“By God, you’re right,” Andy said, and swung the Lincoln off the road to wait for an oncoming bulk milk truck to pass. “I think what it is, Wally,” he said, “I never went looking for anything so short before.”
“I guess,” Wally said.
Andy swung around behind the milk truck, reapproached the railroad line, and again pulled off onto the verge, where a million spring weeds were in flower. They all climbed out, stretched, shook their legs as though looking for a quarter that had fallen through a hole in their pocket, and went over to look at the railroad line.
It was a singleton, one pair of rusty tracks stretching off both ways into the woods, here and there partly covered by encroaching weeds and brush. The section across the black-top road was less rusty than the rest, which had aged to a dull dark blackish red. Set back on both sides of the road were barriers across the rail line, these consisting of two broad bands of horizontal metal attached to metal stakes set in concrete footings. The barriers had once been painted white, but most of the color had rusted away. Signs reading NO ENTRY were screwed to them.
Andy beamed at the railroad line. “You know what this reminds me of?”
“Yes,” John said. “It reminds you of Tom Thumb.” He didn’t sound particularly cheerful about it.
But Andy was cheerful. “You’re right!” he said.
John looked back and forth, then said to Wally, “Which way’s the reservoir?”
Wally pointed to the right. “Two miles that way.”
“Two miles,” John repeated, and sighed.
“That isn’t so far,” Andy told him. “Two miles, just a good healthy walk.”
“Four miles,” John said. “Unless you figure to live there.”
“Well, let’s get started,” Andy said, walking around one side of the barrier.
John said, “I don’t suppose there’s any way to get that car onto the tracks.”
“Even if it was the same gauge, John,” Andy said, leaning on the barrier on its other side, “we’d have to chop down these three or four trees here to get the car in.”
John glared at him. “Gauge? What do you mean, gauge?”
Andy pointed at the tracks. “If the width between the rails is the same as the width between the tires on the car, then we can let some of the air out of the tires and put the car up on the tracks and drive on in. But it probably isn’t the same, and we can’t get the car in here anyway, so why are we talking about it? Why don’t we just walk?”
“I wore the wrong shoes,” John said, but then he shook his head and walked around the barrier, and the three of them set off along the old line toward the reservoir.
As they walked, trying to adjust their pace to the distance between the old half-rotted ties, Wally said, “Andy? What did you mean, Tom Thumb?”
“It was a locomotive,” Andy explained. “One time, John and me and some other people, we had to get into a place with an electrified fence, and there was an old track like this, and we got a locomotive from a circus—pretty locomotive, painted all different colors, called Tom Thumb—and we drove right through the fence.” To John, he said, “Things worked out that time, too.”
“Later on they did,” John admitted grudgingly. “Kind of.”
Wally wanted to know what place they had to get into that had an electrified fence and why they had to get into that place, but he didn’t exactly know how to ask, and he suspected anyway that Andy wouldn’t tell him. Andy was very cheerful and open and everything, but then later on you realized he told you as much as he wanted to tell you and then he stopped. Wally imagined the bright-painted locomotive crashing through the electrified fence. “Were there sparks?”
“You bet!” Andy said, and laughed. “The crazy people were running everywhere!”
“I guess they must have been,” Wally agreed, hoping for more.
But John interrupted, saying, “Isn’t this two miles?”
“John,” Andy said, “we can still see the barrier back there.”
“I don’t know why I wore these shoes,” John said.
Then they walked in silence for a while, Wally contemplating the fact that an accent had been wrong in that last thing Andy had said about the train and the electrified fence. He should have said, “The crazy people were running everywhere,” but what he’d said was, “The crazy people…” Why?
“Fence ahead,” Andy said.
It was a chain-link fence, eight feet high, with three strands of barbed wire at the top, and it crossed the railroad line from left to right. When they neared it, they saw the expected sign.
NO ADMITTANCEVILBURGTOWN RESERVOIR AUTHORITY
“Gosh,” Wally said. “What do we do now?”
“I’m gonna sit down,” John said, and went over to a nearby log and sat on it.
Meantime, Andy approached the fence, took a pair of wire cutters out of his inner jacket pocket, went down on one knee, and started snipping the fence from the bottom. Wally goggled: “You’re cutting the fence!”
“Well, we’re not going over it,” Andy said, snipping away, “and I didn’t bring a shovel to dig under it, so this is pretty much what’s left.”
Wally looked at the official sign: NO ADMITTANCE. In games, sometimes, it was necessary to do shortcuts across the regular routes; so this must be the real-life equivalent. And when Wally stopped to think about it, what startled him mostly was not what Andy was doing, but his calm while doing it. Whenever Wally set out on an adventure in the computer, the excitement was what it was all about; but Andy and John did adventures as though they were jobs.
“There,” Andy said, straightening, putting the wire clippers away. “John? You wanna go first?”
John sighed, got up from the log, and came across to study the fence. Andy had snipped a vertical line up about four feet; it barely showed at all. John said, “That isn’t enough.”
“Sure it is,” Andy told him. “Wally, you pull that side in. I’ll push this side out. Plenty of room to get through.”
There was barely room enough, as it turned out. With Wally pulling and Andy pushing, it was like opening an envelope. John slithered through, complaining, and then he took over Wally’s role while Wally grunted and squeezed past, not quite ripping any of his clothing, and then Wally and John held the fence for Andy, and there they were on the other side.
But still some distance from the reservoir. They walked and walked, with John complaining from time to time and Andy pointing out pretty flowers or oddly shaped tree limbs, and at last they saw the bright glint of sunlight reflecting from water out ahead.
That was very strange. The railroad tracks ran straight into the reservoir, under the water and gone. On both sides, tangled brush and small trees made an impassable obstruction right down to the water’s edge, with no path or cleared shoreline in either direction.
Andy pointed to the left along the overgrown bank, saying, “That’s where we went in last time, way over there. So we’re farther from the dam now.”
“Don’t remind me of the last time,” John answered. Turning to Wally, he said, “You’re sure this goes all the way down in there to the town.”
“Oh, sure. And out the other side,” Wally promised him, pointing to the far shore. “But over there, it’s a lot farther from Putkin’s Corners.”
Andy, looking dubious, said, “I dunno, John, I guess we could go look at the tracks on the other side, if you think we ought to.”
“No,” John said. “What matters is what happens underwater, and we can’t know that until we…” another long sigh, accompanied by a headshake “… go down there.”
“Well,” Andy said, “the point of the trip was to see are the tracks here, and do they go into the water. They are, and they do.”
“And they go all the way across underneath,” Wally assured them.
“Well,” John said, “I look, and I look, and I just can’t find any reason not to do it. So I guess that’s it.”
Excitement leaped in Wally’s breast. They were going to try again. Maybe this time, he thought, they’d let him come along. Not to go down into the reservoir, he had no desire at all to do anything like that, but just to be one of the people up here on the bank, helping out, waiting, doing whatever the people up here did while John and Andy were down there in the cold and the dark and the wet. Trying not to sound too eager, he said, “Well, John? What do you do now?”