Once Upon a River (11 page)

Margo lifted her .22 with some difficulty. Her arm muscles were still strained from rowing. She experienced some kind of electrical shock when she first pulled the trigger, and she missed the first can. She focused and dinged it on the second shot, and then caught the top on the third, sent it flying. She inhaled the faint smell of gunpowder. She reloaded the Marlin with fifteen of the long-rifle cartridges she’d carried from Cal’s gun cupboard and listened for a moment to the river. Holding the rifle steady would have been easier with a sling, but she held her arm up until her body remembered it as a natural position. She hit the next can and each can after that, and she reloaded and knocked all the bottles from their perches. And in that several minutes of intense focusing, she felt peaceful. Margo lowered the gun, pressed the barrel against her face to feel its heat.

“Holy shit,” Brian said. “A guy has got to respect that.”

Afterward, he exchanged his M1 for a shotgun, an old Winchester 97 twelve-gauge pump-action with a full choke. He shot at some frozen hunks of driftwood he’d dragged over from the edge of the river, and she saw that the buckshot created a tight pattern of holes only a few inches wide at thirty feet. With her first shot, the kick of the thing knocked her back. After that, she jammed it tightly into her shoulder and absorbed the recoil with her whole body. She loaded and shot until she knew she would be bruised. Though the sound was muted by the ear protectors, each blast moved through her and settled and soothed her.

Brian offered to stay at the cabin with her the following day, but said there was two hundred bucks cash if he cleaned the roof and gutters at an apartment complex. There was no road leading to the cabin, meaning a boat was the only way in or out, and this made Margo feel easier about being alone there. If anyone came for her, she would see him coming on the water. Brian said that if the river froze over this winter, they’d be stuck, so they needed to keep their supplies of food, bait, and ammo laid in, and the prospect of winter preparation seemed to please him. After he disappeared upstream, Margo found a piece of a rope that was too short to use for much of anything, so she unraveled it and then set about braiding the sections to create a rifle sling.

That evening, Brian visited Carpinski and got a report on Margo’s mother. After a few months of living with Carpinski, Luanne had apparently gone off with a truck driver. Carpinski provided an address in Florida, but the first letter Margo wrote came back the next week to Brian’s post office box with a note handwritten across it,
No longer at this address
. Brian said he would keep asking around, would talk to Carpinski again to see if he remembered anything else. According to Brian, the man was still pretty broken up about Luanne more than a year after she had left.

Brian was a storyteller, recounting his own tales and others he had collected, and in the evenings he often told about growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in logging camps, about damming creeks to catch fish, about dipping smelt, about men who were killed by walking too close to the edge of the road when a wagon full of logs was passing. There was a long, complicated story about killing and eating rattlesnake in Idaho. He told her about two men who went out in a boat with one of their wives and came back without her, neither of them realizing she was missing, so relieved had they been by the quiet. She’d shown up hours later, having walked from the other side of the lake, mad as hell. He told a story about a Michigan Department of Natural Resources official going out with his friend fishing in the middle of a big lake. The DNR man watched his friend light a quarter stick of dynamite and toss it into the water. After the blast, twenty fish floated up dead, and the man collected them. When he lit another stick of dynamite, the DNR man said, “You know I’m going to have to arrest you for this.” So the guy handed the DNR man the lit dynamite and said, “Well, are you going to talk or fish?”

The nearest neighbor downstream on Brian’s side of the river was a half mile through wild woods. And it was a lonesome sort of relief not seeing the Murray farm across the way as she had her whole life. Upstream on the other side was a plain white clapboard house, apparently unoccupied during the winter months. A few hundred yards downstream, separated from the white house by an empty lot tangled with small trees and brambles, was a tidy yellow house, in which there lived a man who drove a green Jeep, a woman who wore a slim-fitting white winter jacket, and a big loopy dog, maybe a yellow Lab–Irish setter mix. The house was built way back from the river, but the dog hung around at the river’s edge and gazed into the water. Margo had never had her own dog—the no-pets policy had been a rare point of agreement between her parents—but she had spent so much of her youth with the Murray dogs that she had come to see dogs as her natural companions.

It was after the new year when Margo came up with the idea to write to the occupant of her mother’s old address in Florida, asking him or her for information about Luanne. Brian said she should offer a fifty-dollar reward—he would pay for it, he said. The reply came to Brian’s PO box. The address the man provided was not in Florida, but in Michigan, Lake Lynne, a town west of Murrayville and north of Kalamazoo. Margo worked for days to write the simplest note she could, giving no details about her life, telling her mother that she was doing fine and would like to visit her. Brian mailed it to the new address.

Over the course of the next few months, Margo was grateful that nobody came around looking for her. If the police or the Murrays were searching at all, they weren’t looking very hard. She’d seen a sheriff’s boat traveling upstream a few times, but the craft had always sped toward Heart of Pines and then back downstream a while later. Nobody ever came to the cabin to inquire about a missing girl. Sixteen was the legal age for dropping out of school in Michigan—maybe sixteen was also the age when folks stopped worrying about you. Margo had a feeling that Cal and Joanna didn’t really want to find her.

During those cold months, Margo worked on
leading,
shooting just in front of running rabbits and squirrels. She also shot, plucked, and cooked the occasional nonmigrating duck, from among the half-domestic oddities that appeared on the river. Brian worked odd jobs in town for cash, especially snowplowing, for which he used a four-wheel-drive truck he kept somewhere in town. He and Paul owned a stand of woods south of Heart of Pines, and so he cut trees, split logs with a hydraulic splitter, and delivered cords of firewood around the county. He also was able to fix cars, but he hated to do it in winter unless he could use somebody’s heated garage. Once a week or so, he visited his kids in town, one of whom was just three years younger than Margo, he said, which meant the boy was only one year younger, really. He invited Margo along on some trips, but she did not want to risk encountering the police or the Murrays. At first Brian had seemed uneasy about leaving her alone, but he soon took for granted that when he returned, she would be there. He said he felt like a better man knowing she was waiting for him at the end of a day of digging trenches or cutting down trees. She was his
salvation
, he said, his reason to settle down and mend his ways. Sometimes, when he said this sort of thing, his grin took on a ferocity that scared Margo.

