Chapter Twenty One

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 Delaney 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 Delaney 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. Delaney 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; Delaney 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.”

Delaney 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 Delaney with his foot and the two men sat down.

Delaney passed a well-worn deck to Cy, who examined it and nodded his assent. Delaney 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 Delaney 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 Delaney’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 Delaney. A few hands later Cy drew a third jack, overcoming Delaney’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. Delaney 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. Delaney 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 Delaney’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 Delaney 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 Delaney 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 Delaney 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 Delaney or Penner wanted. Twenty-two dollars now.

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

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

“Could be. You buying again?”

Delaney 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.

“Maybe I need to walk you home first!” She set the flask down on a table and put her hands on his upper arms. “Can you make it across the lock?”

“I’m fine.”

She guided him down the porch steps and onto the lawn, which was now wet with dew. Walking helped restore his equilibrium, and he was able to follow her across the planks.

“Ready to walk?”, he asked.

“It’s almost three miles. I can get to Swains on foot, but if you go with me, you’ll end up face-down in the water before you make it back here!”

“I can handle it. Just the thing to sober me up.” He could tell that his words were still slurred, and the dark surface of the canal tilted away from horizontal for a moment before realigning itself.

“Lee, you don’t look up to it. You should just climb the stairs and go to bed.”

“But it’s too far for you alone,” he said, unable to string the words together the way he wanted, “this late. Too far to walk alone this late.” Now he felt nauseated, so he rested his hands on his knees and took shallow breaths.

“Well then maybe I could ride to Swains. I could borrow your bicycle.”

Lee looked up with his hands still on his knees. “It’s Charlie’s,” he said between half-breaths. “But you could borrow it. I have a lock for it. As long as you lock it.” He straightened and tried to remember where he had left it after their sunset walk. “It’s locked to the tree.” Katie followed him to a tree on the far side of the lockhouse. “Can you ride it? It’s not too big?”

“I grew up riding boys’ bicycles,” she said. “That’s all my family ever had.”

“OK,” he said, still breathing shallowly. He fumbled around in his pocket for the small key, then used it to unlock the leg-irons. “You can put these in here for the ride,” he said, sliding them into the tool compartment. “Leave ‘em open. That way you can lock it to something at Swains.” He started to give her the key, but she deflected his hand.

“Keep the key. I won’t need it. That way you can unlock it yourself.” She smiled and gripped his upper arm again. “After you sleep this off, you can pick it up tomorrow at Swains. I’ll lock it to the canoe rack… on the berm, near the driveway. No one will notice it there.”

“OK,” he said, smiling weakly. He carried the bicycle the few steps to the towpath. Katie gathered the front of her dress with one hand and swung a leg over the top tube and tool compartment. She found her balance and put a foot up on the pedal.

“Gimme a kiss goodnight,” she said. He draped an arm around her shoulders and leaned forward to kiss her with his eyes closed and time unraveling. Katie pulled back from the kiss and studied him long enough to see his eyes reopen. She pushed off and pedaled into the night.

Flying down the towpath between the moonlit surfaces of the canal and the river, she lost herself. She was no one, knew no one, was heading nowhere but further into the darkness. Her dress was blown back into her legs by the wind but her coat and the steady pumping of her legs kept her warm. A looming shadow appeared in the canal -- Cy’s number 41 boat, tied to the berm and deserted -- and its familiar contours pulled her out of her trance. She was pedaling to Swains, where she was staying with Cy and Pete while they waited for the canal to open.

And then the lockhouse appeared as a pale shape hovering in the curving distance. Pete should be inside it, asleep by now, she thought. It must be close to midnight. Cy was probably still out at the Tavern or plodding his way home astride Jewel. She let the bicycle glide as she approached the lock, then carried it across on the planks.

The canoe rack was beyond the driveway to her left, so she wheeled it past the tethered canoe Pete had used to launch his stick armada. On the far side of the rack near the woods, she propped it against a post where it would be inconspicuous. The leg-irons had been rattling around inside the tool compartment throughout her ride, so she knew they were still there. She pulled them out, aligned the open cuffs on her palm, and closed her hand around the two upper C-arms. She walked back to the unlit lockhouse and around to the back, where the mules rested in a small corral abutting the driveway. One, two, three dark beasts -- so Cy and Jewel were still out. Still carrying the leg-irons, she circled to the front door and slipped inside.

