Odds Are Good (20 page)

Edgar understood why when they stepped down onto the giant's gums. A narrow trench between gum line and teeth provided a good foothold. Even so, the flesh was moist and slippery, and without the anchor rope it would have been all too easy to slide into the damp cavern of the giant's throat. The giant's tongue, pulsating beside them like a pink and fleshy whale, was a constant danger. Even worse, when they first started out they had to dodge into the gap between Meagan's tooth and the next one while the giant poked at their hiding spot with the tip of his tongue, as if he was trying to dislodge an irritating bit of food that had become stuck there.

It was a humbling thought for Edgar to realize that “an irritating bit of food” was, in fact, precisely what he had become.

“Does he ever use toothpicks?” he asked Meagan nervously.

“Too stupid,” replied the woman. “Come on, he's done now. Let's go.”

The tooth directly next to Meagan's was strong and solid, with no obvious place for Edgar to begin excavating a home. The one next to that, however—the tooth farthest back in the giant's mouth—had a hole twice the size of Edgar's fist. The odor of decay hung rank about it, but Meagan said that would disappear when Edgar had cut away the rot.

It had taken a while to find the hole, since they had had to crawl all over the tooth looking for it. Unlike the opening to Meagan's home, it was on the tooth's outer side, facing the cheek rather than the tongue. They had reached that side by crawling on their bellies through the same gap between the teeth where they had taken shelter earlier.

“Nice location,” said Meagan, when they found the opening. “Safer than mine, though not quite so convenient for snagging food. I suppose you might give yourself a door on the other side of the tooth as well, once you've dug through it. Need to be careful, though, not to weaken it too much.”

Before Meagan would let him start to work, she bound them both to the tooth with a combination of ropes and leather straps. When she had driven Edgar nearly mad with checking and rechecking to make sure they were secure, she nodded and said, “Dig in.”

Edgar swung the pick and knocked away a chunk of the yellowed enamel.

The outraged roar of pain that rose from deep within the giant nearly deafened him. At the same time, the giant slapped his hand against his cheek. The mushy cheek wall pressed Edgar and Meagan against the tooth. The torch went out with a sizzle.

“Meagan!” cried Edgar. “Are you all right?”

The question—and her answer—were lost in the giant's reverberating
“Owwwwwwieeee!”

Despite the horrifying darkness, the awful squishiness of the cheek pressed against him, and the fact that he could scarcely breathe, Edgar almost felt sorry for the giant. Then he reminded himself that the only reason the creature was suffering this way was because it had tried to eat him.

“Now you see why I strapped us down,” gasped Meagan, after the bellowing had died away. “I'm afraid you'll have to work in the dark for now. I won't be able to light the torch again out here.”

Edgar located the hole by touch, then began chipping away at it. Without light the work was excruciatingly slow, since he could not take mighty swings with the pick. Instead he began tap-tap-tapping at the tooth, and in this way painstakingly enlarged the hole. This method was clearly safer, since the giant merely moaned, rather than howling in pain, and did not again slap his hand to his cheek. Edgar and Meagan did have one bad moment, when the giant began digging at the back of his mouth with his fingertip, trying to dislodge whatever was bothering him. But Meagan had tied them down with slipknots, and as soon as she saw the light at the front of the giant's mouth, she loosened the ropes so they could again take shelter in the gap between the teeth.

The giant's blunt and dirty fingertip prodded against their hiding place but was far too wide to get at them. He did try his fingernail a couple of times. It came somewhat farther into the gap between the teeth, but by cowering back they were able to avoid it. Edgar longed to attack the probing nail with his pick, but Meagan held him back.

By the time they decided to rest, Edgar had managed to enlarge the hole to the point where he could get his head and shoulders into it. His arms ached, and he longed for light. But he reminded himself that Meagan had done the same thing all on her own, with no company and no hope of light for relief, with nothing but her own will to survive driving her on.

When they had returned to the tooth where Meagan made her home and she had lit a fresh torch, Edgar found himself looking at her with new respect.

 

The outer coating of the tooth was hard but brittle, and broke away fairly easily. After about four feet, the material changed to something dense and yellow, and tougher to work with the pick.

It took five days—which is to say, five of the times between when they slept—to reach this inner material. Two days before that, the hole had been big enough that Edgar could crawl completely inside. Though it was big enough for him to fit in comfortably—if you consider being curled in a tight ball comfortable—Meagan did not make him move there immediately, as he had once feared she would. This pleased him, and not merely for the obvious reasons. They had grown more easy in their companionship as the work on Edgar's home had continued, and he had come to think of her not merely as someone sharing a disaster, but as a genuine, if somewhat irascible, friend.

Finally the time came when the excavation in the tooth was big enough for Edgar to take up his home in it. He moved his things—that is, the two or three items Meagan had given him, as well as a pitchfork (the single thing he had managed to snag on his own)—to his new abode.

After a day, he was surprised to find Meagan knocking at the edge of the hole he had made.

“I missed you,” she growled. Then she showed him a bottle of wine she had recovered from a wagon the giant had swallowed two years earlier, which she had been saving for a special event.

Edgar invited her in and they had a small party, sitting in the darkness and discussing what he should do next to make his tooth more homey.

The following day they ran a rope from Meagan's home through the gap between it and the next tooth, and then along the outer wall of the teeth to Edgar's door, which made it easier for them to visit each other whenever they wanted.

While he continued work on his new dwelling, Meagan taught him how to snatch things from the tide of food and rubble that poured down the giant's throat three times a day. When she “went fishing,” as she called it, she first secured a safety rope about her waist, anchoring the other end of the rope to one of the chairs inside her tooth. Normally she pulled things in with the help of a long pole that had a hook on one end. But if something particularly good came rushing past that was too far out on the tongue for her to snag simply by leaning for it, she would fling her whole body onto the surface of the tongue, then use the rope to haul herself back.

