“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.