Falling Platypus - Chapter 5

“Let’s blow this popsicle stand!”
—Dan Denny and the author

“CRAISIN!”
—refugee children

“My things…” I said, in the tone of, “Oh, no!”

“What?” said Serena Mayfield.

“Everything I have, it’s back at the Wheel.”

“So?”

“We’re going to need it, if we’re going to be out adven­turing. Even to get to Mount Commie.”

“Okay, we’ll make a pit stop,” Serena Mayfield agreed.

“I’m sorry about your father,” I ventured presently as we drove, the Land Cruiser bouncing along on the uneven terrain. “I lost a good friend of mine recently, so I guess I understand sort of how you feel.”

“Oh, he wasn’t really my father,” she said, spinning the wheel. “I just said that because you were dinking around.”

“Oh.”

“Thank you, though. It’s the thought that counts, right?”

* * *

We pulled up at a slight rise overlooking the Wheel. Serena Mayfield tapped her lip thoughtfully. “How do we want to pro­ceed?” she said to me. “I didn’t see if West Spoke had one of those tin automaton things. But they definitely didn’t get here be­fore us. I drove like a maniac. We don’t want to drive right in,” she went on. “It might be easy to ride down one of those spokes now, but what if they get here by the time we want to leave? Nah-uh.”

“What about that helicopter?” I asked. A helicopter stamped with the logo of the Africa Kit Society—only the Africa Kit Soci­ety—had just choppered in and was preparing to land.

“Agreed,” she said, and gunned it toward the spokes.

* * *

Nobody paid us any mind. We were just one Charity Food vehicle among many. None of the drivers going the opposite way noticed that instead of a random volunteer, the world’s most beautiful woman was driving.

We stopped at my tent, where I gathered up all of my few belongings. I threw them in the Land Cruiser.

Serena Mayfield had vanished. I got behind the wheel and bit my nails, or would have if that were something I ever did.

She was back in a few minutes. “Look at these,” she said, climbing in the passenger’s side. “I stole them from the camp director’s tent.”

They were the papers I’d seen when I first arrived, the ones that said CLASSIFIED: POTENTIAL VEINS.

“It’s probably the refugees’ medical records,” I said. “Let’s go! Before that helicopter takes off!”

“You’re at the wheel,” she reminded me.

“This is just fascinating,” she went on as we drove back up the spoke toward the edge of camp. “What does a charity need with something like this?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like this!” she said, and hung a diagram of suspected gold veins in front of my face.

Someone honked. She whisked the paper away, and I had time to see the camp director. He was going the opposite way in another Land Cruiser.

“It’s Serena Mayfield!” someone shouted. “And the kidnap­per!”

The camp director’s car braked and turned around, knock­ing over a couple of spotless white tents. I pressed the gas pedal all the way down.

“Faster!” Serena Mayfield screeched. “He’s getting closer!”

It was true. The camp director’s Land Cruiser was gaining its own length on us every two seconds in the rear view mirror. Ours jolted as they bumped into us.

“Surrender now!” the camp director shouted through a megaphone. “Surrender now and don’t touch Serena Mayfield! You have no idea the trouble you’re in, buddy, no you don’t!”

The Land Cruisers touched again, and Serena Mayfield braced herself for the next impact.

“This is really your last warning!” the camp director shouted. This time he didn’t even need the megaphone. “If you don’t stop right now, you’re toast, buddy, you’re buttered toast!”

The cars’ fenders locked together and stuck.

“Ah, crap,” someone said.

Our Land Cruiser began to slow way down, and I realized the camp director had cut the engine of his vehicle. We were pulling his car with ours.

“I’m coming over!” the camp director said, and he climbed out the window and jumped into the back of our vehicle.

The two Land Cruisers crept along at half speed, while tent after tent after white, white tent whished by.

At the end of the spoke, in the clearing beyond the last of the tents, the black helicopter came into view.

“Almost there,” Serena Mayfield cried.

“I am!” the camp director agreed. “Don’t worry, darling, I’m almost there!”

He picked up a crowbar that had been lying in the back of the Land Cruiser and tried to bash my brain in—or at least that’s what Serena Mayfield told me afterward.

I’m not entirely sure how we got out of that mess, but the Land Cruiser got to the end of the tents at the same time as the engine gave out, at the same time as Serena Mayfield punched the camp di­rector on the nose, at the same time as I’d been knocked out by the camp director’s first swing of the crowbar—fortunately, a glancing blow only. Then, somehow, she managed to drag me, my unopened cardboard box, and Dan Denny’s backpack (with the classified papers stuffed inside) to the helicopter, evading the enraged camp director and his driver and aides, and convince the good people of the Africa Kit Society helicopter to take us in and lift off all at once.

And that was how, several hours later, we came to be in a helicopter flying over Camp Commie (at the base of Mount Com­mie), parachutes strapped to our backs, with the Africa Kit Society representatives cheerfully waving us goodbye.

