The Cuckoo Colloquium

4 - Pinky Bell

Hearing Pinky Bell's plea, Moonch grunted from her own bed in the dark. "I'll hold my nose in the toilet shack and take a big crap before the boat cruise in the morning."

For a big girl, Marilyn Moonch sometimes spoke in an unusually high register that, to Pinky Bell, sounded close to a sheep, bleating out on some lone, American prairie. But then sometimes Moonch would revert to a low, scratchy voice like someone whose larynx has been eaten by cancer ... And what was with her clothes? Moonch wore a hideous orange nightgown that was way too tight on her, making her look like a sack of Chinese cabbage-a fat, orange sack.

Why orange, anyway? Orange signified an entirely different mentality; it was a mindset that would not get along with pink.

She squirmed, squeezed her thighs together, kept the pee in. The room smelled like it had just been under water: the netted slats of their beds held withered mattresses that reeked like soggy boat cushions, and a pool had formed under an old sink with a leaky pipe that had a stale, rusty odor.

She sat up and looked out the little window at the black blanket, a wall of opaque foliage. Under the thick canopy of what they called old-growth forest, the tin-roofed shed with the toilet sign on it seemed at the end of a long, arduous tunnel, full of all sorts of gruesome snares.

"The monkeys are not so nice," she said, more to herself than to anyone else. One of the four-legged rascals had made off with her make-up kit when she had placed it on the railing of the visitor's hut to look at pictures of the animals and plants of the region. Thank goodness she always carried two kits.

Cuckoo Camp-Therese Chance For You! ... That was the title of the pamphlet with the pictures. What a strange thing to say-Of course she had a chance; everybody had a chance, didn't they? And what atrocious spelling! She figured the schools must not be very good in a jungle.

"They're not monkeys, they're macaques," corrected Moonch in that patronizing tone of hers, "pig-tailed macaques, and I would advice NOT looking them straight in the eyes, as the males will take that as a challenge."

Nini got up and slipped on her sandals. "Guess I could use a pee, too."

Rejoicing in silence at the company, Pinky Bell slipped out through the netting over her bed.

... But now she began dreading the perils of the new quest. Were those mischievous macaques waiting for them outside?

In her pink heels, she stepped down onto the trail behind Nini, who wore a headlamp secured to her forehead with straps. The light gave Nini an air of authority, and her beam lit the path before them with reliability, while Pinky Bell's flashlight beam hurdled up and down, and streaked left and right, then behind them in her new animal panic. The shadows coiled in her dancing beam and everything looked menacing.

Pinky Bell followed her companion closely. She could sometimes see all those endearing freckles of Nini's, which made her look like some fairytale pixie. But was she a good pixie or a bad pixie? She had trouble reading Nini's moods; her facial expressions were constantly shifting like Nini was bobbing anchorless in the rough ocean of some endless hurricane of rage, and then disbelief, and then maybe more rage.

"I've tried to have a talk with this Fat Hus fellow," Nini began, "but he dismisses me like I'm some soft-in-the head teenage girl."

"But you are a teenage girl."

"Yeah, but I'm not soft in the head-wanna feel?" Nini stopped and made a deep, ceremonial bow toward Pinky Bell, who gave the other girl's head gracious taps with her knuckles, something Pinky Bell's mother would do when inspecting supermarket melons.