want to tell about last night.
And how I continued to rise up under the falls.
When I was bare down to my waist, I shut my eyes. The falling water splashed onto the top of my head, onto my shoulders and outstretched arms. It slid down my body like warm oil.
This was where Connie had stood, naked, rubbing herself with her wadded T-shirt. She’d stood with her back to me.
In my mind, I turned her around.
I became her.
I was Connie standing under the waterfall, arms out, trembling as the water spilled down my naked body, showing myself to an imaginary Rupert.
Which sounds a trifle odd, now that I try to write about it.
Let’s just say I let my imagination run wild for a while, there at the falls last night. I had so many different emotions swarming through me, I’m lucky I didn’t go nuts entirely and stay that way.
After a while, though, I remembered my reasons for coming up to the lagoon.
Namely, to search for Connie, Billie and Kimberly.
Not for their spirits, but for their bodies—alive or dead.
And to see if I could get some idea about where Wesley and Thelma might be.
To kill them, if I could.
So I waded over to the flat rock where we’d taken Connie after she’d been knocked out. I boosted myself up, got to my feet, and climbed to the top of the falls.
Even though I’d finally gotten back to business, I still felt strange. I was dripping wet and shivering— trembling from head to toe. My jaw even shook. The night probably hadn’t turned any colder while I’d been in the lagoon, but it felt as if the temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. Also, I was gripped by a weird mixture of fear and excitement.
At the top of the falls, I stood in a patch of moonlight and gazed down at the lagoon.
My lagoon.
It seemed like a wonderful place just then, and all mine. It was my own private swimming hole, a place where I could be completely free and completely safe, where I could dwell in my memories of Kimberly, Connie and Billie—where they would come alive in my fantasies.
Better to have imaginary friends and lovers than none at all.
In some ways, they might even be an improvement over the real thing. If they only exist in your mind, they can’t get killed.
Plus, they cooperate better than…
(That’s me, going off the deep end again. Maybe I was having—am having?—a slight encounter with a touch of mental breakdown. Could that be? Tee hee hee. And I ain’t even gotten to the BAD part yet. The bad part about last night, that is—as opposed to the bad part when we got attacked several days ago and all three of my women… Never mind. That’s for later, too. I should get back to last night.) I’ll skip over some of the weird shit I was feeling and thinking, etc., while I roamed the jungle naked with the razor in my sock. I’ve got so much to write about, anyway, without dwelling on stuff like mat. (Not to mention that I’ve already filled up more than three-quarters of my notebook. I have about a hundred empty pages left, and that’s counting both sides of the paper.) Here’s how it went last night. From the top of the falls, I followed the stream uphill, climbing through the shadows and the moonlight toward the place among the rocks where we’d found Kimberly on the day I think of as “the last stand.”
I wanted to see where it had happened.
That would be the best place to start my search.
The Calm Before the Storm
Before I go on with the rest of what happened last night, I’d better tell what happened to me and the women at the chasm. Last night will make more sense that way.
When I left off, we were wading upstream, Connie in the lead. Earlier, Kimberly had run away from us on the beach. She was afraid we might try to tone down her vengeance, so she wanted a crack at Wesley without us.
We were afraid that, going after him alone, she might get herself killed.
We hurried up the stream. Though we splashed quite a bit, we didn’t speak.
Connie and I slapped mosquitoes, now and then. They weren’t as bad as they’d been on the day we made our first trip to the lagoon, but plenty of them buzzed around us and settled on us and sucked our blood and tickled, so we both worked at smacking them flat. (The critters didn’t bother Billie, of course. My theory is that they didn’t want to spoil her fabulous body by marking it with little red bumps.) Anyway, we waded up the stream at a good, quick pace, and didn’t speak at all for quite a while. We were afraid of giving away our position. None of us, I think, looked forward to a premature encounter with the enemy. If it came to a fight, we wanted Kimberly to be with us.
About halfway to our destination, though, Billie broke into song.
“Once jol-ly swagman… !”
Connie twisted around. “Mom!”
“What?”
“Shhhh!!!!”
“Let’s all sing,” Billie suggested.
Connie’s attitude had improved so much that she didn’t blurt out, “Fuck you!” Instead, she asked, “What on earth for?”
“It’s a great day for singing.” Billie looked over her shoulder at me, and smiled. “Don’t you think so, Rupert?”
“They’ll hear us,” I said, and whacked my neck to mash a mosquito.
That’s the idea,” she said. “Let’s get their attention, if we don’t already have it.”
Connie lifted her eyebrows. “So they’ll worry about us instead of Kimberly?”
“Exactly,” Billie said. “It might not even occur to them that Kimberly isn’t with us.”
“As long as they don’t see us,” I added.
Billie grinned. “If they’re busy watching us, they aren’t watching Kimberly.”
“Okay,” I said. “But we’d better be ready for them.”
“What the hell,” Connie said.
“Let’s do it,” said Billie.
Off we went, marching up the stream, the three of us singing “Waltzing Matilda” at the top of our lungs. Billie and Connie seemed to know the lyrics by heart—Andrew, the Navy lifer, had probably learned the song on shore leave in Australia, or something, and taught it to them. I knew most of the words, myself. (I’ve made it a point, since I was a little kid, to memorize song lyrics, poems, all sorts of quotes that impress me.) We sounded damn good, bellowing it out.
Even though the song is mostly about death and ghosts, it’s so jaunty that I felt great singing it.
We were flaunting ourselves, taunting Wesley and Thelma if they were near enough to hear our cheerfully defiant marching song.
After “Waltzing Matilda,” we sang “Hit the Road, Jack.” I didn’t know the words at first, but caught on after listening to Billie and Connie. Then we sang, “Hey, Jude,” which we all knew most of the words to.
For our next song, I suggested, “We’re off to See the Wizard.”
Billie laughed. “Oh, that’s rich.” Rich, mostly, because I was lugging an ax. “You make a cute Tin Woodsman,” she said. “Ill be the Cowardly Lion.”
Cute. She’d called me cute.
“Gimme a break,” Connie said. “We’re choosing parts? What does that leave me, the Scarecrow? Fat chance. What was he looking for, a brain? Thanks, but no thanks.”
“You can be Dorothy,” I told her, smiling.
