Bay of Souls Read Free

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