“He-ey! You have to broke the door!” he shouted to the angry mob.
The watermen did and thundered inside, waving their oars and tongs.
“Down with Virginia! Down with Virginia!” was their furious battle cry. “You daren’t go back to the main, Dr. Faux, hear? You’re wer prisoner!”
“You’re going to catch it!”
“That’s right! That’s right!”
“Heeey thar, Dr. Faux. How feels it, you being the one stuck in that thar chair?”
“Give him the dickens!”
“I did!” Fonny Boy said, full of himself. “I scobbed him right in the nose and down he went ass-over-tin-cup!” he boasted.
“We should yank out ever one of his teeth! Look at all the teeth a’ ours he always a’ pullin’!”
“Take him potting, we should! And tie ‘im up good and feed ‘im to the crabs!”
“And that ain’t no way to go, I tell you!”
“Durn it, if it ain’t what he got comin’! Hear?”
“Wait a minute!” Dr. Faux protested loudly enough to briefly silence the watermen as he cowered in the dentist’s chair and rubbed his nose. “I do hear! And what I’m hearing is first you’re mad at Virginia, and now you’ve suddenly turned on me! Make up your mind!”
“We mad at ever one of you on the main,” someone decided. “There’s neither one from the main who don’t take our advantage.”
“Well, if you’re fully decided on kidnapping me,” Dr. Faux thought quickly and with fraudulent intent, “then your plan will only work if you send notice to the governor. Otherwise, no one will know I’m here and what good will it do to lock me up? And as for your unfair and ungrateful accusations about how I’ve taken care of your dental needs, I must point out that I have come here for many years with nothing but goodness in my heart, and without me you would have no dentist at all.”
“Better none than you.”
“My wife, she would still be with all her teeth. And I get the ache in my tooth when it gets right airish out. A tooth you fixed!”
“Well, maybe we should have another mind about this.” One of the watermen had second thoughts and leaned his oar against a wall. “We don’t want neither trouble.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Faux agreed. “You watermen are projecting. You’re furious with the governor, and I can’t say as I blame you. Clearly, you’re being persecuted and discriminated against as usual, and I’m not sure what these painted lines are about, but they weren’t put there with your best interest in mind.”
“Nah, neither interest that might be a good turn for us.”
“Don’t listen to him talking at us!” It was Fonny Boy who took charge. “He’s of the main, and how did it come to us that the troopers and him are here at the same time? He’s spying, he is!”
“I’ll swagger! What’s in your head to make you notion him spying on us, honey boy?” Fonny Boy’s father asked with growing anger and resentment.
“Spying on potting and drudging and then he go telling untruths about jimmies and sooks and arysters. Soon enough, they’ll make the law that we have no business follering the water,” Fonny Boy declared without the thinnest fabric of evidence.
“This one thar let on that to you?” Fonny Boy’s father asked as he jerked his chin at the dentist.
“Yass. Durn if he didn’t!”
“What words did he put to you?”
Fonny Boy shrugged, his yarn running aground, but the seed had been planted.
“Can’t be taking no chances,” another waterman spoke up.
“Nah.”
“Nah. That’s right.”
“The governor already’s cut our crabbing to the wick, and now that arster drudging is pretty near on us, what if are told to leave that off, too? Why, there’ll be nothing in our pockets, neither a red cent.”
“It ain’t fittin’!”
“Nah. For sure it ain’t!”
“I say we let ‘im make one call over the phone and talk our intentions,” Fonny Boy’s father suggested in a wild, angry voice.
“Who’s he gonna call for?”
“I say he talk at the state police, that’s what. They was the ones who painted on the street out thar. And maybe the dentist is spying for the police on part of the gov’ner.”