"I didn't know. I just thought I'd."

"Go on, then." Finn grinds his teeth and the muscles in his jaw bunch. "Go on and put it all on hers. Every bit." The words come out of him as if he is deflating all at once.

"Yes sir." The proprietor's eyes brighten. "That'll go some way."

"I'll not have her obliged."

"That's a fine policy."

"I don't require your say-so."

"I need more customers think like you."

"Good luck."

Finn leaves with the same next to nothing in his pocket that he came in with and a freshly discovered debt on top of it. As he walks with his empty sack down the lane and back to his skiff he weighs in his mind the relative merits of the two courses open to him: to never visit this place again and thus remain beholden but aloof, or to come back straightaway and pay off the debt with all of the speed and dignity that he can muster. He has not yet decided between the two when he arrives at the skiff and casts off, and he has still not decided when he realizes that thanks to her he is now shy the money he had hoped to spend on whiskey.

BLISS'S SHACK LIES so deep in the woods as to be nearly past locating for those with ordinary sight. He labors in the open air down a path hidden behind that disreputable falling-down ruin with none but his fire and his boiler and his ranks of empty jugs for company, and he stores what he produces God knows not where. The surrounding forest serves as his guardian, for not so much as a rabbit can move among its dense overwhelming greenery without the old blind bootlegger taking note.

Finn has heard the way to this spot described as often and as erringly as one might hear tell of the path to glory, and from these thousand fragmentary and conflicting reports he has triangulated an idea of his own. He is not too far wrong, as it happens, and so after fighting his way through a mile of tangled underbrush and recovering from a few false turnings he detects from up ahead the unmistakable mingled aromas of fire and forty-rod.

Bliss when Finn spies him is hunched close by his works in a broad clearing burnt barren as a holy place, head tilted and sniffing the air, his right hand atwitch on the ivory handlepiece of a pistol.

"You Bliss."

"Step no further."

"I won't." Raising his hands and then seeing his mistake and dropping them again.

"Now go on back the way you come."

"I can't."

"Git." Bliss swivels his head in tiny increments, and when he has satisfactorily located Finn he raises his gun and points its barrel toward the unseen man's unseen heart with a preternatural accuracy.

"I'm lost." From where he stands Finn can see the man's eyes, one of which points off in a direction that seems riverward but may be otherwise. The other one has a gray glaucous film over it, as thick and obscurant and mysteriously portentous as a caul.

"Lost, are you?" Bliss creaks out an appreciative laugh but refuses to unaim the gun. "I've heard that before."

"I ain't no liar."

"'Course you are. No man ever found this place by accident."

"I'll grant you."

"Not even me."

"It ain't easy."

"Damn right."

"I been lost since noon."

"Bullshit."

"I have."

"I won't hold it against you."

"You mean happening on you like I done."

"I mean lying about it."

"I ain't lying."

"You are. But since you're so intent on it I just might reconsider." For there is something about Finn's conviction that he admires.

"Either way," concludes Finn. "It don't matter to me."

"How about a little taste of my corn?" Lowering the pistol. "Just to speed you on your way."

The old man's stuff is as clear as kerosene and nearly as poisonous, the kind that gives certain strains of bootleg whiskey the reputation for taking a strong man down at a distance of forty rods. Finn learns in a hurry that Bliss enjoys the taste and potency of it as much as anyone, perhaps more, and the riverman is wily enough to use such weakness to his advantage.

"So how'd you find me here?" the old man asks after he has mellowed some under the influence of his own drink.

"I got lost," Finn confesses again.

"Tell the truth."

"I got lost. But it weren't for lack of trying."

Bliss wheezes in a good-natured way. "Who told you?" He names three quarters of the barmen and trading post operators in the region, at places as low as Dixon's and Smith's and as elevated as the Liberty and Adams hotels. He names them in miraculous alphabetical order, a fact that Finn would not notice even if he could.

"Nobody told."

"You can level with me," says Bliss. "Whoever it was, I swear I'll do no more than cut his balls off. Next time I see him." As if to indicate the potency of this promise he tilts his head downward and his one dead filmy eye travels straight from Finn's visage to his vulnerable crotch.

"There's lots of rumors," says Finn. "I ignored every one of them and ended up here."

"But you do like your whiskey."

"I do." Helping himself to the jug and refilling Bliss's portion too.

