Their table looked out on the empty two-lane highway. Michael ordered coffee with his ham and eggs and got up to buy the whiskey at the adjoining bar.
The bar had eight or nine customers, half of them middle-aged men, burnt-up drunk, unhealthy looking and ill disposed. There were also two Indian youths with ponytails and druggy, glittery eyes. One had a round, apparently placid face. The other was lean and edgy, his features set in what at first appeared to be a smile but wasn't. Michael stood at the take-away counter, resolutely minding his own business. Then the barmaid, whom he had not seen at first, came out from some storage space behind the mirror and the stacked bottles and the pigs'-feet jars.
The barmaid looked only just old enough to serve liquor. She had dark hair and brilliant blue eyes evenly set She was tall, wearing black cowgirl clothes, a rodeo shirt with little waves of white frosting and mother-of-pearl buttons. Her hair was thick and swept to one side at the back.
"Say," she said.
"Do you have Willoughby's today?"
"Could be we do," she said. "Like, what is it?"
Michael pondered other, different questions. Could he drive out every Friday and Saturday and have a Friday and Saturday kind of cowboy life with her? But not really. But could he? Would she like poetry with a joint, after sex? Not seriously. Idle speculation.
"It's whiskey," he told her. He thought he must sound impatient. "It's unblended Irish whiskey. You used to carry it."
"Unblended is good, right? Sounds good. What you want."
"Yes," Michael said. "It is. It's what I'm after."
"If it's good we mostly don't have it," she said.
And he was, as it were, stumped. No comeback. No zingers.
"Really?" he asked.
Someone behind, one of the young Indians it might have been, did him in falsetto imitation. "Really?" As though it were an outrageously affected, silly-ass question.
"But I can surely find out," she said.
When she turned away he saw that her black pants were as tight as they could be and cut to stirrup length like a real cowgirl's, and her boot heels scuffed but not worn down from walking. He also saw that where her hair was swept to the side at the back of her collar, what appeared to be the forked tongue of a tattooed snake rose from either side of the bone at the nape of her neck. A serpent, ascending her spine. Her skin was alabaster.
He heard voices from the back. An old man's voice raised in proprietary anger. When she came back she was carrying a bottle, inspecting it.
"What do you know?" she said. "Specialty of the house, huh? You Irish?"
Michael shrugged. "Back somewhere. How about you?"
"Me? I'm like everybody else around here."
"Is that right?"
"Megan," one of the smoldering drunks at the bar muttered, "get your butt over this way."
"George," Megan called sweetly, still addressing Michael, "would you not be a knee-walking piece of pigshit?"
She took her time selling him the Willoughby's. Worn menace rumbled down the bar. She put her hand to her ear. Hark, like a tragedienne in a Victorian melodrama.
"What did he say?" she asked Michael, displaying active, intelligent concern.
Michael shook his head. "Didn't hear him."
As he walked back to the diner section, he heard her boots on the wooden flooring behind the bar.
"Yes, Georgie, baby pie. How may I serve you today?"
Back in the restaurant, their table had been cleared.
"He ate your eggs," Norman said, indicating Alvin Mahoney.
"Naw, I didn't," Alvin said. "Norm did."
"Anyway," Norman said, "they were getting cold. You want something to take along?"
Michael showed them the sack with the whiskey.
"I'll just take this. I'm not hungry." When he tasted his untouched coffee, it was cold as well.
Beyond the Hunter's Supper Club, the big swamp took shape and snow was falling before they reached the cabin. They followed the dirt road to it, facing icy, wind-driven volleys that rattled against the windshield and fouled the wipers. As they were getting their bags out of the trunk, the snow's quality changed and softened, the flakes enlarged. A heavier silence settled on the woods.
As soon as it grew dark, Michael opened the Willoughby's. It was wonderfully smooth. Its texture seemed, at first, to impose on the blessedly warm room a familiar quietude. People said things they had said before, on other nights sheltering from other storms in past seasons. Norman Cevic groused about Vietnam. Alvin Mahoney talked about the single time he had brought his wife to the cabin.
"My then wife," he said. "She didn't much like it out here. Naw, not at all."
Michael turned to look at Alvin's worn, flushed country face with its faint mottled web of boozy angiomas. Then wife? Alvin was a widower. Where had he picked up this phrase to signal the louche sophistication of la ronde? Late wife, Alvin. Dead wife. Because Alma or Mildred or whatever her obviated name was had simply died on him. In what Michael had conceived of as his own sweet silent thought, he was surprised by the bitterness, his sudden, pointless, contemptuous anger.
He finished his glass. At Alvin's age, given their common vocabulary of features, their common weakness, he might come to look very much the same. But the anger kept swelling in his throat, beating time with his pulse, a vital sign.
"Well," Norman said, "all is forgiven now."
Michael, distracted by his own thoughts, had no idea what Cevic was talking about. What was forgiven? All? Forgiven whom?
In the morning they helped Alvin secure the cabin. His twelve-foot aluminum canoe was in a padlocked shed down the hill. Getting the canoe out, they found the padlock broken, but the burglars, in their laziness and inefficiency, had not managed to make off with the boat. One year they had found the bow full of hammered dents. Still working in darkness, they placed the canoe in its fittings atop the Jeep.
A blurred dawn was unveiling itself when they reached the stream that would take them into the islands of the swamp. There was still very little light. Black streaks crisscrossed the little patch of morning, the day's inklings. They loaded the canoe by flashlight. Glassy ice crackled under their boots at the shore's edge.
Michael took the aft paddle, steering, digging deep into the slow black stream. He kept the flashlight between the seat and his thigh so that its shaft beams would sweep the bank. Paddling up front, Norman also had a light.
"Nice easy stream," Alvin said. "I keep forgetting."
"It speeds up a lot toward the big river," Michael said. "There's a gorge."
"A minor gorge," Norman said.
"Yes," said Michael, "definitely minor."
"But it gets 'em," said Cevic. "Every spring they go. Half a dozen some years." He meant drowned fishermen.
Yards short of the landing, Michael picked up the flashlight, lost his gloved grip and sent it tumbling over the side. He swore.
They circled back, and riding the slight current got a look at the flashlight resting on the bottom, lighting the weedy marbled rocks seven, maybe eight feet below.
They circled again.
"How deep is it?" Alvin asked, and answered his own question. "Too deep."
"Too deep," Michael said. "My fault. Sorry."
"No problem," Norman said. "I've got one. And it's getting light."
By the time they offloaded, the day had composed itself around the skeletal woods, each branch bearing a coat of snow. They fanned out from the river, within sight of the glacial rock face that would be their rendezvous point. Each man carried a pack of provisions, a gun, a compass and a portable stand. Michael made for high ground, following a slope north of the rock. The snow was around four inches deep. He saw quite a few deer tracks, the little handprints of raccoons, the hip-hop brush patterns of rabbits. There were others, too, suggesting more exciting creatures, what might be fox, marten or wolverine.