The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

- Chapter 42 -
The Fall

        Frogstick jumped.
        It was a perfect jump, a marvelous leap, a moment suspended, as it were, in time; we held our breaths; he jumped. Backward and upward he leaped, and then, siezing the stainless steel handle with his life in the balance, he swung wildly to and fro while Sha-no-she-ba roared and gnashed her teeth below.
        "Let go of the handle," crackled the bullhorn, far below us. "The monument is not engineered to withstand a flush."
        "A flush!" I crowed ebulliently, connecting the multihued threads of disparate events into a single, united handkerchief that I couldn't wait to blow my horn into. "Flush the gator!" I tooted loudly.
        Frogstick looked up and beheld our distant forms on the tower, high above him. "FLUSH HIM!" I yelled with enough volume to bow out a set of concert speakers, "FLUSH THE GATOR!"
        "Flush the gator! Flush the gator!" we began to chant. And Frogstick responded to our plea, rising to the occasion like a trout taking the bait.
        "Do not flush the toilet!" the reedy bullhorn commanded.
        "Flush it! Flush it! Flush it!" we cried.
        "Remember R. W. Twilley, and flush with pride!" I shouted for added encouragement.
        Frogstick, dangling beneath the handle, began to walk hand-over-hand toward its uttermost edge, gaining leverage. The big steel handle start to dip.
        "Do it, do it!" we chanted.
        "...you will not..." the bullhorn croaked.
        "...AAAOOOGH..." the gator growled.
        "Do it! Do it!"
        "I repeat..."
        "Do it!"
        "...not flush the..."
        He did it.
        He flushed it.
        The ground began to shake.
        Frogstick swung back and forth at the bottom of the handle's journey, and as he did the gator reated on it haunches to attack him, and as it did Frogstick's feet swung close and he kicked that ugly, relentless, inhospitable dragon with all of his might.
        It must have lost its footing on the rim. The ground was already shaking; Frogstick kicked; Sha-no-she-ba slipped and began to descend into the flushing bowl, which now contained a thunderous, roaring vortex of hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. The gator slipped, she slid, she grappled for a clawhold, she strained on the edge of the slick, glassy rim with her back arched and her body as tense as a drawn bow, trembling, reaching out an ugly, slew-footed claw for the receding rim of the bowl.
        "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-OOOOOOO-AAAAOOOOOOO-OOOOOGH!" Sha-no-she-ba cried as she fell into the flood. The wild, raging water choked off the end of her plaintive lament as she swirled helplessly in the gigantic bowl. It was an awesome sight.
        The ground shook; the tower swayed dangerously: a rigid, inverted pendulum of flexing steel topped by a counterweight of Hicks; the gator whirled around and around in the froth of the mighty maelstrom within the bowl. She roared and disappeared and then popped up again, still roaring, shaking her fist at our gaping friend. Frogstick clung to the shaking handle and gawked at the end of his heartless nemesis as she whirled around and round and tightened the circle down and into the bottom and round and round and round and BOOM!
        She was gone.
        Just like a schoolkid flushing a pet gator, I thought. And then the earthquake began.
        They had constructed this great Florida World upon a deep, hidden fault; they had built the R.W. Twilley Memorial above an underground river. The faultline was overdue for a little adjustment to releave its tectonic tension, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of water from the R.W. Twilley Toilet was just what the doctors of geology ordered.
        The earth rocked and shook. Our skinny tower began to sweep back and forth feverishly. The tower bowed down, almost reaching the toilet before it shot back towards the southern forest. I could see the whites of Frogstick's eyes as we drew near to him; we all hung on for dear life. Below us huge cracks appeared and raced along the broad boulevards, splitting them asunder; sirens wailed and the security people raced toward the exits; buildings collapsed like rag dolls into dust before our eyes with a single clap, like thunder.
        "Wheee-hah!" I yelled.
        "Frogstick!" cried Egghead through the clamorous rumbling din as we began to swing back in his direction, "Tell him to jump!"
        "Jump here!" I boomed as our tower bowed down to his dizzying perch. He just gaped at us. We were swept away from him again, high up over the top of Florida World, which by now began to tilt and smoke like a pinball machine on its last legs. We began our return.
        "Jump!" cried Egghead.
        "Jump!" we hollered.
        We descended to our nexus. We were right beside him. He leaped onto our tower, and we grabbed him. Now we began to ascend again towards the high point of our orbit.
        "Well, this is it boys!" I cried, "We're flying too fast now, we can't hang on!" Then, suddenly, as we whistled along, almost at the top of our arc, something happened. Something stopped the tower dead in its tracks. Of course, we just kept on going: sans gator, sans tower, sans sense. We were up there at about a thousand feet, sailing knees-over-elbows and hollering like stuck pigs, and I figured "This here is all she wrote."
        But friends and neighbors, I figured wrong.