SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (27 page)

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.

“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.”