Once Upon a River (13 page)

A month later when Brian arrived home drunk again, this time alone, he crashed his boat into the dock with enough force that he cracked some boards. He cursed as he entered the cabin. Margo saw the neck of a pint bottle sticking out of his jacket pocket. Usually she’d seen him with half-pint bottles.

“Who’s been here with you? I smell a man.” His voice was blunt.

“No one’s been here.” Margo moved around so she was closer to the door, just in case she had to run outside to get away from him. There was something different in him tonight. She’d seen this in Crane the one time he’d struck her—it was about a month after the trouble with Cal, and Crane had demanded she speak to him. When she remained silent, he slapped her face, only his hand was half curled into a fist. Afterward, he went out and sat in his truck and didn’t come back in until Margo was asleep. In the morning she discovered she had a broken blood vessel in the corner of that eye, a blood mark spreading over the cornea, and a bruise had formed under her eye. Crane had never taken a drink of alcohol again.

“Are you two-timing me, Maggie?” He stepped into the center of the room.

“No.” She studied the door. She would not hesitate to run.

“Are you a two-timing slut?” Brian slurred. He sounded a little tentative, as though he were less certain about his words than usual.

“No,” she said. That word had hit her hard coming out of Cal’s mouth—it had hurt her feelings—but now it made her angry. She said, “Why do guys want to call girls sluts?”

Brian sat at the table, and she sat across from him. He lit a cigarette and studied her. While she sat quietly mending the collar of her jacket, he tapped his fingers. Finally he crushed out the cigarette and said, “Okay, Maggie, I won’t call you that again. I was just worried. You know I love you.”

She reached across the table and touched the scars on his hand. “Why are you getting mean?”

“I worried that maybe you weren’t alone. Something Pauly said. I couldn’t stand for anybody else to slip in and have you.”

“If you’re not here, I’m alone, Brian. I got nobody else. I don’t even have a dog. I need to find my mom, but she doesn’t want me. Why hasn’t she written back telling me to come, even just for a visit?”

“Did you tell her your daddy got shot?”

“No.”

“Maybe you ought to tell her. Maybe she doesn’t know.”

Margo shrugged. She had tried, but couldn’t bring herself to write the words.

“Don’t worry, Maggie. You got me. I’ll always take care of you,” he said. “Maggie, how much would you do for me? Would you kill for me?”

“I killed that rabbit for you. It’s overcooked now.” She had thought of Brian the whole time she’d skinned and cleaned it at the edge of the river, thought of how he’d enjoy eating it. She had started making a blanket of rabbit skins, cured with salt, something to put over their bed. It was the softest thing to touch on the fur side. Everything she did now was tangled up with Brian, for better or for worse.

“Would you kill a man for me?” He held her wrist while he waited for her answer.

“If a man was going to kill you, I’d kill him.”

“I’ve never known a woman who’d kill for me. I’d kill a man for you,” he said loudly, as though showing off for someone who wasn’t there. “I’d kill my own brother if he messed with you, Maggie. If I ever see Cal Murray again, I’ll kill him.”

“Nobody has to kill anybody,” she said. “You’re hurting my wrist.”

“Oh.” Brian pulled away with exaggerated care. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He reached out clumsily to touch her hair at the side of her face, and the motion, performed in drunken slowness, spooked her. “I promised myself when you came to me that I’d never hurt you, that I’d always be gentle. I told God, I said to God in my head,
If she’ll stay with me, I’ll treat her good
. Please don’t leave me, Maggie. Promise you won’t leave me.”

Margo would have liked to ask him not to drink whiskey, but she knew he wouldn’t listen when he was this drunk. The best thing now would be to get him to bed.

“Where else would I go, Brian? I got nobody else.”

“I never knew I’d be so lucky, to have a girl like you in my life, a beautiful girl who cooks me dinner and makes love with me and doesn’t ask me for anything.” He pulled her around the table to sit on his lap, and he wrapped both arms around her. Margo usually liked the feeling of being contained by and connected to Brian—it was like being attached to a powerful weapon.

When Brian went outside to relieve himself, Margo sat at the table listening to the croaking snore of leopard frogs through the walls. She wondered how much longer she could stay here.

“I’m doing my best, Daddy,” she whispered, in case Crane was aware of what was going on. “Don’t worry about me.” This was the first time she had spoken aloud to him. If there was a heaven or hell, Margo worried about how Crane was getting along in either place without her.

The river never flooded that year. The late spring rains were steady and mild. It wasn’t until June that the first pair of seventy-degree days came up with a wind out of the south. Brian came home from the bar on the second of those warm days with his knuckles cut up again. A man had taken his jacket, he said.

“You let somebody take your jacket, he thinks he owns you. You don’t know what he’ll do after that. Next thing you know, he’ll be screwing your woman.”

Margo looked at him, startled.

“You know about evening the score, girl. I know you understand that. I know you’ll get even with your cousin someday.”

She nodded. She knew better than to want revenge, but she couldn’t let go of her desire for it. She did not tell Brian what else she knew and knew too well: you couldn’t always keep things even, that in trying to keep things even, you could lose everything.

