Drowned Hopes (14 page)

Now it all began to move. Tiffany, on her father’s arm, and her attendants made their uncertain way down the aisle, trying but failing to keep pace with the music, stumbling and tripping prettily along, concentrating so totally on their feet that they forgot to be self–conscious. Bob watched them as though they were an approaching truck.

Bride and groom met in front of the lectern and turned to face the minister, who beamed over their heads at the people and announced, “Bob and Tiffany have written their own wedding service,” and everybody went back to sleep.

When they awoke, the deed was done. “You may kiss the bride,” the minister said, and some smart–aleck pal of the groom said, “That’s about the only thing he
hasn’t
done to her,” perhaps a little more loudly than he’d intended.

Bride and groom made their hasty grinning way up the aisle as the congregation stood and stretched and talked and cheered them on, and from the speakers high above came the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The mean–looking old guy turned to the sharp–nosed fellow and said, “If I had a gun, I’d shoot somebody.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” the sharp–nosed fellow answered in agreement.

“How about with these two?” the mean–looking old guy said as the happy couple hurried past.

Across the aisle, the round troll dabbed his moist eyes and said, “Gee, that was nice. Better even than Princess Labia’s wedding.” The pessimist sighed.

Most weddings take place in daylight, but there’d been a certain urgency in the planning of this one, and all the potential daytime slots here at Elizabeth Grace Dudson Memorial Reformed Congregational Unitarian Church of Putkin Township had already been taken. The mother of the bride had been determined that her daughter would have a church wedding, and women who successfully name their infant daughters Tiffany do tend to get their own way, so an evening wedding it was. Exterior lights had been turned on at the end of the ceremony, so that when the wedding party emerged, laughing and shouting and throwing superfluous rice (it was unnecessary to wish fecundity upon Tiffany and Bob), the scene looked more like a movie than real life. Many of the revelers, becoming aware of this, started to
perform
wedding guests rather than
be
wedding guests, which merely increased the general air of unreality.

Inside, the church was nearly empty. The minister chatted up front with a small group of ladies, a few other relatives and friends drifted slowly doorward, and the four latecomers sat stolid in their pews, as though waiting for the second show. A departing aunt said to them, “Aren’t you coming to the party?”

“Sure,” said the pessimist.

She continued on. “Come along, now,” said another exiting in–law.

“Be there in a minute,” the sharp–nosed fellow assured her.

“It’s over, you know,” kidded a grandmother with a grandmotherly twinkle.

Twinkling right back, the butterball said, “We’re looking at the pretty windows.”

The minister, passing with the last of the ladies, smiled upon the quartet and said, “We’ll be closing up now.”

The mean–looking old guy nodded. “We wanna pray a little more,” he said.

The minister seemed taken aback at that idea, but rallied. “We must all pray,” he agreed, “for long life and joy for Tiffany and Bob.”

“You bet,” said the mean–looking old guy.

The pessimist slowly turned his head — his neck made faint cracking sounds — to watch the minister and the final few of his flock amble on to the door and out. “Jeez,” he said. Which
was
a prayer.

Across the aisle, Kelp said, “Okay, Tom? Okay? Can we get it now?”

Sullen, Tom said, “It wasn’t my idea to come to a
wedding.
”

“It was your idea,” Kelp reminded him, “to stash your stash in a church.”

“Where’s a better place?” Tom wanted to know.

Dortmunder rose, all of his joints creaking and cracking and aching. “Are you two,” he wanted to know, “just gonna sit there and
converse?
”

So everybody else stood up at last, their knees and hips and elbows making sounds like gunshots, and Tom said, “Won’t take but two minutes now that the goddamn crowd is gone.”

He stepped out to the aisle, turned toward the front of the church, and a voice back at the door said, “Gentlemen, I really must ask you to leave now. Silent prayer in one’s home or automobile is just as efficacious —”

It was the minister again, coming down the aisle at them. Tom gave him a disgusted look and said, “Enough is enough. Hold that turkey.”

“Right,” said Kelp.

As Tom walked down the aisle and Wally gaped at everything in fascinated interest — the true spectator — Dortmunder and Kelp approached the minister, who became too belatedly alarmed, backing away, his voice rising toward treble as he said, “What are — ? You can’t — This is a place of worship!”

“Sssshhh,” Kelp advised, soothingly, putting his hand on the minister’s arm. When the minister tried to pull away, Kelp’s hand tightened its grip, and Dortmunder took hold of the sky pilot’s other arm, saying, “Take it easy, pal.”

“Little man,” Kelp said, “you’ve had a busy day. Just gentle down, now.”

The minister stared through his round spectacles at the front of his church, saying, “What’s that man doing?”

