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.
Think about all those lives up there in space, unguessable lives, millions and millions of miles away. Each life its own, each life unique, unrepeatable, soon ended, a brief shining of the light.
“And this is mine,” Bob whispered, accepting it, accepting all of it: himself, Tiffany, Manfred, his shit-for-brains buddies, his small destiny in this unimportant spot on this minor planet circling this mediocre sun in this lower-middle-class suburb of the universe. “I accept,” Bob whispered to the universe.
Bubbles. Little air bubbles breaking the surface of the water, out a ways and off to the right. Hard to see, in this thin starlight barely brushing the black surface of the reservoir. Just a few little bubbles, rippling the water. Bob smiled, calm, accepting it. Some fish down there, moving around.
Dortmunder moved around as the Hornet came to a stop. Their progress had been very slow from the time they’d been completely submerged, just drifting down along the railroad track, but that hadn’t been at all bad. Actually, the gradualness of their descent helped control the turbidity, so whenever Dortmunder aimed his flashlight back up the track there was very little extra roiling of the water.
Which didn’t mean the damn stuff was clean. Far from it. Their flashlight beams still glowed dimly on murky brown water full of drifting hairy tendrils and clumps of stuff that Dortmunder could only hope were not what they looked like. But visibility was a lot better than last time; by which is meant, some visibility existed. It was possible for a light beam to cut at least partially through the sludge and drifting guck and pervasive brownness of the water to show the slimy gravel and rusty track over which they were passing, the furry tree stumps on both sides.
At one point, Kelp had poked Dortmunder’s arm to direct his attention to a low stone wall they were traveling by on their right, with more stone walls going away at right angles into the murk at both ends. A building foundation. That was spooky; people used to live there. Way down here, in the dark.
The Hornet had still been moving at that time, the old stone foundation gradually receding away behind them. But now it was stopped, with no town at all in sight within the short uncertain range of their lights. As with the last time they’d been down in here, spatial disorientation had taken place, so it was impossible to tell if they were still on a hillside or had reached flat ground. So who knew how much farther it was to Putkin’s Corners?