The letter that came in March was in a yellow envelope. The paper folded inside featured cartoon bumblebees. After reading it a few times, Margo noticed it smelled like flowers and honey. There was no return address on the envelope. Folded inside the paper was a postal money order for two hundred dollars. The letter read:

Dear Margaret Louise,

Thank you for writing to me, Sweetheart. I’m glad to hear you are fine and still living on the river. I know you always loved the river. I could not endure that mildew and smell. Though it breaks my heart, I cannot encourage you to visit me at this time. My situation is delicate. I will write to you soon and arrange to meet with you.

Love, Your Mama
p.s. Don’t tell your daddy
or Cal you heard from me.

Margo couldn’t speak at all that evening, but she nodded in agreement with Brian when it made sense to do so, and she fell asleep early. The following day, when Brian went to work, Margo loaded up his twelve-gauge and went into the woods dragging the heavy-duty sled Brian used for firewood. Though it was not deer hunting season, she tromped downstream through the snow until she found a deer trail cutting to the river. She sat against the trunk of an oak tree and waited. A few hours later, the first deer to follow the path down to the water was a doe, and a second doe followed, her belly swollen. Margo watched them drink at the river and then jump back up the bank and nuzzle the snow for buried acorns before continuing on. She watched them chew disinterestedly on saplings, and finally they wandered away, still unaware of her presence. A little after noon, a bigger deer, surely a buck that had dropped its antlers, went down to the water to drink. Margo focused on the muscle movement in the deer’s shoulders and neck, the twitching of the ears and the tail. She pushed thoughts of her mother into the quietest place within herself, until she was inside the sound of leaves rustling and the wind-sound of the moving surface of the river. The deer jumped back up onto the bank, and Margo calmly followed its motion. When it stopped and nuzzled the ground, she aimed into the heart and lungs and pressed the trigger.

The deer fell hard. When Margo went to the animal, she found that she had shot the slug into a doe. From its musculature, she had been certain it was a buck, but now she could see its sex and its slightly swollen belly. Though her aim had been perfect, the doe was not dead. It attempted to lift its head, watched Margo, terrified, through a big, clear eye. The creature kicked with its back legs as though trying to run. Margo took the army knife out of her pocket, unfolded the biggest blade, and sliced through the deer’s jugular, an act that took some strength. She folded up her knife with the blood still on it, wiped her hands on her jeans, and only then did her hands start shaking.

Margo sat down cross-legged beside the doe’s warm body, sick about what she’d done. She stroked the rough fur stretched across the cage of ribs as the body grew cool. After a while, she heard the approach of another deer. She remained still while it passed close to her and went down to the water. She watched it drink its fill, lift its head, and look around. She wondered how the deer could be completely unaware of the dead doe and of Margo when both were so near, not twelve yards away. The deer climbed the bank, and Margo was once again almost sure it was a buck. It paused and sniffed the bark of a wild apple tree and took interest in something. It pawed at the ground. It reared up and put its front hooves on the tree, so it was standing on its back legs, exposing its chest and balls. Then the buck nosed upward and bit at something in the crook of the tree. Margo fired her second slug into its heart. As the deer hit the ground, it seemed to sigh. From its mouth tumbled a gray bird, a mourning dove, with its dark eyes bulging and darting and then closing.

She suppressed a cry of surprise. She’d never seen or heard of a deer eating a bird. There was still more to learn about life along the river. She moved in and nudged the deer’s chest with her foot to make sure it was dead, and a flurry erupted beside her as the dove woke up and launched itself into the air.

Margo had to sit still for a while and survey the mess she’d made. After killing the doe, she should have unloaded the shotgun. She was hunting out of season, so killing either deer was already a crime. She promised herself if she ever killed a doe in the future, she would gut it and skin it, same as a buck. She ate female rabbits and squirrels all the time. But not this time, not this doe. She covered its body with leafless branches, frozen leaves, and snow and hoped no one would come upon it. She rolled the buck over onto the big sled and pulled it slowly upstream, over the snow.

By the time Brian got home, after he’d had a few beers at The Pub in Heart of Pines, Margo had dressed out the deer on a vinyl tarp and deposited the guts in the river, hoping they would float away.

At first Brian seemed shocked to find her with a deer out of sea-son, but he produced a hacksaw and helped her take off the legs. They tied a rope around its neck and strung it up in a tree behind the
house, out of sight of passing boats. He offered to help her skin the thing and seemed glad when she declined his offer. He sat on a stump, sipping from a half-pint bottle, while she worked. He told her a story about his buddy skinning a deer by tying up a golf ball inside the
deer’s skin between the shoulders and making a knob out of it. Then his buddy tied a rope around the knob, tied it to a four-wheel-drive truck, and drove slowly.

“Hide peels right off in a minute,” Brian said. “You wouldn’t believe it. Wish I could show you.”

“Did you ever hear about a deer eating a bird?” she asked.

“I’ve seen a deer eat a fish. Paul said I was crazy, but I know what I saw.”

She nodded.

“It was when we was kids, and I’d caught some carp nobody wanted to eat, and I dumped them in my ma’s garden. I’ll be damned if I didn’t look out my window that night and see a deer eating them.”

“Why would it eat fish?”

“I don’t know. Protein? Calcium? Because it tastes good? Same reason we eat fish.”