Cy limped and Zimmerman shuffled from the Tavern patio around to the downstream end of the building opposite the entrance. They let their eyes adjust to the reduced light, then navigated to a black shape on the mottled lawn. It was a wooden trapdoor to a cellar beneath the Tavern, and Zimmerman seemed to know it was unlocked. He bent over and pulled the door open for Cy, who felt his way down the stairs into the darkness. The air in the cellar smelled like decaying leather and dust.

Zimmerman followed, then pulled a string hanging from the ceiling at the base of the stairs. A weak electric bulb cast a spectral light over the mid-sized room. Crates and chairs were stacked to varying heights along the concrete walls, with bedframes, tables, and other furniture clumped into piles in the middle. The far wall held a closed door, but Cy didn’t know or care where it led. He limped to a shapeless straw tick along the right-hand wall that was covered with an old blanket. An inverted dresser drawer had been placed on the floor beside it. He groaned as he sat down on one side of the tick and Zimmerman lowered himself onto the other side.

In the feeble light, Cy watched Zimmerman withdraw a small glass vial from his coat pocket and sweep the bottom of the inverted drawer clean with his hand. Without speaking, he opened the vial and tapped a coin-sized circle of white powder out onto the drawer. From his shirt pocket he pulled a curling square of heavy paper. He used an edge to sculpt the powder into two thin lines. When the lines looked symmetrical, he handed the paper to Cy.

Cy rolled it into a tube and placed one end against the nearest line of powder. He lowered a nostril to the other end and inhaled steadily, advancing the tube until the line was gone. He lifted his head, sniffed a few times, rubbed his nose, and handed the paper tube to Zimmerman, who inhaled the other line. Both men leaned back on the tick against the wall.

Cy felt his facial muscles relax. The incessant throbbing in his hip was gone, replaced now by an almost-comical itchiness dancing around his torso and legs. He yawned three times in the span of a minute but didn’t feel tired. Morphine had let him sleep and kept him sane in the months after he got hurt, and losing his prescription had been like losing a brother. But now heroin was a revelation. Much faster and much cheaper. And heroin made him feel that everything that held him back was an illusion. Money, property, women, pain. In reality everything was connected and all the levers were in his hands. No one out there at the Tavern saw it. No one on the canal saw it. But Zimmerman would know. He turned toward his provider for confirmation but Zimmerman was already tapping out another circle of powder on the drawer. He edged the circle into two lines and handed the paper square back to Cy.

After ingesting their second lines, they slouched back against the wall. Cy yawned again as the outline of an invisible network of gears that governed the world revealed itself. Now he felt a little tired. But he also knew that the design of the entire network was coded into an acorn that he held in his fist, and that he could use the acorn to accomplish his plans at any time. He yawned and let the acorn dissolve in a gesture of power and goodwill. He knew that another line from the vial could summon its return.

“Are you feeling better, my friend?” Zimmerman’s voice was raspy but musical.

“Much better. The way I’ve been waiting to feel.” Zimmerman nodded but didn’t reply. “Since I left Philadelphia,” Cy said, “I ain’t found a doctor who will prescribe me morphine. They all tell me I reached a time limit.”

“Morphine is too expensive,” Zimmerman said, “and you can’t find it anyway. The times have changed.” He closed his eyes and paused while Cy watched the omnipotent gears engage and spin. “It started with the Narcotics Act,” he continued. “Then there was the war. But some doctors… some pharmacists still understand.”

“E.S. Leadbeater,” Cy said. “In Alexandria. A pharmacist named Nelson gave me your name. They still sell to you?”

Zimmerman wheezed, shook his head. “I can’t say. But I can help you. When you pass through the area.”

“You should work further up the canal. You’d find other buyers. And you must know the territory. Nelson told me you boated on the canal long ago. That’s why he thought you’d be willing to meet me.”

“He’s right,” Zimmerman said. “That was one reason. But my boating years was decades ago. In the eighties. I boated until I was fifteen, then I was done.”

“You was still too young to work a real job. Why did you quit?”

“The canal closed down. That was 1889, the end of May. A flood wrecked the canal, same flood that killed Johnstown. The canal didn’t open again until ’91, and by that time I didn’t want no part of it.”

“You was seventeen by then. I guess you outgrowed it.”

Zimmerman stared ahead in silence, gnarled fingers interlaced across his worn gray shirt. Below wisps of hair, his high forehead displayed constellations of age spots. He turned slowly toward Cy. “No,” he said. “That wasn’t it. My daddy quit boating but there was other captains that wanted to take me on. The canal still accounted for most of the work in Sharpsburg.”

