But, just as the current starts to pick up speed and propel her over the edge, along comes this empty barrel, tumbling and rolling in the waves, and sort of scoops her up, head first — and there she is, halfway inside, her head banging around on the bottom, her backside up in the air and feet kicking, when she feels the whole apparatus tip, pause, and then drop. It is not a pleasant ride. The half of her left outside feels very airy and vulnerable the whole way down, not unlike the way it felt when she got sent to the principal's office for a paddling in the fourth grade, while the half on the inside gets shaken around like the churning balls in a lucky numbers barrel. Ow! It hurts worse than the time she went rollerskating and got thrown off the tail end of a snakeline. Or the night her friends shoved some cotton candy and a double-dip ice cream cone in her two hands and pushed her down the collapsing ramp of a carnival fun house, with a thousand people standing out front watching and laughing their fat heads off.
It seems to take centuries to get to the bottom, that's how it is when you think each second is going to be your last, but finally the whirling and pounding is over and she finds herself dizzily afloat, her head at the dark smelly end of the barrel, her legs dangling in the water, which does not seem so cold now. She knows the barrel's starting to fill up and sink, she has to do something soon, but her head hurts too much to think, and besides, it feels good just lying there like in a bathtub, all alone, the cool water swirling gently around her as though to kiss away the hurt. She remembers a movie she saw once in which this queen was taking her bubble bath when some gorgeous guy she'd never seen before came running in, being chased by the heavies and desperately needing some place to hide, so she gave him a kind of regal smile and let him duck into her bathwater. You couldn't see anything, the only way you could tell what was going on down there while the yoyos after him were clanking around grumpily stabbing at the curtains was by the majestic expression on the queen's face as she clawed at the edge of the tub. Just thinking about that movie makes her head hurt a little less.
A kind of chilly current passes under her and something tickles her thighs, giving her the shivers, so, somewhat reluctantly, she slides out of the barrel at last and, holding on to its rim, gazes dreamily around her. She seems to have been cast far out to sea: nothing but water in all directions. And then she sees them: fins slicing through the water! Sharks! Hundreds of them! She scrambles back into the barrel, kicking frantically, and by throwing her weight at the bottom tips it upright, even as those huge slimy things come streaking by, whumping and thumping against it, as though trying to tip it over again.
She squats down, peering over the edge at them, her heart in her throat (why is everything in this world so hungry all the time?), safe for the moment, but not for long: the barrel is more than half full of water, it's nearly up to her nibbles, as her girlfriend would say, and more is lapping in over the rim every minute. She tries to scoop it out with her hands, but it's too slow. Her shoe doesn't work much better. She makes a kind of bag out of her blouse, but it's too torn up to hold anything. She feels like she's in one of those slow-motion sequences in which the more you run the more you don't go anywhere. Finally what works best is her bra, always the friend closest to her heart, as the ads say. She develops a kind of fast jack-in-the-box motion, collapsing her hands together underwater, filling both cups at once, then quickly spreading them apart as she snaps the bra upward — splush! whoosh! splush! whoosh! — over and over again, like she might be trying to fill up the ocean.
Eventually the bra snaps — that much action it was never made for — but she has won the battle. She bails the rest out with her one remaining shoe. She notices the sharks have gone. Probably it just got too weird for them. Not that her problems are over of course. She's adrift in a leaky barrel on an endless ocean, no food, no water, not even a cough drop. Boy, isn't that the way it always is? The one time she's worked off enough calories to really let herself go, and they take away the concessions. She pulls what's left of her blouse back on, loosens the buttons at the waist of her skirt, and slumps once again into a cramped-up squat at the puddly bottom of the barrel, feeling empty and bloated at the same time. She'd chew on the ticket stub she's still clinging to if it weren't all soggy with sea brine.
Days pass; weeks maybe, she loses count. She gets lonely, exhilarated, depressed, raving mad, horny. Then one day, on the distant horizon, she sees smoke. Right away, of course, she thinks of somebody roasting hotdogs or marshmallows and starts paddling frantically toward it with her bare hands. This is not very effective. She makes a sail out of her skirt and holds it up between her arms, which works better. The smoke, she sees, is coming out of the top of a mountain. It's all a lot farther away than she'd thought. The sharks come back and she has to beat them off with her shoe, temporarily losing the use of her masts, as they might be called, but still, slowly, progress is made.
As she bobs, at last, toward the shore, her arms feeling like they're about twenty feet long and made of waterlogged lead, she sees that a welcoming party — a bunch of natives with long spears and flowery necklaces — has come out to meet her. Her skirt has shrunk so much she can't get it up past her knees, but her underpants have little purple and green hearts on them (ever a wishful thinker) and might easily be mistaken for a swimsuit, especially by foreigners who aren't wearing all that much themselves. She's not sure what you say to natives on occasions like this, but finally decides the best thing is just to wave and say hi. This doesn't work as well as she might have hoped. They grab her, tie her hands and feet to long poles, and start lugging her on their shoulders up the mountainside. "Volcano god much hungry," one of them explains, stroking his belly, and it's true she can hear its insides rumbling even worse than her own. "But, hey, I haven't eaten for weeks; shouldn't you at least fatten me up first?" she shouts back hopefully as he walks on ahead, but he doesn't hear her, or pretends not to.
At the lip of the volcano, just as they're about to heave her in — she can already feel the heat on her backside, smell the sulphur coiling around, it's a desperate situation, but what more can she do? she's never been good at languages — an argument breaks out. There's some little fellow there, who looks a lot like the driver of the gangsters' car but now with burnt cork smeared on his face, leaping about hysterically and screaming something about "Medicine man! Medicine man!" This sets off a lot of squawking and hallooing and spear rattling, but at last they untie her and send her off down the mountainside with kicks and spear-swats, snatching up her rescuer and tossing him in instead. She can hear his fading yell for what seems like hours as she runs away down the trail they've sent her.
The trail leads to a small hut in a clearing, where a man stands waiting for her. It's the same guy she saw in the theater lobby, except his chest is bare and bronzed now and his shorts are so thin you can almost see through them. "The plan worked!" he exclaims, taking her in his arms. "We're alone at last!" Listen, there were probably easier ways, she might have said if she weren't so out of breath, but by now he is peeling back her blouse shreds and gazing pop-eyed at her best act, so what the heck. Don't step on them, as her friend would say.
He fills his hands with them, rolling them round and round, pinching the nipples between his fingers, having all kinds of fun, then leans down to give them a little lick with his tongue, which might be a lot more exciting if it didn't remind her how ravenous she is. That shoulder under her nose is about the most delicious thing she's seen since the invention of peanut butter. He gapes his mouth and is just about to take one of them in whole, when everything gets shaken by a tremendous explosion and suddenly a bunch of trees that were there aren't there anymore. He looks up anxiously, holding her close, and then another one whistles and hits, knocking them off their feet. "Invasion!" he cries and grabs her hand, dragging her, both of them scrambling on all fours, toward the jungle cover.