Crier and Bob had gone off hunting, since Crier had finally made a bow and a few arrows, and from here on out the animal populace was no longer safe. It was going to be roast rabbit and roast squirrel to go with the fish from now on.
Or so said Crier.
I had my doubts, since I had seen Crier practicing with that thing. It didn’t look to me that he could have hit the side of a barn with a cannon, let alone a squirrel with a dull arrow. Still, I was hoping for him. I was beginning to tire of fish and fruit, fine as it had once seemed.
Isn’t that the way of humans? They’re never happy. One day I’m living off sardines and jerky with no water, and the next thing you know, I’m complaining about having fresh water, fish and fruit. Before long, I’d probably want a sauna in Jungle Home and someone to cater my meals.
Anyway, Crier and Bob went off on safari, and I was home filling some water containers we had made out of thick cylinders of hol lowed-out bamboo.
I finished the job, stripped off my blanket, and went out and sat on the deck and dangled my feet over the edge.
I had no more than gotten comfortable, when I heard a car out on the highway, the engine straining and knocking as if it were about to explode.
I found me a good spot between the limbs and leaves, zeroed in on the highway, and saw a battered green Galaxy. It was coughing gouts of black smoke from under its hood and puffing a matching concoction from its tailpipe.
The driver hit down on the horn for some reason, and the horn hung.
This wasn’t the Galaxy’s day.
It slowed, turned off the highway onto the grassland, started weaving and picking up speed again.
I could see a figure in the front seat, fighting the wheel as if it were some rare breed of poisonous hoop snake. Then the driver lost it or quit, because the Galaxy veered to the left toward the lake.
The closer it got to the lake, the more speed it lost. It got down to a crawl. But it still made the water and dipped its nose in. Hot black smoke hissed up in a cloud, and the Galaxy began to slide languidly into the water.
And I was moving.
I had minded my own business so long, I was somewhat surprised when my Good Samaritan urges came back to me like a return bout of malaria fever. I went down the ladder two steps at a time and started running across the grassland toward the lake.
Owing to the gradual slope of the shore, the Galaxy had still not eased all the way in. The back right window was open, and I climbed through that.
The backseat was little more than springs and foam rubber. On the floorboard was something that looked like burnt sticks and brush. Another look and I knew it was human. Its skin was burned the color of neglected bacon. There was no hair, features or genitals. One of its arms was lifted, fingers extended and frozen in a pose that made the hand look like a miniature weed rake.
Water began to trickle in the back window. Already the front seat was filled. The thing on the floor didn’t look alive, so I was about to go over the seat for the driver when the garden rake took hold of my ankle.
I jerked and flesh came off of the ruined hand and ran down my ankle like dirty Jell-O. I looked at the thing and it opened its mouth, made a croaking noise that sounded like “Kill me.”
The water would take care of that. I couldn’t. I went over the seat and into the water and found the driver, fearing he or she would be like the burned creature on the floorboard.
I got the driver’s head out of the water, saw it was a woman. I started pulling her into the backseat by the chin. The rising water helped me.
The car was going under now, and I had time to get one deep breath before the whole kit and caboodle sank to the bottom of the lake.
The mud was stirred up down there and it was like being in creamed coffee. Somehow I got out the open window and tugged the woman after me, tried to kick to the surface.
The woman was deadweight and I couldn’t get us up. We sank to the bottom. Since we were near the edge of the lake, it wasn’t too deep, so I buried my toes in the sand and flexed my knees and shot us to the surface.
I managed her on shore, rolled her on her stomach, got hold of her arms and worked them some, pausing to push in the middle of her back. She puked.
I turned her over, cleared her mouth with my fingers and started mouth-tomouth. It was a stinky job and tasted of vomit, but after a short time she coughed hard once and started breathing regularly.
She blinked at me. “Timothy?”
“He the burned guy?”
She nodded.
“He’s still down there.”
“Best,” she said, and tried to get up on her elbows. She looked at that part of my body I least wanted her to look at.
“Small,” she said.
“It’s cold, for Christsakes.”
But she wasn’t listening. She had fallen back and was out of it.
5
Considering the way she had insulted my anatomy, I wasn’t in any rush to pick her up and carry her to Jungle Home, but I finally gave it a try. She was a pretty hefty gal.
I put her down, went back to Jungle Home, found the keys to the camper and drove over there and got her, loaded her into the back, letting her head bump the tailgate only a couple of times.
When I got her stretched out, I moved her hair out of her face and took my first good look at her. She wasn’t bad looking. Somewhere between eighteen and twentyone. Guessing ages is not one of my better attributes.
Under the wet clothes her breasts looked nice and so did the width of her hips and the shape of her thighs. I thought about getting her wet clothes off to make her more comfortable, but I feared an ulterior motive.
I left her there in a puddle and went back to Jungle Home, stopping on the way to look at myself in the truck’s wing mirror. My hair was wet and twisted and my scraggly little beard looked like a smear of grease. If I was going to have whiskers, why couldn’t I have a full set like Bob and Crier.
I did the best I could combing my hair with my fingers, then went on up to Jungle Home and put on my blanket and tied it around my waist with a belt I had made of vines. Then I lay down on my sleeping bag and found that all that exertion had worn me out. I went right to sleep.
Next thing I knew, Bob and Crier were back. They had a vine basket of fruit, but no game.
“The great hunters return,” I said.
“He saw a bunny,” Bob said, “and couldn’t shoot it. He got all dewy-eyed.”
“It had a little pink nose,” Crier said. “After all that’s happened, I just couldn’t kill something.”
“Think those fish you catch live happily ever after in our bowel movements?”
“They aren’t cute like bunnies,” Crier said.
“Boys,” I said, “there’s a girl down in the camper.”
“Don’t joke me,” Bob said. “I see a fork in a tree and I get hard.”
“I’m not joking,” I said, and told them the story.
We brought the basket of fruit with us, and when we got around to the back of the camper and looked inside, it was empty. There was a pool of water where she had been and her clothes and tennis shoes were laid out on the tailgate.
“Melted, I figure,” Bob said.
“I’m right here.”
