Drowned Hopes (15 page)

“No,” Doug said.

Looking around, Billy said, “Anybody else here?” He took a step forward into the room.

“Uhhh, no,” Doug said, and moved casually but quickly to join Billy at the doorway. “What I’m doing here, Billy,” he explained, “Jack Holsem let me have a key, you remember Jack?” Subtly, he moved in a half circle, turning Billy away from the pool.

“Sure,” Billy said. “Dumbest kid in school. Works here now.”

A three–quarter turn away from the pool was the best Doug could make Billy do. “Still in school,” he said, and tried a casual grin, just to see if he could do it. “Anyway, I don’t have any place to try out new equipment, test it, you know. This time of year, the bay’s too cold.”

“Yeah, I guess it would be,” Billy agreed.

“Listen, Billy,” Doug said, being very confidential, pressing hard on their old friendship, “I’m not supposed to be here, you know. Jack wasn’t supposed to let me have the key. But I’m not
stealing
anything or anything, not doing —”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Billy said, looking down, watching himself with awkward intensity shove his gun back into its holster.

“I don’t want to get Jack in trouble,” Doug said, and over Billy’s shoulder he saw John and Andy’s heads emerge, way down at the shallow end of the pool. They were walking out! But then they turned and saw him talking to the cop, the quite obvious cop, and without even pausing they reversed direction and plodded stolidly back underwater again.

Oh, very good! Very smart! Doug, turning his relief into good fellowship, said, “Billy? You can forget about this, can’t you? For Jack’s sake?”

“Sure,” Billy said. “You I don’t have to worry about. But what about that stolen car out there?”

“Stolen car,” Doug echoed, while his stomach joined John and Andy at the bottom of the pool.

“Mercedes,” Billy explained. “MD plates. Reported stolen in the city about an hour ago. I came back behind the school” — and he grinned sheepishly — “to tell you the truth, Doug, I was gonna coop a little.”

Doug didn’t know the word. “Coop?”

“Take a little nap,” Billy translated. “Back behind the school here’s the perfect place. Anyway, I recognized your pickup, you know, because of the bumper sticker, and right next to it’s this stolen Merc.” Consciously becoming more formal, more official, Billy said, “You want to tell me about that, Doug?”

“A stolen Mercedes?” Doug’s mind skittered with a million unhelpful thoughts.

“MD plates,” Billy amplified. “What about it?”

“I don’t know,” Doug said, floundering. “What about it?”

“You don’t know anything about this car?”

“Well, no,” Doug said, as innocent as anything. “It wasn’t there when I parked the pickup. I’ve been down here maybe half an hour. They must’ve left it there after I came down.”

“Abandoned it,” Billy decided, nodding in agreement. “Okay, Doug. I better go report it. You ready to get out of here?”

“Aw, gee, Billy,” Doug said. “I’ve still got another, I don’t know, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to do down here, testing, uh, equipment. Can’t I, uh —”

“Well, the thing is,” Billy said, “our department wrecker’s gonna come here for the Merc. If they see your pickup, you know, the least I’ll have to do is give you a ticket. There’s no parking behind the school after ten
P.M.
except on game nights.”

“Well, uh …” He couldn’t leave John and Andy in the bottom of the pool for the rest of their lives! “Give me, uh, Billy, give me just five minutes, okay?”

“Well, a couple minutes,” Billy agreed reluctantly. “But I can’t be away from my post, away from the radio —”

“You go back to the radio,” Doug told him. “I’ll just finish up down here. I’ll be right out.”

“Now, don’t take too long,” Billy said.

“No no no, I promise.”

Billy looked out toward the pool, as though he’d walk over there and look in after all. “Spooky down here at night. Just like
Cat People.
You gotta see that flick, Doug. The original, not the dumb remake.”

“I will, I will. Don’t forget your radio.”

“Right.” Billy pointed a stern finger at Doug, becoming official again as he said, “Five minutes.”

“Thanks, Billy.”

Then, at last, Billy left, and the instant he was gone, Doug ran to the pool and jumped into the water, descending to where John and Andy stood around as though waiting to be picked up by the next submarine. With pointings and other frantic gestures, he showed them yet again how to add air to the BCD to increase their buoyancy, and up all three rose together. As soon as their heads broke the surface, all three started loudly to talk, but Doug’s urgency was greater and he shouted them both down, screaming, “We don’t have
time!
”

“That was a cop!” Andy yelled.

“Looking for the people who stole the Mercedes!”

Andy and John became very silent. Floating in the pool, they exchanged a glance, and then John said to Doug, “You didn’t happen to mention us down there in the pool.”

