Drowned Hopes Part 21

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 pus.h.i.+ng, 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 impa.s.sable obstruction right down to the water's edge, with no path or cleared sh.o.r.eline 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 sh.o.r.e. "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 a.s.sured 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?"

"Now," John said, "I talk to Tom about more money."

THIRTY-FOUR.

Dortmunder kept squinting. He couldn't help it. It wasn't the light in here, which was ordinary enough, it was knowing about all that s.p.a.ce out there, sensing it, just the other side of these blank walls. In here, in an airport terminal building in the unnecessarily large, flat, tan state of Oklahoma, Dortmunder stood against one of the walls with two small suitcases at his feet, hurrying travelers eddying around him as Tom, at one of the chest-high counters across the way, rented a car (again!) from a robot shaped like a short smiling girl. Dortmunder had shown his driver's license to this automaton, since he would be driving the car when rented, but then he had retreated to this distant vantage while Tom handled the repellent commercial aspects of the transaction.

Finally finished, Tom stepped across the stream of travelers as though they weren't there, causing several people to b.u.mp into one another but none to b.u.mp into him, and picked up his bag from beside Dortmunder's left foot. "Okay," he said. "We go out and wait for the bus."

"No cars?" Dortmunder asked.

Tom lowered his eyebrows at him. "The bus to the car," he said. "Don't start with me, Al."

"I don't know about these things," Dortmunder reminded him, picking up his own bag, and they went out of the terminal building, watched by every cop, Federal agent, and private security guard in the place, all of whom were certain in their hearts those two birds were up to something. When a lawman looked at Dortmunder and Tom Jimson, particularly together, he said to himself, "Probable Cause is their middle name."

Outside, it was still just airport, normal airport, with horizontal concrete between the slabs of vertical concrete, but Dortmunder knew Oklahoma was just out there, just a step away, just around a concrete corner. "Sunny," he complained.

Every car rental company had its own buses, and they were all weird-looking, with oddball color patterns and hatlike outgrowths and strangely placed fins, as though they were designed by the same people who draw s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps in comic books. Tom rejected several of these, for no reason Dortmunder could see, and then accepted one, and they got aboard with a lot of white men in suits carrying garment bags. Among these solid citizens, Dortmunder and Tom looked like exactly what they were: ex-cons, up to no good. The driver was the only person who noticed them, and he kept an eye on them in his rearview mirror all the way out of the airport and down the wide sunstruck road to the rental company's parking lot.

The driver had collected a stuffed envelope from each of his pa.s.sengers, including Tom, and now he dropped off each renter right at the car he'd been a.s.signed in the great lottery, giving Tom and Dortmunder a small white vehicle like a was.h.i.+ng machine with four tiny doors. "I like Andy's cars better," Dortmunder said as they jammed their small bags into the no-leg-room backseat.

"I like a car the state cops aren't looking for," Tom told him.

They got into the front, Dortmunder at the wheel, and as he steered the little machine along, following one exit sign after another, Tom checked out the radio, to discover that his choices included thirty-seven stations playing rock music, four religious broadcasters, and one all-news station operating under the theory that "all news" meant "sports." Tom finally settled on one of the religious programs and sat back, content.

"The bad man is among us, my friends, he is in our hearts and our minds, and our Lord and Creator sees him, my friends, sees us shelter him..."

"Hee-hee," said Tom.

Soon enough they had left the airport and come out to nothing. Nothing. As far as the eye could see. "You wouldn't believe how empty this all was before the white man came," Tom said, looking around at the nothing.

"Uh-huh," Dortmunder said.

For somebody who had lived his entire life in cities or the tumbled landscapes of hills and mountains, this nothing was extremely scary. If somebody a thousand miles over that way accidentally shot a gun, he could blow your head off. Dortmunder drove the little white was.h.i.+ng machine down the broad white road in the scanty-to-moderate traffic, and tried to pretend something had gone wrong with his peripheral vision so that there really was something to left and right; a building, a hill, a few trees, something. He was glad, at least, to be sitting down; if he stood up he'd run a real risk of losing his balance.

