Flight (41 page)

With the bottle wedged between two crates of
spicy smelling mesclun, Joe came back to Bob Tom and lifted his
legs so that his whole body was stretched out on the shelf they had
made earlier by moving a half dozen crates around. As Joe velked
the old man’s themkin tighter to keep out the night air, the old
man’s mouth fell open in an unconscious yawn. The sight of that
gawp acted on Joe like a nail in a tire. All the pressure within
him began leaking out. He yawned, yawned again, struggled as he
made himself a nest from a mound of coiled rope and within minutes
of getting as himself comfortable as he guessed he could, despite
all of the adventures of the day, was fast asleep.

* * *

Even as he fought the hands that were holding
him down, Joe had the clarity to twist his head to see what Bob Tom
was doing. From what he could glimpse between his assailants’ arms,
those three crew members were having a much easier time
overpowering the riverman than the two who were trying to tie Joe
up as the teener kicked and thrashed, and used all of his hockey
experience to get out of their clutches. Joe, since he was neither
drunk nor drugged, might have succeeded, although what advantage
that might have produced given that he was on a barge in the middle
of the Hudson River wasn’t clear, if the other three crew members,
after securing Bob Tom, hadn’t joined their mates.

After the crew members bound their hands and
feet with the same heavy plastic zip-ties used to secure the crates
to the barge and locked Joe and Bob Tom in a well-worn storage
locker area in the bow end of the tug’s hold, the old man
immediately fell back into a deep sleep. By flopping around on the
floor of the hold and not worrying about the bruises his efforts
were making, Joe managed to work his way onto his knees. From his
kneeling position, despite the tight restraints around his crossed
wrists, Joe could reach Bob Tom’s hands. Leaning back on his heels,
he tried to roust his friend by pulling on an arm, but when that
appendage stretched like a water balloon in Joe’s hand, he gave up
on that tactic. Instead, he leaned forward, wedged his head under
the riverman’s fusty armpit and using all of his strength, managed
to push Bob Tom upright, but as soon as Joe removed his head,
Damall fell over like some hideously re-imagined Raggedy Andy doll.
Listening to Bob Tom’s stertorous snores, Joe wondered if there was
something else in the bottle besides the bourbon the old man had
treated as if it were sacrament. After one more effort to bring
back Bob Tom to the living, an exhausted Joe gave up on getting any
help from his rescuer.

As the old man slept, the exhausted but
sleepless Joe laboriously crawled and wriggled around the hold
looking for possible means of escape. The steel lever handle on the
locker’s door moved a couple of centimeters, but no more. A second
unmovable door, one that seemed to lead to the tug’s engine room,
didn’t have a handle on it. After more than an hour of probing the
locker and considering the collection of frayed lines, lubricants,
a dilapidated generator, and foul weather gear without coming up
with anything that felt like a practical plan, Joe decided to
followed Bob Tom’s example and go to sleep. As he waited for his
exhaustion to win out over his outrage at the cowardice of his
captors attacking while he and Bob Tom slept, Joe desultorily
twisted his restraints until his wrists began to bleed. What did
the tug’s crew plan to do with him? Would they themselves try to
ransom him or would they turn those dealings over to someone with a
little more experience? Would they try to keep Joe and Bob Tom in
the hold of the ship or would they decide that it would be safer to
stash them someplace on land? If it was to be land, would they opt
for someplace rural or would they carry their quarry all the way to
Manhattan or beyond? And the most interesting question of all,
given that the victims had seen their faces, did the kidnappers
have any intention at all of returning their captives even after a
ransom had been paid?

After asking his questions and getting no
answers, Joe finally fell into a short uneasy sleep.

* * *

Joe had been watching shards and pinpricks of
lights lasering around the storage hold for almost two hours before
Bob Tom began to stir. After he had awakened, Joe had started by
reconsidering his questions from the night before, however those
thoughts were so formless that the boy soon abandoned them.
Instead, his thoughts veered from escaping the hold, to fledging
and flying, to Prissi, to Prissi’s lips when he kissed her, to
fighting the Hudson for his life, to the extraordinary way he had
been rescued and what a debt he owed to Bob Tom, and back to Prissi
and the danger she must be in, to some vague time in the future
when he and Bob Tom, and… maybe, Prissi would be flying above the
Adirondacks spying in the nests of eagles before landing and eating
a meal with Blesonus. Joe was so engrossed in his diversionary
thoughts that it wasn’t until Bob Tom groaned a third time that the
boy recognized that his friend was awake.

