by Eric Bower
I was glad that I brought my books with me, because after the first week or so of slowly paddling along in the deepest part of the ocean, I began to grow a bit bored staring out the window. Rose spent a lot of time with my parents, learning how the submarine worked and how to operate it, but I wasn’t particularly interested in any of that. You could tell me that the submarine was powered by fairy burps and leprechaun spit, and I’d probably believe it. And my parents knew better than to let me steer anything –I once crashed a bicycle that wasn’t even moving.
So I spent most of my time reading.
Of course, I only had three books left which I could still read, because the rest of my books had been ripped apart by little Waldo, who was quickly becoming my worst enemy. In fact, I was starting to hate that monkey with a passion. I hated him more than I’d ever hated another living thing, including the kid at school who stole my liverwurst sandwich and replaced the liverwurst with . . . well, let’s just say that now I double-check what’s in my sandwiches before I eat them.
Little Waldo would wake me up in the morning by pulling my eyelids open and screaming in my face. He’d also steal my food, take my seat, mess up my bed, flick my ears, lick my drinking glass, use my toothbrush, stretch out my socks, and sometimes he’d creep up behind one of my parents or Rose and then shove the back of their heads. When they’d turn around to see who shoved them, he’d jump out of the way and point at me, like I was the one who did it. And for some reason, they always believed him. Apparently I’m less believable than a monkey.
“Quit shoving my head, W.B.,” Rose had said after Waldo had shoved the back of her head and then pointed at me. “Or I’ll shove you back.”
“It wasn’t me!” I claimed. “It was the monkey!”
Rose rolled her eyes.
“You’re always blaming everything on Waldo. But he’s a perfectly sweet little monkey.”
She looked over at little Waldo, who gave her a perfectly sweet little monkey smile, as though he was a hairy angel who never did anything wrong. When she looked away, he stuck his little monkey tongue out at me. I shook my fist at him. He shook his fist back at me. We continued shaking our fists at each other until suppertime.
It was day fourteen on our trip to the South Pacific. We had surfaced earlier that morning, so that we could bathe in the warmth of the sun and get some much needed fresh air. When we climbed out of the hatch and sat on top of the metal submarine, we had nothing to look at but the open sea. We couldn’t see land, and we couldn’t see any other ships. It felt like we were the only people (and monkey) left in the world. It was a very lonely feeling.
Everyone was beginning to grow a bit grumpy. And by a bit, I mean A LOT. Fourteen days is a long time to spend in a little submarine with nothing to do but stare at the sea, which was no longer as magical and entertaining as it was before. In fact, I was starting to hate all of the stupid fish and dolphins and turtles and whales and seals that we saw out the windows. I’d make faces at them as we passed, stretching out my mouth with my fingers while I stuck out my tongue. The sea creatures tried to make faces back, but since they didn’t have fingers to stretch out their mouths, they couldn’t makes ones as good as me. Score one for W.B.
“Remind me again why we couldn’t have flown to the island in the Air Oh! Plane?” Rose Blackwood asked M and P as we reentered the submarine and closed the hatch. “Why did we have to ride in this slow little tin can the whole way there?”
“We didn’t know if there would be a good place on the island to land the Air Oh! Plane,” M told her. “And this little tin can is a wonderful invention, which was our best option for safely getting to the island, and then searching for the treasure in the surrounding waters. You didn’t have to come along if you didn’t want to, Rose. We would have been alright with you staying home with Aunt Dorcas.”
She said it in a biting tone which I could tell hurt Rose’s feelings.
“She’s right,” P said. “You didn’t have to come along, Rose. Neither did you, W.B.”
“Me?” I exclaimed. “Why did you mention me? I didn’t even say anything!”
“You’ve been giving Waldo a hard time for the past two weeks, and it’s very upsetting. You and Rose are trying to make little Waldo and me miserable!”
“Oh, stop talking about your silly monkey!” M snapped at P. “I wish we would have never decided to take him along with us. He smells terrible.”
“So does W.B.!” P insisted.
“Again, why are you picking on me? I didn’t even say anything!”
“Oh, you never say or do anything wrong, do you, W.B.?” Rose said to me in a mocking tone. “Nothing is ever your fault, is it? It’s the monkey who keeps shoving everyone’s head, right? I swear, you are so whiny and ridiculous, with your nonstop fimble-fambles.”
“Fimble-fambles? Fimble-fambles???!!!”
If I knew what that meant, I probably would have been really upset by it.
“It’s true, he is pretty darn whiny,” P agreed.
“You two need to leave W.B. alone!” M shouted.
Waldo shrieked loudly, letting everyone know that he was upset as well.
“Oh, shut up, you!” I yelled at the monkey. “I wish we’d never unshrunk you!”
“W.B.! Apologize to Waldo for that!” my father demanded.
“I’m not apologizing to a monkey!”
“I wish I hadn’t come along!” Rose moaned.
“I wish Vice President Morton hadn’t convinced us to search for this dumb treasure!” P snarled.
“I wish the monkey could take a bath!” M groaned.
“I wish we could turn around and go home,” I grunted.
Waldo bit me on the head.
