Drowned Hopes (4 page)

Tom looked back at the reservoir. “That’s fifty feet of water, you know.”

“I know, I know,” Dortmunder said. “Just give me a little time to consider the problem.”

Tom’s gray eyes shifted this way and that in his skull. He said, “I don’t know if I want to stay on your sofa that long.”

Oh. Dortmunder stared, agonized. The thought of May came into his mind but was firmly repressed, pushed down beneath the hundreds and hundreds of drowned people. “It’s a comfortable sofa, Tom,” he said, his throat closing on him as he said it but managing to get the words out just the same.

Tom took a deep breath. His lips actually twitched; a visible movement. Then, the lips rigid again, he said, “Okay, Al. I know you’re good at this stuff, that’s why I came to you first. You want to find another way to get down to the stash, go ahead.”

“Thank you, Tom,” Dortmunder said. Relief made his hands tremble on the wheel.

“Any time,” Tom told him.

“And in the meantime,” Dortmunder said, “no dynamite. Right?”

“For now,” Tom agreed.

“I’ll get it, Mother!” Myrtle Street called, and went skipping down the well–polished mahogany staircase toward the front door. A pretty person of twenty–five — no longer really a pretty girl but somehow not quite a pretty woman either — Myrtle had lived most of her life in this old sprawling beautiful clapboard house here in Dudson Center, and was barely conscious anymore of the oddity of having the same name as her home address. At least some of the mail Joe would be bringing up onto the porch this afternoon would be addressed:

Joe the mailman smiled roguishly as he climbed the stoop to the wide front porch of 27 Myrtle Street and saw Myrtle Street pushing open the screen door. He liked the way her legs moved inside her loose cotton dresses, the demure but lush swell of her breasts within the gray cardigan she always wore, the pale softness of her throat, the healthy animal sparkle in her eye. Joe the mailman was forty–three years old, with a family at home, but he could dream, couldn’t he? “Lovely as ever,” he greeted Myrtle as she smiled hello and reached for today’s messages from the world. “We must run away together one of these days.”

Myrtle, who had no idea of the actual depth of depravity lurking within Joe’s plain–to–lumpish exterior in his badly fitting blue–gray uniform, laughed lightly and said, “Oh, we’re both much too busy, Joe.”

“What’s he want?” screeked Edna’s voice from upstairs. “Don’t you give him anything for postage due, Myrtle! Make him take it back!”

Myrtle indulgently rolled her eyes and laughed, saying, “Mother.”

“She sure is something,” Joe agreed. He was imagining his head between those legs.

“See you tomorrow,” Myrtle said, and went back inside, the screen door slamming on Joe’s creative study of her behind.

Climbing the stairs, Myrtle went quickly through the mail. Myrtle Street, Myrtle St. She and her mother had been Myrtle and Edna Gosling when Edna had inherited the place from her mortician father and moved in with her not–yet–two–year–old baby. To be Myrtle Gosling of Myrtle Street would have been perfectly ordinary and unremarkable, but she hadn’t remained that for long. She’d been not–yet–four when Edna met Mr. Street — Mr. Earl Street, of Bangor, Maine, a salesman in stationery and school–and–library supplies — and not–yet–five when Edna married Mr. Street and decided to give her only daughter her new husband’s name. Myrtle had been not–yet–seven when Mr. Street up and ran away with Candice Oshkosh from down at the five–and–dime, never to be heard from again, but by that time Edna had firmly become Mrs. Street, and her daughter was just as firmly Myrtle Street, and that was simply the way it was.

Entering the front bedroom, Myrtle found her mother putting on one of her many black hats at the oval pier–glass mirror, staring with suspicion and mistrust at her own hands as they jammed the hat in among her steel–gray knotted curls. “Here’s the mail,” Myrtle said, unnecessarily, and Edna turned to snatch the thin sheaf of circulars and bills from her hands. It was required that Edna look at
all
the mail, that Myrtle not throw away the most pointless sale announcement or congressional report before her mother had seen it, looked at it, touched it, possibly even smelled it. “We have to go soon, Mother,” Myrtle said. “I don’t want to be late for work.”

“Pah!” Edna said, greedily fingering the mail. “Make them wait for you. They waited for
me
when
I
worked there.
Watch
him, will you?”

So Myrtle hurried to the front window to stand watch while her mother examined the mail. Out there, Joe the mailman was just crossing the street down at the corner to start his delivery to the houses across the way. A Mrs. Courtenay, a fiftyish widow, lived over there, just two doors from the corner. A woman who wore bright colors and hoop earrings, she had thus earned Edna’s utter condemnation. Edna was convinced that some day Joe the mailman would enter that house — and that widow, no doubt — rather than merely drop off the mail there, thus committing — among other things — a gross dereliction of his sworn Federal duty to deliver the mail, and Edna would at
once
phone the main post office downtown and have Joe the mailman dealt with. It hadn’t happened yet, but it would, it would.

