“Not the motor,” Tiny told him. “Sounded like a voice.”
“—hehhh—”
“You won’t hear any voice,” Tom said, “all you’ll hear is—”
“Shut up,” Tiny requested.
“What was that?”
Tiny was in no mood. “This ground’s wet, Tom,” he said. “Maybe I’ll sit on you for a while.”
“Well, we’re all getting testy,” Tom told him, forgiving him.
Tiny said, “Just be quiet, while I listen to this voice.”
“Joan of Arc,” Tom commented, sotto voce, but then he was quiet, and Tiny listened, and heard no voice.
Was it something he’d made up? Was it just something the rain did? But it had sounded like a voice out there in the water somewhere.
At last, restless and uneasy, Tiny lumbered to his feet and plodded down the soggy bank to the water’s edge, listening, not even caring that Tom was behind him.
“—eye—”
By God, that is a voice. “Hey!” Tiny yelled.
“—eye?—”
“Over here!” Tiny yelled, and saw a dim light out there on the water.
Tom had come down to stand beside him at the lip of the reservoir. At this moment, neither was being wary of the other. Tom said, “What the hell is that out there?”
“The boogie man.”
“No, it isn’t,” Tom said. “I’m the boogie man.”
“Tiny!”
“Over this way!” Tiny shouted, and the light out there bobbled and disappeared.
Tom said, “Which one is it?”
“Couldn’t tell. His voice was full of water.”
Splashing sounded out there, and then the voice called again: “Tiny! Where are you?”
“Over here! Come this way! Can you hear me! Hey, here I am! We’re both here! Can you—”
“They’re here,” Tom said quietly.
They were. Andy Kelp and Doug Berry came stumbling and wading out of the reservoir, still in their full diving gear. Berry said, gasping, “I thought we’d never find the right place.”
“Where’s the boat?” Tiny asked him. “Where’s Dortmunder?”
Kelp and Berry stood panting in front of him. Berry said, “We were hoping he was here.”
Driving around all night, and in the rain. Stan didn’t mind driving usually—he was a driver, after all—but on tiny country roads, at night, in the rain, with no other traffic, nothing to look at or think about, no passenger in the vehicle, not even a destination, just driving aimlessly around until everybody else was finished work, that could get old. Very old.
Finally. Finally. Finally, at quarter to five in the ayem, when Stan made yet another pass by the bridge over Gulkill Creek, Andy Kelp appeared at the side of the road and gave him the high sign, and Stan pulled to a stop just past the bridge.
Sliding over to the right side of the seat, he opened the passenger door, stuck his head out in the rain, and watched Tiny and the others come up out of the woods and climb into the rear of the slat-sided truck. Too bad it didn’t have a roof back there. He called back, “How’d it go?”
Andy came squidging forward through the rain. “Well, yes and no,” he said. “Good news and bad news, like they say.”
“You found the money?”
“That’s the good news,” Andy agreed. “It’s still down there, but we got it dug up and we got a rope on it.”
“Great,” Stan said. “So that’s the good news; you found the money. What’s the bad news?”
“We lost John.”
From the instant she saw Stan’s face, May knew. She didn’t know exactly what she knew, but she knew she knew. That much she knew; that she knew.
“Now, we’re not giving up hope,” was the first thing Stan said, when shortly after sunup he walked into the kitchen where May and Wally and Murch’s Mom were still sitting around, bleary-eyed and weaving but unwilling to go to sleep before the word came. And now the word was this.
May said, “Stan? Not giving up hope about what?”
“Well, about John,” Stan said.
His Mom said, “Stanley, tell us this second.”
“Well, what happened, as I understand it—”
“This second!”
“The boat sank. John was the only one in it. Nobody knows where he is.”
May leaped to her feet, spilling cold milk. “At the bottom of the reservoir!” she cried. “That’s where he is!”
