All this along with drugs that were swiftly going about their perplexing work, turning the whole show inside out and making us acutely aware of the fact that above all we were nothing much more than a collection of raw sensations. Marsha’s legs emerging beautiful from her fringed cutoff shorts—the shorts are another story—and her bare toes, with her nails painted cherry red, wiggled in the breeze from the windows. The seaway at the bottom of the street, spread out in front of a few lonely houses, driftwood gray, rickety and grand, baking in the summer heat. They crackled with dryness. They looked ready to explode into flames. They looked bereft of all hope. In front of a Victorian, a single dog, held taut by a long length of rope, barked and tried to break free, turning and twisting and looping the full circumference of his plight. We parked across the street, got out of the truck, and looked at him while he, in turn, looked back. He was barking SOS. Over and over again. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Until finally Ernie yanked his gun from his belt, pointed quickly, with both hands extended out for stability, and released a shot that materialized as a burst of blooming dust near the dog; then another shot that went over his head and splintered a porch rail. The dog stopped barking and the startled air glimmered, got brighter, shiny around the edges, and then fell back into the kind of dull haze you find only in small towns in summer, with no one around but a dog who has finally lost the desire to bark. The dog sat staring at us. He was perfectly fine but stone-still. Out in the water a container ship stood with solemnity, as if dumbfounded by its own passage, covered in bright green tarps.—We’re gonna drop her right here, Ernie said, unleashing the boat, throwing back restraining straps, trying to look like he knew what he was doing. The water was a five-foot fall from the corrugated steel and poured cement buttress of the wall. The Army Corps of Engineers had constructed a breakwall of ridiculous proportions. We lifted the hitch, removed it from the ball, and wiggled the trailer over so that the bow of the boat hung over the edge. Then without consultation—working off the mutual energies of our highs—we lifted the trailer and spilled the boat over the edge. It landed in the water with a plop, worked hard to right itself, coming to terms with its new place in the world, settling back as Ernie applied the rope and urged it along to some ladder rungs. To claim this was anything but a love story would be to put Sault Ste. Marie in a poor light. The depleted look in the sky and the sensation of the pills working in our bloodstreams, enlivening the water, the slap and pop of the metal hull over the waves.