Once they saw an old man go past, but he was all the way in the center of the mouth and they were not able to reach him, despite their best efforts.

His cry of despair as he disappeared down the giant's gullet echoed in Edgar's dreams for many nights afterward.

 

Once Edgar was truly settled, he began to explore the giant's mouth in search of a way out. Though he did not tell Meagan this was what he was doing, he suspected she was able to guess. Not that it made any difference. He could find no way of escape. His greatest hope had been to climb out of the giant's mouth while he was sleeping. But the moist walls of his lips were too slick to climb easily. Twice Edgar tried using the pickax to help him make the climb, but both times this caused the giant to rub his mouth, with results that were nearly fatal. (The second time, he barely made it back to Meagan's tooth, where she set his broken bones but gave him no sympathy for the pain that kept him awake for seven nights running.)

It was like being at the bottom of a well: easy enough to fell in, impossible to climb out.

Despite his misadventures at the front of the giant's mouth, Edgar continued his explorations, until he had at last reached the most distant of the giant's molars. He carried a torch with him, which he lit and waved to Meagan when he reached the far side.

When he returned from that trip, he was burning with a new idea. “If we string a rope directly across the center of his mouth, we might have better luck snagging things as they go by,” he said.

“The giant would rip it out,” replied Meagan.

“Well, what if we didn't make it permanent? We could put in a couple of hooks or pegs or something, one on each side of his mouth, and run the rope between them when we wanted to use it.”

“Might work,” said Meagan dubiously. “We'd have to put the pegs in the upper teeth, though; if we try it with the lower ones he's sure to snap it with his tongue right away.”

 

The next day Edgar again made his way to the far side of the giant's mouth. As he traveled, he tucked a rope into the narrow trench that ran along the edge of the teeth.

He made the trip without incident, except for one frightening moment when he was at the front of the mouth and the giant happened to make a clucking sound. The violent forward movement of his whalelike tongue had almost flattened Edgar.

After some searching, Edgar found an upper tooth with a small hole, into which he pounded a peg. Then he waved his torch to Meagan to let her know he was going to take up the slack on the rope.

Once they had the rope tight, he swung himself onto it. Then, moving hand over hand, he inched his way toward the center of the giant's mouth.

His ambition was rewarded when the giant tossed a cart full of melons into his mouth. Though it went directly down the center, Edgar was able to retrieve not only a pair of the melons but one of the wagon wheels, which he thought would look nice in his new home.

When he returned to the other side, Meagan grudgingly admitted that the rope had been a good idea. Just how good an idea became clear as the weeks rolled on and they were able to retrieve more and more items.

The most unexpected of these items was a young man named Charles, whom Edgar snatched from certain doom by hanging upside down from the rope and reaching out to him.

When he escorted Charles home with him, Meagan muttered about things getting too crowded in the giant's mouth. But when Edgar said that Charles could live with him until they were able to excavate another tooth, she settled down.

Charles turned out to be clever with his hands, and it was not long before they were hard at work making a home for him in the tooth between the two they had already hollowed out.

Many hands making lighter work, the home took less time to complete than Edgar's had, and soon they were turning their energies to new and better ways to salvage things.

 

During Edgar's second year in the giant's mouth, they rescued Farley. His arrival upset Meagan even more than Charles's had, and she began muttering that she didn't like having so many men around. On the other hand, she seemed to find Farley attractive, and once it became clear that he returned the compliment, she stopped fussing. They hollowed a home for him in the tooth above hers—the first in an upper tooth—and soon the two of them were visiting each other several times a day to consult on various ideas and projects.

Their masterpiece was a system of buckets for collecting fresh water whenever the giant took a drink. This freed them from reliance on the giant's saliva, which was a great relief to everyone. Even better was when they could save some of the occasional flood of beer. Such a catch was always a signal for a party—which helped make up for the dangerous (not to mention putrid) belches that the giant inevitably unleashed an hour or so later.

Next to be pulled to safety, about six months later, were a pair of sisters, named Babette and Cleo, and their dim-witted brother, Herbert. The time had come to begin building homes in the teeth on the other side of the mouth. Babette and Cleo chose to live together. Herbert took the tooth above them.

Once their homes were complete, Edgar began thinking about doing some bridgework.

 

Before too many more years had passed, a thriving community had risen in the giant's mouth. The people got on well enough, though there were occasional conflicts—as there always will be when you have people locked together in a crowded space.

To the surprise of no one save Edgar, he turned out to be the one who usually solved these conflicts, and eventually he was elected mayor of Giant's Mouth Township. They gave him a jeweled scepter, which they had managed to retrieve one afternoon when the giant swallowed a king. (They had tried to save the king, too, of course, but his grip was weak and flabby, and he had not been able to hold on when Herbert reached out to him.) Many was the night Edgar sat in his tooth and looked out the window he had carved on the tongueward side, feeling warm and cozy at the sight of the lights twinkling on the other side of the giant's mouth.

In this way, the years rolled on.

And then, one afternoon while he was setting a rope, Edgar was suddenly yanked from the giant's mouth.

It happened because the giant, who was in a foul mood that day, became particularly irritated by the feeling of things moving in his mouth. Edgar was stringing a rope across the roof of the giant's mouth in order to do some salvage work when the giant reached in and began to scratch at the roof of his mouth. Though the rope was less to him than a silk thread would be to a human, it caught on his fingernail. When he pulled his hand out, one end of the rope came free—and with it, still clinging to the end, came Edgar.

As he hurtled out of the giant's mouth, two things caused Edgar to blink. The first was the unexpected brightness of the sun, which he had not seen except at a distance for so many years. The second was the horrifying distance that separated him from the ground.