Chapter 4
Of Boat Trips And Severe Pain
Huddled just around the corner from the harbor, Pinky and the Brain watched the boats intently. Well, Brain watched the boats intently; Pinky was watching a large French skunk chasing a black-and-white pussycat through the streets. When the humor of that wore thin, though, Pinky directed his always sparsely applied attention towards whatever it was Brain was doing.
"Brain, why're we watching the boats?" Pinky asked after what was maybe five seconds.
Brain rolled his eyes emphatically. "Oh, I don't know, Pinky," he answered with a voice practically swimming in sarcasm. "We don't have to perhaps sneak on or anything. It's not as if they wouldn't let us on if we just asked."
The sound of Pinky's mental gears attempting to translate the statement was almost audible. Once the process was done with and he was satisfied that Brain had just invited him to go and ask if they could ride the barges, Pinky pulled a French phrasebook out of Brain's backpack and skipped happily to the harbor.
The Brain didn't notice Pinky's departure, instead pulling a pair of self-made mouse-size binoculars out of his backpack to better watch the harbor. "This will take very precise timing," he explained to the mouse he thought was still there. "We must enter the barge only at the very last second before they depart so as not to be detected and disposed of. So that boat over there..." He adjusted the binoculars's lenses to bring the harbor into better focus and spotted a huge, burly French human hauling raw coal onto the barge Brain was staking out. The Brain was trying to decide roughly when the coal capacity of the barge would be filled when a tall, gawky white mouse approached the human. Sensing something familiar about the mouse, he focused the lenses even further while the mouse pulled out a phrasebook and tried to get the man's attention. Brain snorted in laughter.
"Pinky, look over there!" Brain addressed the empty air beside him. "There's a mouse over there that looks just like you!" He chuckled again before noticing the uncharacteristic silence. At last, he looked up. "Pinky?" he queried, then suddenly realized that the mouse who looked like Pinky actually was Pinky.
At that moment, though, Pinky had succeeded in getting the attention of the coal-hauling human. "Ummm..." he began, rifling through the pages of the tourist manual for a proper phrase, "Ummm...'Bon Jour'? Ah, 'Koh Moh Say Wah'?"
Shattering the general speed limit for small rodents, Brain was immediately on the scene and nearly tackled Pinky. "Pinky, you FOOL!" he shouted panickedly. "You're giving away our presence!"
Pinky chuckled with the sort of carelessness one can only find in a head whose single function is to keep the owner's ears from touching. "Oh, no I'm not, Brain," he replied. "We don't have any presents for them. I'm just asking to ride the boats, like you told me to." Turning back to the husky human, who was now surrounded by more curious, large men, Pinky flipped through the guidebook and selected a phrase. " 'May we get on your boat'...'May we get on your boat'...Umm, 'Seel voo play,' uhhh...'vos lobes d'orreilles sont comme têtes de poisson'?"
Instantly the men's demeanor changed from bewildered to threatening as they immediately began to crack their knuckles and advance on the mice. Brain shrank back behind Pinky, who at this time had actually started to look a little concerned.
"Pinky...?" the Brain asked slowly as he trembled. "...What did you tell them?"
"Poit!" Pinky gulped as they started backing away. "I think I said 'May we get on your boat'..."
A small, grungy-looking French mouse covered from head to toe in coal smudges popped up from the raw coal deposits on the barge. " 'May we get on your boat' NOTHING!" he scoffed in a thick accent as he watched the men advance on Pinky and the Brain. "You just said that their earlobes looked like fish heads!"
Brain did not have time to pass a sardonic comment on the situation before the men pounced. Raising their fists above the small mice, the—
Please excuse the interruption. A scene of
unimaginable violence has just erupted which
shall not be described out of consideration for those readers
with heart conditions, feeble constitutions and memberships in
the Humane Society. We apologize for the inconvenience and
ask that you please put down your pitchforks while the
story resumes.
Having finished with their offenders, the large men tossed the two mice into the coal pile on a nearby barge and stomped off, saying several nasty things that our heroes certainly hoped were in French. Sitting up abruptly and painfully, the newly blackened Pinky slapped the side of his head until all of the coal dust had come out of his ears. "Say, Brain," he asked woozily, "d'you think that guidebook was like the one in that episode of Monty Python? The one where they purposely mistranslate phrases so the foreigners will say stupid things?"
Brain sighed and reconstructed as much of his spine as he could locate. "No, Pinky," he grunted, "I think you're just stupid."
At that, they collapsed into a dead faint in the coal heap.
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A long while later, Pinky awoke dizzily to the sounds of the boat docking again. Brain was still fully unconscious and didn't seem likely to wake up anytime soon, so Pinky decided to take a look around in case they were almost at Auvergne. This sounded like a very good idea, and he was very excited at the prospect of doing something constructive rather than just messing up something very important. However, he was distracted by a rumbling sound coming from above, and looking up, the little mouse saw a giant claw-like machine descending from the end of a crane down to the raw coal.
"Hmm, that's interesting. Poit!" Pinky noticed. Then, his survival instincts suddenly pointing out the imminent threat to his well being, Pinky let out a strangled shout and a "Fjord!", hurrying over to the Brain and dragging him, backpack and all, off to the furthest edge of the boat and out of the way of the claw. Just a few seconds after he had accomplished this, the claw came down and scooped up the coal from the spot where the two mice had just been laying, stretching back up to dump it somewhere else.
"Phew!" Pinky exhaled, wiping a bead of sweat (and quite a bit of grime) from his forehead. "That was a close one, wa'in't it, Brain?" he asked before remembering that his companion couldn't hear him. At this revelation, his ears suddenly perked up.
