“No, no, I’ll tell her, first thing.”

Her face lifted in a reassuring smile. “I meant about Nicky Pryor. The boy talking to Kate? Forgive me, but I saw you look. You probably know his parents, Cash and Suzie.”

I looked again. “Jesus. That’s Cash’s kid, with the hockey stick? He looks so…”

She allowed herself a gentle laugh. “Mature is the word you’re looking for. But he’s a nice boy.”

“I was going to say menacing.”

“Maybe a little of that too.”

Her eyes found mine again. What a pity, I thought, that Shellie had no children of her own. Though of course that wasn’t right. She did have them; my Kate was one.

“I know it seems to happen fast, Joe. But believe me, they’re still just children. Just barely, but they are. Maybe trying to be a little more. Certainly they’d like to be a little more. But it’s still… oh, I don’t know. Just a game. Like dress-ups, when they were small.”

“What you’re saying is, I’ve got time yet.”

“Hell’s bells, Joe.” She laughed again, this time with pleasure. “I’d say it just to cheer you up.”

In rubber waders, boots, and fly vests, a two-mile walk over even pretty flat terrain can feel like ten, and by the time I got my lawyers to the dam, the bunch of them were a sorry sight, breathing hard as horses and drenched with yeasty-smelling sweat. On the way, Bill had stopped twice more to pee-the poor guy couldn’t go half an hour without muttering an apology and taking a trip to the weeds-and though the rest of them were decent about it, waiting by the side of the trail in what passed for respectful silence, I could tell this generosity was motivated less by friendship or goodwill than their own sympathetic pangs of worry. Prostate, I’d figured, though now I was also thinking type 2 diabetes, which my father had toward the end. Either way, I thought Bill would tell me which it was before the day was through. The sun was blasting through the trees when we reached the gate, and as I fumbled with the padlock, I gave them the lay of the land.

“The dam’s about a hundred yards down this incline. Maybe another two hundred yards across, and there’s a catwalk but no handrails, so be careful. The Army Corps of Engineers keeps a watch station, but nobody’s been in it for years. On the other side of the catwalk a trail loops down to the old turbine outlet at the base of the dam. The water’s rough and tricky to wade, but you can fish from the rocks if you like.”

Bill nodded. “Okay, I’ll bite. How rough is rough?”

We could all hear it plainly now, a sound you might mistake as wind in the trees as you hiked up the path, but not this close: the muscular pounding of a thousand gallons of ice-cold water pouring out the vacant turbine channel each and every second. Where we stood you could smell it, too, all that cold water mixing with the air of the valley, like icy breath falling out a freezer.

“It sounds worse than it is. If you’re careful and stay clear of the outlet, you should be fine.”

We made our way down the last of the path. Where it cleared the trees the ground and sky opened like jaws, giving us a broad view of the two lakes and the dam between them, a wall of white concrete you couldn’t look straight into when the sun hit it. The drop on the downstream side was eighty feet; below it, water roiled in a frigid roar of boiling whitecaps, then fanned out in a broadening spillway before emptying, another thousand yards below, into the Lower Zisko. You could fish any part of it, and on any given day it could all be good, but the upper end, where the water was trickiest, was generally best; all that moving cold water churned up the small feeding fish that the landlocks loved, drawing them closer to the surface. The control station stood on our side of the dam, empty as always. A second gate, also unlocked, guarded the entrance to the catwalk, with a large sign of warning: NO TRESPASSING. DANGEROUS WATERS. NO SWIMMING. DO NOT CROSS THE DAM.

Pete stopped at the gate. “I don’t know about this. Is it safe? This doesn’t look legal. The sign says no trespassing.”

They all paused, lawyers thinking about the law and maybe that eighty-foot drop to boot, but then Bill stepped forward and swung the gate wide. “Joe, anybody ever drown out here?”

It had happened, I knew, but not for years. I saw where he was going and thought I’d play along. “All the time,” I said.

“Good.” He winked at me, then smirked in Pete’s direction. “See? We’ll make a man of you yet, youngster.”

Pete folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

Bill snorted and stepped through the gate. “What is this, fourth grade? Don’t be such a pussy, son.”

It all seemed like a jolly joke, but by the time we got to the other side, I could tell something was wrong with Pete. His face had gone the white of chalk, and he was breathing in shallow little puffs. I sent the other three ahead to wait while he sat on a big piece of limestone, his rod across his knees.

“It’s the heights. I can’t stand heights.” He looked back the way we’d come and grimaced like he’d seen his death. “Jesus. Is there another way back?”

“Afraid not, unless you call a helicopter.”

Pete put his head in his hands, letting himself take a moment just to breathe; his hands were shaking, and for a second, I actually felt sorry for him. Bill, Mike, and Carl Jr. had already made their way down the embankment to the base of the dam and were looking the water over. In a large party, there was always one, and Pete was the one.

“Mother… fucker.” He gave his head a sharp shake and looked up, squinting into the light. “Did you mean it, about people drowning?”

“Nah. I was just kidding around.”

“Well, very fucking funny. What was that thing where the water went in? Christ, it was sucking like a toilet bowl.”

He was referring to the wide concrete tube that stuck ten feet or so above the surface of the lake on the upstream side. A series of gates, like the open spaces between rungs on a ladder, pulled water down to the bottom of the dam. Only the top gate was open, but with the water so low, it sat right at the surface, water swirling around it in a whirlpool.

“That’s the inlet tower. It used to draw water down to the turbines, though they pulled those out thirty years ago.”

“Listen,” Pete said, “I probably should tell you I don’t know how to do any of this. The only thing I know how to fish for is a can of tuna at Stop and Shop.”

“I kind of guessed.”

“It gets worse. I can’t even swim.”

“Not at all?”

He shook his head hopelessly. “Something about my body mass. I can do the strokes okay, but I sink like a rock.”

I nodded silently. What was there to say?

“I’ll tell you a story,” Pete went on. “At Harvard there’s this idiotic swim test you have to pass to graduate. The family that built the library lost their son on the Titanic, so everybody has to make it across the pool and back just to get their diploma. Like being able to swim would have helped the poor bastard in the middle of the North Atlantic. Know what I did?”

Never mind that this little story was his way of letting me know he’d gone to Harvard. “You cheated?”

“Swimming the thing was out of the question. I actually had a scheme cooked up to have one of my roommates take it for me. But when the last day for the test came, he said he couldn’t do it. Guy’s all lined up with a big Wall Street job, no way he was taking any chances for me. I went down to the pool, and there was this long line, mostly Asian kids shivering in their skimpy little suits, I have no fucking idea why, but all of them waited like me until the last day. When my turn came, I jumped in and just let myself go under. I just sat on the bottom of the pool and waited for somebody to pull me out. Who fucking knows how long I was down there, but it felt like forever. But then, the lifeguard yanked me out. ‘You can’t swim?’ he asks me. ‘Not a stroke,’ I say. For a long time the guy just looked at me. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth of education, and it all comes down to this one guy, what he’s going to do. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Get out of here.’ I couldn’t believe it.”