Shaking his bound hands at those above-deck,
Bob Tom exclaimed, “Et tu, Brute or whatever yore damn name might
be.” The old man brought his bound hands to his head and struck
himself in the forehead.

“Noby One, my little friend, you done
yourself a huge favor by passin on what I thought to be Kentucky’s
finest.”

Bob Tom hit himself a second time.

“I’m afeered that they done me some permanent
damage, Noby. My brain feels like it fell in a swift current and
got battered around in the rocks.”

Although he was sympathetic, Joe wasn’t
feeling patient. He figured that Bob Tom must have had between four
and five more hours of sleep than he’d had and since the riverman
had been drunk, he hadn’t fought as hard and consequently hadn’t
been as bruised and banged up as Joe himself. When Bob Tom groaned
and started to hit himself in the head a third time, Joe asked,
“Any chance of you taking a time-out from your exercises to help me
think how we’re going to get out of here?”

Damall’s bushy eyebrows bolted upward like a
couple of mangy rabbits flushed from their warren.

“After all I done for you and you talk to me
this way. I’m hurt, Noby, bad hurt from what them pirates done to
me, but I’m worse hurt from yore unkind, ungrateful and surely
uncalled for words.”

Joe held out his hands, “What are we going to
do? If we don’t do something soon, they might kill us.”

Bob Tom grunted as he raised his shoulders
from the deck of the hold and looked around before asking “Where’d
you get that idea? Kilo for kilo, yore surely the most valuable
piece of real estate in all of New York.”

“We’ve seen their faces.”

“As ugly a collection as I’ve had occasion to
witness since…”, Bob Tom paused as if he couldn’t think of what
next to say.

Despite their situation, Joe smiled as he
asked, “Since you was underground with a bunch of bristle-lipped
wimmin?”

“My very thought, Noby, despite it bein a
while comin. My very thought.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Well, I’d say the furst thing we’re goin do
is ask our hosts for some java, an I’ll drink yore’s so to help my
pore head, an a half dozen eggs over easy an, mebbe, some bacon.
You like bacon, Noby?”

Bob Tom did some yelling and he and Joe did
some exploring, but the day passed and no one answered their calls.
Neither bacon nor eggs, not even coffee arrived. Not did any
solution to their problems appear. They used a broken pipe wrench
they found to try to wedge under their plaston fetters and snap
them, but the loops were drawn too tightly around their wrists to
succeed. Bob Tom talked about using the wrench and a couple of
pieces of pipe they scavenvged to attack the kidnappers when they
came below, but Joe didn’t see that plan as being very successful
until their hands and feet were free.

The hours slowly passed, the light faded, and
their hunger pains and thirst grew. The engine, on the other side
of the handle-less bulkhead door, chugged along, but the only other
sound the captives heard than the engine was the sloshing of the
Hudson against the steel hull. Joe was curled into as small a ball
as possible trying both to keep warm and to keep his hunger from
spreading beyond his belly, when he was startled from his sleep by
Bob Tom’s anguished swearing.

“May you burn in the stench of brimstone and
feel yore spirit weighed down with a millstone.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong.
We’ve been assaulted on. Captured. Mis-used fearsomely. But, l I’m
not one to make a fuss about bein mis-used. Since Eden, it’s all
men’s fate. But, Noby, there must be limits. What happened to me
lessen four days ago, Noby? What sorry fate came to pass?”

Bob Tom, with his hands held up in the air in
anticipation, waited, and waited some more for Joe’s answer.

When Joe didn’t respond, Bob Tom finally let
his hands drop to his chest.

“Tarndamnation, Noby. What ignominy have I
suffered? What near mortal loss?”

Joe finally had an inspiration, “Your kayak?
Your favorite boat?”

“Yes, my most favorite boat is gone. Taken
from me by fate...with a punkin-sized helping of help from you, as
I recall. And when that was taken, did I complain? No. No, sir, I
took ole Fate’s medicine, a right bitter medicine, and swallered it
down.”