“Don’t worry, I said I was alone. But I’ve got to leave now, and take the pickup away before Billy calls the department wrecker to come get the Mercedes.”

John said, “Billy?”

“The cop,” Doug told him. “I went to high school with him. This high school.”

“Those early contacts,” Andy suggested, “are so all–important.”

“Yeah,” Doug said. “Anyway, I gotta leave, but you can’t. So what I’ll do is, I’ll wait till they come for the Mercedes and everybody’s gone, and then I’ll come back and pick you guys up and all this equipment.”

John said, “How long?”

“How do I know?” Doug asked him. “An hour, maybe.”

John said, “And what are we supposed to do down here for an hour?”

Doug looked around the pool, then back at his students. “Well,” he said, “you could practice. Tell the truth, guys, you need it.”

She’d known this fact for nearly two weeks now, and it still hadn’t lost its power to astonish and appall and excite. The very next morning after that evening of pointless pursuit of her father in the car that merely circled and circled, when Myrtle had gone to work at the library, she’d started to look for Tom Jimson in every reference work she could think of, and there he was right away in, of all major–league places, the index of the
New York Times!

She had been two years old, just on the brink of entering play school, when Tom Jimson had entered Sing Sing for what the newspaper account said would be the last time: “… seven life sentences to run consecutively, with no possibility of parole.”

Now
she understood why her mother had been so unbelieving when she’d first seen Tom Jimson ride by in an automobile in the bright light of day, why Edna had been startled into such uncharacteristic language and behavior. Tom Jimson was supposed to be in prison forever!

Had he escaped? But he wouldn’t boldly show himself in his old neighborhoods, would he, if he’d escaped? And wouldn’t there have been something in the newspaper if he’d escaped? But that twenty–three–year–old report of his conviction and jailing was the last time Tom Jimson — born in Oklahoma, sometime resident of California and Florida and several other states — had made the newspaper.

So what else could have happened? Maybe —
this
was a thrilling thought! — maybe they’d let him go! Maybe it had all been a mistake; he hadn’t committed all those crimes after all, and finally the truth had come out, and her father was a free man today, exonerated.

But wouldn’t
that
have gotten into the papers? And wouldn’t he, if a wrongly convicted innocent man, have returned to his family? Did he even know he
had
a family? Had Edna ever told him that Myrtle existed? (Edna herself refused to talk at all about the subject anymore and would fly into a rage if Myrtle dared start to question her.)

Myrtle spent nearly every waking moment of her life now going over and over these questions, considering the possibilities, thinking about her
father!
This morning, driving to the library, she concentrated so exclusively on the enigma of Tom Jimson that she never noticed the ancient, battered, rusty yellow Volkswagen Beetle that had been parked across the street from her house and that then followed her all the way downtown, even parking just a few slots away in the parking lot behind the library building. Nor did she feel the Beetle driver’s eyes on her as she entered the building.

It was half an hour into her workday when the little fat man with the wet eyes approached her at the front desk and asked what books the library had on computers. “Oh, we have a large number,” she assured him, and pointed across the room at the card catalogue, saying, “Just look in the subject heading drawers under
computer,
and you’ll —”

“But,” he interrupted, being timid and yet at the same time forceful, doing some pointing of his own toward the computer terminal on the counter to her right, “won’t you have it all in there?”

Myrtle looked with a kind of remote distaste at the computer terminal, one of four in the building, put in a few years earlier as part of a statewide program. Money that could have been spent on
books,
as the librarians often told one another. “Oh, that,” she said. “I’m sorry, the person who runs that isn’t in today.”

There was in fact no one who ran the computer, and hadn’t been since a few months after the four were installed. At that time, a half–day orientation course had been offered up in Albany, and the only member of the staff willing to spend the time had been the most recent employee, a flighty young woman named Duane Anne, who’d just wanted the day off from regular work, and who in any case had shortly afterward enlisted in the navy.

Usually, telling someone that “the person who runs the computer” was unavailable was enough to deal with the problem, but not this time. The little round man turned his wet eyes on the machine, blinked at it, and said, “Oh, that’s a very simple one, just an IBM–compatible VDT.”

“VDT?” She didn’t even like the
sound
of these things.

“Video display terminal.” His large wet eyes — they did look unappetizingly like blue–yolked eggs — swiveled toward her and he said, “The main frame’s up in Albany, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“The entire state wide catalogue’s available there,” he said, as though that were something wonderful. “Everything in every branch!”

“Oh, really?” Myrtle could not have been less interested, but she did her best to sound polite.

