Authors: Donald Westlake
The problem was, to take the boat out on the reservoir, they needed darkness, clouds,
no moon.
They didn’t need nights so bright you could read a newspaper in the back yard (Kelp did, which Dortmunder hated). They didn’t need nights so bright that the local drive–in movie shut down because people couldn’t see the screen. “In darkness deep the darkest deeds are done,/And villains all retreat before the sun,” as the poet put it. Dortmunder didn’t know that particular verse, but he would have agreed with it.
It was a big house, 46 Oak Street, but it had never expected to house nine people and a computer. Dortmunder and May occupied the master bedroom, upstairs front over the living room. Stan and Tiny shared the other front bedroom, Stan sleeping on the box spring and Tiny tossing uncomfortably on the mattress on the floor. Kelp and Wally and the computer filled the large bedroom at the rear, Wally being the one on this mattress on the floor (he didn’t seem to mind), while Doug had been shoehorned into the last bedroom, with Tom. Since Tom would not divide his bed, Doug had brought up a sleeping bag; when it was open and occupied, the room was so full the door couldn’t be opened. And, finally, the small utility room off the kitchen downstairs contained a cot which was Murch’s Mom’s portion. The three bathrooms — two up, one down — were fought over constantly.
Idle days in Dudson Center aren’t exactly the same as idle days in Metropolis. Wally still had his computer, still could spend his days and nights battling unambiguous enemies in far–flung galaxies, but for the rest of them certain adjustments had to be made. Doug had a local girlfriend, whom he kept scrupulously away from the others (not even telling her he had a place to stay here in town), and with whom he spent as much of his free time as he could, and other than that he commuted four days a week to his Dive Shop, three hours each way, driving doggedly back to Dudson Center every night just in case the weather should break. Tiny traveled with him as far as New York about half the time, not liking to be for very long away from his own lady friend, J.C. Taylor.
Other than that, though, time hung heavy.
“I know exactly what you mean,” said the guy to his right. “New York Central. D&H. Delaware, Lackawanna, and
Western.
Those were railroads.”
Down at the end of the bar, Dortmunder and Kelp drank beer.
“Union Station up in Albany,” the first regular said, with a little catch in his voice, holding up his bourbon and Diet Pepsi. “Now, that was a beautiful station. That station was like a church.”
“Grand Central Station,” intoned his pal. “Crossroads of a million private lives.”
“You know,” said a third regular, joining the conversation, “some people confuse that line with the
Naked City
motto.”
A fourth chimed in: “There are eight million stories in the naked city.”
“Exactly,” said the third.
“Let’s get outta here,” Dortmunder said.
“Stan,” May said, “I’ve got two phone calls already today.”
Stan and Tiny lifted their heads out of the hoodless engine compartment. They were as grimy and oil–streaked as the auto parts. Stan asked, “Yeah?”
“About this car,” May told him.
“Not for sale,” Stan said.
“One, there’s no papers,” Tiny added.
Stan was about to dive back into his disassembled engine when May said, “
Complaints
about the car.”
They looked at her in surprise. Stan said, “Complaints?”
“It’s an eyesore. The neighbors think it detracts from the tone.”
Tiny scratched his oily head with an oily hand. “Tone? Whadaya mean, tone?”
“The quality of the neighborhood,” May told him.
“That’s some quality,” Stan said, getting a little miffed. “Down where I live in Brooklyn, I got two, three cars I’m working on at a time, I
never
get a complaint. All over the neighborhood, guys are working on their cars. And it’s a terrific neighborhood. So what’s the big deal?”
“Well, look around this neighborhood,” May advised him, taking one hand out from under the dish towel to wave it generally about. “These people are neat, Stan, they’re clean. That’s the way they like it.”
Gazing up and down the street, Stan said, “How do they fix their cars?”
“I think,” May said carefully, “they take them to the garage for the mechanic to fix, when something goes wrong.”
Appalled, Stan said, “They don’t fix their own
cars?
And they complain about me?”
Tiny said, “May, I tell you what we’ll do. On accounta the fence, we can’t move the car around in the back, but we’ll put everything in front of it, so you won’t see all this mess and stuff from the street. Okay?”
“That would be wonderful, Tiny,” May said.
Stan still couldn’t get over it. “Hand your car to some stranger,” he said, “then take it out, drive it sixty, sixty–five miles an hour. They got no more brains than that hood over there, and they’re complaining about
me.
”
“Come on, Stan,” Tiny said, picking up auto parts from the lawn. “Help out.”
Stan did so, muttering and griping all the time. Before going back into the house, May leaned out from the porch and looked up. Not a cloud in the sky.
They were seven tonight, crowded around the dining room table, all but Doug and Tiny, who’d be back up from the city later. Kelp looked over at Murch’s Mom and said, “I thought that’s what you liked about driving the cab up here.”
“I’m losing my
edge,
” she snarled. “I’m getting soft, I can feel it.”
“I told you so,” her son said.
She gave him a look. “Don’t start with me, Stanley. And pass the white stuff. What is it?”
“Mashed potatoes,” Dortmunder said, passing it to her.
