against his body until he had wriggled in as far as his waist. Then, when his left arm was free…
Only what if he wasn’t able to get it free? He saw himself stuck, right arm in the tank, left arm pinned against his body, his midsection blocking the hole, blocking the air, dying a dog’s death, flailing at the sludge just below him while he strangled, the last thing he saw the mocking bright stitch that had lured him on.
He saw someone finding his body half-plugged into the toilet hole with his ass
sticking up and his legs splayed, smeary brown sneaker prints stamped on the goddam
toilet cubicle from his final dying kicks. He could hear someone—perhaps the IRS
agent who was The Motherfucker’s bête noire—saying “Holy shit, he must have
dropped something really valuable down there.”
It was funny, but Curtis didn’t feel like laughing.
How long had he been kneeling there, peering into the tank? He didn’t know—his
watch was back in his study, sitting by his computer’s mousepad—but the ache in his
thighs suggested quite awhile. And the light had brightened considerably. The sun
would be entirely over the horizon now, and soon his prison would once more turn
into a steam room.
“Gotta go,” he said, and wiped sweat from his cheeks with the palms of his hands.
“It’s the only thing.” But he paused again, because another thought had occurred to
him.
What if there was a snake in there?
What if The Motherfucker, imagining that his witchly enemy might try this very thing,
had put a snake in there? A copperhead, perhaps, for the time being fast asleep under a layer of cool human mud? A copperhead bite on the arm and he would die slowly
and painfully, his arm swelling even as the temperature climbed. A bite from a coral
snake would take him more quickly but even more painfully: his heart lunging,
stopping, lunging again, then finally giving up.
There are no snakes in there. Bugs, maybe, but no snakes. You saw him, you heard
him. He wasn’t thinking that far ahead. He was too sick, too crazy.
Perhaps, perhaps not. You couldn’t really gauge crazy people, could you? They were
wild cards.
“Deuces and jacks, man with the axe, natural sevens take all,” Curtis said. The Tao of The Motherfucker. All he knew for sure was that if he didn’t try it down there, he was almost certainly going to die up here. And in the end, a snakebite might be quicker
and more merciful.
“Gotta,” he said, once more wiping his cheeks. “Gotta.”
As long as he didn’t get stuck halfway in and halfway out of the hole. That would be a terrible way to die.
“Not going to get stuck,” he said. “Look how big it is. That thing was built for the
asses of doughnut-eating long-haul truckers.”
This made him giggle. The sound contained more hysteria than humor. The toilet hole
did not look big to him; it looked small. Almost tiny. He knew that was only his
nervous perception of it—hell, his scared perception, his frightened to death perception—but knowing that didn’t help much.
“Gotta do it, though,” he said. “There’s really nothing else.”
And in the end it would probably be for nothing…but he doubted anyone had
bothered to add a steel outer layer to the holding tank, and that decided him.
“God help me,” he said. It was his first prayer in almost forty years. “God, please help me not get stuck.”
He poked his right arm through the hole, then his head (first taking one more deep
breath of the better air in the cubicle). He pressed his left arm to his side and slithered into the hole. His left shoulder caught, but before he could panic and draw back—this
was, part of him understood, the critical moment, the point of no return—he shimmied
it like a man doing the Watusi. His shoulder popped through. He jackknifed into the
stinking tank up to his waist. With his hips—slim, but not nonexistent—plugging the
hole, it was now as black as pitch. That seam of light seemed to float mockingly just
before his eyes. Like a mirage.