(If Bob had really wanted to see a sea serpent, he should have stuck around for this one. Unfortunately, though, the apotheosis of having sighted the first sea serpent had led him to realize that in fact he hated his bride, loathed his friends and coworkers, and despised his job, so Bob had left work and driven to the nearest town with an all-night newsstand to buy a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Happiness, he now knew, would be found as a mercenary soldier on some different continent.)
Having been dragged headfirst through tree stumps and roots and mud for what had seemed like miles, Dortmunder was not at the moment at his most presentable. He’d lost both his boots by this stage, plus the weight belt, plus the collapsible shovel, and several times had come damn close to losing his grip on both the rope and his mind. The wet suit had half unzipped itself and was full of mud. So were the goggles.
This creature, looking in fact less like a sea serpent and more like one of the clay people of Mayan mythology and Flash Gordon serials, stomped up out of the reservoir and slogged straight to Tom, who actually looked kind of startled at this abrupt approach, saying, “Al? You okay?”
“I got one word to say to you, Tom,” Dortmunder announced, pointing a muddy finger at Tom. “And that word is dynamite!”
Tom blinked. “Al?”
“Blow it up!” Dortmunder ranted wildly, waving in the general direction of the reservoir. “Do it any way you want! I’m through!”
Tiny, sitting up from his supine position, said, “Dortmunder? You’re giving up?”
Dortmunder swiveled around to glare at him. In a clear and praiseworthy effort to keep himself more or less calm and under control, he pointed again at the reservoir with his mud-dripping finger and said, “I am not going in there again, Tiny. That’s it.”
Kelp approached his old friend, worry creasing his features. He said, “John? This isn’t you. You don’t admit defeat.”
“Defeat,” Dortmunder told him, and squished away to the motor home.
SECOND DOWN
THIRTY
May put on her mitts, opened the oven door, and took out the big white-with-tiny-blue-flowers Corning bowl containing her famous tuna casserole. It was perfect; already she knew it. The smell alone was enough to tell you. Little bubbles of the grand aroma within kept breaking through the crusty golden-brown surface—a surface composed of grated cheese and riced potatoes sprinkled liberally over elbow macaroni— and just filled the kitchen with promises of culinary pleasure to come. May hoped John could smell it from the living room.
It was only, in fact, the promise of her tuna casserole that had persuaded John to permit this meeting in the first place. “I don’t want to talk about it!” he’d kept raging at the beginning. “I don’t want anything more to do with it! I don’t want him living in this house anymore! And I don’t want to ever be underwater, or talk about being underwater, or even think about being underwater, for the rest of my life!”
This was a pretty negative attitude to overcome, but May’s famous tuna casserole had worked wonders before, and so she’d promised she would make it and serve it at a nice social dinner that would also happen to be a discussion of the feasibility of trying for Tom’s buried/drowned cache again. That’s all it would be, just a discussion, just to talk about the possibility, just to see if it really and truly was no more than a hollow hope that Tom Jimson could ever get hold of his seven-hundred-thousand-dollar stash without blowing up the Vilburgtown Reservoir dam, or if somebody, just maybe, if somebody might come up with something.
“They better not,” John had said, but at long last he’d agreed to this dinner. And now all May could do was present the tuna casserole and hope for the best. From here on, it was up to everybody else.
When they had six for dinner, like tonight, they moved the coffee table out of the living room into the bedroom, and the kitchen table out of the kitchen into the living room, and the four kitchen chairs into the living room, and the other armless wooden-seated chair from the bedroom into the living room, and John would sit on a telephone book on his regular living room chair, which would still have him lower than everybody else but at least high enough to see his food and enter into the conversation. The kitchen table was really quite a good size with both its leaves open, and if you put a really thick pad under the tablecloth, you wouldn’t hardly hear at all the hollow clack of Formica every time you put down your glass or your knife.
When May walked into the living room carrying the casserole like an offering in front of her, at arm’s length, in her mitted hands, they were all already seated at the table, but given the smallness of the room and the way the kitchen table filled and dominated it, there was hardly much of anything else for them to do. On the other hand, May knew full well that even if the living room were the size of a baseball field, a couple of these people present would be seated at the table anyway.
“Dinner,” she announced, put the casserole bowl on the middle of the table, and began to dispatch her troops: “John, see if anyone wants a beverage. Andy and Tiny, you two—”
“Anybody ready for a beer?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah.”
“Naturally.”
“Andy and Tiny, you two get the vegetables, they’re on the counter beside the sink. Tom, would you bring in the bread and butter, please?”
“You know,” Tom said, as he got to his feet, “I’m getting used to this living on the outside, living with other people and all. Like on the television.”
John flashed May a look as he left for the beer, which May refused to acknowledge.
Little Wally Knurr looked up, smiling his wet smile and saying, “Miss May, what can I do to help?”
“You’re the special guest,” May told him, “because it’s your first time here.”
“Oh, I want to do my part,” Wally said, sounding worried, his broad brow knitting.
“You can help with dessert,” May promised him, and Wally smiled again, happy.
Wally was a new experience for May, unlike just about anything she’d ever met before, including John’s odd friends and some of the customers at the supermarket where she worked as cashier. For one thing, his appearance; enough said. For another thing, his manner toward her, which was a sort of childish courtliness; when he’d first come in this evening and called her Mrs. Dortmunder and she’d told him she wasn’t Mrs. Dortmunder (without giving him her actual last name) and saying he should call her May, so that he didn’t know any formal name for her at all, he’d stumbled and spluttered awhile, and then had finally decided she was “Miss May,” and that was that. Then there was his size, so large horizontally and yet so small vertically; in fact, this was going to be the first meal in this apartment with two people seated on telephone books, John on the white pages and Wally on the business-to-business yellow pages to bring him up to a normal height with all the others.
Food and drink were quickly assembled, and everyone took their places. May sat nearest the door since she’d have to be going to the kitchen from time to time, and John sat facing her at the inner end of the room. Tiny sat to May’s left and Wally to her right, with Andy beyond Tiny and Tom beyond Wally. Once all were settled and served, they all tasted the famous casserole, and the usual round of sincere but hurried praise ensued. Then, the amenities out of the way, silence took hold as everyone tucked in.
Nothing had been said about Tom’s buried stash before dinner, and hardly anything was said on any subject at all during dinner, so it wasn’t until after May and Wally had brought in the coffee and two kinds of ice cream and pound cake and raspberries and whipped cream that anyone raised the topic of the day, and then it was left to May to do it. “I guess everybody knows,” she said, into the murmur of five people working their way through a number of terrific desserts, “that John doesn’t think there’s any way to get down into that reservoir and get Tom’s money except to blow up the dam.”