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half-filled with a liquid about the color of gasoline.
    â€œThere’s a washroom in the back if you want to get cleaned up, mister, but you look like you could use a little stiffener first.” Evan uncorked the bottle. The raw scent of
alcohol was potent on the morning air. Moonshine.
    He half filled the cup. Wycherly took the bottle away from him and filled it to the brim, then picked up the cup. The main ingredient of shine was usually cane sugar—sometimes with the addition of arsenic or lead—and Wycherly could smell a candy-like sweetness hovering on the surface of the liquor smell.
    He felt every cell in his body contract with the craving, and his hand shook slightly as he raised the cup to his lips, drinking down the caustic, overproof spirit as though it were water.
    The panicky clutch of deprivation receded as the seductive, toxic warmth of the drink spread through him. The shine seared his mouth and throat, as if it were in fact the gasoline it so resembled, and its arrival in his stomach masked any hunger pangs Wycherly might have felt with a sullen hurting burn. When he was sure it would stay down, Wycherly drew a deep breath. Evan was regarding him with some respect.
    â€œLast time a flatlander tried that, he fell over backwards and we had to sweep him out with the sawdust,” Evan said.
    Wycherly smiled faintly.
    â€œI’m Wycherly Musgrave,” he said, as if that were some sort of explanation. One cup of whiskey was far from enough to get him drunk—to make him drunker, he scrupulously amended—but it had taken the edge off the demons. “And I’d like to buy a bottle of whatever that is, if you’ve got any to sell.”
    Evan looked thoughtful. “I guess you’d have to talk to Mal Tanner about that. All we sell here in the store is beer.”
    â€œI’ll take a couple of six-packs then.” Wycherly laid a ten on the counter. “Thanks for the drink. And now I guess I’d better wash up.”
    An hour or so later Wycherly was sitting on the front porch of the general store gazing out at downtown Morton’s Fork.
    The morning’s loiterers had vanished, and no one had come to replace them. No policeman came, either, and
Wycherly began to believe that none would come. He’d escaped his well-deserved punishment—from the laws of Man as well as the laws of physics—one more time.
    Wycherly felt like an actor playing a part. He was wearing a painfully-new pair of work pants bought in the store to replace his shredded and bloody pair and was working his way slowly through the six-pack of beer. He was nicely insulated now, in momentary charity with the world. His aches and pains were a distant thing, as long as he didn’t move too much.
    There was no blinding revelation, no sudden stroke of insight, but it slowly occurred to Wycherly that as he looked at Morton’s Fork he was looking at his last chance.
    He glanced down at the beer in his hand, then at his wristwatch. It was a little after ten o’clock in the morning. He’d totaled his car and then drunk six ounces of moonshine and five cans of Rolling Rock, and now he was probably going to drink five more. And he knew just as he knew that the sun would eventually set and rise again that he’d go on drinking—and driving, too, if he could get his hands on another car.
    And it would kill him. If not next time, then the time after that.
    Wycherly resented that. He resented it as much as if it were something someone else was making him do. Automatically, he drained the can in his hand, and then looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. Beer, the breakfast of champions.
    Could he stop? He’d never thought seriously about it before. Wycherly had been dried out by experts at expensive clinics in three countries. He’d been stopped a dozen times—but could he stop himself? He could phone home and—
    The image of his parents’