Well, of course, Myrtle knew it would never happen at all. Joe wasn’t like that. True, on occasion Mrs. Courtenay would appear at her door when Joe arrived, decked in her bright colors and her hoop earrings, and she and Joe would chat a minute, but the same identical thing sometimes happened between Joe and Myrtle herself — today, for instance — which didn’t mean Joe would ever come in
here
and perform … anything. It was all just silly.

But it was better, in the long run, to go along with Mother’s little idiosyncrasies. “He’s on Mrs. Courtenay’s porch now,” she reported to the rattling sound of Edna tearing open an electric company bill. “He’s putting the mail in the box. He’s leaving.”

“She didn’t come out?”

“No, Mother, she didn’t come out.”

Edna, hatted and still clutching the mail, scampered over to glare out the window at Joe the mailman taking a shortcut across Mrs. Courtenay’s lawn to the next house on his route. “Probably having her period,” Edna commented, and switched her glare to Myrtle. “Are you ready or not? You don’t want to be late for work, you know.”

“No, Mother,” Myrtle agreed.

The two went downstairs together and out the back door and over the gravel to the unattached garage containing their black Ford Fairlane. This part of their day was such a foregone routine they barely even thought about it while going through the motions: Myrtle opened the right–hand garage door, while Edna opened the left. Myrtle entered the garage and climbed into the Ford and backed it out while Edna stood to the left, hands folded in front of her. Myrtle made a backing U–turn on the gravel while Edna closed both garage doors. Then Edna walked around the car, got in beside Myrtle, and they left home.

Myrtle was going to work. She was an assistant (one of three) at the North Dudson branch of the New York State Public Library. Edna was going to her Senior Citizens Center down on Main Street, where she was something of a power. At sixty–two, Edna was three years too young to even be a member of the Dudson Combined Senior Citizens Center, but there was nothing else doing all day in this dead town, so she’d got herself in by lying about her age.

Myrtle was a good, if cautious, driver; cautious mostly about her mother, who was not reticent about remarking on any flaw she might find in Myrtle’s judgment or performance skills along the way. She was quiet today, however, all the way from Myrtle Street to Spring Street to Albany Street to Elm Street to Main Street, where they had to stop and wait for the light to change before making their left turn. While they were waiting there, a car drove wanderingly by from left to right, with two men in it; they didn’t seem to know exactly where they were going.

And suddenly Edna’s bony sharp hand was clutching Myrtle’s forearm and Edna was crying, “My God!”

Myrtle immediately stared into the rearview mirror; were they about to be crashed? But Elm Street was empty behind them. So she stared at her mother, who was gaping after that car that had just gone by. The whites were visible all around the pupils of Edna’s eyes. Was she having some sort of attack? “Mother?” Myrtle asked, firmly burying that first irrepressible instant of hope. “Mother? Are you all right?”

“It couldn’t be,” Edna whispered. She was panting in her anxiety, mouth hanging open, eyes staring. Voice hoarse, she cried, “But it was! It was!”

“Was what? Mother?”

“That was your
father
in that car!”

Myrtle’s head spun about. She too stared after the car with the two men in it; but it was long gone. She said, astonished, “Mr. Street, Mother? Mr. Street’s come back?”

“Mr.
Street?
” Edna’s voice was full of rage and contempt. “
That
asshole? Who gives a fuck about
him?
”

Myrtle had never
heard
such language from Edna. “Mother?” she asked. “What is it?”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” Edna said, hunching forward, staring hollowly out the windshield, all at once looking
plenty
old enough to be a member of the Senior Citizens Center. “It couldn’t happen, but it did. The dirty bastard son of a bitch.” Bleakly, Edna gazed at the sunny world of Dudson Center. “He’s back,” she said.

“They shouldn’t have let him out of the cell,” Dortmunder said. “As long as I’m not in it with him.”

“You are in it with him,” May pointed out. “He’s living here.”

Dortmunder put down his fork and looked at her. “May? What could I do?”

They were in the kitchen together, having a late lunch or an early supper, hamburgers and Spaghetti–Os and beer, grabbing their privacy where they could find it. After the run back from Vilburgtown Reservoir, after they’d actually given the rental car back to its owners (yet another new experience today for Dortmunder), Tom had said, “You go on home, Al, I’ll be along. I gotta fill my pockets.” So Dortmunder had gone on home, where May had been waiting, having come back early from her cashier job at the supermarket to meet him, and where, with a hopeful expression as she’d looked over Dortmunder’s shoulder, she’d said, “Where’s your friend?”

