The Cuckoo Colloquium

38 - Windy

Tarcodile was dying.

At least, he felt like he was dying. And he was angry-maybe hungry, too-not sure about that.

"There are worms under my skin that won't stop itching!"

Pinky Bell didn't answer, and now Windy wasn't sure if he had said the words or merely thought them. He needed to find a cool stream, and maybe this would lower his blazing temperature.

"I mean, c'mon, I beg for a new I-phone and all I get is a 5C? - What are we at my house, poor cavemen? I don't think so!"

He didn't know why he had just said that; those petty thoughts belonged to the old Windy. The new one was changing...

Dying, too, but changing.

"Stupid sniper suit!" Pinky Bell was probably right-he was allergic to the latex. But he kept it on, anyway-it gave him a soldierly look, and girls went for the tassels (the pictures on the shopping website sure suggested so).

He sat up, pulled the sniper suit up to his knees, and studied his leg as if expecting to see rippling waves under the filthy flesh. Then he examined his feet-the skin had peeled off between his toes, leaving inflamed, scarlet flesh, no matter what concoction of creams and powders he applied from the pharmacy in his backpack.

He ached with the cold, and with the damp, and then with the heat, and he knew there was an excellent chance he would die in the jungle, that they would all just turn to fodder, a food source, so that the tropical forest could go on living and staying green-and, in a way, that was good. But he, Windy, would rot into nothingness in mere hours.

"If I decompose, what color will I turn?"

"Shut your gob, boy!" Outback snapped at him.

Windy blinked several times and then saw Pinky Bell next to last night's burnt out fireplace, sitting courteously on her legs like she was hosting some Japanese tea party.

Her only guest-Outback, the new, psycho version, sitting on the other side of the fireplace, recalling more tales of the war years.

"...Your blood, he captured a group of civilians, told the children to climb up into the trees he did. I was there, I remember... They machine-gunned the women, they amused themselves by picking off the children one-by-one as if they were goddamned roos, they did. Your blood, there, Miss Asano."

Windy noted they were both maintaining decorum-They were tea party-polite, even though it was obvious to Windy what lurked in the ancient recesses of the old guy's mind-cutting off some teenage heads and then shrinking them, in some kind of bizarre payback ceremony.

Outback's justice-jungle style.

"You need a shave, Pete," Windy said.

Outback had changed quite a bit-he still wore his floppy explorer hat and his Timberland boots. But in between had become a feathered menagerie of animal outlines and ink-like tattoos; his chest, his arms, his torso, his legs - Outback had gone indigenous Dayak, all right; he had become the rain forest.

"One shave out here, one nick, and your septic, you little shit-for-brains!"

Windy nodded like he knew that all along. "Septicemia-that's how you die, that's how you turn into a rotten stump in the soil. That's how you reach RIP Central, that's how you make it to the dirt archives, that's how you buy a pine condo... "

Outback glowered at him like he was just some mangy dog that needed a swift kick. "I'll buy you a pine condo, all right..."

"He's sick," Windy heard her say in his defense, "he needs a doctor."