All right, all right. They aren’t alive, okay? They’re tree stumps, that’s all. Get hold of yourself, goddammit.
Then he remembered one of the items factored into Wally Knurr’s computer model of the valley when it was flooded. Most of the trees had been cut down before the water was put in. Yes, and most of the buildings had been towed away, except for totally useless ones or some overly large stone or brick ones like a couple of churches and firehouses and the library Tom had buried his goddamn stash behind. And those had been stripped of doors and windows and floors and anything else that might be of use.
He hadn’t thought before about what all that meant. He hadn’t stopped to think how difficult it was going to be to walk downhill through a forest of short tree stumps. On the other hand, even if he’d thought about tree stumps, he still wouldn’t have known about the murky darkness, the complete inability to see anything more than a few feet in front of a flashlight. And he hadn’t known just how difficult this mud was going to be to move around in.
Bent over, the rope and the weight belt digging into his waist, Dortmunder tried to find a path through the tree stumps. Shuffling forward, bumping into roots and stones—now there’s rocks in here, too—having to turn this way and that to make any progress at all, he soon realized he’d lost all idea which way was forward.
Well, forward is downhill, right? But which way was downhill? With just this narrow tiny area of light for reference, with all the crud floating around in the water, it was impossible to tell which was uphill, which was downhill, which was crosshill.
Which way is forward? More importantly, which way is back? He aimed the flashlight at the floating rope trailing him, but it weaved and drifted with tiny currents, forming half loops, coming from everywhere and nowhere.
Still gazing upward, trying to peer farther back along the line of rope, Dortmunder moved, bumped into something else, lost his balance briefly, compensated fast, and stepped out of his right boot.
Oh, hell! His bare foot was down now in cold wet slimy mud, sinking into it. He tugged upward, and felt a thick root pressed across the top of his instep. Clutching at him!
Bending quickly down, swinging the flashlight around fast to see what was going on with his foot, Dortmunder inadvertently slammed the light into yet another stump. It bounced from his hand. It went out.
Darkness. Blackness. Don’t panic. The flashlight’s down there somewhere, in the dark. The boot’s down there somewhere, in the dark. The foot’s down there somewhere, in the dark, caught by roots. Don’t panic!
How long have I been down here? I’ve only got an hour of air! Have I been down here an hour? Does this air taste funny?
Don’t panic? Don’t panic? Why the hell not?
Leaning on the rail of the catwalk, gazing out over the still silent beauty of the reservoir in the increasingly pale bright light of the rising moon, Bob found himself reflecting on the changes that had come so recently into his life, and for the first time he wished he actually had a friend. Not the so-called friends he’d had all his life, in grade school and high school, not those gape-jawed assholes so like the three clowns down in the dam, but a friend, a real friend, someone he could talk to about his innermost thoughts.
For instance. He couldn’t possibly talk to the jerks in the dam about waking up with a woman; they didn’t have the maturity for the subject. And the fact is, although Bob had what he considered plenty of experience in going to bed with women, the whole phenomenon of then waking up with one, waking up in the morning with another person right there, a woman, an entire life-size woman, first thing in the morning, an entire experience to deal with the second you open your eyes, was something he’d thought insufficiently about before it started to happen.
And what was it like? That was the weird thing; it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It sure wasn’t sexy. It was like having some kind of big animal in the room with you, a deer or a sheep, maybe a goat, sometimes more like a horse. There it was, coughing and blowing its nose and scratching itself, moving around the room, opening and closing drawers, looking as pale and bloodless as a vampire victim without its makeup on. It was like—
Sea monster! Bob stared, thrilled and terrified, as the thing broke the surface way out there across the reservoir, a huge saurian head with long laid-back ears, its reptile eye reflecting white from the moon. It was scaly, almost metallic; a definite sea monster, no question.
The thing moved toward shore. Bob panted, staring at it, almost fainting. Here! Here in the Vilburgtown Reservoir! Like Loch Ness! Like, like, like Stephen King! Right here in front of his eyes!
Near shore, the sea monster—lake monster? reservoir monster? — dove again and disappeared, a widening circular ripple left in its wake. Bob stared and stared, but it never came back. And here, he thought, his awe tinged with bitterness, here’s something else I’ll never be able to tell anybody. Not even Tiffany.
Maybe especially not Tiffany.
Hmmm.
Kelp surfaced again, closer to shore, and saw Tiny and Tom watching him from up the bank with the interest of uninvolved spectators. Boy, he thought. Get to know who your friends are.
What a bad few minutes that had been, back down there in the lake. He’d lost contact with John, he was stuck in mud down in among all those tree stumps, and he’d lost every bit of his sense of direction. He didn’t even have the rope linking him to shore; John had that. If he hadn’t remembered the BCD, he might of got really worried down there.
As it happened, though, just as he was considering he might start to get really nervous, he remembered that the B in BCD stood for “buoyancy,” and he even remembered how to operate the son of a gun; you press the button on the side of the control box. Not the one on top.
And what a glorious feeling that was, to rise up and up, out of the muck and mire, up through the crud-filled water, floating upward like a bird, like a balloon, like Superman, then bursting through the skin of water into the air above, to find the moon higher, brighter, whiter, the great water-filled dark bowl of the valley holding him in its comforting dark-green cupped hands, and himself floating safe and serene in the middle of it all, master of his fate!
Over there was the shore. And over there on the shore was the light blur of the Dodge motor home. Kelp was not really a smooth swimmer, not one of your Olympic types, knifing gracefully through the water. What he tended to do was dangle his arms and legs down in the water, agitate them in busy random motion, and gradually move forward. Now, he tried heading for shore via this usual method, but the BCD had him so buoyant that he just bobbed up and down in the water like an abandoned beer can.
Finally, he let some air out of the BCD, enough to drift down just a bit below the surface, and then his usual method regained its usual level of inefficiency. He progressed that way awhile, until one dangling foot hit ground, and after that he walked the rest of the way, emerging from the reservoir like the latest salesman on the staff, the one who’d been given the worst route.