Apparently Harry, a somewhat delusional and nearsighted individual, mistook Herbie for a shore-power cord, and had awakened the snake by trying unsuccessfully to plug him into a 15 amp outlet. Herbie had objected, of course, and then slunk off the dock to lie low in the reeds and feel sorry for himself..
Harry had been taking a lot of pills for his sciatica by this point, and these weren't mixing with the daiquiris he had been drinking because of the heat. The snake was the last straw. Harry went to the equipment shed, grabbed an axe, and headed back down the dock with blood in his eye. Thwock! went the axe as Harry encountered the first yellow power cable. Snap! went the ground-fault protector, and then the breaker, and Harry was ready for the next. Before anyone noticed, and we should have noticed, Harry had worked his way down half of the dock, cutting cables. Not until he hit a green one did he get some resistance. The damned snake seemed to be bleeding all over him, and the blood was cold. Cursed reptiles. No matter. On to the next. Well, Peter's old refrigerator had a problem with modern wiring, and so he had surreptitiously replaced the ground-fault receptacle with a regular one, and sneaked a 30 amp breaker into the panel with a 15 amp cover on it so no one would notice. When the axe hit Peter's cable, Harry, still wet from the bleeding hose, landed on his backside with a thump.
Stunned, he felt around for the wound, and finding none but Herbie's ineffectual scratches on his palm, concluded the worst. "Monique! I've been bitten by a rattlesnake and the wound has already dissolved! I'm dying! We'll have to amputate my hand!"
Well, we didn't hear too much of that, just the "I'm dying" and the "amputate" bits, at which point we looked over to see Harry, soaking wet, hair on end, sitting in a puddle with a smouldering axe.
At this point Gerry the Commando, accustomed to emergency situations, darted down into his cabin, and came up from his bilge with three lifejackets on, a bicycle helmet, and with a flare pistol. "Where's the hostage????"
"Gerry, what are you doing with a flare pistol?"
"Don't worry, I've put a machined barrel in it, and loaded it with 12 gauge SSG's. It's pretty effective at short range. I should be all right."
"It's not you we're worried about, Gerry. Put that thing away. It's just Harry with an axe."
"But he just killed my refrigerator," piped up Peter.
"Naw, just the cord, and probably that bootleg wiring you've been hiding," quipped Lester.
"Why does that guy have to do such weird things when he gets delusional?"
"Well, last week when he got mad and threw his barbecue into the lake, nobody reacted much."
"That's true," muttered Justin. "And so when he finally dove down to find it, what did he find but a stack of barbecues -- all the old ones that were in the shed up above. He had them all up on the dock, looking at them, trying to figure which was the one he had originally thrown into the water."
"So who did that?"
Justin beamed an innocent grin, got up and retreated to his boat for a nap. Our attention returned to Harry, still screaming for Monique, carefully measuring up a left-handed swing with the axe to amputate his right index finger.
Fred got there more quickly than the rest of us.
"Harry, what are you cutting your finger off for?"
"A snake bit my hand, and I have to cut off the wound before the venom spreads."
"Yes, but the bite's on your palm, and you're lining up a finger. What good will that do?"
"I don't know, but it might help. I can't very well cut off a whole hand, now, can I?"
"Maybe, but you'd have a hard time tying up your boat without a hand."
"Yes, maybe you're right... Monique! Could you bring me three Tylenol and the mercurochrome? I have to treat a snake-bite here!"
"So what were you trying to do? Kill Herbie?"
"Yes. He bit me when I tried to plug him in this morning."
"But why did you cut all of these power cords? Did you think they were snakes?"
"Well, I guess so, at first. Then it just seemed that the dock would be neater if there weren't so many yellow cables running across it. But that last one....wow! What a shock!... You know? My back doesn't hurt at all now. In fact, it feels great! Monique! I got a shock and now my back feels great! I can go back to work! This is great! I can move, I can bend over, I can pick up an axe...ouch. Uh, could you give me that axe there? I'll use it as a cane. Just a bit. Okay, over to the chair. Good. Thanks. Monique! Could you bring me three of the red pills? My back is kicking up again! Oh, geez, is that sore!"
"Harry, don't you think you ought to ease up on the pain killers?"
"What pain killers? I'm not taking anything! I'm just high on life!"
Musing upon the fact that Monique had not been on the boat for the last three days, Jack made his way back up to the porch.
None of this affected Herbie at all, as he had spent his morning stalking a
juvenile bullfrog in a patch of lily pads down the bay.