“Oh, yeah?” She looked at the creamy white mound in the oval bowl, then shrugged and spooned a couple plops of it onto her plate.
The cooking was being done by an ad hoc committee chaired by May, with Wally, Stan, and Tiny as primary committee members, and noncommittee members responsible for clean–up. The opening of packages was the principal culinary method. The result was acceptable, but no one was anxious to prolong the experience.
Tom broke a silence composed of munching and swallowing to say, “Anybody hear the weather report?”
“I did, in the cab,” Murch’s Mom told him. “It’s gonna be fair forever.”
“Aw, come on, Mom,” Stan said.
“Extended forecast,” his Mom said, implacable, “sun, moon, sun, moon, sun, moon, sun
and
moon. Pass the round green things.”
“Peas,” Dortmunder said, passing her the bowl.
Murch’s Mom rolled a bunch of peas onto her plate, then held them down with bits of mashed potato. “I met an old lady in the cab today,” she said, “lives the next block over. I’m gonna go play canasta with her tonight. Not for money, just for fun.”
She ate a pea — she couldn’t get more than one of the little devils onto her fork at a time — then looked up at the silence and the surprised eyes. “Well?” she demanded.
Dortmunder cleared his throat. “Maybe the weather forecast’s wrong,” he said.
Movie theaters and the interior of the pickup both allowed for a certain amount of personal interaction, but by no means enough. Nor could he convince Myrtle to grab a blanket one day and come with him for a nice picnic in the woods. It was extremely frustrating.
Well, at least he didn’t have to lie to her anymore; or anyway not so much. Her curiosity about the environmental protection group he’d claimed to be a volunteer researcher for had been so intense and so unrelenting that first he’d told her it was merely a minor part of his life, not as important as she’d at first thought, that he was mostly a diving instructor out on Long Island. And then he’d told her he’d quit his volunteer work with that group because he didn’t like their attitude. (John, in this scenario, became a demanding regional head of the environmental group, an autocratic ideologue who Doug had simply been unable to stand anymore, the last straw having been that unfortunate scene on Myrtle’s front porch.)
So now, as far as Myrtle was concerned, Doug was in fact who he really was, and his trips up to Dudson Center from Long Island three or four days a week were simply because he was
crazy
about her. Since Myrtle seemed to be more or less crazy about him as well, the situation should progress swimmingly from here, and it would, too, if there were only someplace they could be alone together.
Now, after another evening of sweet hot frustration at the movies — the one local movie house was never more than half full, mostly old people and kids, people who didn’t have VCRs — they were walking home, hand in hand, and Doug was trying yet again to figure out some way to get Myrtle alone.
If only the weather would break so he and the others could make the descent into the reservoir and salvage Tom’s money, life would surely become easier. Doug would no longer have anything active to conceal from Myrtle, and with time and leisure and full attention to devote to this project,
surely
he could make it all happen. After all, summer was fast approaching; high season in his line of work. From Fourth of July weekend through Labor Day, he was going to be
busy,
far too busy to make six–hour round trips in pursuit of some girl.
It was a beautiful night in Dudson Center, clear and crisp, a velvety sky with a great milk–glass moon, temperature in the low sixties, humidity nonexistent. A playful breeze rustled and breathed in the dark green branches of trees, and below the mysterious upper reaches of those trees the old–fashioned streetlamps spread a yellow glow on sidewalks flanked by green lawns. Gentle music sounded from open windows here and there, late sprinklers could be heard whispering their rhythmic secrets, and the romantic in Doug just swelled with sensual delight.
But when he approached Myrtle’s front porch, expecting at least to spend a little time with her on the glider, the porch light was on and someone was already out there. In fact, two people. With a table in front of them, doing something there, playing some kind of game.
Doug hadn’t been present at dinner the other night when Murch’s Mom had announced the news of her new local pal, so it was with a real sense of dislocation that he recognized who that was on the glider with Myrtle’s mother. Oh, my God, he thought, am I supposed to know her? What’s she doing here? What does Myrtle know?
“There you are,” her mother said. “How was the movie?”
“Okay,” Myrtle said, a bit listlessly. She’d been rather quiet and withdrawn all the way home, come to think of it.
“Gladys,” the old bitch said to Murch’s Mom (
Gladys?
), “this is my daughter, Myrtle.”
“How do you do.”
“Hello.”
“And a beau of hers.” Smiling like a shark at Doug, she added, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”
She never did. Doug had met Myrtle’s mother half a dozen times in brief passages at the beginning or ending of dates, and Myrtle always introduced him, and her mother always immediately cast his name out of her memory bank.
This time, before Myrtle could say anything, Doug smiled hugely at the nasty old witch and said, “That’s okay, Mrs. Street.” To Murch’s Mom, he said, “It’s Jack Cousteau. Nice to meet you.”
All three women gave him funny looks, which he affected not to notice, turning his smile on Myrtle, saying, “See you in a couple days?”
“Sure,” she said, but still looked confused.
“I’ll call you at the library,” he promised, shook her hand as though they’d just finished a really productive Kiwanis meeting together, and turned to say, “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Street. Nice to meet you, Gladys.” And he went whistling away in the dark.