The Cuckoo Colloquium

47 - Pinky Bell

Finding a thick branch, she sat on the ground and thumped on the oblong fruit with it, and the woody rind slowly cracked open, exposing the pinkish flesh...

Pinky Bell squeezed her eyes shut-The odor was suggestive of fresh feces, with strong wisps of turpentine, even Limburger cheese.

The durian fruit had a unique odor, all right.

"Umai!" she cried in Japanese after nibbling on a small piece of the pulp, and then pitching huge chunks into her mouth, and chewing in a festive frenzy as if stoking some voracious furnace.

The taste of the fruit was heavenly, like ice cream, bananas, and Tabasco sauce, all mingled into one blissful flavor. Pinky Bell had discovered a bonanza of glorious sustenance, and her throbbing toe, the infected bites, the scratches, the filth, the abrading sex, it all seemed of little consequence as she sat there luxuriating in her durian fruit.

Then she walked, alone and in guiltless contemplation. Pinky Bell had earned what she considered private, valuable quality time. The men would just have to hash it all out themselves; she had simply rechanneled the aggression.

Japan didn't want any part of it. Japan went its own way. If you didn't like that, there was no need to visit.

The fog didn't alarm her. Instead, the jungle was coming alive for her. It pulsated with heat, with lights, and even with sound. The trees whispered and moved. The water of the shallow stream murmured to her, and she was ready to float through the Borneo rainforest like a bird-if it would have her.

Creeark! A grey-green cuckoo shrike said from above, and then something fell from the canopy, something blue and shiny-the GPS!

She picked it up, studied it a bit, and then dropped it into her fanny pack.

She walked far. The jungle rot seeped from the sores on her hands and feet, oozing, and she wiped it on her trousers. She looked up once when she heard the soft honking of some geese. But in which direction they were flying, she couldn't tell under the obscuring canopy.

She found a stream and began to follow it. Soon she came upon a beautiful series of small fountains spurting up from the rocks like something at a summer water park. The spray from the fountains made a rainbow, and Pinky Bell brushed her fingers over the orange-tinted moss on the rocks, while tiny fish swam in the pools, nibbling at the skin on her ankles.

It was mid-afternoon when she entered a broad, broken clearing, and knew she had returned: The GPS had keyed in the location of the village-the village of warring smugglers, and albinos, and lepers, and two-year-olds smoking cigarettes, and machine guns, and Hickory Dickory Docks.

But it was different this time; the village felt festive. She walked in on the little path to a flurry of human activity, and of the cool sounds of modern jazz. She ambled into a big, semi-open room, and saw the dancers from Cuckoo Camp on a crude stage. But it wasn't the tagunggak bamboo flutes she had all heard during the culture show; instead, they were blasting away, with saxophones, and with electric guitars, on what seemed some musical rehearsal.

They gave her cross looks from their instruments on the crude stage, unsurprised that someone had wandered in unannounced.

"France?" asked the man with the face like a radish, faintly irritated, holding his clarinet.

She was a day early for the performance, but she didn't know that. And the big room had a somewhat annoyed air, like some tourists had barged in on private preparation and would then begin making unreasonable demands.