Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

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.)

But now here he was, home at last, and where was everybody? I don’t even get a sympathetic welcome, Dortmunder thought, feeling very sorry for himself as he padded with his one bare foot and one socked foot to the kitchen, opened a can of tomato soup, added milk (no water!), heated it, drank the whole thing serving after serving out of a coffee cup, and packed crackers in around it in his stomach for body. Then, beginning at last to feel warm and dry, and knowing how tired he was, he went back through the empty house and slumped upstairs one heavy foot at a time and got into bed without even bothering to take his sock off.

The return, hours later, of the other eight residents of the house, cold, wet, discouraged, shocked, unhappy, and bickering, didn’t wake him, but May’s scream when she opened the bedroom door and saw him there did. Briefly. “Later, May, okay?” Dortmunder said, and rolled over, and went back to sleep.

Then they all blamed him . They all sat around in the living room on Oak Street after Dortmunder finally woke up and came downstairs, and they blamed him . Wouldn’t you know?

“You had us very worried, John,” May said, gently but seriously.

“I had myself a little worried, too,” Dortmunder answered.

His foghorn voice more fogbound than usual, Tiny said, “I think I got a little head cold out there, walkin around in the rain while you were asleep in your bed here.”

Murch’s Mom sneezed and looked at Dortmunder significantly, but didn’t say anything.

“Pretty dangerous,” her son commented, “driving that borrowed truck around in the daytime, hour after hour. And then for nothing.”

“You know, John,” Doug said, “it’s kind of hard to figure out how you missed that monofilament, that line stretching right across the lake, when it was right there and everything.”

“That’s right,” Kelp said. “ I saw it, no trouble.”

Dortmunder lowered an eyebrow at him. “In the light from your headlamp?”

“Well, yeah.”

Wally said, “John, while you were asleep up there, I asked the computer, and it couldn’t predict you going to the dam either. That’s the one direction nobody thought of.”

“That’s where the lights were,” Dortmunder told him. “Mention that to your computer next time you run into each other.”

Tom cackled and said, “Looks like everybody’s sorry you made it, Al.”

Then they all changed their tune, and everybody reassured him how happy they all were to see him under any circumstances, even home safe in his bed when they’d expected him to be either dead in the reservoir or half-dead beside it. And that was the end of that conversation.

It was late afternoon now, Dortmunder having slept most of the day, and outside the windows the rain still poured down. The weather forecast, full of stalled lows and weak highs, promised this stage of storms would, at the very least, even the score for the weeks of sunny days and star-strewn nights preceding it, and maybe even throw a little extra rottenness in for good measure.

After everybody got over the desire to be crotchety with Dortmunder for having saved himself from a watery grave, the next topic on the agenda was Tom’s money, plucked at last from its own watery grave but not yet from the water. “From here on,” Doug told the assembled group, “it’s a snap. All we do is go back out to the res—”

“No,” Dortmunder said, and got to his feet.

May looked up at him in mild surprise. “John? Where are you going?”

“New York,” Dortmunder told her, and headed for the stairs.

“Wait a minute!”

“We got it beat now!”

“Piece of cake!”

“We know where the box is!”

“We got a rope on it!”

“We’re winning , John!”

But Dortmunder didn’t listen. He thudded upstairs, one foot after the other, and while he packed people kept coming up to try to change a mind made of concrete.

May was first. She came in and sat on the bed beside the suitcase Dortmunder was packing, and after a minute she said, “I understand how you feel, John.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said, his hands full of socks.

“But I just don’t feel as though I can leave here until this is all over and settled.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to Murch’s Mom.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if we walk away now, Tom might still decide he’d rather use that dynamite of his.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you can see, John,” May said, “why I feel I have to stay.”

Dortmunder paused with his hands in a dresser drawer. “I can see that, May,” he said. “And if you stop to think about it, you can see why I can’t stay. When you’re done up here, you’ll come home. I’ll be there.”

She looked at him, thought it over, and got to her feet. “Well,” she said, “I can see your mind is made up.”

“I’m glad you can see that, May,” Dortmunder said.

Tom was next. “Runnin out, eh, Al?”

“Yes,” Dortmunder said.

Wally followed a couple minutes later. “Gee, John,” he said, “I know you’re not the hero, you’re only the soldier, but even the soldier doesn’t leave in the middle of the game .”

“Game called,” Dortmunder told him, “on account of wet.”

Tiny and Stan and his Mom came together, like the farmhands welcoming Dorothy back from Oz. “Dortmunder,” Tiny rumbled, “I figure you’re the one got us this far.”

“I understand it’s a piece of cake from here on,” Dortmunder said, folding with great care his other pants.

Stan said, “You don’t want to drive to the city on a Wednesday, you know. Matinee day, there’s no good routes.”

“I’ll take the bus,” Dortmunder told him.

Murch’s Mom looked insulted. “I hate the bus,” she announced. “And so should you.”

Dortmunder nodded, taking the suggestion under advisement, but then said, “Will you drive me to the bus station?”