Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Well, uh,” Kelp said. “We’re here. I guess we should get on with it.”

  “No time like the present,” Tom said.

  “Right,” Dortmunder said.

  Dragging their feet a little, Dortmunder and Kelp led the way back to the motor home and off-loaded all their gear: wet suits, air tanks, underwater flashlights, the whole schmear. As they started to strip off their street clothes in the chilly night air, Tiny frowned away to the left, saying, “Dam’s down there somewhere, isn’t it?”

  Tom, pointing, said, “You can make out the curve of it right there. See?”

  Tiny said, “Nobody inside there can look down this way?”

  “Naw.” Tom waved both bony hands, dismissing that problem. “The windows all face down the valley. Don’t worry, Tiny, we’re all alone here.”

  Nearby, Dortmunder and Kelp, changing into their wet suits, heard that remark and looked at each other. But they didn’t say a word.

  “Hey, it’s the husband!”

  “Welcome back, honeymooner! Hey, you got some bags under your eyes!”

  “You gotta take time out to sleep, boy! It’ll still be there when you wake up! Is he thinner?”

  “Thinner? He’s wasted away to nothin! He’s got no lead in his pencil!”

  “He barely got a pencil anymore!”

  “Siddown, Bobby, siddown, you got to start building up your strength!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bob said, nodding at his tormentors, keeping his bitter thoughts to himself. He’d known all along that when he finally came back to work here at the dam he’d be sure to take some ribbing, and the thing to do was just play along and wait for these jerks to get bored with themselves.

  But it wasn’t easy, under the circumstances, to keep his mouth shut. The fact is, he’d screwed Tiffany a hell of a lot more before the wedding than during the so-called honeymoon. The first couple days of married life, Tiffany’d been in a really shitty mood, just mad at everything, at the airplane ride, the hotel, the whole island of Aruba. Bob had been pretty patient and reasonable, all things considered, and at last on the third day she’d relaxed and her disposition improved, and they’d had several kind of nice hours together before the onset of morning sickness, a thing Tiffany was apparently going to be experiencing all day long for the next five months. (The worst so far, the absolute worst for everybody concerned, everybody in the vicinity, had been the plane ride back.)

  So all this hooting and hollering was pretty well aimed at the wrong guy. But there was no point saying so, or saying anything at all to these clowns, come to that. His three coworkers on the night shift at Vilburgtown Dam were not famous for empathy or thoughtfulness. (Well, to be honest, neither was Bob.) So while they made increasingly crude remarks, in their desperate pseudo-friendly determination to get a rise out of him, Bob went glumly to his work station and settled back into the routine of things. There were forms to be filled out, computer input to be caught up on, safety checks and maintenance checks that hadn’t been dealt with while he was gone, consumption reports for the New York City water people, pension and insurance and overtime and union and tax documents on the four-man detachment of New York Police Department cops assigned to the dam, electric and phone bills…

  And they just wouldn’t let up; they just had to keep making their brilliant remarks, even though he was trying to get some work done. These three bozos, janitor clerks like himself, handmaidens of the dam, with no Civil Service seniority, had drawn this utterly boring and unchanging night shift as their introduction to the world of grown-up work, would be here for years until youths even more callow than themselves were hired by the city and stuffed into this dam like worms into a hydroponic tank, so that Bob and his pals could at last move up to a life of daytime inactivity, to spend their days watching cloud formations and guarding the reservoir against fishermen, boaters, skinny dippers, malfunctions, and madmen carrying enough LSD to drive the entire Eastern Seaboard mad.

  Day duty: when sometimes the phone did ring, when sometimes a passing motorist wanted to stop and chat about engineering marvels, when sometimes something happened. But until that happy day, the four of them were stuck together in here in utter tedium, and so any event at all, including (perhaps especially including) a coworker’s return from his honeymoon, was something to be savored, to be dwelt on, to be consumed slowly and completely, to be driven right flat into the fucking ground.

  “I’ll be back,” Bob finally announced, knowing he could stand no more of it for a while. Getting to his feet, he turned away from his data sheets and computer terminal and best friends, and muttered, “I need some air.”