“Well, no,” Stan told her. “At least, that’s not the theory we’re working on. See, there was this line stretched across the reservoir over the railroad track, up by the top of the water, and that’s where John was, so the theory is, he held on to that line and followed it to the shore on one side or the other, and got out before Andy and Doug could catch up with him. So now Andy and Doug are going in along the railroad line from the road on one side, and Tiny and Tom are going in from the other side. And I come back to tell you.”
“I’m going there!” May said.
“We’ll all go,” Murch’s Mom said.
“Sure!” Wally cried, jumping up, eyes agleam.
“It’s raining, May,” Stan pointed out.
“I just hope it’s raining where John is,” May told him.
Of course, Bob couldn’t drive a car yet, not just yet. Of course, he understood that completely, in fact, everybody understood that completely, and that’s why Kenny the boss had said he’d drive Bob back and forth from now on, that is, just until Bob was ready to drive a car again. Kenny always drove Chuck anyway, because Kenny and Chuck lived right near each other over in Dudson Falls, and Kenny said it wasn’t really out of the way much at all, and he didn’t mind anyway, and in fact everything was perfectly fine about picking Bob up from his house in Dudson Center where he lived with that girl, whatsername, the one he was married to, and then dropping him off there again every morning after work. And Chuck said, “Hey, good idea. That’s easy, man.” So that’s what was going to happen.
Bob was filing the Ws, taking his time, feeling the texture of each sheet of paper, enjoying the even rows of words across all the sheets of paper—look at all those letters, making up all those words, filling up all those pieces of paper—and he was all the way to the Ws when Kenny came by and said, “Hey, there, buddy, how you doin, pal, everything okay, Bob? Good, that’s good. Listen, it’s almost six and—”
BEEP.
Kenny jumped back, then nodded at Bob’s watch, laughing nervously as he said, “Time for another pill, huh?”
“Oh, yes,” Bob said. “We don’t know what would happen to me, Dr. Panchick and me, we don’t know what would happen to me if I didn’t take my pills.”
“You take a lot of them, huh?”
“Well, we’re going to taper off,” Bob explained. “But not yet,” he said, and went away to the bathroom for water and took his pill.
When he came back out to the office, it was after six o’clock and everybody was ready to go. “Here I am,” Bob said, smiling happily at all these nice fellas, really liking how they all were just good pals together, working together, having all these nice times together. “All ready, Kenny,” he said, and just beamed.
The crew went out to their cars, their usual exchanges of low humor with the day crew muffled a bit by the presence of this ethereal creature among them. Bob didn’t notice any of that; he was noticing how pretty the rain was. When he looked up at the sky, raindrops fell on his eyeballs and made him blink. Nice!
“Ready, Bob?”
“Oh, sure, Kenny, here I come.”
Chuck was in the passenger seat in front, so Bob got in the backseat with the naked man on the floor. “Hello,” he said.
The naked man on the floor—well, he wasn’t completely naked, he was wearing underpants and one sock—wasn’t as happy as Bob’s friends. In fact, he glared at Bob and shook his fist, and then he put his finger to his lips and pointed at himself with his other hand and emphatically shook his head.
Well, gee, all right. The nak
ed man didn’t want Bob to talk about him being there. Well, gee, that’s okay. With the pill he’d just swallowed now stamping out every little brushfire of fear or excitement or panic in his entire neural network, Bob said, “Okay.”
Kenny was just then getting into the car, slipping in behind the wheel. Pausing before putting the key in the ignition, he looked in the rearview mirror at Bob and said, “What’s that, Bob?”
Giggling, Chuck said, “He’s talking to his imaginary playmate back there.”
Kenny gave Chuck a warning look. “Watch that.”
But the naked man on the floor was nodding emphatically, pointing now in the direction of Chuck. So that was the true explanation after all. “That’s right,” Bob said placidly. “I’m talking to my imaginary playmate.”
Kenny and Chuck exchanged another glance, Kenny exasperated and feeling his responsibility, Chuck guilty but vastly amused. Kenny shook his head, and irritably watched himself insert the key in the ignition. “Get well soon,” he muttered.
