Dangers are everywhere about the Saugus River: the porous bog whose dark underworld has softened for centuries, the jungles cat-o-nine tails leap up into. Once, six new houses ago, one new street along the banking, two boys went to sea on a block of ice. They are sailing yet, their last flag a jacket shook out in dusk still hiding behind December every year. An old man has strawberries in his backyard. They run rampant part of the year. He planted them the year his sons caught the last lobster the last day of their last storm. In summers, ever since, strawberries and salt mix on the high air. A truck driver, dumping snow another December, backed out too far and went too deep. The only son stutters when the snow falls. His wife hung a wreath at the town garage. At the all-night diner an old waitress remembers how many times she put dark liquid in his coffee. When she hears the engines kick over on a Mack or a Reo or a huge cumbersome White big as those old Walters Sno-Kings used to be, she tastes the hard sense of late whiskeys. He had an honest hunger and an honest thirst, and thick eyebrows, she remembers, thick thick eyebrows.