Joe’s hands started to protest Bob Tom’s
re-telling of the story, but the riverman shook his head.

“I won’t put up with it. I, Damall, damwell
won’t.”

Bob Tom paused and Joe gave in and played his
part, “What?”

“My pole. My fly-fishing pole. Not only my
favorite fishin pole, but the best fishin pole on the whole Hudson.
Where is it? Who’s got it? I lost my favorite boat, but I will not,
won’t lose my favorite fishin pole. No, sir. I won’t.”

Looking around at the shadows that lurked in
the corners of the tug’s hold as if some answers were to be found
there, Joe says, “Then, let’s get it back.”

Bob Tom concurs, “Good plan,” before yawning.
Seconds later, he is snoring, but it is hours before Joe gets back
to sleep.

The following day their captors opened the
hatch and sent down an unimaginably bright column of sunlight as
well as a five liter can of water and a tub of something that was
more than soup but fells short of stew. Bob Tom and Joe waited
until the tub cooled before alternating their hands into the
pot.

When the pot is about half-empty, Bob Tom
wondered, “You ain’t holdin back, are ya, Noby. Lettin me have a
little more just cause I’m bigger’n you and apt to be more
haingry?”

Joe laughs, “I thought about it, but figured
I shouldn’t because I’m a growing boy.”

Feeling restored by the food, and with Bob
Tom more than a day away from his hangover, the two captives spend
their time crawling around the hold seeing if what they find can be
turned into a means of escape. Joe follows the hunter’s advice to
look at things sideways, not to try too hard to figure anything
out, just let it come. Joe, who has been looking for things either
sharp or hard enough to cut through their restraints, tries to take
Bob Tom’s advice.

Joe tells himself that he must have done a
good job when he looks at a small battered-sided lantern, flicks a
switch, and gets an idea. He wriggles around until he is facing Bob
Tom, who is rummaging around in the dark, narrow, wedge of the
bow.

“Look! I’ve got an idea.”

He wiggles the lantern.

Bob Tom turns around, “An I can see it’s a
bright idea, Noby, but a bright idea is a far ways from a
solution.”

Afraid that he won’t have enough time, Joe
turns off the lantern and begins wriggling along to where he
remembers seeing cans of motor lubricants and fluid. Once there, he
picks up a can, reads the label, puts it back, picks up a second,
reads that label, puts it back, reads a third and holding it
tightly drags himself over to the pile of orange foul weather gear.
Pulling a slicker free, he studies how to tear a pocket flap free.
With his hands bound one over the other, he can’t use them to tear
it off. After a minute, he puts a corner of the flap in his mouth
and bites down as he uses a hand to try to tear it free. His effort
fails. He starts to ask Bob Tom for help, but decides to take a
second to try to figure out another way to free the flap. When
nothing comes to him, he follows Bob Tom’s instructions to the
letter and literally turns his head half-way from the slicker.
After a minute he laughs and gives his full attention to the
slicker. Using his forearms, Joe spreads the slicker out on the
locker’s floor. Once that is done, he twists and turns until he can
kneel on the shabby jacket. He scoots around until he has one knee
of on either side of a pocket before bending over, wedging a fist
into the pocket and straightening up. It takes more strength that
he would have guessed, but the pocket’s side seams finally let go.
Joe backs up, leans down and now using his forearms to secure the
slicker, he bites the flap and pulls and twists, like a dog trying
to win tear a rawhide bone from its owner’s grip.

By the time Joe has the pocket torn free, Bob
Tom has crawled over to see what he is doing.

“Iffen I’d knowed you were that haingry,
Noby, I wouldn’t et so much myself.”

Joe laughs, “I’m haingry for freedom, Bob
Tom. Here, hold this.”

Joe brings his mouth close to the old man’s
hand and they transfer the pocket.

Bob Tom looks at the patch of waterproof
fabric and asks, “What now?”

When Joe explains what he aims to do, Bob Tom
just shakes his head, but within an hour, both captives have their
hands and feet free. As soon as the plastic on the binds on his
feet burns through, Joe extinguishes the torch which he has made by
rolling up the patch of slicker, soaking it in engine oil and
lighting it with a spark from the filament of the lantern bulb
after its glass case has been broken.