Trouble in River City was no understatement.
The water was bubbling up through the hole in the floor before any of us had so much as mmmpphhhed. We were sinking fast.
Quickly, I elbowed my face into Frisbee’s so we were nose to nose, mouth full of pillow case rags to mouth full of pillow case rags. We started smooching around like crazy, rubbing the rags back and forth trying to dislodge them. I was smooching around anyway. Frisbee was trying to get away from me like I’d gone mad. After a particularly glaring glare from me and a pithy mmpphh, she finally got the point and mooched into the fray with a frenzy.
It wasn’t working. I moved my nose down and used it like a crowbar to dig at the rag in her mouth. She rolled her eyes up like she couldn’t stand to watch what I was doing in her mouth with my tobacco infested nostrils. It was about as personal as two people would ever want to get, I guess. But hey, what’s a little gross behavior when the only alternative is drowning your guts out.
Whatever. I nosed and nosed in there like mad. Finally, I got my whole nose into the side of her mouth and started nudging out the rag, bit by bit. It was slow work. Her saliva was getting into my nostrils and cutting off my air. I had to take four breathe breaks before the rag finally slid all the way out and her mouth was free.
“That is the most disgusting thing that ever happened to me,” she queased. “Why do you always come up with solutions that are disgusting?”
She started spitting and pittooing in case there were any of my nostril contents stuck on her tongue. I could see she was going to overdo the spew cleaning for about six hours, so I interrupted her and shoved my rag into her mouth and motioned for her to take a bite and pull it out. She backed her head off a couple of times, not reading my motioning correctly. Finally, she got what I meant.
“Oh, God,” she muttered.
She chewed hold of the rag and we gawked back and forth like a couple of geese heads beaking it up on the shore line while she pulled the rag out bite by bite. There was only a little nibble left at the end and our lips found themselves touching. We looked into each other’s eyes. I winked. She yanked out the nibble with a fury and spit it off of her.
“Don’t ever try this again,” she warned. “And don’t ever mention this to anyone. You hear me, asshole?”
“My nose feels all horny,” I teased.
“You’re sick,” she said.
Back to the business of not drowning to death. “We’ve got to lean down to our knees and get our teeth on that fucking rope,” I said. “We’ve got to get it loose so we can stand up. Otherwise, we’re going to drown right here on our butts.”
She looked at the water spreading out across the floor. “Got it,” she said.
We left the rag in Moose’s mouth. Nothing he ever said was worth a shit anyway. Even Frisbee could see that. And we didn’t have time.
We leaned forward and down as far as the three of us would go. Not enough. I was too pot bellied to get my head down to my knees any more. I could do it a long time ago, I remembered. Not now. Another example of the disheartening side effects of living too damned long and getting stuck in a fat, wrinkled, old container.
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m too fat.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I can get there. You and Moose slide around to the back of my shoulders so I’m squeezed to the front.”
We did as she said. It was a smart idea. When we leaned over this time, she got far enough down so she could get her teeth onto the rope knot. Paul had tied it kind of carelessly. It had some looseness to it.
Frisbee went to work gnawing and pulling at it. As she moved her jaw around, Moose and I flopped this way and that on her back like a couple of knapsack heads. We exchanged a few eyeball daggers during the process. The water was halfway up our legs. Frisbee would drown chewing in a matter of minutes.
“Go, Frisbee,” I said. “C’mon girl. You can do it. Hurry.”
Just as the water started pooling over our legs she reared back up with the rope in her mouth. We were free.
“You did it!” I said.
“That was the worst breakfast I ever fucking ate,” she said. “Yuck. That fucking rope had salt and fish guts all over it.”
She sounded a little funny. Then I saw why. Her bottom teeth weren’t there. They’d popped out when she yanked the rope free.
She suddenly noticed this interesting tidbit herself. “Oh holy fucking crap,” she moaned. “Where’s my goddamned teeth?”
We looked around for them. They were lying between my legs. Underwater.
“We gotta get up,” I said.
“I’ll lose my teeth if you stand,” she said.
She plunged her head into the water and tried to grab onto her teeth. I could feel her jaw working around between legs. My thighs, actually. Shit. Mr. Unmentionable started creeping down my pant leg.
She came up gasping for breath. Without the teeth. She looked at me. “I felt that,” she said. “You did that on purpose.”
“Did what?”
“You know what, asshole.”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t help it. Your jaw was sliding around on my leg. It’s just an automatic thing. Honest. I don’t run the show down there.”
“Bullshit.”
“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get up.”
Moose had nothing to say so far. A whole lot of angry mmmpphhing, though. Especially when Frisbee was digging around with her face between my legs. I could see his eyeballs blowing geysers over that one.
We pulled up our feet and braced ourselves against the wall and started inching ourselves upward, back by butt by feet. Somehow, without any previous training, the three of us instinctively knew how to perform this rarely attempted pressure based lever and fulcrum maneuver which produced a geek commodity called torque. Or maybe not. It was probably whatever they called it when a worm humpbacked along the ground, sliming his feetless butt forward, which pushed his feetless guts upward and allowed his feetless head to slime forward a couple of millimeters as he roared across the earth at .000000000000000000001 miles per hour. Whoops. Excuse me. Kilometers per hour. Worms were on the metric system, for some reason. Something the Mayflower brought over, I guess.
We were on our feet, backs against the wall.
“Now what?” Frisbee said.
I looked down at our hands. All three sets were dangling in front of her lap, right down there inches from you know where land.
“Don’t get no fucking ideas with any of those fat fucking fingers,” she said, following my gaze down to her lap.
I noticed she didn’t give the same exhortation to Moose. Fat fingers weren’t all the same, obviously.
“Jesus, Frisbee. Is that all you ever think about?”
“Me? You’re the one with the boner.”
