SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (26 page)

“I ain’t seen anything like it either. I
don’t know what to make of that symbol.”

“I was boating with my daddy that summer,”
she said, “and there was a break in the towpath above Cabin John.
It took them all day to repair it and we got stuck behind a line of
boats waiting to get down through Seven Locks. We knew we was going
to be there for most of the day, so Daddy let me and George go off
to play after we finished taking care of the mules.

“We found a trail down to the river from the
towpath…they’re not too close together at Seven Locks. So we
followed it to a line of huge rocks in the woods near the water’s
edge. The boulders were almost as tall as the trees. While George
was trying to climb, I walked along the base of the rocks on a bank
that got narrower as you went along. Then the rocks met the river,
so I had to turn around. Walking back I saw a small, flat stone
lying against the roots of a tree on the riverbank. It was tangled
up in fishing line and tied to a piece of driftwood. When I picked
it up and untangled it, I guessed it was a pendant or part of a
necklace. I thought that it must have been made for someone and
then lost.”

“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.

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.