  “What you need is oysters!”

  “By now, what he needs is a splint! A little short splint about, what, Bobby, about four inches long?”

  “That Tiffany’s a lucky girl, you know. Bobby can do his dirty deed on her with that little wiener, and she won’t know a thing about it, can go right on sleeping.”

  Jesus. Bob went out the door and up the concrete steps and out onto the catwalk on the reservoir side of the dam, just below the lip of the roadway. Beautiful out here; since Aruba, Bob had become something of a student of beauty, and he could tell that this scene, this northern spring scene here, with its outlined pine trees and big orange moon and scraggle-toothed mountains and the peaceful water, was beauty.

  And he was all alone with it. Down there to his left, where the roadway atop the dam met the land on the far side, was the only structure in sight, a low square one-room building made of local stone, which housed the office of the police detachment, and which was empty right now. There were no cops on duty at night, though they were on call in their homes nearby in case of trouble, and the state police were also close by and available in case of real trouble.

  But if you ignored that little stone building and turned your back on the dam to look straight out across the water, it was almost the way it would have been back in Indian times, before the Europeans ever came up the Hudson River and started their settlements. Squinting, you could almost imagine silent Indians out there in their canoes, skimming across the water. Of course, this particular body of water hadn’t actually been here back in Indian times, that imaginary canoe of Bob’s would have been fifty or sixty feet up in the air among the treetops back then, but the idea of it was right.

  And he alone here, the only observer. That faint splash from some distance off to the right, for instance. If he wanted to pretend that was an Indian paddle, what was wrong with that? Even if he really knew it was just some fish.

  While Kelp splashed his fingers in the water to see how cold it was—and winced—Dortmunder fitted his goggles on and inhaled through his nose, the way Doug Berry had showed him, to create the seal that would make the goggles water-tight. Then he put the mouthpiece in his mouth and started breathing the air out of the tank, and once again he got that claustrophobic feeling. When his head was enclosed in face mask and mouthpiece, for some reason it always reminded him of prison.

  “You ready?” Kelp asked, which of course meant he himself wasn’t ready, because if he could talk his mouthpiece wasn’t in. For answer, Dortmunder went plodding toward the water.

  Because they weren’t diving in but walking in, and because they didn’t intend to do any swimming while they were in there, just walking, they didn’t wear the normal flippers, but had chosen low zippered boots instead. This made their entry into the water a bit more dignified than the usual flapping flipper-wearer. A bit more dignified, but not much.

  Or, that is, it would have been dignified if the water hadn’t been so cold, causing first Dortmunder and then Kelp to jump right back out the instant they stepped in. Then, looking wide-eyed at each other through the masks, clutching their flashlights, each with his small folding shovel hooked to his weight belt, and with the end of the long white rope lashed loosely around Dortmunder’s middle, they both tried again.

  Cold. Wading in was the worst possible way to do this. Each inch of the body was given
its own opportunity to start freezing, separately, serially. When Dortmunder was about thigh deep, he knew he could stand no more of this death-by-a-thousand-freezes, so he simply sat down in the water, which flooded the wet suit right up to his neck. My heart’s gonna stop! he thought, but then the wet suit began to do its job, warming the water next to his skin the way it had done every time in the swimming pool out on Long Island, and his shivering lessened, and the severe ache in his teeth abated, and the hair reattached itself to his scalp.

  Next to him, Kelp, seeing what he’d done, had echoed it, and was no doubt going through the same tortures. I am extremely uncomfortable, Dortmunder told himself, but I’m gonna live. There was a kind of gloomy satisfaction in the thought.

  Well, it was time to move on. With some difficulty, Dortmunder got his feet under himself once more, but he didn’t stand up all the way. He remained crouched to keep his body underwater, and looked back at the shore, where Tiny and Tom were visible against the lighter mass of the motor home—Tiny leaning on the winch on its tripod, Tom just standing there to one side, like the evil spirit of the lake.

