Free The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe Page A

Right there in the midst of the other passengers’ hammock-swaddled bottoms, Keren and Shannon took turns sitting on the pot. Everett wrapped a blanket around each one like a tent with a head popping out at the top. The Brazilians couldn’t keep their eyes off the gringos who were gushing gringo misery out of their hindsides. They were disgusted and riveted. They twisted over sideways in their hammocks so as not to miss a moment of the spectacle. The redheaded, red-bearded gringo kept taking the pot of sloshing diarrheic rot through crowds of passengers, constantly bending way down with his reeking pot to pass under the hammocks or standing up with his reeking pot and leaning this way and that to hog-wrestle his way through the midair clutter of human haunches to reach the railing and dump the contents into the Madeira and weave his way back through the crowd with the chamber pot, knowing it would be no time before he had to slosh through them again with a potful of humiliation.
    The spectators talked about them constantly, out loud and in full voice, apparently assuming that the gringos couldn’t understand Portuguese. But Everett could.
    “She’s going to die, isn’t she,” one would cry, nodding toward Keren, who was down from 105 pounds to about 70, if that, and looked like the Red Death with a raging fever. “Of course she is,” another would say. “Malaria does quick work with a skinnybones like that one.”
    Everett would experience a very small, rueful lift of superiority. These smug Brazilians obviously couldn’t recognize typhoid fever when it was right in their faces.
    People could already tell that Keren was dying! One look and they knew that much! Everett implored the captain, a one-armed Brazilian who was also the owner, to go faster, straight to Porto Velho. Skip the stops in between! My wife is dying!
    “Look, comrade,” said the one-armed Brazilian, without so much as a trace of fellow feeling, “if your wife is supposed to die, that’s that. I won’t speed up for you.”
    In what seemed like barely an hour the ship pulled into shore in the middle of nowhere and stopped. No passengers were getting on or off. There was no platform and barely a dock. Unaccountably, the entire crew had slipped on red jerseys, even the one-armed captain. With a whoop they all left the ship and climbed up a steep embankment. They looked like a lot of little ladybugs on the way up. At the top, men in green jerseys awaited them.
    Godalmighty—they were stopping to play soccer!—and obviously they had arranged it well in advance.
    Keren, her face a fiery red, slipped in and out of consciousness. It was two hours before the one-armed captain and his crew returned to the ship, still togged out in soccer gear, in high spirits, laughing, making jokes, jolly jolly jolly flirting with pretty girls among the passengers.
    An eternity it took, but they finally reached the hospital in Porto Velho.
    “My wife and my daughter have typhoid fever,” Everett announced.
    The doctor took a good look at Keren and Shannon and said, “Looks like malaria to me.” He took drops of blood from Keren’s and Shannon’s fingers and put them on slides and examined them with a microscope…and began chuckling.
    Indignant, Everett said, “What are you laughing at?”
    “They have malaria, all right,” he said, “and not just a little.”
    He laughed some more, apparently at Everett’s ignorance. What made it even funnier was that Keren’s and Shannon’s bloodstreams had the highest levels of malaria he had ever come across in his whole career, and he treated malaria patients every day hahahaaaa!
    Every doctor, every nurse, every AD (Almost a Doctor), told Everett that Shannon might make it, but it was too late for Keren. He had wasted so much time with his own AD diagnosis of typhoid fever, she would never survive.
    But after two weeks of intensive care, she did—and would probably recover entirely…in time…which turned out to be