“Won’t take a minute,” Dortmunder explained.

Up front, Tom had approached the pulpit, which was an octagonal wooden basket or crow’s nest built on several sturdy legs. The underpart of the pulpit was faced by latticed panels inset between the legs, the whole thing stained and polished to the shade generally known as “a burnished hue.” Tom bent to stick his fingers through the diamond–shaped holes in the latticework panel around on the side, half hidden by the circular stairs. He poked and tugged on this, but the last time that panel had been moved was thirty–one years earlier, and Tom had been the one to move it. In the interim, heat and cold and moisture and dryness and time itself had done their work, and the panel was now well and truly stuck. Tom yanked and pushed and prodded, and nothing at all happened.

At the other end of the church, the minister continued to stare at these suddenly hostile wedding guests, trying to remember his emergency–techniques training. He knew any number of ways to calm a person in a traumatic or panic–inducing situation, but they all worked on the assumption that
he
was an outside observer — a skilled and concerned and compassionate observer, it is true, but
outside.
None of the techniques seemed to have much relevance when
he
was the one in a panic. “Um,” he said.

“Hush,” Kelp told him.

But he couldn’t hush. “Violence is no way to solve problems,” he told them.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dortmunder said. “It’s never let me down.”

From the front of the church, underlining the point, came a crash, as Tom, exasperated beyond endurance, stood up, stepped back, and kicked the pulpit in the lattice, which smashed to kindling. The minister jumped like Bambi’s mother in Dortmunder and Kelp’s hands. They held him in place, quivering, while Wally, excitement making him seem taller but on the other hand wider, waddled hurriedly to the front of the church to see what was going on.

Up there, Tom was on his knees again, pulling out from inside the pulpit an old black cracked–leather doctor’s bag with a rusted–out clasp. “There’s the son of a bitch,” he said, with satisfaction.

“Gee!” Wally said. “The treasure in the pulpit!”

Tom gave him a look. “That’s right,” he said, and carried the bag down the aisle toward the others, Wally bouncing along like a living beachball in his wake.

“Is that it?” Dortmunder asked. “Can we go now?”

“This is it,” Tom acknowledged, “and we can go in a minute. Hold on here.” He put the doctor’s bag on a handy pew and fiddled for a while with the clasp. “Fucking thing’s rusted shut,” he said.

Shocked, the minister blurted, “Language!”

Everybody looked at him, even Wally. Tom said, “How come that’s talking?”

“I really don’t know,” Kelp said, studying the minister with unfriendly interest. “But I don’t think it’s gonna happen again.”

Taking a good–size clasp knife from his pocket and opening it, Tom said, “I hear from him again, I take his tongue out.”

“Drastic,” Kelp suggested calmly, “but probably effective.”

“Very.”

The minister stared round–eyed at the knife as Tom used it to slice through the old dry leather around the clasp, freeing the bag, opening it, and then putting the knife away. The minister sighed audibly when the knife disappeared, and his eyes rolled briefly in his head.

Tom reached into the bag, pulled out a wad of bills, peeled off a few, dropped the wad back into the bag, and turned to slap the bills into the minister’s enfeebled hand. Since the minister couldn’t seem to do it for himself, Tom closed his fingers around the money for him, saying, “Here’s half a grand to fix up the pulpit. Keep your nose clean.” To the others he said, “
Now
we can go.”

Dortmunder and Kelp released the minister, who staggered backward against a pew. Ignoring him, the others headed for the door, Dortmunder saying to Tom, “You’re a generous guy. I never knew that.”

“That’s me, okay,” Tom said. “Ever surprising.”

As they reached the door, the minister, beginning to recover from his fright, called after them, “Don’t you want a receipt? For your taxes?” But they didn’t answer.

How old it made him feel now, still in his twenties, to look at the old school and remember that feeling of infinite possibility back then, the absolute conviction that a determined fellow, if he kept himself in shape and didn’t drink too much, could eventually sleep with every girl in the world. Various girls he had and had not slept with during those halcyon days drifted through his mind, every one with the same identical smile, and he and his police car drifted on past the high school, wafted by the gusts of imperfect memory.

Doug Berry, at the wheel of his black pickup with the blue–and–silver styling package, watched that goddamn slow–moving police car inch by and tapped impatient fingers against the steering wheel. He was parked on a dark side street across from the high school, engine running but lights off, waiting for the coast to be clear. He knew that would be old Billy Pohlax at the wheel — they’d gone to high school together, that very high school across the street, way back when — and he knew Billy wouldn’t pass by here again for at least an hour. Which should be plenty of time, if his students showed up when they were supposed to.

