“Maybe it was made for you. Or maybe it was lost so you could find it.” He took the opportunity to gaze at the pendant resting against her chest, just above the swell of her breasts. “It’s yours now, anyway. I think it looks nice on you.”

Katie smiled again, her lips slightly parted. He thought he saw her eyes mist over but they cleared quickly. She stood up abruptly and stretched her arms overhead, then brought them together over her stomach. “Well now that it’s past sunset, I’m getting hungry! Did you remember to find us some dinner?”

“Let’s go see,” Lee said. They returned to the towpath and swung downstream.

***

The purple sky was bleeding to black as Tom stopped the mules at Widewater, about a mile below the Great Falls Tavern. Kevin tossed him the lines and he tied the scow to trees near the edge of the towpath. The Canal Company wouldn’t be running coal down to Georgetown for a few more days yet, so they didn’t have to worry about barges trying to get around them during the night. The repair scows were done with this level and were working out of Great Falls to Seneca and beyond. And those crews only worked during the day anyway.

After the mules had been fed and watered, Tom led them a few feet into the Bear Island woods and left them in the small corral where they’d spent the night on the way downstream. A crescent moon hung in the night sky over the dark skin of Widewater as he returned to the scow. He crossed the fall-board and ducked into the cabin, where Kevin had lit the lamp and was stirring a pot of beef stew on the stove.

“You thinking about playing a few hands at the Tavern?” he said. He sat down on the lower bunk and began tossing his knife and catching it by the handle as it spun. Kevin interrupted his stirring to pour himself a shot of whiskey from the jug.

“Hell, no,” he said. “We got too much money on board to walk away from the boat, even if we lock the cabin. We don’t need no more paper anyway, and we got more whiskey here than you’ll ever find at Great Falls. You and me can play cards here. I’ll even try not to whup you this time.”

Tom flashed a crooked smile and his obsidian eyes glittered. “Keep talking,” he said, ‘cause I been setting you up. You’re about to take a dive.”

Chapter 21

Unwinding By Starlight

Friday, March 28, 1924

Cy dragged the last dollop of mashed potatoes across his plate, accumulating stray morsels of shepherds pie. When the colored girl came, he asked for coffee. About a buck for coffee and dinner, he thought. That was the price of doing business at Great Falls Tavern. Five pints sold so far and two left, since he’d had to turn one into a tasting flask. The damn Englishmen didn’t know him, so that was what it took to get them to buy two pints, after they finally came around.

Before that Clint Hillis and Frank Penner had come by, and both bought without needing a taste. They worked on one of the repair crews and remembered Cy from last season. They had gone back to their camp for dinner, but said they was planning to return later to play cards. No harm in joining ‘em, Cy thought. They might bring a friend. Customer relations was good for business.

The colored girl brought his coffee. He nodded and waited for her to leave before surveying the brick patio. The other two tables were empty again. He pulled out the tasting flask and splashed a finger of whiskey into his coffee, then stirred in the cream and sugar. The shepherds pie and shots of whiskey were kneading an analgesic warmth into the knots of nerve and muscle in his hip. He stood up to stretch and transfer his weight from one leg to another, and the pain receded partway into its shell. His fingers stretched the skin beneath his eyes.

What was Harriet doing right now, he wondered. On a mild Friday night in the first full week of spring, the streetlights of Philadelphia would draw her out into the evening like a moth to flame. That his ex-wife was better off without him, he had little doubt. After his injury, and after he left the Naval Yard to hobble around their apartment while sifting his limited options for less arduous work, he had served as a constant reminder of the constraints and obstacles that life could arbitrarily impose. Harriet had spent her life believing she was destined to pursue a bright line of opportunity and fortune that stretched to the horizon, and that obstacles to that pursuit could be sidestepped or cast off. And she had cast Cy off when his misfortune spun away from her bright line. The path to his horizon had grown shorter and darker during recent years and now stretched no further than Cumberland or Georgetown. And the slow current in the artery that connected those endpoints offered him predictable days of subsistence and pain.

Clint Hillis appeared on the patio, coming around the corner from the entrance. He spotted Cy and raised a hand in greeting as Frank Penner followed him to Cy’s table. “A bit quiet here tonight,” he said, casting his eyes at the empty chairs. Hillis was hatless and lean, a few inches shorter than Cy, with a weathered face and an auburn mustache that defied the graying hair on his head. Canal work can age a man quickly, Cy thought; Hillis was probably in his early 30s. His sleeves were pushed partway up his sinewy forearms, revealing the talons of an alighting Great War eagle tattooed beneath his right sleeve.

“It’s not too late,” Cy said. “I expect that will change.”

Hillis nodded, twisting one end of his mustache with his fingers. “Maybe so. Join us for a hand or two while business is slow?” Cy pushed a chair toward Hillis with his foot and the two men sat down.

Hillis passed a well-worn deck to Cy, who examined it and nodded his assent. Hillis called the game and the men threw their quarters into the pot. Penner shifted to align his broad waist with the table as the cards were dealt. Younger than Hillis and as tall as Cy, he had an unwhiskered, fleshy face that conveyed his affable demeanor. A drooping Stetson covered his bald scalp and his jaws always seemed to be grinding some invisible morsel of food. He had joined Hillis’s crew this season and taken readily to the card games that occupied many of their evenings.

The first hand went to Penner and the second to Hillis. A few hands later Cy drew a third jack, overcoming Hillis’s three sixes and Penner’s pairs. All three men bet heavily on this hand and scowls from Cy’s opponents reflected the sudden redirection of fortune. Hillis pushed up his sleeves and the tattooed war-eagle joined the game.

Cy gave back a few dollars before winning another high-stakes hand. After attributing his first large pot to luck, he began to reassess the game’s dynamics upon winning his second. He’d begun with about twenty dollars, including the proceeds from tonight’s whiskey sales. Now he had almost thirty. Hillis and Penner were average card players, like most of the men he ran into on the canal, and he had always considered himself an average player as well. Maybe he was better than that. Cards and whiskey traveled together, and maybe poker could be part of the equation that would allow him to break free of the canal’s limited horizons. Doing that required more money than he would earn as a boat captain. Gambling and whiskey might be useful means to an end, and that end was to escape this grinding, clawing life.

When the Englishmen returned to greet Cy with inebriated affection and acquire his last two pints “for a long automobile journey tomorrow,” the equation began to seem compelling. He’d left Swains a few hours ago with twelve dollars and eight pints, and he now had thirty-three dollars and half a tasting pint left. Along with his stash at Swains, he only needed nineteen to settle with the Emorys tomorrow. After paying them he’d be debt-free, with forty pints left in his second cask to sell on the run to Cumberland – assuming them new colored boys from Georgetown showed up on time, and that his boat was ready to go when the whole canal opened on Tuesday.