Once he had the barrier unlocked and open, Bob sighed and got back into his car, shifted into drive, and headed down the dirt road, among the trees, in the dark, toward the water.
The water looked darker tonight, with no moon. Darker, and colder, and even more unfriendly. Changing into his wetsuit, boots, gloves, airtank, weight belt, and BCD, Dortmunder muttered, “Last chance to get outta this.”
“What?” Kelp asked chirpily, nearby.
“Nothing,” Dortmunder said grumpily.
Because, of course, it wasn’t the last chance to change his mind, he’d missed that moment a long time ago. He was here now, with Kelp and Tiny and Tom and Stan Murch and this vivisected Hornet and this winch and all this rope, and there was no choice. Into the drink. “I could use one,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing!”
“All set over here,” Stan said, standing beside the car.
All set. Tiny had broken off a couple of pine tree branches to chock the wheels of the Hornet, though it didn’t give much impression of any lively desire to race down the gradual slope into the water. One end of the long rope from the winch was tied to a frame piece where the bumper used to be attached; not because they had any hope of winching the entire car back up to the surface, but only because that was the simplest and safest way to be sure they had the rope with them. The two big trash bags of Ping-Pong balls were in the trunk, which was closed only with a simple hook arrangement to make it easy to open underwater in the dark. The underwater flashlights waited on the front seat, the shovels and a four-foot-long fireplace poker in back. A second long coil of rope also lay on the backseat, one end extended forward between the front seats and tied firmly to the steering column. The two long poles, to push them along as necessary, were placed behind the front seats, sticking up and back over the rear seat.
The idea was, the Hornet would roll on down the track underwater, downhill almost all the way into Putkin’s Corners. Now and again, if they came to a stop, they’d stand up in the car like gondoliers and pole themselves along. Since only the points of the poles would ever touch bottom, they could minimize turbidity.
Once they reached Putkin’s Corners, they’d have to get out of the car and walk, which would roil up the bottom some, but that couldn’t be helped. They would use the second rope then to keep in contact with each other and with the car as they made their way around the library—directly across the street from the railroad station, that’s a help—and into Tom’s goddamn field. The four-foot-long poker would be poked into the soft bottom in the area where Tom had buried his casket, and when they hit it they’d dig it up and drag it—this would be a tough part, full of hard work and turbidity—back to the Hornet. There, they’d attach the long rope to a casket handle, then open the car’s trunk—carefully! don’t want the trash bags of Ping-Pong balls to escape and float up to the surface—tie the bags of Ping-Pong balls to the casket on both sides to lighten it, then give the prearranged three-tug signal to Tiny and walk back up the track with the casket as Tiny cranked the winch.
Not exactly a piece of cake, but not absolutely impossible either. And this time, if anything went wrong, Dortmunder would definitely remember his BCD and rise up out of there. Count on it.
“I’m ready,” Kelp said. “You coming, John?”
“Naturally,” Dortmunder said, and plodded over to get into the Hornet, sitting behind the wheel, the underwater flashlight in his lap, Kelp on the seat beside him, grinning around his mouthpiece. At what?
Dortmunder put his own mouthpiece in and nodded to Tiny, who pulled away the tree branch chocks, and nothing happened. Dortmunder made pushing gestures, and Tiny said, “I know, I know,” and went around to the back of the car.
While Tom stayed with the winch, Tiny and Stan pushed on the car, which rolled sluggishly, and then less sluggishly, down the incline toward the reservoir. “Mmmmmm!” said Kelp, in delight, as the Hornet’s front end plowed into the black water.
The front wheels hit with a little splash. Dortmunder expected the water’s drag to stop the damn car again, but it didn’t, at least not right away. Rolling slowly, but rolling, the Hornet moved easily down into the reservoir, water bubbling up into the passenger compartment around their feet through the holes where the accelerator and clutch pedal used to be, then pouring in through the larger space where the dashboard once spread, as the hoodless front went beneath the surface. The windshield and side windows caused a little wake to boil past them as they rolled on, water bubbling on the outside of the glass. There was no rear window anymore, it having gone with the top, so all at once the interior was full, water halfway up their chests, a few seconds of freezing icy numbness, as Dortmunder had expected, and then it was okay.
Breathe through the mouth.
Breathe through the mouth.
Breathe through the mouth.
Breathe through the mouth.
Kelp pulled his mouthpiece out long enough to cry, “It’s working!” and then popped it back in as the water closed over their heads. Water tumbled around their face masks. Trapped bubbles of air in the car’s doors and trunk and frame began to work their way clear for the straight run up through the black water to the eddying, then quieting, surface.
Second padlock untampered with. Nobody at the clearing down by the reservoir at the end of the road. Naturally not.
Bob switched off his headlights, got out of his car, and stood leaning his skinny butt against a front fender, arms folded, gazing out over the water. Nobody could say for sure how long it would take him to do this pointless inspection every night, since nobody had ever had to go through this nonsense before him, so there was no reason why he shouldn’t take a little time out for himself along the way.
Darker tonight, without the moon, but lots of high tiny white pinpoints of stars in clusters and lines and patterns all across the black sky, looking as though they really ought to mean something. If only the thousands of white dots were numbered, you could connect them, and then you’d know it all. The secret of the universe. But nobody even knows which dot is number one.
Maybe the sun? Our own star? Maybe we can’t see the pattern because we’re in the pattern. Have to talk to Manfred about that.
Ever since he’d started the counseling, Bob had learned there were depths and complexities within himself that his schooling and his family—and certainly his retarded boyhood friends—had never evoked. Ways of seeing things. Ways of relating himself to the world and the universe and time itself.
What did it all matter, really, in the vastness of space, the fullness of time? Maybe Tiffany wasn’t exactly the ideal person to spend the rest of one’s life with, but what the heck, maybe he wasn’t anybody’s lifelong ideal either.
Look up at all those pinpricks of light up there, all those stars, billions and billions, so many with planets around them, so many of the planets beating some form of life. Not human beings, of course, and not the kinds of aliens and monsters and ETs you saw in science fiction, either. Maybe life based on methane instead of oxygen; maybe life closer to our plants than our animals, but intelligent; maybe life in the form of radio waves. And all going on for billions of years, from the unimaginable beginning of the universe to its unthinkable end. What were Bob and Tiffany in all that? Not very important, huh?
So take it easy, that was the answer, don’t get so excited about things. Don’t get so excited about sex—that’s what got you where you are today—or your future or your job or sea serpents or the simple-ass stupid asinine meatheaded dumbness of one’s pals and coworkers. Accept the life you’ve got. One little life in the great heaving ocean of space and time, the hugeness of the universe.