Three blocks away, brake lights gleamed like rubies on the village police car, which then made a right off Bay Boulevard, heading down to the docks and marinas along the waterfront. Doug slipped the pickup into gear, left the lights off, and scooted across Bay and onto the driveway leading up to the big parking lot wrapped halfway around the school, on its left side and rear. Doug drove around to the back, the equipment in the bed of his vehicle thumping and clanking from time to time, and pulled in close up against the rear door to which he had bought the key, just the other day, from another old classmate, now an assistant building custodian (janitor) at this same school.

Doug opened his pickup’s door, the interior light went on, and he slammed the door again, scared out of his wits. The light! He’d forgotten about the light! If somebody saw him …

Was there a way to turn off that damn light? Trying to study the dashboard in the dark, he succeeded only in briefly switching on the dashboard lights. Finally, he decided the only thing to do was chance it, and move as fast as he could. Pop open the door (
light on!
), scramble out, close the door rapidly without slamming it (light off), sag in relief against the side of the pickup.

Okay, okay. No problem. Not a single light showed in any of the houses on Margiotta Street, out behind the high school. No one had seen him. There was nothing to worry about.

Reassuring himself like mad, Doug went over to the door, tried the key, and was relieved, faintly surprised, and also faintly disappointed, when it worked and the door swung open. Standing in the open doorway, he was about to check the time on his waterproof, shockproof, glow–in–the–dark watch/compass/calendar when motion made him look up to see a long black car — a Mercedes, he realized — traveling without lights and just coming to a stop next to his pickup. In the extreme dimness, he could just make out the MD plate on the Mercedes, which was a real surprise. Those guys weren’t doctors. Standards haven’t slipped
that
much.

Both front doors of the Mercedes opened, without the interior light going on. (How did they
do
that?) Andy was the driver, John the passenger. They shut the car doors quietly and approached, Andy saying, “Right on time.”

“I’ve got the door open,” Doug announced, unnecessarily, since he was standing in it. Then he gestured at the pickup, saying, “All the gear’s here. It weighs a ton.”

It did, too. Wearing half the stuff and carrying the rest, the three staggered into the school building, Doug closing the door behind them and then leading the way with his pencil flash along the wide empty dark corridor — that well–remembered smell of school! — to the stairs, and then down the long flight and along the next corridor — not quite so wide down here — to the double swinging doors leading to the boys’ locker room, and through it to the entrance to the pool. An interior room in the basement, the pool area had no windows, and so there was no reason not to turn on lights, which Doug did: all of them, revealing great expanses of beige tile and heavily chlorinated water. Footsteps and voices echoed wetly in here, so you always had the feeling there was somebody else around, just behind you or on the other side of the pool.

The two students looked at that great ocean in the bottom of the school building, and Andy said, “Where’s the shallow end?”

“It’s the deep end we want,” Doug told him. “Right here. Let’s get our gear on.”

“At the real place,” Andy said, “we’re just gonna walk in.”

“Look, guys,” Doug said. “That was your decision, that I’m not going to the real place with you. So I arranged for us to use this pool. And believe me, wherever it is you’re gonna walk into, when you get fifty feet deep it’s gonna be a lot farther down than the deep end of this pool.”

They both took a moment to look into the pool, contemplating that truth. Then John sighed and shook his head and said, “Okay, we’ve come this far. Let’s do it.”

“Fine,” Doug said. “We’ll get out of our street clothes, into our swimsuits and our wetsuits and all our gear, and get
to
it.”

Two less athletic or more reluctant students Doug had never had. They didn’t like their wet suits, they didn’t like the way the tank straps felt on their shoulders, they didn’t like the weight belts around their waists (he’d given them each fourteen pounds), they didn’t like their masks, they
hated
their BCDs. Finally, Doug said, “Look guys, the idea was, you wanted to do this, remember? I’m not forcing you into it.”

John held up his BCD, a thing that looked like a larger and more elaborate life vest, and said, “What
is
this thing, anyway?”

“A BCD,” Doug told him.

Which didn’t seem to help much. “That’s the alphabet,” Andy pointed out. “A, B, C, D.”

“No, no,” Doug said. “Not
A
BCD,
a
BCD. Buoyancy Control Device. Simply, the amount of air you put in the BCD determines at what level you hover when you’re underwater.”

“When
I’m
underwater,” John said, “I generally hover at the bottom.”

“Not with the BCD,” Doug assured him. “Let me demonstrate.”

“Go right ahead,” John said.

So Doug went into the pool, wearing all the gear and with the BCD inflated enough to keep him at the surface. Head out of the water, he said, “I’m going to raise my arm and press the button on the top of the control to release some of the air from the BCD. This pool is only eight feet deep, so I can’t descend very far, but I’ll hover in the water,
above
the bottom, and then I’ll add air to the BCD from my tank, and I’ll rise again. Now, watch.”

