'What did the Dalai Llama say about rain forests?'
This was preying on Moonch's mind as she sat on the stump. The mantra-compassion, non-violence, love-it just didn't feel right, not in a jungle.
She had been watching the shirtless local man with a spear and pretty tattoos on his neck paddle up in a small canoe, and then beach it on the other side of the elephant-eared palms. And then, 'Head hunters, head hunters!' went Windy's frenzied screams.
Fish dotted a big net, heaped in the back of the man's canoe-Moonch just intuited this to be true, even though the canoe was on the other side of the palms.
"They're gonna cook us in big pots and shrink our heads!"
Moonch also knew the guy was the same fisherman they had passed on the river in the boat-or when they had had a boat.
How did she know these things? Had the accident woken some new sensitivity within her?
This was bigger than compassion, non-violence, love; it was bigger than Taoism, or Buddhism, or Moonch family solidarity. Because when she was doing that soaring backflip, she had seen only one thing-and it wasn't the naked body of Nini Read, or anything so lesbo shallow-it was the trees, the jungle trees, and it was like the jungle had split open, and there was this gaping, green hole, and inside the hole was a soul, and that was profound and way cool.
'My missing soul-it's here, waiting for me!' She just had to locate it, like a scavenger hunt.
The man spoke in Malay with Dim, though their communication seemed an effort, and he jabbered and pointed off in an eastwardly direction.
"He gonna's take us to his house," Dim said, though he didn't seem thrilled with the invitation-more like it was an offer one best not refuse.
Dim and the local zipped off like small darts into the forest, and she did a diagnostic check-She had pain, but it was the right pain, the pain you'd feel if you did a back-flip from thirty feet-a stinging pain throughout her body. But nothing was broken-nothing except her view of life, her jungle vision, which, actually, was a pretty big event: Everything seemed different now, the jungle had come alive for her; colors seemed so vibrant; there was a happy buzzing all around her, and it was life-jungle life, pulsing, singing!
They had piled things onto her like she was some pack burro, but Moonch didn't mind-not when the jungle had come alive, not when the flora was auditioning for her, not when the butterflies danced so.
After about an hour of steady jungle slogging, Puso slumped against a fat vine as if something had inexplicably affected his health. "I'll never get home to graduate, I'll wind up working in bars getting propositioned by my own Mum!"
After another hour Nini flopped to the ground as if stricken by a blowgun dart. "You'll have to amputate my feet if I'm forced to walk any further."
But Moonch didn't mind; there was music in everything; you just had to be plugged in.
Dim seemed to take their concerns seriously, though, and he scuttled away spider-like over a rotted log to talk with the guide. And he came back and waved his hand. "He say five."
Nini held out her arms, martyr-like, again. "Five what? - Minutes? Hours? Years?"
"We there in five."
It was not five minutes-Moonch could testify to that. Another hour went by, and the tattooed guide in front kept walking, climbing ridges, and then descending into swamp brush and mud, and then back onto a green carpet of leaf litter, with occasional barbs and trip-wire creepers.
It was going to be an onerous five-hour hike-and that was only if they were capable of maintaining the pace of the fleet, shoeless local, who then danced over the harsh rocks and the mud wallows with a motorized certainty.
"A bloody cock up," Puso grumbled like he was mourning his own death.
"Yeah," Windy chorused, "a cock up-A big, old cock up!"
Outback clicked his tongue. "It doesn't have to be an old one, but I like your thinking."
Moonch sometimes fell, and then got up again. And as the forest grew in on them, and around them, and pushed them, Moonch lost her air, and she felt the grit in her mouth, along with the scrapes and bruises and insects bites on her exposed skin. She was hot, too-the forest seemed opaque with foliage everywhere, yet somehow it all remained remarkably unshady.
Windy moaned from under the enormous roots of a tall tree, which made everyone look small indeed. "I'm floating in my own flop sweat!"
He was still wearing the Christmas tree outfit-the little artificial tree you'd get at Target-and the mesh stuck to his face and legs, his whole body. His hands, the only part of him not covered, had swollen up with bug bites and looked like pink boxing gloves.
Dim sidled up to Moonch as if she were some fellow conspirator. "I don't trusts these people, they don'ts like us so much." He gave their guide up front a quick nod like this was profound and sobering. "At least I half Malay, these people none, no civilization, you never knows what theys thinking."
Dim scurried ahead, leaping over another high root. And Moonch followed, sweating a great deal, scratching at her bites and cuts and leaving a blood trail down her arms and legs.
'Whatever', she thought. She enjoyed taking everything in, just like a baby-unable to vocalize speech, just absorbing this new jungle world around her.
"The indigenous people are God's miracle," Puso announced, probably because he was a pretentious little twirp, and that was his nature.
Their new guide, perched atop a putrid log, smiled, then hawked phlegm and spit a big, yellow gout in his contentment, disappearing off the other side.
Nini snorted. "We're screwed if God's miracle doesn't get us out of the jungle before dark."
The setting sun appeared immense and flaming, with its orange glow saluting the fine day that had been. And the land changed again, with the precipitous ground falling away on both sides, tilting fiercely, and they were no longer walking, but climbing again. They were going slow now, taking one exhausted step after the other. Then the land flattened somewhat, and they followed what seemed to be a kind of trail, with Dim and their guide somewhere ahead, unseen.
Moonch was the only one of them free of tribulation. The boat mishap had shaken off a good deal of the ennui that had enveloped her all this time. And she sometimes lagged behind, not from a lack of stamina, but because she took time admiring the arboreal delights of the rain forest and its inhabitants.
They were getting close to something, Moonch could feel it. Slowly, the day was fading, yet they were still hemmed in by the adamant forest, slowly flushing with the power of dark, liquid steel.
"Oh!" Moonch said, fascinated by a moth of a purple fluorescent radiance.
She followed it into the darkening blanket of foliage, nearly skipping like some demented fairy, heedless of whether she got lost or not. And she could hear them talking about her.
"She is so happy," Pinky Bell said.
"So perky," Nini hissed, as if perky was a bad thing.
"The Flying Nun routine," Windy said, "it's a sign of damage."
They were just ignorant. And she reappeared a minute later with the moth-like thing fluttering leisurely on the back of her hand.
They made it just as darkness set into the jungle. The thick mantle all around them suddenly thinned, and then they came out into a clearing with paddy fields and barking dogs. And they could see smoke from a structure on the other side of a row of leafy fruit trees.
They all slowed to baby steps, because of the breath-taking sight before them-The longhouse was narrow and stretched like a lizard, twenty feet above the ground. Weather-beaten ironwood timbers braced the structure, and it seemed a wonder the whole thing had not collapsed into the soggy soil beneath it a long time ago. But it was beautiful, nonetheless.
"Mind-blowing, isn't it?" Moonch said in a bubbly way, like she was a realtor showing a reclusive home.
"They take heads," Windy said from under his sticky face netting.
She climbed the notched log that served as the entrance to the wooden planks of the house, following the mesh fringe of Windy's Cousin It suit, which dangled in her face like she was back home in some carwash.
The first sight to greet her were baskets of twine, swinging gently in the soft breeze, and she knew right away what the baskets held-the skulls of the long deceased greeting the longhouse's visitors.
Moonch wondered if headhunting, and all its curious arts and crafts-like shrunken human heads, and exotic adornments sewn through the eye-holes of the skulls-if that world came with its own religion, because she didn't feel orangey anymore; maybe some kind of fungal-green.
It was time to revamp the whole wardrobe.