“I’m not sure about this,” Dortmunder said, touching the motor’s handle with gingerly doubt.
“It’s easy,” Doug assured him, and repeated the simple operating instructions one more time, at the end saying, “You just want to be sure to keep it slow, that’s all. So Andy can unreel the monofilament, and so you don’t run into a root or a drifting log or the other shore.”
“I won’t speed,” Dortmunder promised.
Thrummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmm…
Dortmunder kept the dam’s lights to his left, moving them forward very slowly indeed, while Kelp dangled his arms out over the water and let the monofilament unreel.
Finding the railroad line on the other side was even harder, since they’d never been over there before and so were operating with neither memory nor light, but after several useless passes back and forth Doug said, “That looks like a cleared spot. Let’s try it.” And he was right.
According to the old maps, the railroad had run along pretty straight through the valley, and so, once Doug had tied the other end of the monofilament to the rail on this side, they had a thin surface line that more or less paralleled the tracks crossing down below.
Now Dortmunder thrummed them even more slowly than earlier back out from shore, Doug guiding them with one hand on the monofilament. “Here, I think,” he said at last, when they were well out in the middle of the reservoir and presumably directly above Putkin’s Corners.
“Right,” Dortmunder said, and turned the handle to idle. He was beginning to feel pretty good about his relationship with this motor, in fact. It was small, it was quiet, and it did what he asked it to do. What could be bad?
Doug used a short piece of white rope to tie them to the monofilament, then reached out to drop over the side a small iron weight with a ring in it through which one end of a long thin nylon cord had been tied. He kept feeding out the cord until it was no longer being pulled, meaning the weight had hit bottom. Inspecting the amount of cord that was left as he tied it to the rope lashed around the upper edge of the boat, he said, “Hmmm. Closer to sixty feet, I think. You ready, Andy?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been that deep,” Kelp said. It was hard to see what he looked like in the dark, but he sure sounded nervous.
“Nothing to it,” Doug assured him, lifting himself up to sit on the rounded doughnut of the boat’s side, facing inward, feet on the bottom of the boat. “Now, Andy, you remember the best way to leave the boat, right?”
“Backward.” Yep; nervous, all right.
“That’s right,” Doug told him, lowered his goggles, put his mouthpiece in place, and toppled backward out of the boat. Plash. Gone, without a trace.
Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other, as best they could in the dark. “You can do it, Andy,” Dortmunder said.
“Oh, sure,” Kelp said. “No problem.” Scrambling a bit, hampered by the scuba tank on his back, he pulled himself up to a seated position on the boat’s round rim. “See you, John,” he said, and, forgetting to put the goggles and mouthpiece in place, backward he went over the side.
All the fellas were so nice to Bob now. “Great to have you back, Bob,” they said, grinning at him (a trifle uneasily) and patting him on the back.
“It’s really nice to be here,” Bob told them all with his new sweet smile. Looking around the big office inside the dam, he said, “Gee, I remember this place. I really do.”
“Well, sure you do, Bob,” Kenny the boss said, grinning harder than ever, patting him softer than ever. “You were only gone a few weeks.”
Bob nodded, a slow drifting motion very akin to his new smile. “I forgot a lot, you know,” he told them. “A lot of stuff from before. Dr. Panchick says that’s okay, though.”
“Whatever the doctor says,” Kenny said, nodding emphatically.
The other guys all nodded and smiled, too, though not as sweetly as Bob. They all said they agreed with Dr. Panchick, too, that it didn’t matter about all that old stuff Bob had forgotten.
Gee, it was nice to be back with these nice fellas. Bob almost thought about telling them how he’d even forgotten that girl, whatsername, the one he was married to, but how Dr. Panchick had told him he’d definitely start to remember her again pretty soon. That and a lot of other stuff, too. Not the bad stuff, though. Just the good stuff.
Like the girl; whatsername. After all, there she was around the house all the time, looking red-eyed and smiling so hard it seemed sometimes as though the edges of her mouth must have been tied back to her ears. Having her around all the time like that, calling him Bob and so on, pretty soon he’d remember her just fine. And then she wouldn’t have to keep going off into other rooms and crying and then coming back with that smile on. Which was anyway a nice smile, even if kind of painful-looking.
Anyway, he was almost about to kind of mention that, the lapse of memory that included whatsername, but as he was taking one of his slow deep breaths, the slow deep breaths he took these days before he made any kind of statement at all, just as he was taking that breath, he remembered he wasn’t supposed to talk a lot to other people about his symptoms.
That’s right. “They needn’t know you’ve forgotten XXXX,” whatever her name was, Dr. Panchick had said just today. Or yesterday. Or sometime. So he didn’t say any of that about whatsername after all, but just smiled and breathed out again, and nobody noticed.
“Well, uh, Bob,” Kenny said, still grinning fitfully, washing his hands, looking around the big open office, “uh, we thought maybe you could, uh, get back into the swing of things by maybe doing some of the filing, getting caught up on some of this paperwork here. Do you think you could do that?”
“All right,” Bob said, and smiled again. He was very happy.
Kenny continued to grin but looked doubtful. Peering at Bob as though this new sweet smile made him hard to see, he said, “You, uh, remember the alphabet, huh?”
“Oh, sure,” Bob said, very relaxed and easy, very happy to be here in this nice place with all these nice fellas. “Everybody knows the alphabet,” he said.
“Sure,” Kenny said. “That’s right.”
Then Bob’s watch went BEEP, and everybody jumped and looked scared. Everybody but Bob, that is. He raised his left arm to show everybody his watch, and smiled from watch to people to watch, saying, “Dr. Panchick gave me this. It reminds me when to take my pill. I have to take my pill now.”
“Then you better, I guess,” Kenny said.
“Oh, sure,” Bob said, and smiled around at all the nice fellas, and went away to the men’s room for water to wash down his nice pill.
(“Doped to the eyes!” a fella named Steve said, and a fella named Chuck said, “You could sell those pills on the street down in New York City and retire,” and Kenny the boss said, “Now, leave him alone, guys. Remember, it’s up to us to help Bob get his head out of his ass,” and all the fellas said, “Oh, yeah, sure, naturally, of course, you got it.”)
Mouthpiece in; breathe normally: well, breathe, anyway. Sinking like a stone. Goggles on. Goggles off; full of water.
Oh, boy. Feeling the water rush upward into his nose as his body rushed downward toward the bottom of the reservoir, Kelp stuck his left arm straight up, pressed the button, and filled the BCD. Immediately he stopped sinking, started soaring instead, and suddenly broke through into air.
But where? Anonymous reservoir in the dark. Dortmunder and the boat were nowhere to be seen. I am not going to get lost, Kelp told himself sternly. Ignoring the tiny voice telling him he was already lost, he emptied the water from the goggles, put them on, reassured himself the headlamp was in the right place, released some of the air from the BCD, and floated down through the black water like a discarded love letter.
During the descent, he switched on the headlamp and kept turning his face this way and that, hoping either to see Doug’s light or show Doug his own. But when his flippered feet finally found the bottom, he still had seen nothing, and in fact he couldn’t even see what he was standing on until he bent almost double. Then, through the brown water, he saw he was on a flat pebbly surface covered with hairy slime. Yuck.