“Then what.”

“Something I saw,” Zimmerman said. “Two days before the flood.”

Cy looked puzzled. “Something on the canal? Too much mule shit?”

“I was on the towpath. By myself. Driving the team for my daddy’s boat. It was late at night, past midnight. We was boating fast that season -- we never tied up. Just switched teams at the locks. We was a light boat, on the level of the Log Wall. About halfway up to Widewater from Seven Locks.”

Cy scratched himself, nodded, yawned, keeping his eyes fixed on Zimmerman.

“This was a dark stretch. The woods was thick, with tall trees that ran downhill toward the river. No light reflecting -- you couldn’t see the river from the towpath. It was off somewhere beyond the trees.” He waved a hand to dismiss it. “But I noticed a light coming up in the woods. Couldn’t barely see it at first, since it was a long ways down the hill. It was just a kind of green or orange glow. First it would look green, then orange. Whatever made the light was still below us, out of sight. The mules had blinders, so they didn’t see it right away.”

Cy leaned back with his eyes closed and tried to visualize this segment of the canal. Like other boatmen, he didn’t like being out on the Log Wall level at night.

“The light started coming up the hill toward us,” Zimmerman said. “You could see it was getting brighter, moving uphill and upstream at the same time. There was a glow that was mostly steady, and then a brighter line that came and went, through the trees. The glow and the line was both moving in our direction. When the light was a hundred feet below us on the hillside, the colors started to change. Green, then orange. Yellow. Red. Then orange again.”

The lights staged their color progressions behind Cy’s closed eyes, and Zimmerman paused briefly to catch his breath. He rubbed a finger across the residual white powder on the drawer, then drew the finger across his yellowed teeth. He inhaled sharply through them before continuing.

“The night was warm, with only a little breeze, but it suddenly felt very cold to me. My skin tightened from the chill and my heart started to pound in my chest. The mules was getting agitated now too, ‘cause they could see the flickering light moving toward us through the woods. It was close enough now. I started to walk faster and tried to keep the mules pulling. My lead mule was getting spooked, so I walked in front of her to talk her down. Trying to get her eyes back on the towpath. She must of decided it was better not to look, ‘cause she started pulling straight again. And the second mule, he followed her lead.

“I got back beside them and turned toward the woods. My heart shot into my throat and I tried to scream, but I couldn’t make a sound. The glow and the bright line was right on us now, only twenty feet away in the trees. Moving upstream through the woods, alongside us. It was a person. A girl, probably about my own age, fifteen or sixteen, and she was glowing green from head to foot! I swear, there was green and gold sparks raining from her hair. She turned to look at me and I could see her blue glowing eyes. My heart was pounding faster than I ever felt before. Then my skin froze, ‘cause I saw her walk right through a thick tree as she tracked us upstream. Like a ghost. Then she passed through another tree, still looking right at me, and she started to turn orange. The sparks from her hair were changing color, too, turning red. She smiled at me and I could see her teeth.

“I closed my eyes ‘cause I was too afraid to look anymore. Then I was too afraid not to look, so I opened my eyes again. And she was still walking fast through the trees, but she had turned back downhill. Moving upstream but back down into the woods and away from us. I watched as she became a bright line again, then the line disappeared and there was just a glow. And then the glow faded below the rim of the hillside and it was dark again.

“I kept driving that night, on up to Six Locks, where we switched teams and I come on board. My daddy sent one of the older hands out to drive the next trick. I never mentioned it to him or the other hands and they never said anything about it to me. My daddy was steering and they was sleeping when it happened, and I don’t think anyone else saw it. To this day I don’t know what it was, or whether I imagined the girl. But when she smiled I heard her whisper she would come again to kill me, and I knowed that night that I was done with the canal.”

Cy opened his eyes, looked at Zimmerman, and yawned. The heroin was warming his chest, legs, and bones, and Zimmerman’s story was part of a mosaic unfolding around him. “How much for the rest?”

Zimmerman peered into the vial. “It’s half an ounce,” he said softly. “Twenty.”

Cy pulled out his roll of bills and counted. He peeled off two singles and handed Zimmerman the rest of the roll. Zimmerman passed him the vial and he put it in his pocket. They pushed themselves up from the straw tick and started for the stairs. There would be a reckoning of sorts with the Emorys, Cy figured, but that was for tomorrow. What was left of tonight was free of worry, pain, and fear. He followed Zimmerman up the cellar stairs.

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