“Adieu! Adieu! Auf Wiedersehen! Goede reis!” they said, multilingual talents that they were.

A thought occurred at the last second. “You guys seem trustworthy,” I said. I fished around in Dan Denny’s blue backpack and pulled out the papers Serena Mayfield had stolen. “Take this, to the highest authority.”

The Africa Kit Society members took the pages. Then Serena Mayfield jumped; then I did.

* * *

If someone had been there to see, they would have seen two graceful figures, clad in the matching clothes of the Africa Kit Society, jumping from a black helicopter over one of the most beautiful mountains in the world, Mount Commie, over the legend­ary Camp Commie. The blue sky, the yellow savanna, the impe­rial mountain with its white snowcap, and two black specks dropping from a loud black fly.

As it was, there was no one to see it, so I had to imagine what it looked like for myself, and that was it.

* * *

Serena Mayfield and I detached ourselves from our parachutes and left them lying in the sun. Then we got our bearings, which was easy, what with Mount Commie taking up so much of the horizon.

Then, adrenalin still pumping, we saw each other as if for the first time, and discovered the pleasure of looking at each other. We took off our clothes, and were still lying to­gether when a vehicle pulled up beside us and trundled to a halt.

“I say,” said the driver of the vehicle, poking his head out the window. He had bushy grey mustaches and a Scottish accent. “I thought I saw someone falling out of a helicopter! Don’t sup­pose it was you two?”

“Who wants to know?” I said, trying to sound intimidating, and fully aware that nobody in his birthday suit is.

“Just me,” he said. “I’m the surveyor at Camp Commie.”

* * *

The surveyor at Camp Commie didn’t seem to notice our lack of clothes, and showed no embarrassment at chatting with us from the window of his vehicle while we put some back on and gathered our things. He’d offered to give us a ride to camp.

“Not too often you see people jumping out of helicopters, no,” he said. “How did you manage to lose all your clothes? Wind must be strong today.”

“It’s strong,” I agreed.

“So you two work for the Africa Kit Society, then?” he asked.

“No,” I said, at the same time as Serena Mayfield said, “Yes.”

“I do, he doesn’t,” she said. “He works for me and I work for them. Settled?”

“It dinnae matter to me,” said the surveyor for Camp Commie. “I just happened to notice it was an Africa Kit Society helicop­ter, is why I’m wondering.”

“I’m doing some research,” Serena Mayfield said. “And he’s… my porter.”

“Well, make yourselves right at home in Camp Commie,” the surveyor of Camp Commie said. “We’re all one big family here. And if you think you’re cut out for an expedition up the moun­tain, just ye let me know, all right?!”

He chuckled, and Serena Mayfield and I looked at each other uncertainly.

* * *

Camp Commie was different than all the other camps I’d been to so far. It wasn’t a volunteer dispatch center, like Base Camp, or a village in bandit territory, like Nkang… Camp X. It wasn’t a vast refugee camp, stylized like a bicycle and named after bicycle ter­minology, like the Wheel with its Hub and Spokes. It was a proper mountaineering camp, with no permanent residents and few semi-permanent residents. Our ride, the surveyor, was one of the latter.

An enterprising chap had opened up a pancake restaurant at Camp Commie. He called it “Mr. Joe’s Extra-Syrupy Pancakes” and although it was based out of a tent, he had plans to expand and build a permanent structure one day. Serena Mayfield and I took dinner there as the wind picked up. The sun had already set.

We poked at our pancakes in the glow of electric lan­terns. Even the sugar rush from the real and genuine maple syrup Joe put on his pancakes couldn’t counter the fact that, after all the running, driving, outrunning, fighting, flying, skydiving, sex, and walking, we were both zonked. I felt like I could sleep for days.

“Now, now! Eat up!” the proprietor of the pancake tent scolded us. “Don’t you know the song?”

“Song?” someone—it could have been me or Serena May­field—said.

Joe began to sing:

“Mr. Joe, Mr. Joe
You know he likes to eat them nice and slow
And you better not be late,
or he’ll pour syrup on his plate
O! He’s a crazy one, that Mr. Joe!”

“Is that song about you?” I asked him.

“Not me, no,” he said. “That song’s been around since I was a boy. My name just happened to be Joe, and I happen to like pancakes, so I appropriated it for myself, like.”

With our musical knowledge expanded, Serena Mayfield and I headed to our separate tents, which the surveyor of Camp Commie had kindly provided.

“Do you think that old fool meant we should go up Mount Commie?” Serena Mayfield asked me before we split.

“I think he was dying of cyanide poisoning,” I said, “and that he is therefore not the most trustworthy person one could meet.”

She bobbed her head in agreement. Even tired, even bobbing her head like that, she was beautiful.

“I think we should get some sleep, and sort things out in the morning,” I went on. And what a surprise I would have then!