“That sounds terrible,” May said.
John pushed food into one cheek in order to be able to say, “I’ve been telling you it was terrible, May. Do you think I give up easy?”
“No, I don’t, John,” May assured him. “That’s why we’re talking this over now.”
“Getting our book reports,” John said.
Tiny said, “Andy? Did this book say what they did about it, how they got around it?”
“I don’t remember,” Andy said. “I just remember they were down in there, inside the Normandie and around under the Normandie, in all this black dirty water.”
“Not while I’m eating,” John said while he was eating.
May said, “Well, it seems to me, one thing we could do is look at this book and see what solution they came up with.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Tiny agreed. “Andy? You still got the book?”
“I don’t think so.”
Wally, wriggling on the yellow pages in his eagerness to be of help, said, “I could find it! I could get us all copies of it!”
May said, “Andy? What was the title?”
“Beats me,” Andy said. “It had ‘Normandie’ in it.”
“Do you know who wrote it?”
Andy shook his head. “I can’t ever remember writers’ names.”
“That’s okay,” Wally said. “I can do it.”
John said, “Not to be a wet blanket, but—”
Andy said, “Meaning, to be a wet blanket.”
John gave him a look. “But,” he repeated, “even if we find out there’s some magic way so you can see through mud, an idea in which I personally have no belief, but even if there is such a thing, some special thing so you can see bright as day through mud, I’m still not goin down in there again. And I’ll tell you why.”
“That’s okay,” Tom said. “Dynamite’s easy.”
“The why is,” John went doggedly on, “tree stumps. Even if you could see down there, that’s what you’d see. Tree stumps. And you can’t tell which is uphill, which is downhill—”
“That’s true,” Andy said. “I noticed that myself. Disorienting, that’s what they call that.”
“I call it a couple of things myself,” John told him. “And that’s why I’m not going down in there. Tree stumps, and you can’t tell up from down, and you can’t walk through that stuff. And even if you could walk through it, which you can’t, you couldn’t drag any heavy casket up through it.”
Wally said, “Maybe it would work better if you took the railroad line.”
Everybody stared at him. Embarrassed at all the sudden attention, Wally’s face grew as red as the raspberries on his spoon which didn’t make him look like a raspberry, but like a hyperactive tomato. John said to him, “Railroad? Wally, there isn’t any train to Putkin’s Corners.”
“Well, no, gee, no,” Wally said, bobbing his tomato head, spilling raspberries off his spoon. “But there’s still the line.”
Andy, looking suddenly very alert, said, “Are you sure about this, Wally?”
“Sure,” Wally told him. “That was part of the information I input when I did the model in the computer. The old DE&W used to go through—”
“DE&W?” asked May and Andy.
“Dudson, Endicott & Western,” Wally explained.
“That’s great, then,” Andy said. “If we could find the old rail bed, there wouldn’t be any tree stumps there, and it would be like a clear path all the way.”
Tiny said, “And you could walk it right down into town. Is that the story, Wally? It went to Putkin’s Corners?”
Tom said, “The railroad station was across the street from the library. Tracks went behind the station, Albany Road went in front.”
“So,” Andy said, “we could walk the rail line right down into town.”
“If,” John said, “we could see, which we can’t. And if I was ever gonna go underwater again, which I won’t. And if we could find the old rail bed, which we can’t.”
“Well, uh,” Wally said hesitantly, “that part would be easy. The tracks are still there.”
Again he got the general stare, and again his reaction was to turn bright red.
This time it was Andy who picked up the ball, saying, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s true, though,” Wally insisted.
Andy said, “Wally, they took out all the buildings they could use. They cut down all the trees. You’re telling me they left the railroad tracks? Hundreds of pounds—no, what am I saying? Thousands of pounds of reusable steel, and they left it there, under the reservoir?”
“Well, it’s kind of interesting what happened,” Wally said. “It was all ecology and conservation groups. I guess in the old days, if New York City needed more water, they’d just go up and pick a valley and move everybody out and put in the dam. But now there’s all kinds of different groups and impact statements and all that stuff, so they always have to do compromises, and this time one of the groups was one that was trying to preserve the old railroad lines anyway, because there’s people that want the railroads to come back because of all the traffic jams on the highway, and the pollution, and—”
“Close with it, Wally,” Andy suggested.
Wally looked embarrassed again. His feet, which didn’t reach the floor, started swinging back and forth. “Well, that was the compromise,” he said. “They’re trying to keep the railroad lines, not let them get torn up and housing developments put on them, so they can be used again someday.”
“Underwater?” John asked.
“Well, only that one stretch of the line was underwater,” Wally explained. “It was all mixed in with a great big negotiation, all kinds of problems and construction projects and other stuff, so part of the compromise was that these groups wouldn’t complain about the reservoir and a couple of other things, and the government wouldn’t tear up the railroad line all the way from Endicott up to the state line at Vermont. So it’s all still there.”
“Even the underwater part,” May said faintly.
“Well, that was the way it was written,” Wally told her, “in the compromise agreement, the whole line was supposed to stay. I guess they didn’t think about the reservoir part of it when they wrote the compromise. Then later on nobody felt like they could go against what it said.”
“And to think,” John said, “my old parole officer—what was his name? Steen—he wanted me to become a productive member of society.”
Tom said, “You see why I favor dynamite. Direct action startles those people.”
Everyone looked uncomfortable, but nobody answered Tom directly. After a brief awkward silence, Andy said, “Well, you know, that’s gotta make it easier. We go down in there—”
“Huh,” John said.
“—and we just stay between the tracks,” Andy went on. “And we don’t get lost.”
“No,” John said.
Andy said, “John, I hear you. If we can’t see, we don’t go. But if this Normandie book—”
“I’m gonna get it,” Wally piped up, all eagerness and bounce. “I really am.”
“And if it shows us,” Andy said, “how to solve the seeing problem, then, John, you know, just maybe we still got a chance.”
John busied himself scraping the last bit of ice cream out of his bowl with the edge of his spoon. The sound of spoon against bowl was very loud in the small living room.
May said, “John, you put in so much time and effort on this already. And you learned all that scuba-diving knowledge. It seems such a waste, not to use it.”