That was it. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I don’t know why people use that particular expression (Why are you carrying so much straw to begin with? Why are you only using one camel to carry it? Who’s going to take care of the camel now that it’s injured? I think you owe the camel an apology, don’t you?), but I knew that I was sick and tired of little Waldo, and I could no longer control my temper.
“Alright, you!” I growled as I stood up and tried to grab Waldo. “Now it’s time for me to rearrange your ugly, little monkey face!”
Waldo shrieked at me as he bounced from chair to chair, scampering up the walls and swinging from the pipes that ran across the ceiling. I continued to chase him even though I kept slipping and tripping and falling with every other step.
“W.B., stop chasing my monkey!” P said angrily. “That’s an order from your captain!”
“You’re not my captain!” I told him as I dove at Waldo. “You gave away my ‘FIRST MATE’ cap!”
“Waldo’s head was cold!”
“He’s a monkey!” my mother said as she rolled her eyes. “His head wasn’t cold. You just wanted to see a monkey in a hat because you thought it would be funny and cute. W.B., stop chasing Waldo. Otherwise you’re going to—”
M didn’t finish her sentence, but I assume she was going to tell me that if I kept chasing Waldo, I might crash into something and break it.
Because that’s exactly what happened next.
I ran into the coal burning stove, which ripped cleanly from the wall. A long pipe coming out of the top of the stove bent and snapped, cutting off the power to the submarine. Several of the turning gears in the walls jammed and twanged as springs shot out like pellets from a rifle. I could feel the submarine come to an immediate stop. We slowly started to sink until we landed on the ocean floor.
Everyone looked at me. P scratched his head. M buried her face in her hands. Rose’s chin quivered.
I had broken the submarine.
Before I could apologize, the vent on the side of the stove suddenly sprayed me in the face with a huge puff of black ash.
“Lousy, stupid monkey,” I choked.
I Quickly Curled Up and Pretended To Be a Shell
For a moment, no one spoke. No one moved. No one even blinked. It was almost as though they couldn’t believe what had just happened. Or maybe they thought that if they held really still without speaking, then somehow everything would magically fix itself and the submarine would no longer be broken. That seemed like a good idea, so I decided to hold still while remaining silent as well.
When a situation seems hopeless, you can always choose to be in denial about it.
Then I sneezed. The ash from the stove had irritated my nose. My eyes suddenly burned so badly that I could hardly see. I squeezed them tightly shut, and ran my knuckles over my sooty eyelids.
“Here,” I heard M say. “Wipe your face with this towel, W.B.”
With my eyes blinded by the ash, I reached out and immediately felt something bite my fingers.
“Ow!” I cried. “Lousy, stupid monkey! Wait, that was the monkey, right?”
“Yes,” Rose said bitterly. “But I sort of feel like biting you too. We’re trapped at the bottom of the ocean because of you, W.B.”
I found my mother’s towel and used it to wipe the ash from my face and neck.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
P scratched his head with one hand while he scratched his chin with the other hand. I had noticed he’d been very itchy lately.
“I suppose I could try tinkering with the pipes and the gears and the springs and the stove to see if I can fix them . . . ” he began, “. . . but I don’t know if that will work. I don’t have many of my tools with me.”
“I don’t think the lack of tools is the problem,” M frowned as she inspected the busted pipe. “You need to replace this entire pipe and several of the gears, and frankly, I don’t think we have enough scrap metal to do that. Tinkering won’t help if we don’t have enough materials. We need replacement metal.”
Uh oh.
“How much oxygen do we have?” Rose asked, suddenly looking very pale. “Is there a chance that we’ll run out of air down here?”
“We have quite a bit of oxygen left,” M told her quickly. “Please don’t start to panic, Rose. Panicking is the worst thing we can do at a time like this.”
“Can’t we just make the Air Oh! Plane big again?” I asked P. “We could fly the rest of the way to the island, or fly home and build a new submarine.”
P shook his head.
“The Air Oh! Plane will be damaged if we use the Bigging Machine on it while it’s under the sea. It wasn’t meant to go in the water. The wings and propellers are too delicate. Plus, it has to roll and pick up speed before it can fly, so it needs to be on solid land.”
“What we need is a miracle,” Rose said quietly.
Everyone went silent again as we hoped for a miracle. As I hoped as hard as I could hope, I happened to look out one of the windows of the submarine. I spotted something shiny on the ocean floor.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the shiny something.
My parents and Rose went to windows and looked. While they were turned away, Waldo shoved me again, and then ran away before I could shove him back.
“Why . . . it looks like a wrecked steamship,” P said, his eyes growing wide with excitement. “That’s perfect! If we can take some of the metal from the steamship and bring it in here, I could reshape it to fix the pipes and the gears and the stove!”
“But how would you do that?” M asked. “How can you bring that metal into our submarine? It’s out there, and we’re trapped in here.”
“Hmmmmm . . .”
P sat on the floor and thought.
My father didn’t think like most people. Most people think by standing there with a look of concentration on their face, or maybe they need to pace for a bit. But in order to think, P needed to sit cross-legged on the floor, and he needed to close one eye, and he needed to stick up his thumbs, and he needed to poke his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, and he needed to puff out his cheeks.
