“Take me to the locks, Alex. Some things you can’t talk about unless you’re looking at water.”

I shook my head and kept driving. “Why is this happening to me?” I said. “What did I do to deserve this?”

Twenty minutes later, the truck was parked in front of the Soo Locks Park. In the summer, the lot would be full, and the observation deck would have maybe forty people on it. On this overcast April afternoon, with a cold wind coming up off the bay and blowing right down the St. Marys River, we had the place to ourselves.

Randy stood on the observation deck, looking down at the locks. There were still great blocks of ice floating in the water. He was already shivering, with that poor excuse for a coat wrapped tightly around his body. But it was his own damned fault, so I didn’t feel too bad for him.

“This is it, huh?” he said. “The ships come right through here, and then what, they get lowered in the middle here?”

“Lowered if they’re going into Lake Huron,” I said. “Or raised if they’re going into Lake Superior. Twenty-one feet.”

“How long does it take?”

“Ten minutes maybe.”

“Must be an impressive sight.”

“When you’ve got a seven-hundred-foot freighter coming through here, it’s pretty impressive, yeah.”

“It opens up next week, you say?”

“Randy, are you gonna tell me about Maria before you freeze to death?”

He moved up onto the cement bleachers, where there was at least a little bit of shelter from the wind. “This is going to sound a little crazy,” he said as he sat down. “Damn, this cement feels cold on my ass.”

“It’s gonna sound crazy? How much more crazy can it get?”

“Well, here it is,” he said. “Just let me tell you the whole story before you say anything, okay?”

“I’m all ears,” I said.

“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “In 1971, when I went up to Detroit, there were a few of us who got called up together.