Drowned Hopes Read Free Page B

explained, as a big truck full of logs gave them the air horn on its way by.

    Tom half turned to look full at Dortmunder. “I understand what you’re saying, Al,” he said. “So don’t say it anymore. Drive on, okay? I’m seventy years old. I don’t know how much longer I got.”

    So Dortmunder drove on, and a mile or so later they came to a sign that said: ENTERING VILBURGTOWN COUNTY. “This is the county,” Tom said. “When they did the reservoir, they covered almost this whole county. There’s no towns left here at all. Putkin’s Corners was the county seat. There’s the road.”

    A two–lane blacktop road went off to the right. Dortmunder nodded at it and kept going straight.

    Tom said, “Hey!”

    “What?”

    “That was the road! What’s the matter with you?”

    This time, Dortmunder pulled off onto the gravel verge before he stopped. Facing Tom, he said, “Do you mean I was supposed to turn there?”

    “That’s what I said!” Tom was so agitated his lips were almost moving. “I told you, ‘There’s the road’!”

    “The last time you told me ‘There’s the road,’ ” Dortmunder said icily, getting fed up with all this, “you didn’t mean ‘There’s the road,’ you meant something else. A history lesson or some goddamn thing.”

    Tom sighed. He frowned at the dashboard. He polished the tip of his nose with a bent knuckle. Then he nodded. “Okay, Al,” he said. “We been outta touch with each other awhile. We just got to get used to communicating with each other again.”

    “Probably so,” Dortmunder agreed, ready to meet his old cellmate halfway.

    “So this time,” Tom said, “what I meant was, ‘Turn here.’ In fact, I’m sorry that isn’t the way I phrased myself.”

    “It would have helped,” Dortmunder admitted.

    “So I tell you what you do,” Tom said. “You turn around, and we go back, and we’ll try all over again and see how it comes out. Okay?”

    “Good.”

    Dortmunder looked both ways, made the U–turn, and Tom said, “Turn here.”

    “I already knew that, Tom,” Dortmunder said, and made the turn onto the new road.

    “I just wanted to practice saying it right.”

    “I’m wondering,” Dortmunder said as they drove through the forest along the new road, “if that’s some more of your famous humor.”

    “Maybe so,” Tom said, looking out the windshield, watching the road unwind toward them out of the woods. “Or maybe it’s concealed rage,” he said. “One time, inside, a shrink took a whack at me, and he told me I had a lot of concealed rage, so maybe that’s some of it, coming out in disguised form.”

    Dortmunder, surprised, gave him a look. “You got concealed rage?” he asked. “On top of all the rage you show, you got more? ”

    “According to this shrink,” Tom said, and shrugged, saying, “But what do they know? Shrinks are crazy, anyway, that’s why they take the job. Slow down a little now, we’re getting close.”

    On the right, the forest was interrupted by a dirt road marked N O A DMITTANCE — VILBURGTOWN RESERVOIR AUTHORITY , with a simple metal–pipe barrier blocking the way. A little later, there was another dirt road on the same side, with the same sign and the same pipe barrier, and a little after that a fence came marching at an angle out of the woods and then ran along next to the road; an eight–foot–high chain–link fence with two strands of barbed wire angling outward at the top.

    Dortmunder said, “They put barbed wire around the reservoir?”

    “They did,” Tom agreed.

    “Isn’t that more security than most reservoirs get?” Dortmunder waved a hand vaguely. “I thought, most reservoirs, you could go there and fish and stuff.”

    “Well, yeah,” Tom said. “But back then, the time they put this one in, it was a very revolutionary moment in American history, you know. You had all these environment freaks and antiwar freaks and antigovernment freaks and like that