The Cuckoo Colloquium

30 - Pinky Bell

The four gun-toting teens didn't kill them. Instead, smoking their cigarettes, and with the black submachine guns strapped from their necks, they stood senselessly in the grass as if in shock at the audacity of these three jungle wayfarers.

"They don't like strangers," Outback warned in a whisper, walking the little trail that led into the village.

The dogs gathered quickly, and they snarled and barked until a couple of men with bleached-white skin and thin yellow hair came out to quiet them. The men were albinos, gaunt, with unsmiling faces, showing the odd three-some an unreceptive curiosity before receding back into the little structures. And the dogs, having performed their duties, dispersed back to shady areas.

The filthy trail had ditches on both sides that were full of either smutty water or stinking mounds of garbage. Children, smoking cigarettes, rummaged through the newer heaps, picking out odds and ends. Pinky Bell watched a little girl squatting on the trail, defecating, while puffing a cigarette she held with the little thumb and forefinger.

She and Windy stood off to the side as a few older people filtered out to huddle with Outback in their flip-flops under a tall date palm. The old folks obscured their faces with hoods, and their hands were wrapped with white and brown colored batik, which only allowed glimpses of their choppy flesh.

"We're in a leper colony," Windy moaned as if dying from some wound. "Isn't that great-our lips are going to fall off!"

"It was cured a long time ago," Outback snapped back at him.

The elders, in turn, returned their own peculiar gazes at Windy's filthy polyester mesh sniper suit, and at Pinky Bell's hair, clothes, and skin-of which were in some combination of either smudged, ripped, bleeding, or filth-caked.

By one house a fighting cock preened and swaggered in a small crate that had torn stickers of the durian fruit on it. Right next to the cock, some old hag was sawing off the head of a small hen, trying to aim the jet of blood away from her property and out onto the trail. Most of the houses were raised ten feet or so on their stilts over a dark, oily slime that seemed to penetrate everywhere from the river. To Pinky Bell, the entire village smelled like one big clogged drain.

She stood there listening to Outback's halting speech in the Malay-Indonesian Bahasa. The village elders nodded, then talked in low voices, and the conference had a guarded air about it. Actually, Pinky Bell thought the whole village had an illegitimate manner to it, what with two-year-olds smoking and twelve-year-olds with machine guns.

But soon they were following some of the women along the trail that slowly degenerated into a black wallow, and they had to practically levitate across flimsy cane slivers so as not to fall into the vile gunk.

The women then turned into one of the houses that had corrugated tin roofing and an enormous, black, satellite TV antenna poking out of the top like a missile silo.

On rattan mats over a dirt floor, they sat by two blackened pots that hung on a crossbar over a fire, and they ate a hot stew-which was out of this world delicious! It burned Pinky Bell's tongue and the roof of her mouth, because she couldn't wait for it to cool. Meanwhile, multi-colored moths and gray ashes from the fire were moving around on the surface of the dark goo. Pinky Bell didn't mind that at all.

Outback leered as if scolding them for being ungrateful children. "It's pig's liver, a special treat."

Then he went back to speaking to an elderly woman, who had black gums and rotted teeth. She was sitting cross-legged, chewing the betel nut, and squirting the scarlet juice onto the floor every minute or so.