fLoOd--Part Seventeen

It's So Easy

sEvEnTeEn

   After the deafening roar produced by Jones' firearm had died away, and after the charming little speech Jones made by way of sequel had reached its conclusion, and after Jones commenced his own version of what is so onamatapoetically referred to as snoring, and occasionally, perhaps more poetically, as sawing, which, incidentally, and probably not unaptly, in view of whence it was emanating, sounded remarkably like short, sharp bursts of gunfire (And where were we?,,,Oh, yes.) after all this came to pass (or, in terms of the snoring, or sawing, was passing) the three men (or, to be more accurate, two men and a boy) began the process of untangling themselves and extricating themselves from the convoluted pile into which they'd been jumbled by Murphy's playfulness, Wilkerson's gymnastics, Davis's defensiveness and Smith's astonishment at his sudden and rather violent, not to mention painful, extraction from slumber.

   Murphy, realizing how much the vocalizing of the trio, now separating and emerging into individual personae at his feet, had been due to his gentle prodding and evocation of greater varieties of harmonics, closed his eyes, threw his head back, and added his gargling (whether genuine or forced isn't truly known, but this author has his suspicions) to the chorus of gunfire, anvil-tones and whispering floating in the moonlight over the now still water. Smith was the first to separate himself entirely from his two fellow musicians. In conducting a cursory physical examination of himself he found his injuries limited to a very tender posterior, which he landed on extremely ungently as he was yanked from his seat by Wilkerson, and a scraped back, which had made contact with the seat which the rest of his corpus had vacated and maintained contact with as gravity carried him to the bottom of the boat, not to mention the combined bosoms of Wilkerson and Davis. Of more concern to Smith than his newly acquired parcel of aches and pains was the whereabouts of his precious brick, last encountered by you, Constant Reader, becoming acquainted with the rear portion of Wilkerson's skull. Smith energetically began scrambling on hands and knees in search of the dear, if somewhat cold and hard, object, which could easily have led to another melee in the midst of the pedal extremities (a rather enticing title for a chapter, eh?) had not Wilkerson and Davis by this time safely ensconced themselves on either side of the vessel, leaning at the gunwales. As his brick was lying placidly directly in the center of the boat's hull, Smith retrieved it without further incident and, holding it as gently as a favorite small pet, he returned to his seat opposite the still-firing but, luckily, always missing, Jones. Unfortunately for Smith, he sat down directly on his posterior, as we humans are always fated to do. This produced a great deal of pain and, truly with no sense of malice to any of his co-inhabitants, it also produced a howl that was neither quiet nor melodic nor conducive to slumber. Three of the men in the boat were already awake and the howl, though quite jarring to the nerves, had not the drastic quality of suddenly tearing them from the peaceful meads of slumber and thrusting them back to our more limited vale of tears.