  Tiny can handle him, Dortmunder told himself. Tiny can take care of himself. Sure he can. Tiny’s a big guy, he’s alert, he’ll keep control of the situation. Telling himself this stuff, Dortmunder turned away and started duck-walking deeper into the lake.

  The ground underfoot underwater was very muddy and very kind of squidgy. As Dortmunder moved deeper, the bottom began to tug at his boots, trying to pull them off, so he had to move more and more carefully, drawing his heel out of the muck every time, while invisible fingers down there clutched at the back of his boot.

  Then cold water touched his bare chin, beneath the mouthpiece. I’m gonna go underwater! Now! I’m gonna go underwater now! He turned and stared wildly shoreward one last time, but he was too far out over the water now and could no longer make out anything clearly. Tiny and Tom and the motor home were all in the darkness under the trees.

  Everything’s fine. I’m gonna go underwater now. And he did.

  Flashlight. How the hell do you turn on the flashlight? There’s gotta be a button, there’s—

  A faint glow off to his right: Kelp’s flashlight. So it’s possible, no reason to panic, just look down in the darkness and try to figure out where the flashlight button is. Concentrating on the problem at hand, he forgot to breathe through his mouth, tried to breathe through his nose, and his nostrils pinched shut as the edges of the mask pressed painfully against his cheeks and forehead.

  I’m strangling! Terrified, he gulped air through his mouth, discovered he was breathing, found the flashlight button, clicked the damn thing, and he still couldn’t see much of anything.

  This was very dirty water. A lot dirtier than the stuff that comes out of faucets down in New York City. This water was brown. It had millions of tiny hairy dirt atoms floating in it, bouncing the flashlight glow back in a sepia halo.

  He couldn’t even see the bottom. He angled the flashlight straight down, and he could just make out his own knees, but no deeper. His boot-clad feet were lost in the brown murk. Behind him, the thick white rope angled upward, buoyant enough to hover just a few inches below the surface, its braided white line disappearing no more than two feet away.

  The original idea was, if they just kept moving forward, they’d come to the old road that used to go from Dudson Park to Putkin’s Corners; downhill to the right would be the direction they wanted. According to Wally Knurr’s computer, the old blacktop should still be there, though it might be partly covered with drifting mud. Of course, if they couldn’t see the bottom at all, that was gonna make it a little tougher to find the road. Except that blacktop, even underwater blacktop, wouldn’t try to pull his boot off at every step, so that would be a clue.

  So the thing to do was stick together and move forward. Stick together. Dortmunder looked around, and couldn’t see Kelp’s flashlight anymore. Was it because of the glow of his own light? Finding the damn button again—why do they make it so hard to find the button? — he switched off his light, then turned in a slow circle, staring through the goggles at nothing at all. Pitch-black darkness. No light. Darkness. Blackness. Cold wet blackness, pressing in, pressing down, pressing against his chest and his forehead and the flimsy glass between his eyes and—

  Button!

  The hazy tan glow came back, re-creating the narrow round tube of dim light in which he stood, this murky closet surrounded by all that black.

  Where was Kelp? Jeez, he could get lost down here. I hope he doesn’t panic, Dortmunder told himself, afraid that Kelp might not have his own nerves of steel, and knowing for certain that Kelp didn’t have the long white braid of rope that, no matter what else might happen, still linked Dortmunder’s waist to the winch and Tiny and the shore and the whole upper world of air and light.

  Move forward, that was the thing to do. Move forward. Keep the flashlight on as a guide to Kelp, keep tight hold of the rope, that absolute lifeline, and move forward, feeling one’s way, waiting for that goddamn road.

  Why am I doing this?

  His foot hit something, hard. The something was hard, and his foot hit it hard. Damn! Now what?

  Dortmunder bent low, sticking the flashlight down into the murk, and saw a tree stump there, right in front of him. Most of its bark had rotted away, the interior was rusty-looking and crumbly, and some of its roots had been exposed by the shifting mud. Roots as bent and dark as witches’ fingers, they were all around his feet.