They looked at each other. Doug said, “Watch
me.
”

“We’re watching,” John said.

So Doug did exactly as he’d announced he would do, keeping his knees bent upward so his feet wouldn’t touch the bottom when he floated downward. He hovered near the bottom for a while, then lay out flat and stroked across the pool, the BCD maintaining his depth at about five feet. Stroking back, he added air and rose to the surface. Looking at those two skeptical faces, he said, “See how easy?”

“Sure,” said John.

“So let’s do it,” Doug said. “Jump on in.”

No. They would not “jump on in”; no matter how he assured them they wouldn’t sink, they insisted on going down to the shallow end and coming down the steps there. And even then, they were barely knee deep when both stopped. Looking as startled as a man whose face is encumbered with mask and mouthpiece can possibly look, Andy cried, “This suit doesn’t work!”

“Sure it does,” Doug told him. I’m
earning
my thousand dollars, he told himself. “Come on in, fellas.”

“It’s wet inside the suit!”

John said, more quietly and fatalistically, “Inside mine, too.”

“It’s supposed to do that,” Doug explained, holding to the side of the pool at the deep end. “The wet suit is Neoprene rubber. It lets a layer of water in. Your body warms the water, the suit holds it in, and you stay warm.”

“But
wet!
” Andy complained.

Doug shook his head, losing heart. “I don’t know, guys,” he said. “Maybe you just aren’t cut out for this.”

“No,” John said, “it’s okay. Just so we know the score. If that’s the way it’s supposed to work, okay, then. Come on, Andy,” he said, and plowed on into the water with the expression of a man tasting his aunt’s favorite eggplant recipe.

Once he actually got his students in the water, Doug’s problems
really
began. These two guys simply did not want to breathe underwater. They’d descend, mouthpiece clamped in teeth, eyes wide behind the goggles, and they’d
hold their breath.
Eventually, asphyxiating, they’d surface and take in great huge gulps of air.

“Oh, come on, fellas,” Doug kept saying. “That’s
air
in that tank on your back.
Use
some of it.” But they wouldn’t.

Eventually, Doug saw that drastic measures were the
only
measures with these guys. Climbing out of the pool, but still wearing all his equipment in case of trouble, he convinced and cajoled them toward the deeper end. Their BCDs were full, of course, so they couldn’t sink, and they kept holding to the edge, but at least they were in water that was theoretically over their heads.

Now to turn theory into practice. Gently but firmly disengaging their clutching fingers from the pool’s rim, Doug shoved each of them away toward the middle. As buoyant as Macy’s parade floats, they drifted in the middle of the pool, blinking at him through their glass masks.

“Fine,” Doug told them, standing at the edge of the pool. “Mouthpiece in mouth. Are you breathing through your mouthpieces?”

They nodded. Above the water, they were happy to use scuba air.

“Fine,” Doug said. “Now we’ll test another part of the equipment. Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen. Each of you, lift your left arm. You know the silver button on that control there? Fine. Press it.”

Trustingly, they pressed it. Astounded, they sank.

Doug looked down through the water at their shifting swaying images. They were standing on the bottom of the pool, staring at each other in horror and shock. At this point, they would either panic and have to be rescued, in which case everybody could go home because the whole idea was impossible, or they would learn to
breathe.
Doug watched, and waited.

Bubbles. First from John, then from Andy. Bubbles; they were breathing.

Doug smiled, conscious of that rare swell of pride and accomplishment that teachers attain all too seldom, and a voice behind him screamed, “
AAAKKK! Spaceman! Don’t move! Don’t move!
”

Doug about jumped into the pool. He did jump, but in a circle, landing to face Billy Pohlax, Officer William Pohlax, the beat cop who wasn’t supposed to be around this area for at least another half hour, but who was in this school, in the doorway to this very room, not twenty feet from the pool, shakily pointing a gun in Doug’s general direction. Billy was so obviously terrified, so out of control, that his gun could surely go off at any second.

Doug cried, “Billy! Billy, it’s me, Doug!”

“Don’t move, don’t move!” Fear, fortunately, was keeping Billy way back in the doorway, where he couldn’t see the people inside the pool.

Doug froze. “I just want to show you my face, Billy. Remember me? Doug Berry?”

“Doug?” Billy’s trembling perceptibly eased.

Doug risked lifting his hands to his head, removing the mask and mouthpiece, showing his white face to Billy’s white face.

And Billy sagged with relief, saying, “Jeez, Doug, I thought you were a man from Mars or something. They had that movie
Cat People
on the box the other night, d’jever see that?”