Drowned Hopes

“When you’re supposed to turn or something,” Tom said, “I’ll tell you so.”

“I thought you did tell me so,” Dortmunder explained.

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Well, it just sounded that way,” Dortmunder said, as a station wagon went by, yapping its horn at them for being stopped in the middle of the road. “When you said, ‘That was the road,’ it sounded like you meant that was the road.”

“It was the road. Twenty-three years ago it was the road.” Tom sounded snappish. “Now what it is is a lot of trees and bushes and hills.”

“It was just confusing, what you said, is all,” Dortmunder explained, as a big truck full of logs gave them the air horn on its way by.

Tom half turned to look full at Dortmunder. “I understand what you’re saying, Al,” he said. “So don’t say it anymore. Drive on, okay? I’m seventy years old. I don’t know how much longer I got.”

So Dortmunder drove on, and a mile or so later they came to a sign that said: ENTERING VILBURGTOWN COUNTY. “This is the county,” Tom said. “When they did the reservoir, they covered almost this whole county. There’s no towns left here at all. Putkin’s Corners was the county seat. There’s the road.”

A two-lane blacktop road went off to the right. Dortmunder nodded at it and kept going straight.

Tom said, “Hey!”

“What?”

“That was the road! What’s the matter with you?”

This time, Dortmunder pulled off onto the gravel verge before he stopped. Facing Tom, he said, “Do you mean I was supposed to turn there?”

“That’s what I said!” Tom was so agitated his lips were almost moving. “I told you, ‘There’s the road’!”

“The last time you told me ‘There’s the road,’ ” Dortmunder said icily, getting fed up with all this, “you didn’t mean ‘There’s the road,’ you meant something else. A history lesson or some goddamn thing.”

Tom sighed. He frowned at the dashboard. He polished the tip of his nose with a bent knuckle. Then he nodded. “Okay, Al,” he said. “We been outta touch with each other awhile. We just got to get used to communicating with each other again.”

“Probably so,” Dortmunder agreed, ready to meet his old cellmate halfway.

“So this time,” Tom said, “what I meant was, ‘Turn here.’ In fact, I’m sorry that isn’t the way I phrased myself.”

“It would have helped,” Dortmunder admitted.

“So I tell you what you do,” Tom said. “You turn around, and we go back, and we’ll try all over again and see how it comes out. Okay?”

“Good.”

Dortmunder looked both ways, made the U-turn, and Tom said, “Turn here.”

“I already knew that, Tom,” Dortmunder said, and made the turn onto the new road.

“I just wanted to practice saying it right.”

“I’m wondering,” Dortmunder said as they drove through the forest along the new road, “if that’s some more of your famous humor.”

“Maybe so,” Tom said, looking out the windshield, watching the road unwind toward them out of the woods. “Or maybe it’s concealed rage,” he said. “One time, inside, a shrink took a whack at me, and he told me I had a lot of concealed rage, so maybe that’s some of it, coming out in disguised form.”

Dortmunder, surprised, gave him a look. “You got concealed rage?” he asked. “On top of all the rage you show, you got more?”

“According to this shrink,” Tom said, and shrugged, saying, “But what do they know? Shrinks are crazy, anyway, that’s why they take the job. Slow down a little now, we’re getting close.”

On the right, the forest was interrupted by a dirt road marked NO ADMITTANCE—VILBURGTOWN RESERVOIR AUTHORITY, with a simple metal-pipe barrier blocking the way. A little later, there was another dirt road on the same side, with the same sign and the same pipe barrier, and a little after that a fence came marching at an angle out of the woods and then ran along next to the road; an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with two strands of barbed wire angling outward at the top.

Dortmunder said, “They put barbed wire around the reservoir?”

“They did,” Tom agreed.

“Isn’t that more security than most reservoirs get?” Dortmunder waved a hand vaguely. “I thought, most reservoirs, you could go there and fish and stuff.”

“Well, yeah,” Tom said. “But back then, the time they put this one in, it was a very revolutionary moment in American history, you know. You had all these environment freaks and antiwar freaks and antigovernment freaks and like that…”

“Well, you still do.”

“But back then,” Tom said, “they were crazed. Blowing up college buildings and all this. And this reservoir became what you call your focal point of protest. You had these groups threatening that if this reservoir went in, they’d lace it with enough chemicals to blow every mind in New York City.”

“Gee, maybe they did,” Dortmunder said, thinking back to some people he knew down in the city.

“No, they didn’t,” Tom told him, “on account of this fence, and the cops on duty here, and the state law they passed to make this reservoir off limits to everybody.”

“But that was a long time ago,” Dortmunder objected. “Those chemicals are gone. The people that had them took them all themselves.”

“Al,” Tom said, “have you ever seen any government give up control, once they got it? Here’s the fence, here’s the cops, here’s the state law says everybody keep out, here’s the job to be done. So they do it. Otherwise, they wouldn’t feel right taking their paycheck every week.”

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Complicates things for you and me, but okay.”

“Not a real complication,” Tom said, but unfortunately at that point it didn’t occur to Dortmunder to follow through and ask him what he meant by that.

Besides, here came the reservoir. The fence continued on, and through it water gleamed. A great big lake appeared, smiling placidly in the afternoon sun, winking and rippling when little playful breezes skipped over it. Pine trees and oaks and maples and birch trees surrounded the reservoir, growing right down to the water’s edge. There were no houses around it, no boats on it, no people in sight anywhere. And the road ran right along beside it. On the other side of the road, past another fence, was a big drop-off, the land falling away to a deep valley far below.

“Stop along here somewheres,” Tom said.

There was a very narrow shoulder here, and then the fence. If Dortmunder pulled right up against the fence, Tom wouldn’t be able to open his door, and anyway the car would still be partly on the road. But there hadn’t been any traffic at all along this secondary road, so Dortmunder didn’t worry about it and just stopped where they were, and Tom said, “Good,” and got out, leaving his door open.

Dortmunder left the engine ru

“Be tough to get to,” Dortmunder commented.

“Just a little muddy, is all,” Tom said.

Dortmunder looked around. “Where’s the dam?”

Tom gave him a disbelieving look. “The dam? Where’s the dam? This is the dam. You’re standing on the dam.”

“I am?” Dortmunder looked left and right, and saw how the road came out of the woods behind them and then swung off in a long gentle curve, with the reservoir outside the curve on the right and the valley inside the curve on the left, all the way around to another hillside full of trees way over there, where it disappeared again in among the greenery. “This is the dam,” Dortmunder said, full of wonder. “And they put the road right on top of it.”

“Sure. What’d you think?”