"Head toward Norman," Tom said as they approached a cloverleaf interchange with another highway. The overpa.s.ses stood out like croquet hoops on a lawn.

"I'll be able to see it, won't I?" Dortmunder asked.

"What, Norman? No, we'll turn off before we get there and head west toward Chickasaw."

"No, I meant as soon as I turn toward it," Dortmunder explained.

Tom frowned, working that one out, while on the radio the preacher described in loving detail various activities taking place even now in h.e.l.l. "You mean," Tom said seriously, "that it's kinda flat around here."

"Something like that."

"I grew up in this territory," Tom said. "When the dust came."

"The Okies, you mean," Dortmunder suggested.

"I guess I was an Okie," Tom said. "Not like in that movie, though."

"No."

"Sit around the campfire, sing a song. Go into a gas station with your big old dead truck fulla mattresses, women, dying old men, whadda you do?"

"Run," said Dortmunder.

"In the movie," Tom said, "they bought gas. Paid for it."

"You rent cars," Dortmunder pointed out.

"Not the same thing," Tom said. "I do what I gotta do to make life smooth. I rent cars because I can."

"Wha'd you do, back in the Okie days, in that gas station?"

"Shot parts off the kid until he remembered the combination to the safe," Tom said. "There's your turn up there."

THIRTY-FIVE.

The way it turned out, the stash in the church had been the only one of Tom's unofficial banks situated in the northeast. Tom did grudgingly admit there were other stashes still out of the lawyers' hands, but they were all far away, in different parts of the country. He didn't feel like traveling, didn't like the idea of giving up all his last stashes, didn't want to be helpful at all, so finally Dortmunder had suggested the two of them go together to wherever the h.e.l.l it was, bringing along overnight bags for if they had to stay a little while, but planning to do it all as quickly as possible. Go there, make the withdrawal, come back.

"But an easy one, okay, Tom?" Dortmunder had said. "No more weddings, okay? Not crowds of people all around."

"Well," Tom had said, "how about a place with n.o.body around? How do you feel about a ghost town?"

So that's where they were headed, and along the way Tom explained what had happened to Cronley, Oklahoma, to turn it from a bustling cow town and transportation hub at the turn of the century into the dry, crumbling, empty sh.e.l.l it was today. "It was the railroad done it, mostly," Tom said.

"Railroads," Dortmunder echoed, steering along an empty two-lane road in the middle of Oklahoma but thinking about the steel tracks running down into the water back up in the green mountains of upstate New York. "All of a sudden there's railroads all over this."

"It was the other way around in Cronley," Tom told him. "All of a sudden, no railroads at all."

"Well, that happened everywhere."

"Not like this," Tom said. "See, Cronley was a farm town to start with, on a little stream between the Canadian and Cimarron Rivers, the place where people went to buy their salt and sell their milk. Then, when the railroad come through, after the Civil War, Cronley got bigger, got to be county seat, a whole lot of warehouses got built, offices for businessmen, a big five-story hotel down by the railroad station for traveling salesmen, tallest building in town."

"Five stories?" Dortmunder asked.

Tom ignored that, saying, "So, the drought in the thirties. .h.i.t Cronley pretty hard, because all the farmers around there went away, cut down the population. But the town kept going until the fifties, when Oklahoma made its big mistake."

"The whole state?"

"That's it," Tom said. "See, Oklahoma stayed dry after Prohibition. What it is, you take people, you give them a lot of trouble and misery, what they always do, every single time, Al, you can set your watch by this, what they do is, they decide G.o.d gave them all this trouble and misery because they done something wrong, so if they give themselves even more trouble and misery maybe G.o.d'll let up on them. You see it everywhere. In the Middle Ages-a guy inside told me this-back then, the big way to keep from getting the plague was to beat yourself with whips. So Oklahoma, poor and miserable and dry as dust, decided to make itself even drier so then maybe G.o.d would leave them alone. So, no booze."