“Out filling his pockets. He said we shouldn’t wait up, he’d let himself in.”

May had looked alarmed. “You gave him a key?”

“No, he just said he’d let himself in. May, we gotta talk. I also gotta eat, but mostly and mainly we gotta talk.”

So now they were eating and talking, sometimes simultaneously, and May wasn’t liking the situation any more than Dortmunder. But what were they to do about it? “May,” Dortmunder said, “if we leave Tom alone, he really will blow up that dam and drown everybody in the valley. And for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he’ll find guys to help.”

“John,” May said, “wherever he is right now, your friend Tom, filling his pockets —”

“Please, May,” Dortmunder interrupted, “don’t do that. Don’t keep calling him my friend Tom. That’s unfair.”

May thought about that and nodded. “You’re right, it is. It’s not your fault who they put in your cell.”

“Thank you.”

“But, John, still, what do you think he’s doing right now? Filling his pockets; how do you suppose he does that?”

“I don’t even want to know,” Dortmunder said.

“John, you’re a craftsman, you’re skilled labor, a professional. What you do takes talent and training —”

“And luck,” Dortmunder added.

“No, it doesn’t,” she insisted. “Not a solid experienced person like you.”

“Well, that’s good,” Dortmunder said, “since I’ve been running around without it for quite a while.”

“Now, don’t get gloomy, John,” May said.

“Hard not to, around Tom,” Dortmunder told her. “And, as for what he’s doing outside right now, that’s up to him. But I was
at
that dam, I looked down the valley at all those houses. It’s my choice, May. I can try to figure out something else to do, some other way to get Tom his money, or I can say forget it, not my problem. And then some night we’ll sit here and watch television, and there it’ll be on the news. You know what I mean?”

“Are those the only choices?” May asked, poking delicately at her Spaghetti–Os, not meeting Dortmunder’s eye. “Are you sure there’s nothing else to do?”

“Like what?” he asked. “The way I see it, I help him or I don’t help him, that’s the choice.”

“I wouldn’t normally say this, John,” May said, “you know me better than that, but sometimes, every once in a great while, sometimes maybe it’s just necessary to let society fight its own battles.”

Dortmunder put down his fork and his hamburger and looked at her. “May? Turn him in? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s worth thinking about,” May said, mumbling, still not meeting his eye.

“But it isn’t,” Dortmunder told her. “Even if it was — even if it
ever
was, I mean — even then, it isn’t worth thinking about, because what are we gonna do? Call up this governor with the birthday presents, say take him back, he’s gonna drown nine hundred people? They
can’t
take him back.” Dortmunder picked up his fork and his hamburger again. He said, “A crime isn’t a crime until it happens.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” May said. “With a character like that walking around loose —”

Dortmunder said, “May, some famous writer said it once: The law’s an asshole. For instance, what if I was still on parole? Tom Jimson’s
living
here, no matter what we think. If I was still on parole, and that parole officer of mine, what was his name? Steen, that was it. If he found out a guy with Tom Jimson’s record and history was living here, they’d put
me
back inside. But him they can’t touch.”

“Well, that’s crazy,” May said.

“But true,” Dortmunder told her. “But let’s say I do it anyway, I’m feeling this desperation or whatever it might be, and I go and do it. And then it’s done. I’ve gone and told the law all about Tom and his stash under the reservoir. So what happens next? At the very
best,
what they can do is go tell him they heard he had these dynamite plans and he shouldn’t do it. And he’ll take about a second and a half to figure out who’s the blabbermouth. You want Tom Jimson mad at you?”

“Well,” May said carefully, “John, it’s you he’d be mad at, actually.”

“People who play with dynamite don’t fine tune,” Dortmunder said. He filled his mouth with hamburger and Spaghetti–Os, and then composted it all with beer and chewed awhile.

May had finished. She sat back, didn’t light a cigarette, didn’t blow smoke at the ceiling, didn’t flick ashes onto her plate, didn’t cough delicately twice, and did say, “Well, I just hope you can come up with something.”

“Me, too,” Dortmunder said, but his mouth was still full of food and drink, so it didn’t come out right. He held the fork up vertically, meaning
just a second,
and chewed and chewed and swallowed, and then tried again: “Me, too.”

She frowned at him. “You too what?”

“Hope I come up with something. To get the money out from under the reservoir.”

“Oh, you will,” she said. “I’m not worried about you, John.”

“Well, I wish you would be,” he said. Gazing across the room, frowning at the perfect white blankness of the refrigerator door, he said, “I think it’s time I got some help on this.”