As they drove away from the dam toward Dudson Center, Bob sat way over on his side of the backseat, his smile kind of raggedy around the edges, his eyes shooting out very teeny tiny sparks. His fingertips trembled. He didn’t like looking at the naked man on the floor, but there he was, all the time, in the corner of Bob’s eye.
Gazing straight ahead as the scrub forest ran backward past the windows on both sides, Bob could see the firm back of Kenny’s head and a small segment of Chuck’s profile. Chuck was giggling and smirking and at times pressing his palm to his mouth. Kenny’s back radiated the lonely obligations of command.
Bob was very happy, of course, very placid, very content. All these little feathery feelings in his stomach and behind his eyes and in his throat and behind his knees didn’t matter at all. It would be easier, of course, if the naked man weren’t there on the floor next to him, but it wasn’t important. It didn’t change anything.
After a long period of silence in the car, Bob leaned forward a little and said, confidentially, to the back of Kenny’s authoritative head, “I never had an imaginary playmate before.”
This set Chuck off again, curling forward, collapsing against his door, various snorts and grunts squeezing out through the hands he held clamped over his mouth. Kenny, pretending Chuck didn’t exist (the same way Bob pretended the naked man didn’t exist), looked mildly in the rearview mirror and said, “Is that right, Bob?”
“Yes,” Bob said. He felt as though there was more he wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.
Kenny smiled in a big-brotherly fashion: “I bet it’s fun,” he said. “To have an imaginary playmate.”
Bob smiled back at the face in the rearview mirror. Slowly he nodded. “Not really,” he said. (The naked man’s fist, in the corner of Bob’s eye, was shaking again. The naked man’s face, in the corner of Bob’s eye, was enraged.)
Kenny hadn’t actually heard Bob’s answer. He’d gone back to concentrating on his driving.
Bob wanted to turn his head away so he could look out his side window and not see anything in the car at all, but it was hard to do. His upper body was made of one solid block of wood; it was hard to make one part of it turn separately from the rest. Slowly, very slowly, strain lines standing out on the sides of his neck, Bob turned his face away. He looked out the window. The first houses of Dudson Center went by. Very interesting. Very nice.
In the middle of town, Kenny had to stop for a red light. Bob gazed fixedly at the windows of a hardware store. The other rear door slammed. Kenny said, sharply, “What was that?”
Bob swiveled his head on his painful neck. Chuck said, “Bob’s imaginary playmate just got out.”
“Goddammit, Chuck!”
“That’s right,” Bob said. “He went away.”
Chuck twisted around to grin at Bob. “He probably went on ahead to your house,” he said. “Waiting there for you now, with Tiffany.”
“Uh-huh,” said Bob.
Through clenched teeth, Kenny said, “Chuck, your job is on the line.”
Chuck gave Kenny an excessively innocent look. “Bob’s happy,” he said. But he faced front after that and didn’t say any more.
Five minutes later, they reached Bob’s house. “Here we are, Bob,” Kenny said.
Bob didn’t move. The lower half of his face smiled, but the upper half around the eyes had worry lines in it.
Kenny twisted around, frowning at him. “You’re home, Bob,” he said. “Come on, guy. I gotta get going.”
“I’d like to go back to the hospital now, please,” Bob said. And that was the last thing he said for three weeks.
The small-town habit of leaving doors unlocked had even begun to affect the residents of 46 Oak Street, and that was just as well. Reaching there at last, cold, wet, naked, in the downpour, and finding nobody even home to hear his complaints, Dortmunder might just have bitten his way through the front door if it had been locked.
He was feeling like biting his way through something, God knows. What a night! That reservoir was out to kill him, there was no question about that anymore. Every time he went near that evil body of water, it reached out damp fingers and dragged him down. If he so much as thought about that reservoir, waters began to close over his head. No more. He was through now. Three times and out.
This last time had been the closest shave yet. The goddamn rubber boat suddenly shrinking and deflating and sinking beneath him, and him sitting there not knowing what to do, the goddamn little 10hp motor clutched in his arms, resting on his lap. It wasn’t till the boat had reduced itself to a two-dimensional gray rubber rag, dumping him into the reservoir, and he’d found himself heading straight for the bottom, that he finally got his wits about him enough to let go of the motor and let it proceed into eternity without him.