After a while they bank the fire and leave the clearing and walk together to micturate in the deep woods. Then they adjourn to a pair of rockers on the old man's porch, all of which gives Finn the opportunity to make a study of the premises. The sun is well down toward the horizon before he brings up his name and his predicament and his inability to pay more than a few pennies for the whiskey he's drunk.

"Judge Finn's boy. So you're the bad seed."

"I reckon."

Bliss puffs himself up and intones the father's full name as if reading it from an engraved card for introduction before royalty. "James Manchester Finn."

"You do know the sonofabitch."

"Ever since I was born, or thereabouts."

Finn gives a sly smile whose contribution to the tonality of his answer goes not unnoticed. "He never mentioned you."

"The world ain't a fair place."

"So they say."

"But I knew him. Since I was a boy."

Finn sips whiskey. "The Judge weren't never a boy."

"Neither was I."

"Maybe not."

The two sit listening to the night come on. At the margin of the woods a flurry of brown bats drops one by one from their hidden haunts to pursue one another riverward, and thus Finn recalls the way home or at least the direction.

"So you're the one took up with that nigger woman."

"I reckon I am." He asks no question but Bliss can hear his curiosity in the silence as clearly as if he had given it voice.

"People talk, is all."

"What people."

"I ain't saying."

"What do they say."

"You know."

"I reckon I do."

Bliss stops rocking and squares his odd gaze at Finn. "Me, I say what business is it of theirs."

"Amen."

Bliss lowers a fingertip into his jar to assess the level of whiskey in it, finds it satisfactory, and resumes rocking. "A person's color don't matter to me. I never gave a tinker's damn for it one way or the other."

"It matters."

"You're the one to talk, ain't you."

"You wouldn't think."

"You wouldn't. But I reckon you'd know after all."

Finn sits and rocks and speaks not.

"Now don't take me wrong," says Bliss, trusting in the defensive powers of his hospitality and his supply of forty-rod and even perhaps his long-dead connection to the Judge, come to that, "but I ain't never had no nigger gal on me."

"Your loss," says Finn.

"Is that a fact."

Finn nods in the dark.

"I had a feeling."

"You was right."

"Then it's like they say." Not wanting to go any farther along this path. Finn will be back to buy whiskey and keep him company, he can be certain of that. And there will be time then to discover each other's secrets.

"I reckon it's like they say," says Finn. "It must be, for all the trouble."

When they are both sufficiently drunk the bootlegger provides his visitor with instructions for finding his way home, instructions that can be followed reliably only in utter darkness or by a blind man fully undistracted. Finn does well enough with them because such dim light as he can make out from the sky overhead is more than offset by his inebriation, and thus he can proceed methodically and slowly with his attention undiluted by sight. When he reaches the river at last he seeks out his skiff, which he has missed by less distance than he had feared. The things he bought for the woman at Smith's are gone, either stolen by men or eaten by scavenging animals, but this he does not notice until he ties up beneath the house and by then he does not care.

"YOU FORGOT THE FLOUR."

This is how he wakes up, this and a head that feels as if Bliss had fired that pistol of his straight through it and then dragged him here to this bed and left him bleeding in it to die. She is calling to him up the stairs, calling to him as if he can do anything about her lack of flour from where he lies in his bed of pain.

"You forgot the flour."

Silence.

"There'll be no biscuits today."

This suits him fine as long as she goes quiet for a while in the bargain, which she does.

Later he troops down the stairs and plants himself at the table and stares across the water with a headful of poison. The coffee tastes vile but he drinks it boiling until he begins to sweat and then he drinks some more and when the pot is empty he goes outside to relieve himself. All the while the woman and the boy eye him as they would watch a snake, and maintain a safe distance.

"You go on run them lines," he says to the boy when he returns. "I didn't get to them last night."

"All by myself?" The boy is as thrilled as he is uncertain.

"I said you go."

The boy does, gladly and with some pride in the newfound role into which he can feel himself maturing. The woman says nothing as he leaves. She has no fear for his safety nor doubt that he will produce a fine catch, but like any mother she desires all the same to advise caution and invoke good luck. Yet the chill that the man has brought into the room suggests that they will all be better served if she permits the boy to go about his father's business without remark, and so she sits in silence. He is barely down the stairs when his father begins.

"There weren't money for flour once I begun paying your debts."

"My debts."

"Weren't money for flour nor nothing else. And we're still in the hole."