"That was the mistake?" Dortmunder asked. "That's what killed Cronley? No booze?"

"It set the situation up," Tom answered. "See, what happens is, you put a law on the books, no matter how dumb it is, sooner or later somebody's gonna come along dumb enough to enforce it. That's what happened back in the fifties. Oklahoma cops boarded a through pa.s.senger train and arrested the bartender in the bar car for serving drinks in a dry state."

"Wait a minute," Dortmunder said. "On the train?"

"The through train, comin in this side of the state, goin out that side. Took the barman off, put him in jail overnight, the railroad people come around the next day and got him out." Tom did that thing of grinning without moving his lips. "Fun night for the barman, huh? Al, you're gonna take that county road up there."

Up ahead, a small sign indicated a side road on the left. Since Tom had steered them off the interstate a while back, each road he'd put them on had been smaller and less populated, and now he was directing Dortmunder from an empty two-lane blacktop road onto a narrow two-lane oiled gravel road wandering off across scrub land as though it had been laid out by a thirsty snake.

At least the countryside wasn't so flat in this middle part of the state; low, bare, brown hills now rose up around them, with taller and craggier (though just as barren) hills out ahead. This new road angled upward slightly, becoming rutted and rocky, as though rain sometimes fell here. Using both hands on the wheel to steer around the b.u.mps and holes, Dortmunder said, "The last we heard, the bartender spent the night in jail."

"Right," Tom said. "So what the railroads did, the next couple years, they kept s.h.i.+fting routes around, and when they were done there wasn't any trains in Oklahoma anymore."

Surprised, but also pleased at the thought of such extensive revenge, Dortmunder said, "Is that right?"

"That's right, all right," Tom told him. "Even today, you take a look at the Amtrak map, the railroad lines go all around Oklahoma, but they never go in. And that's what killed Cronley. No trains, no reason for the d.a.m.n place. Now, there's gonna be a turnoff along here somewhere, Al, but they probably don't keep it up a h.e.l.l of a lot, so we gotta watch for it."

"Left or right?"

"Right."

Dortmunder slowed the little white was.h.i.+ng machine to a walk and hugged the right edge of the narrow roadway, but still they almost missed it. "d.a.m.n, Al!" Tom suddenly cried. "That was it! My fault this time, I shoulda seen it."

Dortmunder braked to a stop and considered Tom. "Your fault this time?"

"That's what I said," Tom agreed, looking over his right shoulder at the ground behind them. "Come on, Al, back up, will ya?"

Dortmunder took a deep breath and held it. Then he nodded to himself, released the deep breath, s.h.i.+fted into reverse, and squirted the was.h.i.+ng machine backward, gravel spraying hither and yon.

"Take it easy, Al," Tom said calmly, looking out his window. He stuck his arm out the open window into the air and pointed, saying, "See it? See it there?"

Then Dortmunder did; crumbled blacktop, covered with dirt and weeds. "That's it?"

"This was the back road in the old days," Tom said. "This thing we're on used to be paved, too."

"Well, why don't we take the front road?" Dortmunder asked him.

"It's gone," Tom said. "They ripped up part of it when they put in one a the interstates, and another part got sold off to some agribusiness. So now this is it."

"How far from here?"

"Maybe six miles."

"I don't know," Dortmunder said. "Maybe we want a Jeep for this. Or a tank, maybe."

"We'll be fine," Tom a.s.sured him. "Just drive, Al."

So Dortmunder drove, steering his little white appliance out onto a surface it had never been intended to know. Much of the roadway was crumbled away or undercut and gullied by rain, and a lot of the rest had weeds growing up right through the blacktop. The road had originally been a fairly wide two lanes, but the worst damage had worked inward from the outer edges, so now in parts it was barely as wide as the car, and never was it within the range of the civilized or the acceptable.