The Cuckoo Colloquium

45 - Tarcodile

It had stopped the farting, and the itching, and the whining.

Tarcodile had taken personal growthing to a new level-It was now more than a finely honed spearhead-it was a killing machine.

It didn't know it had wandered into a grove of durian trees that released their plump, weighty fruit in the strong wind. Heavier than coconuts, some of the fallen durian cracked open, and the stench was piercing in its allusion to a rotting, sunbaked carcass.

Tarcodile liked that.

It was now a sleek, one-hundred-sixty-five-pound reptile, slipping through the succulent grass. Tarcodile served its mistress, its goddess lover, The Leech Queen-for that was the image it carried of her, the bloated parasites worming from her armpits and navel like snakes from Medusa. The Leech Queen had turned Tarcodile inside out, and the creature was all right with that. It didn't like the frightened, hollow boy it had once been. Its outer shell had flipped with its insides, with its prime, its genuine being. And it all felt right.

Oh, did it ever feel right.

It sniffed at the air with near-possession in its eyes. "We're in Woop Woop now, eh, mate?" it called in its newly hatched, deep-throated Tarcodile timbre.

Tarcodile's old world was behind it. Ahead was the unknown, and its heart raced with the runaway emotions of the hunt. It was greying dawn and they had been at it all night. Tarcodile knew the Aussie could hear it coming for him, and it enjoyed the old guy's amusing threats.

"Z-Force Commandoes are on their way!" Outback shouted back at it in his muddled head, thinking it was still 1945, "They'll give you both what for!"

The creature could see signs of the human's path through the forest as if the Aussie's way had become luminous: the bent twigs, the footprints in the soft clay. It was as if Tarcodile now possessed some inequitable advantage like night goggles. This hardly seemed fair, and it smirked. It just wished it knew more Australian slang to badger its prey with.

"How about another bleedin' roo on the barbie, eh, mate?"

"We don't barbecue the kangaroos, you monster!"

A while later the trees gave way to a clearing, which looked like a big, brown bombsight, denuded of life. The only remainders were a few gnarled stumps of felled trees, and the fat tire tracks of heavy trucks that crisscrossed the forsaken ground like a thousand knife slashes.

Tarcodile skulked through this scarred, shorn wasteland of shattered limbs and withered stumps, heading for something out in the middle, something familiar-One lone truck lingered next to a big green concessions trailer with a pink awning in front of it.

Tarcodile sniffed the air, and then slithered into the shade of the green trailer. The truck was sitting idle, but Tarcodile put its palms up to the side of the trailer and could feel the reverberation of human voices inside. It slipped around to the front and could read, in large black lettering:

Developing a Better Tomorrow!

Tarcodile wanted a better tomorrow. It slithered up the steps into the trailer, where a dark-skinned man wearing a white apron stood behind a small counter. The man in the apron glanced uneasily at his other visitor, the old Aussie, who sat on a vinyl sofa in the corner enjoying a blue and gold can of something called Foster's.

Tarcodile nodded-This was Outback's sanctuary, his time out from the chase, and that seemed fair enough. Tarcodile placed the machete back in the deep pocket of the sniper suit, and the man behind the counter sighed with relief.

No chatter titivated the trailer as the man came out with another of the cans. Tarcodile took his cold Foster's and then sat next to Outback on the sofa.

"Got peanuts?" Tarcodile asked.

Those were the only words spoken in the concessions trailer. And the man gave them each a bag of what passed for mixed nuts, Indonesian style, while the two visitors sat there and relished their break time libations, soaking in the air conditioning of the trailer oasis.

The old guy tried to pay, but there were no bills in his wallet, only a small beetle, which scampered out from one of the small card pockets. A corner was torn off the leather wallet, where the Aussie had probably experimented with eating it.

Tarcodile watched him withdraw a small photograph of several people posing at the seashore in front of a giant, white building that had large concrete shells forming its roof. Outback just shook his head, mulling the mysterious picture for some time as if some stranger had slipped it into his wallet.

Tarcodile, meanwhile, moved over to a large dressing mirror and peered at the unruly, sandy-brown beard that covered most of its face. There were dark wrinkles under the creature's yellow, parietal eyes, with a couple of small ticks embedded in the folds of the wrinkles. A larger tick hung from its left ear like a fashion accessory.

The man behind the counter, of indigenous blood, studied Tarcodile as it squinted into the mirror in some small tribute to its former self. The guy may have wondered why Tarcodile wore the remains of pink panties as a bandanna, but he didn't ask.

Outback then hastened out of the trailer with quick, quiet steps, hoping to take some advantage of Tarcodile's self-absorption. But he didn't get far before he heard the chilling scream of the creature...

"AHHHH-A-AAAAAAAAA!"

Tarcodile was proud of its ululating Johnnie Weissmuller yell, which had both volume and duration. The scream was a notice to the world that its bearer was on the path to experiential truth. And the creature did indeed beat its chest with fists as it screamed; it was all about compulsion.

The hunt was on again. The Aussie hopped and tried to sprint on his bandy, beat up, eighty-something-year-old legs, no longer enjoying the adventure. Things had gotten out of control.

"I want to go home, hug the rellies, mow the yards of my grandchildren, for God's sake - I'm an old man!"

Tarcodile could see the hump-less camel, Personal Growth, way off, under a tree. It was grinning all toothy-like in the shade as if it, too, knew how the game would end.

Tarcodile felt as inside-out as something could get; so far inside-out that it had made it to the other side.

It began to follow the old man again. "Good on ya, mate! Personal growthing to the end-No worries!"

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