Moose wriggled around furiously, almost knocking us over.
“Stop it!” Frisbee yelled at him. “Cease this fucking minute you moron!”
He tried to wrench our hands up to his face to pull out his rag. We resisted. He couldn’t overpower us. The rag stayed.
The water was up to our knees.
“We have to chew off the rope,” I said.
“Your teeth this time,” she said.
We pulled our hands up to my mouth and I went to work. My wisdom teeth had been pried out years ago, so they were no help. Why they were called wisdom teeth when they never lasted long enough to get out of high school had always puzzled me. Whatever. My molars weren’t any help, either. One was gone, the other three were capped. All of the capped ones were sensitive to pressure and temperature. I could barely grind a steak to shreds or eat an ice cream cone with them.
So it was up to my premolar, canine, and incisor teeth to do the job. Fortunately, my canines lived up to their name. They had nice little points to them. Not vampire pointed. Cutely round tipped pointed. They didn’t snag upon extraction. I used them to pry into the knot and the other teeth to yank at it. Pry, yank. Pry, yank. It was slow work. Almost as slow as scritching.
The water was up to our waists.
“Get a move on it, Blue,” Frisbee said. “We’re drowning here.”
The water was up to our chests when I finally tore the knot loose. Our hands were free. Of each other. They were still tied together per each, though. I’d only gotten the three-in-one rope untied. We were only three-in-one tied together now by our feet.
Moose immediately yanked out his rag. The peace was finally shattered. Before he could speak out his ass-face, though, Frisbee stifled him. Good thinking, Frisbo. “Stuff it, Moose. Not a fucking word. Untie my hands.”
It was going to be two against one now, I could see that. Tarzan and Jane. Vine swinging it up and down the playground of their black hole paradise. My hands would be the last to be set free, if at all. I decided to get our legs free in the meantime. Nobody was going anywhere as a six-legged onesome.
I took a deep breath and bent down under the water and undid the all three of us rope. It took three dunkings for old tobacco lungs to get the job done. Now we were finally individually free of each other, even though all our feet were individually still tied up. They had their hands free, though. I didn’t.
The water was up to our necks. Mine and Moose’s anyway. It was up to Frisbee’s nose. I had a brief wondering whether it was more accurate to say we were drowning or the boat was sinking. Very brief.
Moose ducked underwater to untie his feet.
“I’m getting out of here,” Frisbee said. “Screw my feet.”
“What about my hands?” I said.
“Shit,” she said. “You’re gonna get me killed.”
The water rose up over her head before she got me untied and she had to hold herself up by wrapping her legs around my neck. It was kind of an interesting moment, as you might imagine, even though I was now officially drowning. The water was over my head and Frisbee was holding me down. Here I come, Teresa. Catch me when I fall. I know I’m biting the big one with my face in another woman’s personal hygiene area, but it doesn’t mean anything to me, I swear it.
Then suddenly I was free. Free hands. Free of Frisbee. I launched up out of the water gasping for air.
“Thanks, Frizz,” I choked.
“I’m out of here,” she said.
For some reason, Moose was still dunking up and down trying to get his feet untied. Well, there was probably a reason. He was terminally stupid.
Frisbee swam over to the doorway, feet tied and all, and pulled herself out through it onto the walkway. I couldn’t see her after that. I swam over after her. The doorway was almost completely submerged now. I paused there for a moment and looked back at Moose. He was still hopping up and down.
“I can’t swim,” he begged as his head bobbed up.
I looked at him. “Gee. What a fucking shame,” I said.
He bobbed down and then bobbed up again.
“Help me, Blue.”
“I’d rather help Frisbee.”
Down he bobbed again. Try bobbing over to the fucking door you brain dead idiot, I ruminated. Well, you die like you live, all those they heads said. How was I living, I wondered. Not particularly well, I suppose. It seemed a good enough way to die. Dying smart and healthy seemed like a waste.
I swam through the doorway and crawled up onto the walkway. Frisbee had freed her legs and walked onto the dock and was sitting there, her head between her knees. I untied my legs and went over and sat down next to her.
We sat there in silence. Drip dropping on the dock. All wet, pooped out, and numb. Then Frisbee jerked up her head and looked around. “Where’s Moose?” she cried out. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Panic.
I faked looking around frantically for him. “I thought he got out before you. He was the first one out. While you were untying me.”
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Shit. She was stuck on a three track mind.
“Take it easy,” I said. “I’ll go look for him. He’s got to be somewhere.”
The boat deck and the cabin room were underwater and going down fast. I walked out on the walkway and looked down at the doorway. I slid off and eased down onto the deck, neck deep. Then I took a deep breath and dove down and swam through the doorway into the submerged room.
Moose was sitting on the floor, his feet still tied in front of him, his arms floating around next to him. His dead eyes stared vacantly out through the water at me, through me, focused on some far off point in eternity. Gone to the other side. No longer with us. I tried to imagine where he was now. What he was doing. What he was thinking. What he looked like. Casper the Friendly Ghost? No luck. So long Moose head.
I turned to swim back out, but caught a glimpse of Frisbee’s teeth lying over on the floor by his feet. I swam out and got another lungful of air and dove back down and swam over and retrieved her teeth.
I swam back out.
“Was he in there? Was he in there? Was he in there?” Frisbee was still three tracking it.
“Yeah,” I said. “He was in there. And he ain’t coming out. I’m sorry, Frisbee. He didn’t make it.”
Hamlet said it best. “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I. A dull and muddy-mettled rascal. I am pigeon-livered. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain.”
The boat shuddered one last time and slipped beneath the surface, settling its slow way down to the ocean floor, however far down there that was.
“Where’s Waldo?” would never be asked again.
“I found your teeth,” I said.
To be continued . . .