Basically, he needed to sit there like a confused gargoyle that looked as though it was about to throw up. Like most things about my father, it was very weird. But it always seemed to work.
“I’ve got it!” he finally cried, springing up and rushing to the little closet beside our bunks. He opened the closet door and rummaged through it, moving aside the extra clothes and blankets and pillows, and eventually he pulled out a little rubber suit and a large oval helmet. The helmet appeared to be made of glass. It had a hose attached to the back of it, a long, coiled hose which was hooked onto some sort of pump. It looked very strange, like something that a creature from another planet would wear while visiting earth.
“What in the world is that?” Rose asked.
“It’s an underwater breathing suit!” P said proudly. “It’s attached to a pump which will provide oxygen to the person wearing the suit. The helmet is made of a new material that I accidentally created when I spilled some chemicals into my morning oatmeal. It tasted awful, in case you were wondering, but it’s as clear as glass and ten times as strong. I had almost forgotten that I invented this suit a few months earlier, and placed it in here to use in case of an underwater emergency. If I put on this suit, I’ll be able to breathe underwater, which means I can leave the submarine and collect the scrap metal from that shipwreck. We’ll be saved!”
But before we could all begin to cheer, P held up the underwater suit and frowned.
While it was true that the underwater suit and helmet might solve our problem, it was clearly too small for P to wear. In fact, it was so small that only two of us in the submarine could possibly fit into it. And one of us was a monkey.
Everyone looked at me. I looked at little Waldo, who quickly shook his monkey head, letting me know that I was on my own.
“W.B.,” my father said with an apologetic look on his face, “you’re the only one small enough to fit into the suit. I’m afraid that you’ll have to be the one who leaves the submarine and collects the scrap metal from the shipwreck.”
!!!
For a moment, I was speechless.
My father wanted me, a kid who was so clumsy that he once got his nose stuck in the bathtub drain, to walk across the ocean floor all by myself, where I’d be at the mercy of the sea serpents and octopi and angry mermaids.
I quickly thought of an excuse to get out of it.
“Can’t you just use your Bigging Machine to make the suit a little bit larger so it’ll fit you?”
P shook his head as he scratched behind his ears like a dog.
“That’s not the way the Bigging Machine works, W.B. We already used the Bigging Machine on the suit once when we biggened the submarine, which means that the suit is already bigged. You can’t biggen something twice with the Bigging Machine, otherwise it will just become crumbly and fall apart. In fact, I wrote quite clearly in the instruction manual for the Bigging Machine: Never, ever biggen a bigged biggened thing.’”
“You’re all aware that biggened, bigged, and biggen aren’t real words, right?” Rose asked everyone.
“Not now, Rose,” M whispered.
“What if you shrunk yourself to fit into the suit, P?” I asked, looking out the window and into the very dark and terrifying sea. “You still have your Shrinking Invention.”
“That won’t work either,” said P as he scratched his neck, grunting with discomfort. “The Shrinking Invention has only one setting, and that’s the squirrel setting. I can only use it to shrink myself to the size of a squirrel, not to the size of a six-year-old boy.”
“I’m eleven.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
P held the suit up to me. It was clearly a perfect fit. It almost looked as though it’d been made specifically for me. I stared out the window again and shivered. There were all sorts of dangerous creatures at the bottom of the ocean,
creatures which would view a kid like me as a delicious treat. In the submarine I felt protected, but out there, with only a rubber suit and a helmet, I’d be as helpless as a floating hamburger.
“How would I even get out there?” I argued. “If we open up the hatch, it will flood the inside of the submarine. You’ll all drown.”
“There’s a little room in the back the submarine,” P told me as he scratched at his eyebrows and ear hairs. “That room has a door with a waterproof seal on it. Once you’re in there with the door closed, I can press a button on the control panel. The back of the submarine will open, and let you out without flooding the rest of the submarine. After you’ve collected some scrap metal, then you can swim into the backroom and knock on the door. Then I can close the back of the submarine and drain all the water from the room before letting you inside with the rest of us.”
“That’s very clever, Mr. Baron,” Rose told my father.
“Yes, McLaron, very clever,” M said, and then she gave him a kiss on the cheek.
Little Waldo hopped onto my father’s shoulder and gave his head a hug, and then began to pick at the tiny bugs in P’s hair. Everyone was so happy with how clever my father was that they had completely overlooked one simple problem with the plan.
Me.
“I don’t want to do it,” I told them. “And you can’t make me.”
“Oh yes, we can,” said M.
“Oh no, you can’t,” I replied.
“Oh yes, we can,” said P.
“Oh no, you can’t,” I answered.
“Oh yes, we can,” said Rose.
“Oh no, you—”
The next thing I knew, I was suddenly dressed in the underwater suit and standing in the back room of the submarine.
“. . . How did that just happen?”
“Good luck, W.B.!” P called to me from the control panel.
“Be careful not to overexert yourself out there!” M added. “Otherwise, it might be devastating to your system! Be calm! Move slowly and cautiously, W.B., and be mindful of hyperventilating! That could cause severe trauma to your brain!”