Drowned Hopes

“Make it fit,” Kelp advised.

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

Doug, sounding scared, his voice cutting through the ongoing roar of the storm, said, “Stan, turn off your lights!”

Stan didn’t ask questions. The heel of his hand slapped the headlight control on the dashboard. Their clearing became abruptly black, pitch black, and they all turned their heads to watch the bright lights approaching down the access road through the rain and the night and the sopping trees.

“Still no light,” Myrtle said, coming back down to the living room from her own bedroom, where she had the best view past the intervening buildings to the house on Oak Street.

“Oh, I think they’ll take another hour, maybe even more,” Wally told her.

“Plenty of time,” Edna said, “to tell me what’s going on. Myrtle, you begin.”

“I think I see a car,” Dortmunder said, peering through the windshield and out at the storm-tossed night. “They’re probably all out on the reservoir in that big boat May told me about.”

He braked the car to a stop at the begi

Guffey said, “What’s three thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars compounded at eight percent interest for forty-three years?”

“I give up,” Dortmunder said. “What is it?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Guffey sounded surprised. “That’s why I was asking you.”

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “I thought it was one of those puzzle things.”

“It’s what Tim Jepson owes me,” Guffey said grimly. “So I figure a lot of that money you say is down there in that reservoir comes to me.”

“You can discuss that with Tom,” Dortmunder advised him. “And remember, half of it belongs to the rest of us.”

“Sure, sure. Sure.”

Dortmunder switched off the headlights. “Can’t see a goddamn thing,” he said.

“Sure you can’t,” Guffey said. “You turned the lights off.”

“I’m looking for their lights,” Dortmunder told him. “We better get out of the car.”

The interior light went on when they opened the doors, illuminating the inside of the car but nothing else, and only making the surrounding blackness all the blacker once the doors were shut.

Dortmunder and Guffey, two bulky huddled figures in the night, met at the front of their car, and Dortmunder pointed past Guffey’s nose, putting his hand up close so Guffey could see it. “The reservoir’s that way, and I thought I saw a car over there. That’s where we’ll look.”

“Uh,” Guffey said, and fell down.

“Uh?” Dortmunder turned, bending, to see what had happened to Guffey, and therefore spoiled Tiny’s aim. The sap merely brushed down the side of his head, not quite removing his ear, and bounded painfully off his shoulder. “Ow!” he yelled. “Goddammit, who is that?”

“Dortmunder?” came Tiny’s voice out of the dark. “Is that you?”

“Who the hell did you expect?”

“Well, we didn’t expect nobody, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, sounding aggrieved. “Who’s this with you?”

Out of the darkness, Tom’s voice said, “So you couldn’t keep away, huh, Al?”

“Looks like it,” Dortmunder admitted.

“Who is this guy?” Tiny wanted to know, prodding the fallen Guffey with his toe.

Aware of Guffey’s helplessness and of Tom’s presence, Dortmunder said, “Um. A hitchhiker.”

The others had gathered around now, and it was Kelp who said, “John? You brought a hitchhiker to the caper?”

“Well, I couldn’t leave the poor guy out there in the rain,” Dortmunder said. At the same time, he was inwardly furious with himself, thinking: Why did I say hitchhiker? Well, what else would I say? Aloud, he said, “It’s okay, Andy. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. You guys finished already?”

That changed the subject, with a vengeance. Everybody vied to tell him how much fun they were having, even Tom. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s see this monster boat.”

After all the build-up, when he finally got face-to-face with the leviathan, it wasn’t really that big. On the other hand, it did look as though a person could survive a voyage on it. Looking at it in the splattered gleam of the station wagon’s headlights, while Tiny banged the trailer hitch into a shotgun wedding with the front bumper, Dortmunder said, “A lot of boats like this have fu

There was a brief awkward silence. Dortmunder turned to Kelp, who was nearest. “Yeah?”

“It has a name,” Kelp agreed.

“Yeah?”

