“La!” belted out the voice. “La la! La la la! La la la LAAAA!”
The singing was coming from behind them but getting closer. Through the spewing, spraying, fountainous jets of water, Milton could make out a bright yellow smudge with two blobs inside—one big, one small.
“Hey hey!” yelled the small blob.
Milton rubbed his soaked T-shirt against his glasses again, and the blobs became—
Rafi and Gabe paddling toward them (and certain doom) in a canoe of their own!
Milton could hardly believe his eyes. And then he could hardly believe his ears.
“Row, row, row your boat,” Rafi started to sing (if the word sing were to mean an earsplitting, terrible cacophony of mismatched sounds).
It was, Milton thought, an unusual choice for last words.
“Come on, someone!” Rafi yelled. “Sing with me. We have to be Tone-Deaf Warblers!”
Tone-Deaf Warblers! Milton remembered what the guide said now. The bird’s song would lull the centopus into a deep sleep, thus ending the sucking-spewing spree. Since there were no warblers around, Rafi was being one, and he needed their help.
Fig and Gabe answered his invitation. “Gently down the stream,” they sang.
But Fig’s and Gabe’s voices were unquestionably tuneful. They could have been in a choir. They could have been soloists. And that infuriated the centopus. At least it seemed to; it spewed about five hundred gallons of river water straight at them in response.
“Not you two!” Rafi spluttered. “You two be quiet. Sea Hawk, sing!”
Milton knew he was not a good singer. He had found out in first grade during rehearsals for the school play when a whole stageful of children had cringed and the girl next to him had actually wept at his vocalizations. The music teacher had quickly brought him a woodblock and a mallet. “Let’s find another way to put your talents to use,” she had said. “No more singing for you, Milton P. Greene.”
And, he recalled with a growing sense of boldness, Sea Hawk had once engaged in an arm-to-tentacle tussle with a huge-eyed, many-appendaged cephalopod. It had taken quite a few Restarts, but Milton had finally figured out that water beast’s weakness—repeated, piercingly sharp caws.
Facing near-certain death in a sinking canoe, Milton realized that the time had come to cast off his woodblock-playing past. The centopus didn’t like the sweet sound of harmonizing children’s voices. The centopus liked cringe-worthy, weep-inducing, tone-deaf noise.
It was time to give it all he had.
“Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” Milton sang as he rose from the canoe floor.
It sounded really, really awful.
The centopus loved it. It began waving its tentacles in time with the song (if the word song were to mean a painfully loud, unmelodious series of ear-bleedingly horrendous vocalizations).
“Life is but a dreeeeeeeam!” sang Milton and Rafi.
Milton finished the performance with a series of bird-of-prey calls that he felt sure Sea Hawk would have approved of.
The centopus expelled a final fountain of water, deflating its bulbous body. Tentacles still swaying, it sank back down into the river. There was a little gurgling sound, and then the water was still again.
“We did it!” Rafi yelled.
“Yes, we did,” Fig said, dripping and wide-eyed in the back of the canoe. “But what are you doing here?”