The Cuckoo Colloquium

19 - Pinky Bell

She woke in the sweaty hammock, confused. Where was she? Why was her bed so hard?

'Because I'm not home, I'm on the ground, still in the middle of this horrid rain forest!'

They had camped on the bank of the river, but there were no trees from which to string the hammocks, and the ground was as hard as packed clay.

Again, she had to pee. But it was her four-hour turn in the hammock, and she wriggled quietly, listening to the voice of Puso outside.

"We hug the shore and take it downstream as far as we can get."

She liked Puso's voice. It seemed so cosmopolitan, though the boy seemed just as screwed up as everybody else, maybe more so. He was probably waving his boxer-briefs with the hearts for attention, too, which was the only thing they all seemed to agree on-When the underpants flapped, everyone had to shut up, and they got a strange kind of reverence in the jungle.

"That's stupid," Nini snapped, "you can't travel a river, it curlicues like a cork screw."

"What if we make a raft and float downstream?" Outback asked. "We'll run into people-by the time we get to the sea, anyway."

The Australian had come up with an intriguing idea, and they discussed the pros and cons of raft design, and the strength of the current, and whether or not they would all drown at the first set of rapids.

"No tool, no raft," Dim said, tipping the consensus-They'd skip the idea of raft building.

"It's not what Robinson Crusoe would have done," Nini barked like an angry dog.

In her sleep, Moonch snorted in the hammock. Moonch's bare feet, just inches from Pinky Bell's face, reminded her of a fermented fish called kusaya, or stinky fish, that tasted okay, but had an extremely off-putting odor.

It was a blessing, though, to be able to close one's eyes in the hammock, bear the bad stink and not have to worry about insects, or leeches; even worse-snakes, and the horrid woes they caused from sleeping outside.

Her own feet throbbed with pain. She regretted bringing the pink heels instead of the brown hiking boots her mother had originally packed. Pinky Bell switched the shoes when her mother was on the phone, and that wasn't smart.

But now she had to get up and pee, though she didn't want to search for a bush to squat under all alone; she didn't like the idea of anything spying on her, especially when her pants were down...

Where was the wildlife, anyway? Had the jungle become some barren wasteland? Had the creatures all run off to the city? There were only so many job opportunities for animals outside the jungle, surely-even in Borneo.

"Isn't this the adventure we came for?" Puso said, "Trekking in this pristine world-the physical, mental, spiritual dimensions, they're nothing but therapeutic to the soul."

"It's all very zen," Windy added, raising his voice, "right, Pinky?"

"My name is not Pinky!" she hollered from the hammock.

Why couldn't he ever remember to say her name correctly? Americans were boorish people. And their country was loutish-the loutishist ...

She frowned in the dark: 'Can I say 'loutishist?' English grammar was so vexing!

Moonch stirred next to her. The large girl continued to broadcast her allegiance to some silly Buddhist sect by wearing all that orange-an orange scarf, shirt, and pants. But really, what would an American girl know about Buddhism? She was pretentious. Bewildering, too.