Augustine reached over to the passenger seat, picked up his sketchpad, got out of the car and immediately put his right foot into a mud puddle, sinking to his ankle. It felt like fate. Shaking his leg as he walked to the front door, the cool verge of a squall bit into his face and a dog howled somewhere in the dark.

The moment he opened the door, a blast of stale beer and cigarettes, mingling with a hint of cleaning fluid, hit him. Hitching up his soaked pant leg, Augustine allowed a cynical hiss to whisper towards the bar as he walked in.

"Ah, New Rotterdam. I'm home."

Then Augustine Jones, veteran of little success and much failure, of trouble and toil, of love and far less, a painter, a poet, a stock market buffoon, and now Brown International's new manager of grain loading operations-a gestalt of his own-made, as his first official homecoming act, a beeline to the Linger Longer Bar & Grill's john.