Free Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins

ether.
    In its place he left the following
announcement: “Don’t fret, Maestra, I’m still escorting Sailor into the Great
Green Hell for you—only now I’m doing it out of love.”
    And mostly he meant it.
    Pucallpa was the Dead Dog Capital of South America. Quite
likely, it was the Dead Dog Capital of the world. If any other city lay claim
to that title, its mayor and Chamber of Commerce were wisely silent on the
subject. Pucallpa did not boast of it, either—but Switters had eyes, had
nose. He recognized the Dead Dog Capital when he saw it and smelled it.
    Smell alone, however, wouldn’t have
tipped him off. There were so many noxious odors, organic and inorganic, in
Pucallpa—spoiled fish, spoiled fruit, decaying vegetation, swamp gas, jungle
rot, raw sewage, kerosene stoves, wood smoke, diesel fumes, pesticides, and the
relentlessly belched mephitis of an oil refinery and a lumber mill—that, on an
olfactory level, mere dead dogs could hardly hope to compete.
    Still, they were there, on view,
concentrated along the riverfront but also in midtown gutters, shanty yards,
vacant lots, unpaved side streets, outside the single movie theater, and beside
the airport tarmac. It might be fanciful to imagine many varieties: a dead
poodle on one corner, a Saint Bernard locked in mammoth rigor mortis on the
next, but, alas, the canine corpses of Pucallpa invariably were mongrels,
mutts, and curs and, moreover, seemed mainly to come in two colors—solid white
or solid black, with only the intermittent spot or two.
    To Switters, who cared even less for
domestic animals dead than alive, the question was, What was the cause of so
much doggy mortality? In his halting Spanish, he posed the question to several
residents of that on-again, off-again boom town, but never received more than a
shrug. In boom towns one paid attention to those things that might make one
rich and, failing at fortune, to those things that made one forget. Since there
was neither profit nor diversion in dead dogs, only the vultures seemed to
notice them. And for every dead dog, there was a full squadron of vultures. Pucallpa was the Vulture Capital of South America.
    “This is a baneful burg,” Switters
wailed to Sailor. “I don’t like to complain, you understand, whining being the
least forgivable of man’s sins, but Pucallpa, Peru, is polluted, contaminated,
decayed, rancid, rotten, sour, decomposed, moldy, mildewed, putrid, putrescent,
corrupt, debauched, uncultured, and avaricious. It’s also hot, humid, and
disturbingly vivid. Surely, a fine fowl like you is not remotely related to
those hatchet-headed ghouls—no, don’t look up!—circling in that stinking brown
sky. Sailor! Pal! We must get us out of here at once.”
    Easier said than done. As Switters
learned from a booking agent soon after completing a walking tour of the town,
a contingent of resurgent Sendero Luminoso guerrillas had attacked the local
airfield three days earlier, destroying or damaging nearly a dozen small
planes. Only two air taxis were presently flying, and both were booked for
weeks to come, ferrying engineers, bankers, and high-stake hustlers back and
forth between Pucallpa and the projects in which they had interest.
    Sorely distressed, Switters was
pacing the broken pavement outside the booking office, sweating, swearing,
barely resisting the urge to kick a power pole, a trash pile, or the odd dead
dog, when, from inside the pyramid-shaped parrot cage that sat with his
luggage, there came a voice, high as a falsetto though raspy as a pineapple.
“Peeple of zee wurl, relax,” is what it said.
    It was the first time the bird had
spoken since leaving Seattle .
Thirty minutes later, in an overpriced but blessedly air-conditioned hotel
room, it spoke again—the same sentence, naturally—and while there are those who
may find this silly, the words lifted Switters’s spirits.
    The flight over the Andes , the poison air of Pucallpa , the
brain-boiling heat and