FORTY-SEVEN

“Oak Street,” Stan said as he made the left. “Forty-six, forty-six…”

“There it is,” Dortmunder said, pointing. “Pretty goddamn place,” he grumbled.

It was, too. Behind a neat green lawn stood a one-story-high white clapboard bungalow with yellow trim and shutters. Climbing roses, red and pink and cream and white, grew up across the front, enlaced with the railing of the cosy-looking broad front porch, on which the seating consisted of two rocking chairs and an actual glider, a kind of sofa without legs suspended by chains from the porch ceiling. White lace curtains made proscenium arches of every window, and the number forty-six was spelled out in iron script across the top riser of the stoop. Impatiens had just recently been planted on both sides of the cement walk; small now, they would soon spread and prosper, so that visitors would enter through a field of flowers. “How could anybody live in a place like that?” Dortmunder muttered, squinting at the brightness of it.

“Let’s find out,” Stan said.

A freshly graveled driveway ran beside the house, stopping at a chain-link fence at the rear. So there was no garage—rough in winter, huh? — but the back yard was enclosed. For puppies, no doubt. As Stan steered onto this driveway and came to a stop beside the porch, Dortmunder’s face had begun to look like the first day of a nor’easter.

They climbed out of the Buick, took the secondary slate path across the lawn in front of the roses to the stoop, and went up onto the porch. The mailbox beside the door was an open wicker basket, without even a top on it, much less a lock. Stan pushed the white button beside the front door—doors: wood and screen, the wood with a large curtained window in it—and from inside chimes sounded. Dortmunder growled, deep in his throat.

It was May who opened both doors, smiling at them, saying, “Here you are! Come in, come in. You’re early.”

“Did the GW Bridge and the Palisades,” Stan told her as they entered the bungalow. “Avoided all that stuff with the Tappan Zee.”

May was wearing an apron. Kissing John on the cheek, she said, “Hello, John. I’m really glad you came.”

“Had to,” Dortmunder told her, and did his best to soften his face with a smile. If he was going to talk reason with this woman, if he was going to get her to move out of this crazy place and come back to the apartment where she belonged, he knew he was going to have to be pleasant, reasonable, calm, patient, understanding, and benign. He was going to have to be, in other words, everything he wasn’t. “Had to talk to you,” he said, and tried the smile again. It felt like it was made of wood.

Stan said, “Where’s Mom?”

“Out driving her cab,” May said. “She’ll be back soon. Come on in the living room.”

They were in a kind of entrance hall with a rug on the floor and pictures of flowers on the walls and some kind of complicated chandelier hanging from the ceiling. As they followed May through the archway on the left into the living room—sofa, chair, chair, lamp, lamp, table lamp, coffee table, end table, end table, TV console, area rug, fake marble plant stand, fern, pictures of nymphs-fauns-architecture on the walls—Stan said, “Mom’s back driving her cab? She commutes to New York?”

“No, she’s driving for the cab company here,” May said. “Sit down, sit down.”

Dortmunder looked around, but everything looked too comfortable. He sat in the middle of the sofa, but even that was cozy and soft.

Meanwhile, May was telling Stan, “She loves it, driving here. She says nobody fights back.”

Dortmunder opened his mouth to say something nice about the roses, as a kind of icebreaker. “May,” he said, “what the hell are you doing in this place?”

May smiled at him. “Living here, John,” she said.

“Why?” he demanded, even though he knew the answer.

May’s smile was serene but steadfast. Dortmunder knew that smile, he’d seen her use it on delivery boys, policemen, bus drivers, drunks, sales clerks, and customs inspectors, and he knew it was unbeatable. “It’s good to make a change sometimes, John,” she said, utterly calm. “Move to a different place, get a different slant on life.”

“And when Tom blows up the dam?”

“We can only hope he won’t,” she said.

“He’s going to, May.”

Stan, sounding a little awed, said, “You can see it from here, out the window.”

The sofa on which Dortmunder sat stood in front of the window but faced the other way, at the television set, the paradigm of America. Twisting around, he looked through the draped-back curtains out the clean window and across the clean street and above the clean cottages on the other side to the broad gray wall, far away, curving among the green hills. At this distance it looked small and unimportant, just a low gray wall surrounded by hills taller than itself. But it was definitely aimed this way.

The sight gave Dortmunder a headache. Twisting back to look at May again, he said, “Tom’s back in New York. He’s putting together a string. He gave me what he said was a courtesy call, one last chance to join in with him when he dynamites the dam.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him no.”

May, still smiling, raised an eyebrow and said, “Did you tell him I was here?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want to hear him laugh.” Leaning forward on the too-comfortable sofa, Dortmunder said, “May, Tom isn’t going to care. His entire family, if he ever had a family, could move to this town, and he still wouldn’t care. He’s gonna blow that dam. You can’t change his mind.”

“I’m not trying to change Tom’s mind,” May said.

So that was it. Dortmunder nodded, knowing that was it. “May,” he said, “I can’t help. I gave that thing two tries, and that’s it, I’m played out. I’m not going down in there again.”

“You don’t give up, John,” she said.

“Sometimes I do. And I won’t go down in that water again because I can’t go down in that water again, and that’s that.”

“Then there’s some other way.”

“Well, I don’t know what it is.”

“You’re not even trying to think about it, John,” she said.

“That’s right,” he said, agreeing with her. “What I’m doing, I’m trying not to think about it. I mean, what are we supposed to do? Have Stan’s friend fix up another car for us, get a lot more scuba stuff from the guy on Long Island, break through the fence all over again that they’ve probably got people watching now, go down in there without Ping-Pong balls? There’ll be something else, May. It’ll try to kill us some brand-new way we haven’t even thought about yet. And if we even get to that goddamn town, we’re gonna have to walk around on the bottom, kick up all this muck, and then try to find one little casket buried in a great big field, where, even if the landmarks are still there we won’t be able to see them. Or anything else.”

“If it was an easy problem, John,” May said reasonably, “we wouldn’t need you to solve it.”

Dortmunder sat back and spread his hands. “I’ll move in here with you, May, if you want. We can go together when Tom blows the dam. But that’s it. I don’t have anything else. Tom and me are quits.”

“I know you can do it,” May insisted. “If you’ll just let yourself start thinking about it.”

Stan said, “Here comes Mom.”

Dortmunder turned to look out the window again and saw the green and white Plymouth Frenzy parked at the curb out there, with the legend TOWN TAXI on its door. Murch’s Mom was getting out from behind the wheel, wearing her usual workaday garb of checked leather cap, zippered jacket over flannel shirt, chinos, and boots. She moved with an unusual and uncharacteristic languor, closing the cab door rather than slamming it, walking toward the house at a normal pace with elbows barely sawing at all, chin hardly even a little bit thrust out.