But then the little man suddenly moved, saying, “May I?” as he ducked around the end of the desk to stand in front of the computer, rubbing his little fat hands together and absolutely
beaming
at the machine. His broad stubby nose actually
twitched,
as though he were a rabbit suddenly faced with an entire head of lettuce.

At a loss, knowing she’d somehow lost control of the situation but unsure what to be alarmed at, Myrtle said, “Excuse me, but I don’t think —”

“Now, we turn it on
here,
” he said, smiling, and his little hand darted out. There was a faint flat
tik,
and the TV screen of the computer went from its normal dead flat gray to a living virulent bottomless black. The little man’s hands touched the typewriter keys, and green letters bounced horribly into existence on that black abyss.

“Oh, please!” Myrtle cried, half reaching out toward him. “I don’t think you should —”

He turned toward her, smiling with pleasure, and she saw his face was really very sweet and harmless; beatific, almost. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Really it is. You don’t have to be afraid of computers.”

Which changed her attitude in an instant. “Well, I’m certainly not
afraid
of them,” she said, insulted at the implication of primitive ignorance. If she chose to have nothing to do with computers, it wasn’t out of aboriginal fear. She simply saw no reason for the things, that’s all.

But the little man clearly didn’t view the situation that way. Shaking his head, smiling sadly at her with his ridiculously wide mouth, he said, “It’s just a wonderful help, that’s all. It’s a
tool,
like that pencil.”

Myrtle looked at the pencil in her hand, seeing absolutely no link between it and the machine the little man was now so fondly fondling. “I really don’t think you should do that,” she told him. “Authorized personnel … insurance … my responsibility …”

He smiled at her, obviously not listening to a word. “Now, let’s see,” he said, studying her, but not in an offensive way. “You aren’t going to care about computers, so what shall we access for you?”

“Access?” The word drew a blank in Myrtle’s brain.

“You have such lovely flowers around your house,” the little man went on, and before Myrtle could react to that, could ask him how he
knew
she had such lovely flowers around her house, he was saying, “So let’s see what all the libraries around the state have for you on flowers.”

“But —” she started, trying to catch up. “My house?”

“Look!” he cried, indicating the TV screen, gesturing to it like an affable host welcoming a favored guest to the best party of the year. “I bet you didn’t know all
this
was here.”

So she looked at the screen. She really had no choice but to look, even though it was difficult at first to make her eyes focus on those sharp–edged green letters. But then it did all come clear, as though some kind of mist or scrim had been swept away from in front of her eyes, and she stared in absolute astonishment. Gardening, flower arranging, picture books of flowers, histories of flowers: title after title went by, in as much profusion as any spring meadow. “But —” she stammered, “we don’t have all those books
here!
”

“But you can
get
them!” the little man told her. “See? These symbols show you which libraries in the system have which books, and this code shows you how to request through the central computer in Albany, and they’ll loan you the books to your library from theirs.”

“Well, that’s wonderful!” Myrtle was delighted at this cornucopia out of the blue, this sudden magic box. “Wait!” she cried. “They’re going too fast! I want to see — How do I order?”

“I’ll show you,” he said. “It’s really easy.”

And the next forty minutes disappeared in a haze of floral technology. With the help of the little round man — he was like the elves in the fairy stories who make the shoes — Myrtle learned to master the computer, the VDT, to ask it questions and give it commands and
use
it like, like, like a pencil! How astonishing! How liberating! How unexpected!

At the end of the forty minutes, when he asked her if she thought she could run it by herself now, she said, “Oh, yes, I can! Oh, thank you! I never realized!”

“People think computers are bad,” the little man said, “because whenever they want to do something somebody always says, ‘You can’t now, the computer’s down.’ But if you know what you’re doing, it’s easy. Gee whiz, you know, pencils break their points, too, but people don’t panic and say pencils aren’t any good.”

“That’s true,” she said, warming to him, wanting to agree with him.

Suddenly shy, he smiled hesitantly, half turning away from her, and said, “We’ve talked all this time, and we haven’t even been introduced. My name’s Wally Knurr.”

Why she said what she did Myrtle could never afterward understand. Maybe it was that the name had been so pervasively in her mind recently. Maybe it was because at long last she wanted there to be
someone
in the world who didn’t think of her as Myrtle Street of Myrtle Street. Maybe it was simply that this was the first time she’d introduced herself to someone new since she’d learned the true identity of her father. Whatever the reason, what Myrtle said, putting her hand out to be shaken by his soft pudgy fingers, was, “Hello. I’m Myrtle Jimson.”

He beamed happily at her. “Would you like to have lunch with me, Miss Jimson?” he asked.