Tom, on Dortmunder’s other side, did his cackle thing and said, “It’s called Over My Head.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

Doug came over and said, “Uh, John, that hitchhiker of yours.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he isn’t dead.”

“Course not,” Tiny said. “I just gave him a lullaby.”

“But he is unconscious,” Doug said, “and I’m afraid he might drown.”

Dortmunder frowned at that. “In the water?”

“In the rain. What should we do with him?”

Kelp said, “Leave him. He’ll wake up.”

Tom said, “And go straight to the law before we can get finished and outta here. I don’t know about you sometimes, Al. Maybe we should just help him drown.”

“Aw, hey,” Doug said.

Dortmunder said, “He can come with us.”

Everybody hated that idea. Dortmunder listened to all the arguments, wishing he’d thought of some other explanation for Guffey, and when they were all finished yammering he said, “Put it this way. I don’t wa

“Done,” Tiny said, lumbering to his feet. “Dortmunder,” he commented, “you get weird notions sometimes.”

“Maybe so,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll put him in the boat now, with Doug.”

So Guffey’s limp light body was picked up by Tiny and handed up to Doug, who would ride the boat out into the water so they wouldn’t lose it once it was finally launched.

Which this time at long last happened. Dortmunder, Kelp, Tiny, and Tom all stood to one side; Doug braced himself against the wheel of the Over My Head; and Guffey lay like a bag of laundry on the floor around Doug’s feet. Stan put the station wagon into low-low, tromped the accelerator, and the double vehicle lunged down the slope. The hauler wobbled left and right, slowing down as it hit the muck, wanting to jackknife, but Stan kept correcting with tiny movements of the wheel, and steadily and inexorably the boat backed down through the mud and the ooze and into the reservoir.

Stan never let up on the accelerator till the headlights were underwater and wavelets were breaking on the hood, and the instant he lifted his foot the engine died; probably never to live again. But the Over My Head was, just barely, in water deep enough to float.

Now Doug went to work unattaching the straps that held the boat to the hauler, and Stan climbed through the foundered wagon to exit out the tailgate and go wait in Dortmunder’s car. At the same time, Kelp and Tiny and Tom waded out to climb aboard. Halfway there, Kelp looked back: “John? Aren’t you coming?”

The rain beat down. The nasty little wind pressed wet clothing against cold flesh. You couldn’t even see the reservoir out there. But a man’s gotta do— Well, you know.

“Shit,” said Dortmunder, and waded into the water.

Edna said, “When I think of the foolish young girl I was then, I could slap my face. And when I think, Myrtle, of the foolish young girl you’ve never been, I could slap both our faces. I know it’s partly my fault for stifling any impulse you ever might have had to fly from the nest, and I know it’s partly Tom Jimson’s fault for turning me into a bitter old woman before my time, but good heavens, girl, don’t you have one single rebellious bone in your body? Whatever happened to heredity? Don’t interrupt when I’m talking. The point is, Tom Jimson may, just may, be doing some good for once in his life, even if he didn’t intend it and doesn’t know about it. If all this hadn’t happened, you and I could have just drifted along the same way, day after day, year after year, all the way to the grave, you just another dim little obedient country spinster taking care of her bad-tempered nasty old mama—now just let me finish, if you don’t mind—but we’ve been shaken out of that, the two of us, and that’s good. That diving fella’s no good for you, Myrtle, and you know it as well as I do. He’s just a paler Tom Jimson, that’s all, less cold-blooded but just as untrustworthy. If you’re going to have your head turned by a pretty face, go right ahead, but please try to reassure yourself that there’s some sort of reliable brain behind it. Which brings me to you, Wallace. I know your type, and don’t think I don’t. I used to see little boys like you all the time when I ran the library at Putkin’s Corners. Intelligent little boys who weren’t any good at sports, boys the other children used to make fun of, and they’d come into the library for a refuge and a fantasy. But you aren’t a child anymore, Wallace. It’s true you’re still fu