Kiss the Bridle, Bite the Bit

The lock at dusk held the river in place. Marlowe Halloway worked the grease cap off the gate winch and counted the tooth wear by feel, four grooves smooth, the fifth starting to catch. October had gone cold along the Cuyahoga’s old barge cut. Diesel from the last tourist boat still sat on the water in a film that broke apart when a carp rolled near the fender.

He heard the suitcase wheels before he saw her. The towpath gravel had a sound for bicycles and a sound for runners and a sound for something dragged. This was dragged. He wiped his hands on the rag tucked through his belt loop and stood.

She stopped at the downstream gate, a woman in a waxed coat the color of wet oak, one wheel of her suitcase stuck with leaves. She looked at the empty chamber, then at him.

“I need you to raise the gates.”

“No boat in the cut.”

“I know.”

Mars let the rag hang. The winch handle was still in his left hand. He set it down against the concrete and walked the catwalk to where she stood, because something in the way she said it made the walk feel required. Up close, her hair was pulled back with a plain elastic, the kind that leaves a mark on the wrist. Her boots had river mud above the soles, dried to a gray crust.

“Gates don’t raise for nothing,” he said. “Pressure differential. You lift both, you drain the pound upstream.”

“I need to see the water move.”

“Why?”

She unbuttoned one cuff and rolled it twice, then the other. The motion was practiced, unhurried. “Because I’m not sure it still will.”

Mars looked past her at the towpath, the sycamores going bare, the one light over the dry-dock shed already humming. No car. The last bus from Cleveland had stopped running to this stretch in September. He should have told her the lock closed at five. He should have asked where she came from. He said, “Where’s your car?”

“I don’t have one.”

“You walked from the station?”

“From the viaduct.” She nodded north. “Two miles.”

“With that suitcase.”

“It’s not heavy.”

The winch house smelled of gear oil and old rain. Mars pulled the chain for the work light and the bulb buzzed before it caught. He looked at the downstream gate, then at the river below it, flat and brown and moving just enough to show it wasn’t dead. “You’re not from here.”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know this cut.”

“I know water.”

She said it without smiling, and that was the first hook. Not a challenge, not flirtation. A fact offered the way a plumber offers a wrench. He found himself wanting to prove her wrong and wanting her to prove him wrong, both at once, and neither urge made sense.

“The gates are manual,” he said. “Takes eleven minutes to lift one. You want both, you’ll be here past dark.”

“I know.”

“And you’ll pay the fee.”

She reached into the pocket of the waxed coat and took out a folded bill. Twenty. She set it on the catwalk railing and put a stone on it from the gravel.

Mars picked up the winch handle. He fitted it over the nut and threw his weight into the first turn. The pawl clicked once. Twice. The gate began its slow rise, and water poured through the gap in a sheet that broke into rope-thick streams, and the sound filled the whole cut like a room full of static.

She watched without moving. Her hands stayed at her sides. When the upstream gate started to lift a few minutes later, she walked to the edge and looked down into the chamber where the water churned against the concrete walls. The work light caught her face from one side. Mars saw her lips move, but the water took the sound.

He finished the second gate and locked the pawls. The river was moving now, a live current through the chamber, and the smell of it rose, cold and mineral, with the dusk settling into the trees. She turned from the railing.

“Thank you.”

“You going to tell me what you were looking for?”

“No.”

She picked up her suitcase and walked toward the lock cottage, the one the county rented to seasonal workers and no one else. Mars stood on the catwalk with the winch handle in his hand and watched her go. The light from the shed reached only halfway down the path. She walked through it and out the other side.

He looked at the still water in the lock chamber, where the current had already slowed. The work light made a hard white circle on the surface. Her reflection should have been in