“No!” Lamonia protested. “Don’t tell Him to come now! There’s too much work to do, you silly woman! Look out there at all them sinners! Just miles and miles of them. Pray for them first, child!”
Hooter gazed out at miles of honking cars.
“Yeah, you right, girl. Most them folks out there ain’t ready for Jesus. Look how upset and nasty they is. Hmmm hmmm. ” Hooter shook her head sadly. “So we ask Jesus to hold off a little longer. Just give us a little time, Jesus, ” she prayed loudly as Lamonia lurched out of the tollbooth and rear-ended another car. “Please, Lord in Heaven, just give me Saturday afternoon off, you got that? Just one little vacation, ” Hooter prayed. “That all I ask, Jesus. ”
Twenty-two
Dear Lord in Heaven, ” Dr. Faux prayed as he and Fonny Boy drifted in the bateau. “We’ve been out here all night and half the morning, and I’m so cold and hungry I don’t think I’ll survive another hour. Please help us. ”
Fonny Boy had given up on trying to get into the locked compartment and was blowing sour sounds on his harmonica and trying out various methods of hand effects and breathing techniques. He was on the verge of wishing that he and the dentist would be captured and returned to the storeroom, and regretted he had not bothered to carry sodas and food on board. But then, he had assumed they would reach the mainland long before supplies became an issue.
“Lord-a-mercy, I reckon the current’s taking us clean back to the island, ” he told Dr. Faux.
“I don’t see land at all. Not anywhere, Fonny Boy. And if we were near the island, we would have been spotted by now and maybe blindfolded and forced to walk the plank. I think we might just have drifted into the sanctuary, and if so, no watermen will be in the area, and we will languish and die out here. ”
“Nah, ” Fonny Boy replied. “You can make out the current. ” He pointed out gentle ripples of moving water. “But nigh as peace, they’ll figure we made off in the bateau and if we don’t make a hurry now, they’ll be on us and we’ll have to cite the Bible!”
“Unless they figure we’re on the mainland, and you know they won’t look for us there. You sure you can’t remember the combination to that damn padlock? Maybe there’s a flare gun in that compartment or even a mirror for sending signals. ”
Fonny Boy had known the combination at one time, and he was terribly frustrated as he strained to recall it. He had tried every birthday in his family, Tangier’s zip code, and several telephone numbers, all to no avail. He rapped the harmonica on the side of the bateau to knock out excess spit and tried a little straight harp, playing a melody in the key of C, and as usual, starting with hole 4.
“Think hard, Fonny Boy, ” Dr. Faux tried to encourage him. “Usually people use tricks to remember things, so my guess is your dad used some sort of association to come up with a combination that he wouldn’t forget. Are there any other numbers that might be important to your dad? What about your parents’ anniversary?”
Fonny Boy couldn’t remember that, either. He drew on the low end of the harmonica, trying a little blues jamming, like his hero, Dan Aykroyd.
“Now, I know some of the watermen use compasses, ” the dentist kept trying. “Possible there is a compass heading your father routinely uses when he comes out to check the crab pots?”
The words crab pot floated out of the barely moving bateau, then settled into the water and began to drift to the bottom, where a large collection of Callinectes (Greek for “beautiful swimmer”) sapidus (Latin for “tasty”) were enjoying the quiet and security of the crab sanctuary. Clustered together were the fugitives from the bucket, and one of them, an especially handsome jimmy with big blue claws and arms, decided to investigate the human voices and faint strains of a harmonica. He swam up through the murk, leaving his friends behind in a cloud of silt, and some twenty feet below the surface of the bay he spied the bottom of a bateau and heard voices again.