The lollipop-lucious lips of Dardenella steamed away East at six knots max as Jenny and I woke up tied face to face on a slow boat to Bora Bora that hauled a load of flax, jute and floss for Singapore. Crumples had slipped me a Mickey alright, a chloral hydrate handshake with San Francisco Nazis!Pressed right up against the gorgeous red-haired Jenny but facing a bottle-nosed Luger wielded by that psycho mime Gunther, I was kinda scared and kinda turned on, like the last time I floated a check to the Jimmy the Twitchy Cleaver to cover a long-odds bet on nag named Cement Molasses.
Gunther made a move. He started swimming in the air, and then pretended to drown. He wasn't the best mime, but I worked that out it was a threat. Then he pretended to hit me across the face with the Luger. That would have hurt, had he hit me with the Luger.
He made a dumb-guy face, and held up a finger.
"Um...one word...sounds... like wrench? No..tool! Fool!!"
Gunther touched his nose, and pointed at me, then air-beat me with the Luger again.
"I'll never talk! And neither will you, apparantly."
Over the next twelve minutes and a knee cramp we eventually worked out that I was still being foolish and there were bays of making me talk. I may have missed a bit. It's always sad how the art goes to hell when a street performer turns fascist on you.
This kept on for hours. I wouldn't crack. Gunther was getting sloppy. The darkness fell. The wind arose.
The Pacific turned surprised and angry, like a woman who's just been kidnapped by a Nazi sea mime. Huge waves built. Gunther finally left forward by grabbing a non-existent rope and pulling against the wind, which somehow seemed to affect him more strongly than I thought it would have. He left Jenny and I tied around a stantion, and I noticed a rather large number of times that her silk dress was soaked, and I could estimate the temperature pretty accurately.
"Make out with me if you want to live!" she screamed against the wind.
"Whaa..?" But it's not the kind of request you really question for very long. Finally I got it - in the throes of our attempted sea-passion, the ropes were falling around our heads in reach of our mouths. By the time I got to 2nd base Jenny had chewed lustily through a 2 inch hemp cable. I smiled quietly through the rope burns to myself.
There were only a few dirty Krauts on board. I came around a corner and a dark shape asked me in Kraut-talk for a cig. I had a pack, which I shoved all at once into his mouth.
"Here's your smokes, Henreich, courtesy of President Roosevelt!," I informed him, and I shoved him overboard with splash lost in the furious waters.
I really wish I hadn't done that. First of all it was my last pack, and Ol' Fritzy McNazi turned out to be the navigator, and since Jenny had shot the captain with the little derringer she kept in her unmentionables, by the time we had taken the bridge no one actually knew where we were anymore. Gunther the mime was now in the engine room and I prayed to god he was actually shovelling real coal. "All Ahead full!" I yelled, and turned the Bon Chance Hedy Lamarr into the wind, praying for break in the storm.
We did get a break, in the form of a brand new volcano, and the break was the ship's back on a shoal that could not have been more than 2 weeks old. Jenny and I scrambled into a lifeboat and managed to launch, leaving six or seven Jerrys to fend for themselves on a bitterly ironic floating shipment of models of lifeboats, while we watched the curious spectacle of Gunther both drowning and pretending to drown at the same moment.
I counted my blessings. Two, if you include Jenny.
No comments:
Post a Comment