The Cuckoo Colloquium

24 - Pinky Bell

'Doesn't jungle come in any other color?'

Those were Pinky Bell's thoughts as they hiked, though a dense fog hung over the canopy, blocking out the sun. The only good thing about the fog to Pinky Bell was that the temperature cooled.

"Please erect the knob prior to insertion," a sultry voice said from the canopy above, and a family of spider monkeys, the new possessors of Windy's GPS, cackled as if sharing some bawdy joke.

"They're playing with it again!" Windy hissed up at the infinite greenery.

Pinky Bell figured the monkeys were following in hopes of getting food. But all she and the two guys had eaten that day was a bag of crab-flavored Tam Tam crisps, shared three ways.

They walked south, uphill and then downhill, Outback leading the way. The trees had drawn in close, and the near-impenetrability of the flora disguised the rugged outcrops of hills that seemed to crisscross their path like furious brush strokes on a green canvas.

Outback started whistling-an upbeat little tune that she recognized from somewhere, from some old movie, generations long past.

"My mouth feels like dead skin and he's whistling The Bridge on the River Kwai," Windy grumbled.

"It's called "Colonel Bogey," Outback snapped back, "and if you're going to stay with me you'd best pick up the pace."

Outback skipped over a fallen log and marched on, dismissing the two teens like unwanted playmates, disappearing into the overarching canopy of thick green.

Windy screwed up his face. "What's he mean if we're gonna stay with him? - Where are we gonna go? - HE'S the adult!"

They hiked in the fog the whole day. By late afternoon it was clear to Pinky Bell that she would not see the sun-like it had fallen back, quiet and resigned to the dreary, ashen silence of the rainforest.

Trudging along, she smelled herself and gasped at the stench-The bacteria, it was feeding on them all. And she grew pensive: at least something was eating, besides the mosquitoes.

But it was the leeches that worried her far more than her stinky body, or the mosquitoes. It was like being stalked by little alien carnivores, and they wanted her blood, those rubbery rogues! Leeches went for the legs or the torso, and the bites bled for quite some time, with a painful itching afterwards. Leeches were tough, too, and camouflaged against the rotting leaves on the ground. Even standing and scanning her perimeter in a slow, 360-degree sweep wasn't good enough, because they could drop, like skillful paratroopers, from the leaves in the canopy. As an enemy, leeches were seasoned and indomitable, they knew the terrain, too; once they smelled her blood, they kept coming, creeping with silent, rubbery resolve.

Pinky Bell often stopped, as if sensing some kind of leech ambush. Sometimes she would tiptoe along like she was traversing a minefield, and the guys would stop and click their tongues, or grumble something unpleasant, either about her personally, or about the Japanese, in general.

Twilight arrived as quickly as an express package, just after they had mounted the gritty bank of a swift, shallow river. She sat on the ground, watching Windy fill the two containers from the shimmering river water, and then pop in his last chlorine dioxide tablet. The insects scurried under her like urban rush-hour commuters, dashing off madly to somewhere, and she watched the color of their camp change from orange, to sepia, to a mauve, then to a slow, dark blue.

Pinky Bell liked the strange, new world of the rain forest. She admired the emerald-green leaves, which sometimes winked at her, and the tiny droplets of water on the leaves, sparkling in the early evening breeze.