FlOoD--Part Eighteen

Love Is a Rose

EiGhTeEn

   Two of the men were asleep when Smith howled and their reactions were almost exact opposites. Jones slowly raised his head and slowly opened his eyes. He lifted his gun and pointed it at Smith, who was crouched over his seat, which was directly opposite from Jones. Smith was resting his weight on his two hands which were keeping his nether regions from contact with the hard wooden plank. He was in the act of either raising himself or gently lowering himself, it wasn't immediately clear which, when the glint of the gun caught his eye and he froze in this untenable position. Johnson's reaction to Smith's howl of pain was much less dramatic. He raised himself into a sitting position and resumed playing tunes on his anvil with its strange accompanying instrument. As he now added vocalization to his repertory,  through the air began to float a melody concerning a haywagon and a hoedown.

   Murphy and Brown also responded to Smith's unanticipated shattering of the newly-fallen silence in the night. Brown simply raised his head, put a finger to his lips and, with a hissing sound, requested Smith to once more let silence reign supreme. Murphy found this a suitable occasion to rouse himself from his feigned slumber. He was feeling rather frisky from having remained confined to one position for so long and was on the lookout for something to enliven the situation. Brown, being granted the silence he had so eloquently requested from Smith, almost before he had asked for it, was at first disappointed that Johnson's music-making further disrupted the calm of the night. But after the gentle tune had serenaded him for a time, it seemed to gain a rhythmic hold on him that he responded to by quietly tapping with his fingers on the urn.

   While peace and harmony (and perhaps an insidious touch of future discord) were establishing themselves in the stern, the bow of the boat held a strange tableau in the moonlight. Jones and Smith were immobile on the seat across from each other. Jones' gun was pointed directly at Smith's midsection and Smith, terrified to complete his journey either up off the seat or down onto it, was looking mighty uncomfortable as his arms began to tremble slightly from holding the weight of his torso in mid-air. The audience for this living picture, which consisted of Peterson, Davis and Wilkerson, easily understood and empathized with Smith's predicament but were slightly mystified at Jones' maintenance of such a threatening posture without any words of warning and also without any further movement, as though he too were being held at bay by Smith. Presently, Davis gently touched Wilkerson with his foot and leaned forward and whispered something to him. Wilkerson uttered an interrogatory and Davis merely shrugged. Wilkerson took a long look at Jones, a glance at Davis and then gingerly reached out and, completely unopposed by Jones, gently removed the gun from his grasp. Jones remained immobile with his hand held out as if it retained the weapon. Smith, in utter relief and exhaustion, dropped himself onto the bench and, producing the same painful results as his first landing and also producing, almost exactly in tone and volume, the same howl as before. The forefinger of Jones' hand, at this instigation, began contracting, over and over, on the trigger of the gun, which, luckily for Smith, was now gracing the hand of Wilkerson. Smith, once again balanced over the seat on his hands, began frantically searching for his brick, absent since his first mishap, but now that he was no longer in fear for his life, only wanted at this moment. His head was swinging around desperately on his neck until Davis put a hand on his leg to get his attention and said, "Right here." Smith looked down and saw Davis holding the beloved brick carefully in the lap covered by Peterson's oversized coat.