He slipped the tasting flask to Penner, who gulped a surreptitious slug and passed it along. Penner shuffled the deck in his meaty hands, let Cy cut, and dealt the next hand.

***

Sitting on the porch swing at Charlie Pennyfield’s house, Lee and Katie finished the sausages and potato salad he had heated up at the lockhouse. Lee knew Charlie wouldn’t be back to tend Pennyfield Lock until the coal boats started running early next week, and he considered dinner on Charlie’s porch a perquisite of his commitment to keep an eye on the big house until he had to leave with the Emorys. He’d brought the oil lamp from the shed down to the porch this afternoon, along with the pencil he’d used for marking the poles, since maybe Katie would tell him something that he needed to write down. Like where to meet her in the weeks ahead. And he’d moved the boat poles to the other side of the porch, which was now uncluttered and offered a nice view of Pennyfield Lock as the last light receded from the sky.

Lee got up to retrieve the cherry pie; when he returned to the porch swing, Katie had already produced Cy’s leather-holstered flask from her jacket pocket. She untwisted the cap and passed it to Lee. “One of the advantages of having a corrupt brother,” she said.

He rotated it toward the lamp to read the inscription “C.F. Elgin” on the holster. “So I see,” he said. He took a swallow and coughed. “Tastes familiar. Does Cy know my cousins?”

“If the Emorys are your cousins, then I’m afraid so,” Katie said. He smiled ruefully and nodded, handing her the flask. She knocked back an effortless shot.

“I don’t have plates for the pie,” Lee said, “just forks and a knife. We can eat slices directly from the tin.”

“That suits me fine. When it comes to food, I’m a simple girl.”

“But when it comes to other things, you’re not so simple?”

She raised her fork and bit down into the sweet cherry filling, then wiped her lips with her fingers. “That’s right.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not always the person that people expect me to be.”

Lee chewed thoughtfully. “So you have a mysterious side?”

“Not mysterious,” she said, slicing off another piece and licking the fork clean. “Maybe unconscious. Or wild. Sometimes I do things without knowing why.”

“You don’t look unconscious or wild,” Lee said. He put the tin down and reached under the porch swing for their portrait at Great Falls, which he removed from its folder and angled toward the light. Katie leaned in to study it with him and he felt her hair brush his shoulder as her warmth and scent electrified the air. “You look very thoughtful and civilized.”

Katie laughed. “My mother taught me how to have my picture taken.”

“Did she teach you how to take care of it? You should always write a date and place on the back, so your grandchildren will know how pretty you were when you were young.” He felt sweat prickle on his forehead as his pulse accelerated again.

“Grandchildren! I think it will rain frogs before I ever have grandchildren!”

“Just the same…” he said, retrieving the pencil he’d brought from the shed. The short stroll across the porch cooled his forehead and let his heartbeat subside. He returned to the swing and took the photo from Katie, balancing it atop the envelope on his knees. On the back in a bottom corner he carefully wrote:

R. L. Fisher and K. Elgin at Great Falls

March, 1924

“Now after it rains frogs, you’ll have something to show your grandchildren.”

“I’ve never been too worried about the distant future,” Katie said. She took another sip from the flask and passed it to Lee, then looked him in the eyes and placed her hand squarely on his knee. “I’m more interested in what happens now.”

He tilted back a healthy swig and the whiskey carved a channel of heat into his chest as the prickly warmth reappeared on his brow. His right arm drifted up the back of the porch swing and his fingers curled to rest on her shoulder. His penis flopped upright against his trousers, looking for clarification. He stole a glance at her face as she sat beside him; her lips were parted and her breathing shallow with anticipation, but her eyes were focused far away.

***

Cy’s high-water mark came sometime around 9:00, after which the cards began to slip away from him. His high-ranking pairs were undermined by Hillis’s eights and threes in one hand and by Penner’s sevens and sixes in another. Later his bluff was called. From twelve dollars to nine to four to zero, his winnings were pulled out to sea by an ebbing tide. By the time Zimmerman wandered over to the table he was underwater, trying with hand after hand to get back to the surface. He still had nineteen dollars and change left, but that included the twelve he’d brought with him. So tonight he’d effectively sold seven pints of whiskey at a loss. And he would need every one of his nineteen remaining dollars to pay the Emorys tomorrow.

Zimmerman appeared from the ether and sat down in the empty chair. He introduced himself to Hillis and Penner, almost without saying a word. Cy cast him an infinitesimal nod. Thin fingers of gray hair arched back from Zimmerman’s pigment-speckled forehead and shorter tufts sprouted from his ears. His eyes were a color that might once have been blue but through the years had drained away; they hung suspended in shallow wells, surrounded by a sea of wrinkles. Uninterested in the flow of cards, he leaned back in his chair and rested his forearms on the table. His oversized hands were spare and bent, as if they’d performed years of physical labor before eroding into sinew and bones, and the ring finger on his left hand was missing above the knuckle. Zimmerman glanced occasionally at Cy or Hillis or Penner as if he were making a concerted effort to reel in his focus and size up each man in turn, but between these halting attempts his gaze unwound from the table and the lights of the patio and spun out into the night, hovering in the darkness that shrouded the canal and the river beyond.

Cy won a hand, recovering halfway to breakeven. He had twenty-one dollars now and the surface was within reach. With twenty-four, he told himself, he could go home without having lost anything. He lost the next two hands and sunk back a little. The pots were diminishing as Hillis grew protective of his winnings and Penner grew tired. Cy shot a glance at each. Not enough whiskey in them to keep them at the table. His hip throbbed in rhythm with the night. He won the next hand after forcing the betting higher than Hillis or Penner wanted. Twenty-two dollars now.

“I’m out,” Hillis said, gathering his bills and coins and rising from his chair. Shaking off his torpor, Penner followed Hillis’s lead. “Me too. Not my night.”

“Maybe tomorrow night, Frank,” Hillis said. “You doing business tomorrow, Cy?”

“Could be. You buying again?”

Hillis chuckled and shook his head. “I’m not quite up to a pint a day. But you should be able to find some sightseers and cityfolk out here on a Saturday night. Maybe you’ll feel like playing a few hands afterward.”

“Maybe,” Cy grumbled. His eyes met Zimmerman’s and they rose slowly from the table.

***

Reclining against Lee’s shoulder on the porch swing, Katie turned to kiss him lightly on the lips. “It’s late,” she said. “I have to go.”

Her words swam into his dream before he opened his eyes. He lifted his head from the back of the swing and the floor spun a few degrees in the flickering light. He reached for the armrest and the seat as he tried to regain his equilibrium. Katie was standing in front of him now, straightening her dress. He tried to get up and the whiskey steered him back onto the swing. He pulled his feet beneath him and tried again.

“Are you alright?” she said. This time he managed to stand.

“I’m OK. A little tight, I guess.” He saw Cy’s flask on the porch swing and picked it up. It was empty, and he remembered Katie offering him the last sip a while ago. “Washington County whiskey…” he said, squinting and handing her the flask. “Don’t forget this. Come, I’ll walk you home.” But he could hear that his words were uneven and slurred.