The mud furrowed and cracked around her eyes as she stared at me. Light reflected into her face for a moment, and I saw that those eyes were a peculiar flat, hard gray. She seemed older than I’d first thought, bones planed with years. “Use it while you can, honey,” she murmured, so angry she forgot to drool over her vowels. I felt her watching me as I walked away.

I passed Banana Sam’s Beer Garden on my way up-Fair, and heard a familiar half whistle, half call, high-low-high. And Cassidy’s voice: “Little bird! Keeper of the fire! Come drink with meeeeee!”

He was already low in his chair, flushed and untidy. His wide eyes sank into their bruised-looking sockets like clams dug into the sand, and the bones below them lurched up against the skin as if to counterbalance. Frail strands of bleached gold hair had slid out of his queue and fallen around his face and ears. The pitcher in front of him had maybe an inch and a half left in it.

Resigned, I came to his table. “What’s this ‘little bird’ riff, Cass?”

“The sparrow,” he said, smug, dignified, and clownish. “Guarded fire for the Devil, ’til Swallow ripped it off and gave it to the walking dung beetles who started callin’ ’mselves Mankind.”

Cassidy always talked like a Taoist mystic with a lobotomy when he was drunk. “I take it tonight we’re on the Devil’s side?” I asked as I sat down. I poured the last of the beer into his glass, and drank off half.

“Hey!”

“You don’t need it. Besides, you invited me.”

“For company. You can damn well buy your own suds.” He peered at me, as if through fog. “I don’t owe you any, do I?”

I considered my answer carefully. But lying, after all, would have been a sin. “No,” I said.

Cassidy looked long at the empty pitcher. “Well, hell. Make it a present, then.”

I set the glass and its last swallow of beer on the table. What was left in my mouth tasted suddenly like soap. I leaned back in the uncomfortable wire chair, away from the table, from Cassidy’s gesture, from him. I felt the need to wound. “I thought you were going to stop drinking at Midsummer.” The picador rises dancing to his toes — thump.

The unfocused camaraderie vanished from his face and voice. “ ’S not Midsummer anymore.” His sunken eyes were bright with resentment.

“Just curious. I don’t care if you drink.” Thump — a second pointed sentence between the shoulders of Cassidy’s amour propre. No doubt the picador also thinks of it as self-defense.

Cassidy frowned down at his knotty fingers. There was a freshly scabbed cut on the back of his left hand, and I wondered, with a jolt of disgust, if he remembered how he’d come by it. In a few seconds that thought came back in my face. Well.

“How’ve you been?” I said, in lieu of apology.