“Ready, Bob?”
“Oh, sure, Kenny, here I come.”
Chuck was in the passenger seat in front, so Bob got in the backseat with the naked man on the floor. “Hello,” he said.
The naked man on the floor—well, he wasn’t completely naked, he was wearing underpants and one sock—wasn’t as happy as Bob’s friends. In fact, he glared at Bob and shook his fist, and then he put his finger to his lips and pointed at himself with his other hand and emphatically shook his head.
Well, gee, all right. The naked man didn’t want Bob to talk about him being there. Well, gee, that’s okay. With the pill he’d just swallowed now stamping out every little brushfire of fear or excitement or panic in his entire neural network, Bob said, “Okay.”
Kenny was just then getting into the car, slipping in behind the wheel. Pausing before putting the key in the ignition, he looked in the rearview mirror at Bob and said, “What’s that, Bob?”
Giggling, Chuck said, “He’s talking to his imaginary playmate back there.”
Kenny gave Chuck a warning look. “Watch that.”
But the naked man on the floor was nodding emphatically, pointing now in the direction of Chuck. So that was the true explanation after all. “That’s right,” Bob said placidly. “I’m talking to my imaginary playmate.”
Kenny and Chuck exchanged another glance, Kenny exasperated and feeling his responsibility, Chuck guilty but vastly amused. Kenny shook his head, and irritably watched himself insert the key in the ignition. “Get well soon,” he muttered.
As they drove away from the dam toward Dudson Center, Bob sat way over on his side of the backseat, his smile kind of raggedy around the edges, his eyes shooting out very teeny tiny sparks. His fingertips trembled. He didn’t like looking at the naked man on the floor, but there he was, all the time, in the corner of Bob’s eye.
Gazing straight ahead as the scrub forest ran backward past the windows on both sides, Bob could see the firm back of Kenny’s head and a small segment of Chuck’s profile. Chuck was giggling and smirking and at times pressing his palm to his mouth. Kenny’s back radiated the lonely obligations of command.
Bob was very happy, of course, very placid, very content. All these little feathery feelings in his stomach and behind his eyes and in his throat and behind his knees didn’t matter at all. It would be easier, of course, if the naked man weren’t there on the floor next to him, but it wasn’t important. It didn’t change anything.
After a long period of silence in the car, Bob leaned forward a little and said, confidentially, to the back of Kenny’s authoritative head, “I never had an imaginary playmate before.”
This set Chuck off again, curling forward, collapsing against his door, various snorts and grunts squeezing out through the hands he held clamped over his mouth. Kenny, pretending Chuck didn’t exist (the same way Bob pretended the naked man didn’t exist), looked mildly in the rearview mirror and said, “Is that right, Bob?”
“Yes,” Bob said. He felt as though there was more he wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.
Kenny smiled in a big-brotherly fashion: “I bet it’s fun,” he said. “To have an imaginary playmate.”
Bob smiled back at the face in the rearview mirror. Slowly he nodded. “Not really,” he said. (The naked man’s fist, in the corner of Bob’s eye, was shaking again. The naked man’s face, in the corner of Bob’s eye, was enraged.)
Kenny hadn’t actually heard Bob’s answer. He’d gone back to concentrating on his driving.
Bob wanted to turn his head away so he could look out his side window and not see anything in the car at all, but it was hard to do. His upper body was made of one solid block of wood; it was hard to make one part of it turn separately from the rest. Slowly, very slowly, strain lines standing out on the sides of his neck, Bob turned his face away. He looked out the window. The first houses of Dudson Center went by. Very interesting. Very nice.
In the middle of town, Kenny had to stop for a red light. Bob gazed fixedly at the windows of a hardware store. The other rear door slammed. Kenny said, sharply, “What was that?”
Bob swiveled his head on his painful neck. Chuck said, “Bob’s imaginary playmate just got out.”
“Goddammit, Chuck!”
“That’s right,” Bob said. “He went away.”
Chuck twisted around to grin at Bob. “He probably went on ahead to your house,” he said. “Waiting there for you now, with Tiffany.”
“Uh-huh,” said Bob.
Through clenched teeth, Kenny said, “Chuck, your job is on the line.”
Chuck gave Kenny an excessively innocent look. “Bob’s happy,” he said. But he faced front after that and didn’t say any more.
Five minutes later, they reached Bob’s house. “Here we are, Bob,” Kenny said.
Bob didn’t move. The lower half of his face smiled, but the upper half around the eyes had worry lines in it.
Kenny twisted around, frowning at him. “You’re home, Bob,” he said. “Come on, guy. I gotta get going.”
“I’d like to go back to the hospital now, please,” Bob said. And that was the last thing he said for three weeks.
The small-town habit of leaving doors unlocked had even begun to affect the residents of 46 Oak Street, and that was just as well. Reaching there at last, cold, wet, naked, in the downpour, and finding nobody even home to hear his complaints, Dortmunder might just have bitten his way through the front door if it had been locked.
He was feeling like biting his way through something, God knows. What a night! That reservoir was out to kill him, there was no question about that anymore. Every time he went near that evil body of water, it reached out damp fingers and dragged him down. If he so much as thought about that reservoir, waters began to close over his head. No more. He was through now. Three times and out.
This last time had been the closest shave yet. The goddamn rubber boat suddenly shrinking and deflating and sinking beneath him, and him sitting there not knowing what to do, the goddamn little 10hp motor clutched in his arms, resting on his lap. It wasn’t till the boat had reduced itself to a two-dimensional gray rubber rag, dumping him into the reservoir, and he’d found himself heading straight for the bottom, that he finally got his wits about him enough to let go of the motor and let it proceed into eternity without him.
Then it was his own clothing that dragged him down. The shoes were pulled off first, one sock inadvertently going as well, then the jacket, then the trousers, then the shirt, taking the T-shirt with it.
By the time all that underwater undressing was done, he had no idea where he was, except in trouble; the boat, the line of monofilament, everything was gone. His head was above water, barely and only sometimes. Turning in ever more frantic circles, he’d finally seen the dim lights way over by the dam and had known that was his only hope. If he didn’t have some target to aim for, he’d just swim around in circles out here in the dark and the wet and the rain and the deep and the horrible until his strength gave out.
So he swam, and floated, and swam, and floundered, and flailed, and at last staggered ashore down at the end of the dam near the little stone official structure and its attendant parking lot. An unlocked car there—nobody locks anything out in the sticks—provided some small shelter from the storm, and Dortmunder even napped in there occasionally, cold and wet and scared and furious as he was.
He’d been asleep, in fact, when the weird kid with the poleaxed smile came in and sat beside him and gave him a completely drugged-out look and just said, “Hello.” He isn’t going to turn me in, Dortmunder had thought. He isn’t going to holler or get excited or do anything normal. He barely even knows I’m here.
And so he’d stuck tight, ignoring his first impulse to jump from the car and make a hopeless run for it, and the result was they’d given him a ride all the way back to Dudson Center. The last four blocks after he left the car, walking along almost completely naked, in daylight, with people on their way to work all around him, had not been easy. But anything was easier than being in the——. (He wasn’t going to say the R word anymore, wasn’t even going to think it.)