"He can't hear me..." he repeated slowly, liking the sound of that. So realizing, he then proceeded to make every sort of annoying noise that he could, just exactly the sorts of sounds that, if he was conscious, the Brain would have pummeled him for.
Apparently Brain had a very strong subconscious, seeing as he was still able to conk Pinky over the head even though he was still lying on the deck out cold.
Sighing again and rubbing his skull, Pinky stared up at the giant claw as it descended to grab more coal. Pinky reflected on how much the giant mechanical claw was like an arcade claw machine. He wondered if they were built the same way. Then he realized—to his own surprise as, no doubt, to any spectator's—that they had to be at least a little different, because the construction claw he was watching now actually kept a grip on most of the raw coal it hauled up.
Pinky then began to wonder what Brain had meant back in chapter 1 when he'd said "A rubber band in the correct location works wonders".
The strain on Pinky's long-unused thought processors then became so great that he received a minor migraine from all of this wondering. Clutching his head meekly, Pinky lowered his eyes from the giant mechanical claw and spotted a signpost. There were a lot of French words he didn't understand, but there, right on the sign, it read "AUVERGNE".
" 'A-U-V-E-R-G-N-E'," Pinky read aloud, squinting at the letters. He then vigorously shook his head. "No no no, that's not right! We're supposed to be in Auvergne, not 'Aw-vurg-nee'!" Slumping back down in the nearly-empty coal deposits, he contemplated waking Brain. "Ahhhhhhh...Ummmmmmmmm...he'd just get mad and take away my Tom Jones CDs again," Pinky decided, then yawned. "We've got to wait 'till the boat gets to Auvergne anyways. Troz!"
So saying, Pinky stretched and curled up in a ball, heading to sleep just as the boat left harbor to return to Paris.
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A few hours later, the Brain came groggily to on the rocking boat—and was promptly seasick over the side. Looking around, he spotted Pinky snoring peacefully on his left. Aside from the proof of Pinky's laziness, the genius mouse perceived the fact that they were now closer to the side of the boat than when he had fainted—and that the coal was gone. So realizing, the Brain then deduced that much time had elapsed since his last bout of consciousness and that they must finally be near their destination.
"Wake up, Pinky!" he ordered, nudging his companion roughly with his foot. Grasping the knapsack while Pinky blearily rubbed his eyes, Brain prepared to disembark on what he thought was the coast of Auvergne.
"Are we there a'ready, Brain?" Pinky asked, not as stupidly as it would soon turn out.
Brain once more managed to avoid whacking Pinky. "Of course we are," he scoffed. "We must be, if I've calculated the angle of the boat, analyzed the flow of the river, interpreted the map and timed our journey correctly—as I must have since I have such an immensely superior brain—then this is Auvergne!" So saying, he jumped out of the boat at the first possible opportunity and dove into the current, swimming deftly to the shore with Pinky following close behind.
Allow me to digress slightly and say that the mental organ we call our minds is an amazingly interesting and complex thing. To use the current situation as an example, it is easy for a simple variable to affect the brain's performance. Overconsumption of alcohol clouds one's logic. A disorder in the metabolism can deceive the senses. Watching reruns of The Brady Bunch shuts down the brain altogether. Keeping such examples in mind, it is easier to understand that while Brain was usually possessed of an internal chronometer correct to within ten seconds of any atomic clock, the fact that he had only just recovered from being beaten senseless by a crew of strong Frenchmen had affected his sense of time, meaning that he was, at the current moment in our story, running two and a half hours behind Paris time.
Of course, as he ascended sopping wet and panting for breath onto the coast, the Brain didn't realize that. Instead, he shrugged off his backpack and compulsively turned back to watch for Pinky. A stream of bubbles some feet away would seem to signify that Pinky had forgotten the knack of swimming midstroke, so, sighing, the Brain waded back for him. Dragging the gangly, tuckered-out mouse behind him, the Brain returned to the shore, deposited his companion on the stiff ground and proceeded to crank Pinky's tail like a handle until all the water he'd swallowed came back out of his mouth. Gasping and spluttering, Pinky finally came back to himself and stood up, shaking himself dry like a dog.
"Thanks, Brain," he managed to pant, hunched over and breathing rapidly to get some more oxygen into the rest of his body.
The Brain simply ignored him, pulling his map of France out of his (apparently) waterproof knapsack. "Hmmmm..." he pondered aloud, trying to discern just where in Auvergne they might be. He turned the map around at every angle, but the landmarks and coastline he could see didn't seem to match up with any of the points of Auvergne. The problem puzzled him, as his megalomaniacal tendencies refused to let him doubt for a moment that he had chosen the correct time to jump out of the boat.
"Narf! Hey, Brain! Come look at this!" Pinky called from somewhere behind him. The Brain's auditory nerves, however, dismissed whatever Pinky wanted to look at as unimportant, and so while his nearly planet-sized cerebrum continued to work on the problem his mouth automatically responded.
"Not right now, Pinky!" he snapped without even looking up from the map. "Can't you see I'm doing something!"
Pinky would not be deterred. "Oh, come on, Brain!" he repeated jovially, ejaculating small chuckles as he went on. "This is really funny!"
"Not," Brain replied through gritted teeth, "Right. Now."
Pinky's ears drooped. "Why not?" he protested, tugging on the Brain's arm. "It's really funny, I swear it is, I—"
At last, Brain became fully fed up. "DO YOU STILL HAVE WATER IN YOUR EARS, PINKY!" he bellowed, whirling around. "I SAID I'M—"
He stopped short abruptly as he suddenly saw what Pinky had wanted him to see: the same exact harbor they'd departed before was right next to them.
"Isn't that funny, Brain?" Pinky giggled. "Fjord! It looks just like Paris!"
The Brain's jaw dropped, his head began to spin and he finally blacked out.
