hangover. She stopped to look down, saw tiny fish darting in the dappled light. She sat up again and glided on the still green water. Trees dripped on her. She looked up and felt tiny cold splashes on her face.
There was no wind back here, only a distant whisper of the weather out there in the real world. She had passed over into a dream of stillness, of filtered, green light, glossy with a night’s worth of rain.
She rounded a bend and sniffed. There was a stench in the air. She remembered it from before, but it was worse this time, possibly because of the rain. And now she remembered what Jay had told her. All along the shore were tangled thickets of carrion flower. Thorny, green-stemmed, with heart-shaped leaves and beautiful blue berries. The stink attracted flies, apparently, which acted as pollinators.
Just what perfume’s supposed to do, she thought.
She dug her paddle in deep and scooted through the thicket. Rounding the next bend, she saw the bridge up ahead; there was a black half-ton parked right in front of it.
She dug the blade of her paddle into the sand and stopped her forward progress. She held her breath.
She saw no one around.
Quietly she pulled herself back until the kayak was invisible from the bridge. She hoped. She hid behind a veil of willow, listening and waiting.
A man appeared on the house side of the bridge. He was maybe in his fifties, but tall and wiry in shapeless farmer’s pants tucked into tall rubber boots that shone with water from fording the snye. He wore a faded shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing formidable forearms. His nose was hooked, under a craggy forehead, bristling with a healthy mat of gray eyebrows. His hair was thin, a gray sheen over the sun-dried dome of his skull. He had his hands in his pockets, and he was looking around, as if he had heard something.
With her hand grasping a thin branch of willow, Mimi inched her way back farther still, wishing the damn kayak wasn’t so damn bright.
Then suddenly there was a rustling in the thick bush beside her, and from out of nowhere a dog appeared and started barking at her like crazy, its whole body shaking with excitement.
“Clooney?” shouted the old man. “What is it, girl?”
And Clooney, a hound of some kind, took those words as command enough to splash through the stream to Mimi’s side, barking even louder.
Leaning away from the dog, Mimi lost hold of the branch and then of her balance, and before she knew it, the kayak flipped. She screamed and went under.
“Come!” shouted the man, who was splashing toward her, right down the middle of the snye. “Come here, girl!”
Clooney obediently abandoned her catch and bounded through the water toward her master, while Mimi struggled to get her legs out of the kayak.
“Jesus H. Christ!” she shouted.
“Lordy, Lordy, what have we here?” said the man as he reached down to offer her a hand. She clambered to her feet without him, soaked and swearing a blue streak, which only made the dog bark all the louder and dance around on the shore.
“Lordy, Lordy,” said the man again. There was a hint of laughter in his voice, which only made Mimi angrier.
“What the fuck are you doing here!” she shouted. Then she slipped on a rock and ended up once more in the drink.
“Whoa, hold on, lass, hold on,” the old fellow said, reaching out again to give her a hand. She slapped his hand away and was content, for the minute, to just sit there up to her chest in the snye.
His hand was huge and gnarled and strong. He wouldn’t budge, so she took it, reluctantly. Soon enough she was on her feet, sopping, undamaged, but seething mad.
She had swallowed some water and started coughing. The man, who was still holding her arm for support, now smacked her on the back, until she was able to free herself from him and stumble a few feet away to the bank.
Meanwhile, the man had grabbed the dog by the collar. Clooney was wagging her tail and looked anything but dangerous. She was a hunting dog, Mimi suspected, the color of a kindergarten kid’s paint palette, muddy gray- brown, and with splotches that looked like they had been finger-painted onto her pelt.
Clooney barked at her.
“I’m not a duck!” shouted Mimi.
Clooney barked again.
“You all right?” said the man. His voice reminded Mimi of a gate that needed greasing.
“I’m fine,” she snapped. She was rooting around in the snye for her running shoes. She had taken them off and they had fallen into the water, which was so stirred up she couldn’t see a thing.
“Clooney has a habit of sneaking up on her quarry,” said the man. “Don’t you, girl?”
Clooney barked and licked his face.
If this genial display was meant to endear the dog to Mimi, it failed. She had found her shoes, which she chucked into the long grass on the bank. She struggled out of her flotation device.
There.
She sniffed and wiped her hair back off her face, rubbed the water out of her eyes, and tried to stand up straight. When she looked at the stranger, he was ogling her chest. She crossed her arms, shivering from the chill.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
“The name’s Peters,” he said. “Stooley Peters, from up the road. Just came by to see the lad. Got him my bill for the snowplowing.”
“Snowplowing?”
The man nodded. “From last winter, eh? I done his drive for him.”
Right. Peters, the keeper of Paradise. What a laugh! She’d noticed the name on his mailbox when she was out jogging.
“I’m not much at the paperwork side of things,” he said. “Takes me a good long while, you know, to get around to it. What with the seeding and chores and such.”
“Jay’s on his way,” she said. “He should be here pretty soon.”
He nodded. “Good, then we can just wait and get to know one another.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Why don’t you just leave your bill in the mailbox.”
He scratched his chin. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said.
She maneuvered her way around the kayak, grabbing the towline in her fist, and splashed toward the bridge.
“Your shoes,” he said. He was behind her now and held her sopping running shoes in one meaty hand.
She reached out to get them and he handed them to her, though he didn’t let go right away, so that she had to tug to release them from his grip. Having a good old time, she thought.
Peters stepped onto the bank, dragging the dog with him. Clooney barked.
“And you, ” said Mimi to the dog, “can just shut up.”
“Boy,” said Peters, wagging his head. “You’re quite the snappish thing, aren’t you?”
She turned to him, pushing back a wing of hair from her eyes. “I’m a regular sweetheart, Mr. Peters, unless someone and his dog scare the shit out of me.”
“Well, we’re sure sorry about that, aren’t we, Clooney?”
Clooney wiggled and whimpered and jumped up to lick her master’s face again.
“Yeah, well, you’re not as sorry as me,” said Mimi. She had been keeping ahead of Peters, not wanting him staring at her breasts, which is what he seemed determined to do, as he kept pace with her along the bank.
Her headache was back with a vengeance. She felt like a fool. A wet fool.
“Around these parts,” said Stooley Peters, “we put a fair amount of stock in neighborliness. Maybe where you come from it ain’t the same.”
Mimi nodded. “Damn right. Where I come from, we shoot neighbors,” she said. It turned out to be a good mood breaker.
Peters slapped his knee and laughed, a dry, barely audible laugh. “But, honest now,” he said. “We look out for