• Chapter Nine •

One day in August, Brian went to town and did not return by nightfall or by the next morning. Several days later, he had still not come home. Each morning when Margo woke up alone she listened for a long time to a phoebe calling its own name from a branch outside the window, until she could copy it perfectly. Each night he was gone, she listened to the orchestra of crickets, cicadas, and tree frogs and wrote letters to her mother. Sometimes she tried to sound lighthearted, and other times she demanded Luanne explain about her
delicate situation
. Whenever she finished a letter, she tore the paper into pieces and sprinkled them on the water from Brian’s dock.

For the last few months she had feared Brian coming home drunk, but now she worried he might not come back at all. At first she found sleeping difficult without his big body beside her, but she soon was stretching out and using the extra space.

At dusk on the eighth night, Margo saw the Playbuoy coming downstream. She stood on the dock and waved. The black-haired, bearded driver turned out to be Paul. At the noise of the boat’s big outboard motor, the yellow dog across the river moved up the lawn toward its house, and a great blue heron that must have been fishing below the cabin launched itself into flight. Margo watched it ascend. Another guy was with Paul, not Johnny, but a smaller man. She hoped they had brought some meat or store-bought food. She was tired of eating fish. She had run out of rifle cartridges and shotgun shells and had no money left to buy more until she got up her nerve to cash her money order. She grabbed the siderail of the boat as Paul idled alongside the dock. The boat was riding heavy in the water.

“You got Brian’s boat,” Margo shouted. Paul cut the engine just as she asked, “Where is he?”

Margo was shocked to hear her own voice over the river sounds. She had not spoken aloud in a while, and she didn’t usually talk to Paul at all. There was something in the center of the boat, covered by a blue tarp. By its shape, she figured it was a fifty-five-gallon plastic drum. That explained why the boat was sunk up over its pontoons. Water sloshed over the Astroturf carpeting.

“Brian’s in jail.”

“For what?”

“For beating on Cal Murray.”

“What? He didn’t hurt him?”

“The hell he didn’t. He hurt him bad. Did it for you.”

“I never asked him to do anything to Cal.” Margo felt spooked by the intensity of Paul’s voice.

Paul got out of the boat and tied it off. “Brian should have known better, but he couldn’t stand it when Cal Murray walked in the bar like he owned it. Cal thinks he owns Murrayville.”

Cal did own Murrayville, thought Margo, didn’t he? “What happened?”

“It ain’t good,” Paul said. He turned his head to favor his bad eye. “Stop staring at me, damn it.”

Margo had not meant to stare. She looked back at the cabin. The green building, tippy on its stilts, blurred as her eyes filled with tears. Margo wiped her face and pointed at the fish pail that Paul was lifting off the boat. “Give me that,” she said.

“Maggie, honey, crying about it ain’t going to do him any good. There’s nothing that’s going to do him any good except a better lawyer than he can afford.” Paul’s voice turned softer. He rested the bucket on the dock and put his arms around her. Paul was a little fatter than his brother. She thought he smelled odd, of ammonia. She thought of pushing him away and running, but it would be crazy to run into the woods, which were full of stinging nettles and poison ivy.

She pulled away from the embrace and grabbed the bucket, sloshing water on herself and Paul. Two of the three bullhead catfish inside were the length of her forearms, with long barbels. Those seaweedy whiskers brushed the sides of the bucket as the fish slid over one another. “These are big catfish,” she said.

“They come from around Willow Island upstream,” Paul said.

“Who you got with you?” she asked. The other man had made no motions to disembark, as though waiting for the signal from Paul.

“That’s just Charlie. He works at the plant with me.” Paul had long held a job at a pharmaceutical plant that made generic drugs. Paul was a
factory rat
, Brian said, though Paul didn’t like the phrase. Charlie was skinny, and one cheek was sunken where he was missing some teeth.

Paul took the fish from the bucket one by one, used his knife to slit the skin all the way around their necks, and nailed each head to the nearest oak; the three tails strained and curled against the bark. The men stood by while Margo stunned one with a hammer and began tearing off its skin with pliers.

“Tell me what happened.” Though she knew better, Margo brushed against the catfish dorsal fin, and her middle finger burned.

“Well, we left The Pub and was at The Tap Room in Murrayville having a few beers, and Brian and this guy he’s playing pool with get to arguing, and then Cal Murray comes in. It’s like my brother has been waiting for Cal Murray but Cal’s been keeping a low profile. So Brian says to him, ‘I heard a guy shot your dick off. Heard all you got now is a nasty little stub,’ which is funny, but everybody’s scared to laugh. Cal Murray asks Brian does he want to suck it, and Brian tells him there ain’t no forgiving what you done to that girl. Brian hits him a couple times, and Cal don’t hardly even defend himself, which seems odd. I don’t know if he was drunk or what. Brian pushes him down some stairs, don’t seem to notice Cal isn’t fighting back, so he stomps the shit out of him on the steps. He broke both Cal’s legs.”

“What?” The fish skin split.

“Broke bones in his legs. You heard me.”