The Cuckoo Colloquium

37 - Dim

When he opened his eyes on the little ledge he knew exactly where he was, and what had happened.

His body throbbed, especially his right arm, like it had been run over by the minivan ... He slowly raised it and studied the hand and fingers, which were swollen to that of a cricket glove.

He was wobbly and didn't trust himself to stand on the narrow ledge. But he could feel his strength returning in a slow, no-doubt surge, as if the tide were washing life back in to him.

"I will live," he mumbled in the tongue of his father, awed at the turn of divine events.

He lay there and recalled what had happened, jubilant that the venom had passed through without stopping his heart.

"I will live!" This time he smiled. The swelling would go down with some oil from the camphor tree, or maybe from the lavender flowers.

Eventually, he stood up, and then he was able to shamble slowly down to the rough ground, picking up his small backpack, which waited patiently, snarled in the scruffy plant below him.

His thoughts turned outward ... 'Oh, I'm so stupid!' How Fat Hus would scream-for destroying the boat, for making trouble with the indigenous people, for losing the tourists...

The tourists! Had he forgotten them? The kids would never forgive him-they'd curse him from their jungle graves!

It was time to admit that he was not a good navigator; he lacked any real sense of orientation. It always happened that when the river rose with the rainfall, everything looked different to him.

"You just have to know these things," the other guides used to say, "they're like the personality traits of your own father."

"But I don't know my father!" Dim had rejoined, "he did a runner when I was just a kid."

Another guide had insisted that the forest possessed personality traits, but that it revealed these traits only if you were willing to spend your life understanding them-your whole life! - "If you're too inexperienced to know these traits," the guide had warned, "then wandering in the forest was like drifting in an ocean of ultimate doom-everything will go badly."

Dim would find their graves, no matter how long it took. And he would give an accounting to the authorities as accurately as he could. And until he had been fired, or jailed, or killed in some revenge attack, Dim was still on the job-though he didn't hold out much hope of getting paid for all this lost time.

"I may not be right for this kind of work," he mumbled on the ledge.

A new set of self-blame set in, and his head hurt something awful, like someone had come up from behind him and whacked him hard with a boat paddle. But it was also like something had jarred loose, a new understanding...

"I don't want to be no stinkin' farmer!" - He remembered those final words of his father, before the man jilted them for the city. He had left them-Why? - Because he was afraid, afraid to raise children while relying on the soil for his crops. He was afraid to fail.

"I'm not afraid!"

Dim now had a plan, a good business plan-he would negotiate those fine pig turds from the longhouses, transport them back to his mother's fields, and there grow the champion Brussels' sprouts!

"My father's a quitter-but not his son!"

It all seemed as clear as a cool glass of the carbonated water they served at the Rain Forest Chalet, one without the ice cubes. It was like the pearly gate frog, with its mysterious venom, had given him a mighty epiphany ...

"I will be the farmer my father couldn't be."

The frog had kissed some sense into him, and he tramped about in a befuddled circle in his bare feet, reflecting on his life with a mature, new outlook.

Dim had woken up a man!

"This no shits," he mumbled in English, now with this new and inspiring sense of himself, and he descended to the ground.

Oh, how his muscles ached, like he had been there a year! How long had it been? And which way should he go? - The tourists were all surely scattered by now, and he would have to go after them like pieces of shredded paper, blown this way and that by the wind.

"Creeark!" went the cuckoo shrike.

Dim looked up, nodded, turned south-west, and marched barefoot and determined on his short, craggy legs-legs that were perfect (though he didn't know this) for the pitilessness of the terrain in which he lived.

Oh, his stomach cramped and thundered at him of its barrenness. But that would have to sort itself out later, along with the rotted pig turd business.

Dim's thoughts were now on his job-He was going to find his tourists.