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set his bottle of rye on the table and poured himself the first glass. Rye and Coke, cut one-to-one. He found Mud and Paul and joined them. Paul nodded and Ray clapped him on the back. The kid wasn’t so bad.
    Mud passed him a beer.
    â€”Guess I’m double fisting.
    â€”Ray, Kelly started eyeing you the second you walked in.
    â€”I like Kelly.
    â€”You should. She’s a coug. I’d hit that if I wasn’t married.
    Ray winked.
    â€”How much you had, Mud?
    â€”They call me Doctor Love.
    Ray shot the last of his rye and took a beer from the stash Mud had beside his chair. Paul sat smiling and mute; hisstack of empties was only half as big as Mud’s, but he was doing his best. Bunch of drunken idiots, the lot of them.
    Ray spent most of the evening trying to work up the courage to go talk to Kelly. The night wore on. Mud entertained the group with a story about bull riding in Kelowna under the name Texas Dunlop. Some cabinet guy tried to breakdance but slipped on a crushed beer can and twisted his wrist. At one point Mud leaned toward him, elbow in his ribs, and nodded at Kelly. She had gone to the liquor table and stood apart from everyone else.
    â€”Persistence beats resistance.
    â€”I’m not sure that applies.
    Mud nodded, sage-like. —Ray, it always applies.
    He joined Kelly at the liquor table. His rye was the least touched of all the booze there, still half-full. He lifted it and filled a plastic cup halfway and offered it to her. She took it. He filled his own and they stood, side by side, but not looking at nor talking to each other.
    â€”How’d it go after I drilled myself?
    â€”We’re not going to talk shop, are we?
    Ray shrugged, beaten. —Couldn’t think of a way to get started.
    She tapped the table with one finger and left it resting there. —Can you drive?
    He shook his head. —Not legally.
    â€”How’d you get here?
    â€”Illegally.
    She left her drink on the table and slunk to the exit. She stopped in the doorway, pressed to the frame, her Ushershirt visible through the cleft in her vest, and winked. Mud saw the wink – had to see the wink – and put on a go for it grin. When Ray looked back she had disappeared except for the tip of her hand. Her fingers waggled on the wood; the nails were chewed down. His ears went red, and not from the booze. He went out the door. Behind him, the guys gave a cheer.
    They walked to the beach because Ray couldn’t drive, and it was about as romantic as things would get, boozed as they were. It was darkening; the sky over the Purcells had turned a milky red. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. The frozen lake creaked, giant ice plates ground like earthquakes, once so loudly she jumped. They leaned against each other. He felt like a sixteen-year-old anxious to get laid. He stopped noticing things, tripped on tiny rocks and almost ate a mouthful of sand. A tree branch, bent and loose like a drunk’s weighty arm, took him straight in the chin. She laughed; he cursed and swatted.
    Their meandering took them to the far end of the beach where the sand terminated against a concrete wall. Above them loomed what remained of a wooden fort, weathered to a mottled rib cage lined with insulator’s plastic. A long time ago it was a ferry port, when people traded up and down the Sevenhead River. Ray used to party in it as a kid, had his first blowjob there, pressed into the corner with a bottle of rye in one hand and a fistful of denim jacket in the other, jeans drawn down past his ass.
    Kelly gestured at the fort.
    â€”I slept with a twenty-two-year-old there, last year.
    â€”Wish I could say the same.
    From her vest she produced a silver flask, held it flat in her palm with one thumb curled over the spout. She flicked her hair around to the other side of her head, showed off the curve of her neck, a mole perched on the cusp of the jugular.
    â€”It’s chocolate vodka.
    Ray let her