Finally, Stan put the wagon in neutral, opened his window, and called Kelp and Tiny over. They slogged around to talk to him, looking like the defensive line in the final quarter of a particularly hard-fought football game, and Stan said, “We aren’t getting anywhere.”
Tiny said, “You noticed that, too, huh?”
“What we gotta do,” Stan said, “is get up on dry land and start again.”
“There isn’t any dry land,” Kelp told him.
“Drier,” Stan explained. “A little more solid, I mean. If I get up there all the way to where the road comes in, up at the top of the clearing, then I can get up some speed, run it backward fast as I can, get some momentum on shoving that goddamn boat into the water.”
“Without jackknifing,” Kelp pointed out.
“I gotta give it the try,” Stan said.
“Very tricky on this messy surface,” Kelp suggested.
Tiny said, “I hate having ideas like this, because I know who they make work for, which is me, but I think maybe we oughta drag it up to the end of the clearing like you say, and then turn this blessed car around and put the trailer hitch on the front bumper instead of the back, so you can drive frontward in low-low.”
“Now that is an idea,” Stan told him.
“I was afraid it was,” Tiny agreed. “And now I got another one. Doug can get down off that boat and help push.”
Kelp grinned at the idea. “Doug’ll love that,” he said.
“We all will,” said Tiny.
They went around to the prow of the boat and yelled at Doug for a while, and after he gave up pretending he didn’t understand what they wanted, he very reluctantly came down off his high boat and helped.
At first the station wagon didn’t want to move forward either, but then its rear wheels came struggling up out of the holes they’d dug, and the hauler’s wheels grudgingly began to lumber along through the mire, and movement took place. At the top of the clearing, Stan brought the wagon and the boat to a stop. The V tongue on the hauler was removed from the trailer hitch, and then Tiny lay down in the mud and Kelp stood by to hand him tools while Tiny, his work illuminated by the station wagon’s back-up lights, with some difficulty removed the muddy hitch from the muddy bumper. Then Stan turned the wagon around and Tiny bent over the front bumper with the trailer hitch in his hands and studied the situation. “It doesn’t want to fit,” he decided.
“Make it fit,” Kelp advised.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
Doug, sounding scared, his voice cutting through the ongoing roar of the storm, said, “Stan, turn off your lights!”
Stan didn’t ask questions. The heel of his hand slapped the headlight control on the dashboard. Their clearing became abruptly black, pitch black, and they all turned their heads to watch the bright lights approaching down the access road through the rain and the night and the sopping trees.
“Still no light,” Myrtle said, coming back down to the living room from her own bedroom, where she had the best view past the intervening buildings to the house on Oak Street.
“Oh, I think they’ll take another hour, maybe even more,” Wally told her.
“Plenty of time,” Edna said, “to tell me what’s going on. Myrtle, you begin.”
“I think I see a car,” Dortmunder said, peering through the windshield and out at the storm-tossed night. “They’re probably all out on the reservoir in that big boat May told me about.”
He braked the car to a stop at the beginning of the clearing. It was hard to see anything at all through the sheets of rain, even with the headlights on; the zillion raindrops just bounced the light right back at you.
Guffey said, “What’s three thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars compounded at eight percent interest for forty-three years?”
“I give up,” Dortmunder said. “What is it?”
“Well, I don’t know.” Guffey sounded surprised. “That’s why I was asking you.”
“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “I thought it was one of those puzzle things.”
“It’s what Tim Jepson owes me,” Guffey said grimly. “So I figure a lot of that money you say is down there in that reservoir comes to me.”
“You can discuss that with Tom,” Dortmunder advised him. “And remember, half of it belongs to the rest of us.”
“Sure, sure. Sure.”
Dortmunder switched off the headlights. “Can’t see a goddamn thing,” he said.
“Sure you can’t,” Guffey said. “You turned the lights off.”
“I’m looking for their lights,” Dortmunder told him. “We better get out of the car.”
The interior light went on when they opened the doors, illuminating the inside of the car but nothing else, and only making the surrounding blackness all the blacker once the doors were shut.
Dortmunder and Guffey, two bulky huddled figures in the night, met at the front of their car, and Dortmunder pointed past Guffey’s nose, putting his hand up close so Guffey could see it. “The reservoir’s that way, and I thought I saw a car over there. That’s where we’ll look.”
“Uh,” Guffey said, and fell down.
“Uh?” Dortmunder turned, bending, to see what had happened to Guffey, and therefore spoiled Tiny’s aim. The sap merely brushed down the side of his head, not quite removing his ear, and bounded painfully off his shoulder. “Ow!” he yelled. “Goddammit, who is that?”
“Dortmunder?” came Tiny’s voice out of the dark. “Is that you?”
“Who the hell did you expect?”
“Well, we didn’t expect nobody, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, sounding aggrieved. “Who’s this with you?”
Out of the darkness, Tom’s voice said, “So you couldn’t keep away, huh, Al?”
“Looks like it,” Dortmunder admitted.
“Who is this guy?” Tiny wanted to know, prodding the fallen Guffey with his toe.
Aware of Guffey’s helplessness and of Tom’s presence, Dortmunder said, “Um. A hitchhiker.”
The others had gathered around now, and it was Kelp who said, “John? You brought a hitchhiker to the caper?”
“Well, I couldn’t leave the poor guy out there in the rain,” Dortmunder said. At the same time, he was inwardly furious with himself, thinking: Why did I say hitchhiker? Well, what else would I say? Aloud, he said, “It’s okay, Andy. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. You guys finished already?”
That changed the subject, with a vengeance. Everybody vied to tell him how much fun they were having, even Tom. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s see this monster boat.”
After all the build-up, when he finally got face-to-face with the leviathan, it wasn’t really that big. On the other hand, it did look as though a person could survive a voyage on it. Looking at it in the splattered gleam of the station wagon’s headlights, while Tiny banged the trailer hitch into a shotgun wedding with the front bumper, Dortmunder said, “A lot of boats like this have funny names. Does this one?”
There was a brief awkward silence. Dortmunder turned to Kelp, who was nearest. “Yeah?”
“It has a name,” Kelp agreed.
“Yeah?”
Tom, on Dortmunder’s other side, did his cackle thing and said, “It’s called Over My Head.”
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.
Doug came over and said, “Uh, John, that hitchhiker of yours.”