Then it was his own clothing that dragged him down. The shoes were pulled off first, one sock inadvertently going as well, then the jacket, then the trousers, then the shirt, taking the T-shirt with it.
By the time all that underwater undressing was done, he had no idea where he was, except in trouble; the boat, the line of monofilament, everything was gone. His head was above water, barely and only sometimes. Turning in ever more frantic circles, he’d finally seen the dim lights way over by the dam and had known that was his only hope. If he didn’t have some target to aim for, he’d just swim around in circles out here in the dark and the wet and the rain and the deep and the horrible until his strength gave out.
So he swam, and floated, and swam, and floundered, and flailed, and at last staggered ashore down at the end of the dam near the little stone official structure and its attendant parking lot. An unlocked car there—nobody locks anything out in the sticks—provided some small shelter from the storm, and Dortmunder even napped in there occasionally, cold and wet and scared and furious as he was.
He’d been asleep, in fact, when the weird kid with the poleaxed smile came in and sat beside him and gave him a completely drugged-out look and just said, “Hello.” He isn’t going to turn me in, Dortmunder had thought. He isn’t going to holler or get excited or do anything normal. He barely even knows I’m here.
And so he’d stuck tight, ignoring his first impulse to jump from the car and make a hopeless run for it, and the result was they’d given him a ride all the way back to Dudson Center. The last four blocks after he left the car, walking along almost completely naked, in daylight, with people on their way to work all around him, had not been easy. But anything was easier than being in the——. (He wasn’t going to say the R word anymore, wasn’t even going to think it.)
But now here he was, home at last, and where was everybody? I don’t even get a sympathetic welcome, Dortmunder thought, feeling very sorry for himself as he padded with his one bare foot and one socked foot to the kitchen, opened a can of tomato soup, added milk (no water!), heated it, drank the whole thing serving after serving out of a coffee cup, and packed crackers in around it in his stomach for body. Then, beginnin
g at last to feel warm and dry, and knowing how tired he was, he went back through the empty house and slumped upstairs one heavy foot at a time and got into bed without even bothering to take his sock off.
The return, hours later, of the other eight residents of the house, cold, wet, discouraged, shocked, unhappy, and bickering, didn’t wake him, but May’s scream when she opened the bedroom door and saw him there did. Briefly. “Later, May, okay?” Dortmunder said, and rolled over, and went back to sleep.
FOURTH DOWN
SIXTY-ONE
Then they all blamed him. They all sat around in the living room on Oak Street after Dortmunder finally woke up and came downstairs, and they blamed him. Wouldn’t you know?
“You had us very worried, John,” May said, gently but seriously.
“I had myself a little worried, too,” Dortmunder answered.
His foghorn voice more fogbound than usual, Tiny said, “I think I got a little head cold out there, walkin around in the rain while you were asleep in your bed here.”
Murch’s Mom sneezed and looked at Dortmunder significantly, but didn’t say anything.
“Pretty dangerous,” her son commented, “driving that borrowed truck around in the daytime, hour after hour. And then for nothing.”
“You know, John,” Doug said, “it’s kind of hard to figure out how you missed that monofilament, that line stretching right across the lake, when it was right there and everything.”
“That’s right,” Kelp said. “I saw it, no trouble.”
Dortmunder lowered an eyebrow at him. “In the light from your headlamp?”
“Well, yeah.”
Wally said, “John, while you were asleep up there, I asked the computer, and it couldn’t predict you going to the dam either. That’s the one direction nobody thought of.”
“That’s where the lights were,” Dortmunder told him. “Mention that to your computer next time you run into each other.”
Tom cackled and said, “Looks like everybody’s sorry you made it, Al.”
Then they all changed their tune, and everybody reassured him how happy they all were to see him under any circumstances, even home safe in his bed when they’d expected him to be either dead in the reservoir or half-dead beside it. And that was the end of that conversation.
Drowned Hopes d-7 Page 38
