and went on.

  Although the Roman Catholic Church never officially proclaimed the children’s rosary-touting visitor to be a reappearance on earth of the Virgin Mary, it authorized devotion to her in 1932, and had a shrine with a basilica erected at Fatima, to which thousands of pilgrims were still attracted each year. “Maybe that’s where I’ll take you on our honeymoon,” whispered Switters, and for a second he could have sworn he saw a flicker of excited expectation in her eyes.

  The best was yet to come. At some point during the October visitation, the Fatima Lady issued to the children three sets of predictions and warnings, two of which she urged them to immediately make public. “Warnings! Predictions! This is more like it,” said Switters. “You be nice and listen,” said Suzy.

  There wasn’t a great deal more to hear, as it turned out. Regarding the Fatima Lady’s prophecies, Suzy was short on detail. “Wars and big floods and, uh, famines and earthquakes and stuff.”