  Dortmunder moved to his right, and bumped into something else. It was another stump, about a foot high, a little thicker than the first one. He remained bent over to swing the flashlight in an arc, and more and more of them appeared out of the darkness; a squat army of tree stumps, some thick, some thin, all frayed and crumbling, standing at grubby attention in uneven rows, none more than a foot high. He moved the flashlight in a wider arc, half turning, and they were behind him, too, thousands of them, crowded together, roots overlapping as though they lolled at their ease here, just waiting for him, waiting all these years, biding their time, in no hurry, knowing some black night Dortmunder would descend among them and…

  All right, all right. They aren’t alive, okay? They’re tree stumps, that’s all. Get hold of yourself, goddammit.

  Then he remembered one of the items factored into Wally Knurr’s computer model of the valley when it was flooded. Most of the trees had been cut down before the water was put in. Yes, and most of the buildings had been towed away, except for totally useless ones or some overly large stone or brick ones like a couple of churches and firehouses and the library Tom had buried his goddamn stash behind. And those had been stripped of doors and windows and floors and anything else that might be of use.

  He hadn’t thought before about what all that meant. He hadn’t stopped to think how difficult it was going to be to walk downhill through a forest of short tree stumps. On the other hand, even if he’d thought about tree stumps, he still wouldn’t have known about the murky darkness, the complete inability to see anything more than a few feet in front of a flashlight. And he hadn’t known just how difficult this mud was going to be to move around in.

  Bent over, the rope and the weight belt digging into his waist, Dortmunder tried to find a path through the tree stumps. Shuffling forward, bumping into roots and stones—now there’s rocks in here, too—having to turn this way and that to make any progress at all, he soon realized he’d lost all idea which way was forward.

  Well, forward is downhill, right? But which way was downhill? With just this narrow tiny area of light for reference, with all the crud floating around in the water, it was impossible to tell which was uphill, which was downhill, which was crosshill.

  Which way is forward? More importantly, which way is back? He aimed the flashlight at the floating rope trailing him, but it weaved and drifted with tiny currents, forming half loops, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

  Still gazing upward, trying to peer far
ther back along the line of rope, Dortmunder moved, bumped into something else, lost his balance briefly, compensated fast, and stepped out of his right boot.

  Oh, hell! His bare foot was down now in cold wet slimy mud, sinking into it. He tugged upward, and felt a thick root pressed across the top of his instep. Clutching at him!

  Bending quickly down, swinging the flashlight around fast to see what was going on with his foot, Dortmunder inadvertently slammed the light into yet another stump. It bounced from his hand. It went out.

  Darkness. Blackness. Don’t panic. The flashlight’s down there somewhere, in the dark. The boot’s down there somewhere, in the dark. The foot’s down there somewhere, in the dark, caught by roots. Don’t panic!

  How long have I been down here? I’ve only got an hour of air! Have I been down here an hour? Does this air taste funny?

  Don’t panic? Don’t panic? Why the hell not?

  Leaning on the rail of the catwalk, gazing out over the still silent beauty of the reservoir in the increasingly pale bright light of the rising moon, Bob found himself reflecting on the changes that had come so recently into his life, and for the first time he wished he actually had a friend. Not the so-called friends he’d had all his life, in grade school and high school, not those gape-jawed assholes so like the three clowns down in the dam, but a friend, a real friend, someone he could talk to about his innermost thoughts.

  For instance. He couldn’t possibly talk to the jerks in the dam about waking up with a woman; they didn’t have the maturity for the subject. And the fact is, although Bob had what he considered plenty of experience in going to bed with women, the whole phenomenon of then waking up with one, waking up in the morning with another person right there, a woman, an entire life-size woman, first thing in the morning, an entire experience to deal with the second you open your eyes, was something he’d thought insufficiently about before it started to happen.

  And what was it like? That was the weird thing; it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It sure wasn’t sexy. It was like having some kind of big animal in the room with you, a deer or a sheep, maybe a goat, sometimes more like a horse. There it was, coughing and blowing its nose and scratching itself, moving around the room, opening and closing drawers, looking as pale and bloodless as a vampire victim without its makeup on. It was like—