The Cuckoo Colloquium

7 - Pete

The festivity boat puttered away from the bobbing dock and into the wide, chocolaty water. Pete squinted back and could see someone waving at them from the bobbing logs, and then shrinking away. The Aussie had been to Disneyland once, and he thought of those Jungle Cruise guides, who, in jest, urged their passengers to wave goodbye to loved ones, as it could-possibly-be forever.

Then they were alone, puttering away, a yellow-purple speck out on the coffee-colored water.

"The river, it embraces us," the European boy, Puso, said as if in some rapture, "it replenishes us."

He was an odd kid, Pete thought, watching him lean over and touch the river water. Moonch rearranged the orange scarf around her neck just right, then let him have it: "Hands in the boat! - I don't want to have to explain to your parents why you came back with some gnarled-up stump for an arm."

"What's wrong with the boy's arm?" Pete hollered over the drone of the boat's motor.

Moonch curled her lip like a tuna on a fishing line. "Keep limbs inside the boat if you want to stay attached to them. The crocs aren't shy."

The only person without a life-vest was their driver, Dim, the local kid who hunched serenely in the back with his hand on the tiller, smoking his Gudang Garam clove-scented cigarette like he'd been smoking them his whole life. Dim always wore a black hat and a T-shirt with a picture of a just-hatched baby chicken popping out of its egg, which said: I got laid in Thailand.

Pete elbowed Pinky Bell next to him, nodding at the shirt, "Boy doesn't have a clue what it means ... the sexual reference."

Pinky Bell squinted at the shirt and said something like, "Yes".

Pete watched Dim motor around the logs and other organic matter in the river the same way he drove the minivan-with a breakneck carelessness. And then the boy turned into a tributary, and then turned again into another, smaller waterway. For Pete, it was like trying to find your way through a giant hedge maze-everything looked the same; it would be impossible to find your way out again. But the boy did it with the confidence of someone who'd piloted these parts with some frequency.

Or so it seemed, anyway.

"My parents don't even like each other, but they exchange better presents than I ever get," the Canadian girl lamented in front of him.

"That's a crying shame, darling," Pete said out the side of his mouth, and Nini glared back at him as if doubting his sympathy.

A cool breeze blew over the water, and Pete, in his bloated life-vest, was, like the others, giddy with anticipation of what would soon appear on the banks-pythons, sun bears, the Borneo rhinoceros, cute, little dwarf elephants-because everything watered at the banks of the quiet offshoots-that's what the organizers said- everything mingled in the morning. It was Jungle Book time.

But nothing appeared.

The banks were bursting with magnificent foliage, yet were empty of animal life. It's like the colloquium members really were at Disneyland and had just been unlucky enough to choose a day when the animatronics went down for maintenance, and the only things left to see were those enormous banana palm leaves, and bubbles in the water, where something big, like a hippo or a crocodile, should have been.

Finally, the boat coasted to the bank in front of a large, broad tree.

"Proboscis monkey," Dim barked, pointing to a lone animal, which sat frozen on a branch, staring at the group in wide-eyed dread.

"What's that on its face?" Pete asked.

"The proboscis," Moonch snapped as everyone gawked at the monkey and the odd appendage, which flopped in a very un-nose-like way.

"If that's its nose," Pete said, "I'd like to see what it's got between the..."

"They're unique, you know," Moonch snarled over him as she readjusted her orange scarf, "proboscis monkeys are only found in this rain forest."

Moonch studied a small booklet from the Sarawak Tourist Agency on her lap. "They're quite endangered, kiddies," she added, looking up from the little book and hoping the slight would give them pause, because there was an unstoppable tittering in the boat.

"May be a blessing," Pete sniggered, "putting a flappin' donger in the middle of the poor monkey's face - God has a bleedin' sense of humor, don't he now?"

The monkey, fixed on the branch, stared in mute horror at the sightseers as Dim motored off, and there was a sense of skepticism in the boat as to what they had just witnessed.

"That wasn't a wild monkey-it was tied to the tree, I saw the twine!" Nini shouted, arms folded tightly across her bulging life vest. "Our parents pay out the ears to fly us all the way over here, so we can get hands-on with the oldest rain forest in the world -and we spend our days looking at a monkey with a ... with a..."

"A flappin' donger," the Aussie concluded for her.

Nini whirled in her seat in an open plea to anyone. "I know what a wildlife expedition is, and this is no wildlife expedition!"

Turning back, Nini bumped Pete next to her with her life-vest; he wobbled to the side and had to grab the gunwale with both hands to prevent his eviction from the boat.

Pete chuckled to himself: 'Almost went for a dunk that time!'

Pete was having a much better time than he had dreamed possible. At first he had declined when the staff at the Rainforest Chalet beseeched him to chaperone the five teens for this two-day excursion to see the wildlife; he was no jungle expert. Truth be told, he didn't even like kids. But they had persisted, and he relented.

And he was ever so glad he did.

That germ of a notion Pete had during the minivan ride, it was getting brighter. Stronger, too. Was it really possible, that even bad experiences, over time, became good ones?

There was only one way to find out, he reckoned. Like a beckoning siren, Pete's past was calling to him, stirring him, reviving him. It was a near-lifetime ago, but Pete had to know. Could he find it again? Would he die looking for it, for her?

There was one thing Pete could not deny; he felt the strength coursing through his body every day like a sudden, glorious well of water to a parched, dying plant. The jungle, somehow, it was returning his power, it was rolling back the years.

Pete was getting younger.

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