Once Upon a River (22 page)

She worked at the quarter-inch plywood for a long time, pulling out one nail after another, until eventually it was loosened enough that she could slip beneath it and through the empty window frame. She carried the lantern inside with her. The kitchen area was the same as before, with candles melted onto the Formica tabletop. The mattress on which Junior and his friends used to sit to smoke pot in the main room had been replaced by a plaid fold-out couch. She peeked in the bedroom and found it a mess, with bits of mattress stuffing spread across the floor along with wood scraps. Only splintered pieces remained of the wooden bed frame on which Margo had first fooled around with a boy. She closed the door.

She searched the empty cupboards. Inside a bread box she found a boxed brownie mix, and in the drawer beneath the oven, a tin pie pan. She collected paper and wood in a bag to use for starting a fire and carried them outside through the window. She ventured a little downstream until she found the Slocums’ garden. Margo knew that if she took vegetables, it was stealing, but she remembered how her father had done favors for the Slocums, once fixing a space heater that had gone out on a cold night, and she picked four tomatoes and a big handful of beans. She built a fire just upstream from where her boat was hidden. She stirred water into the brownie mix and balanced the pie tin of batter above the fire on three rocks, and while it cooked, she munched the raw vegetables. The brownies burned on the bottom, but still tasted sweet and good.

When her belly was full for the first time in days, she noticed the moon was full, too. Being back in Murrayville gave her a way of thinking about the last year and a half, her journey up the river and back. Traveling upstream had taken her no closer to her mother, but she had gotten Luanne’s address and a response. Margo was not yet ready to think about Paul, and she pushed those thoughts away. She would focus for now on surviving each day, figuring out where to hide if the police came and where to go so her mother could contact her. Also, she wanted to find Junior. Maybe with him she could talk through everything that had happened. Junior would have graduated from high school last month, and so she figured she’d see him hanging around.

Margo wiped on more bug dope. She lay on her back on her father’s old army sleeping bag, listening to crickets and looking at the stars. Three in a row would make up a man’s belt, according to her grand-father, but she couldn’t find them. He had said she could navigate by the stars, but who needed that? The river had just two directions, upstream and down. A screech owl whinnied, and Margo whinnied back with a sound so mournful she spooked herself.

Junior didn’t come around the next day, and a week passed and he still didn’t come. Once she thought she saw him driving down the road toward her, but Joanna was in the passenger seat, so Margo stayed hidden in the ditch behind the black-eyed Susans. If Junior or his friends showed up at the marijuana house, she’d offer to cook fish for them or catch a snapping turtle and fry up the meat. How nice it would be to feed somebody, to have some company. After the second week, she decided that if Junior didn’t show up soon, she would go to the Murray house and throw rocks at his bedroom window.

Margo stole enough food to feed herself, never too much from any one garden, and drank water from the spring. She saw a few of the Slocum kids, including Julie, come to the spring to fill their jugs and buckets. Margo would have liked to talk to Julie, but if she was still the tattler she always had been, she would tell everyone Margo was there. She wished she had made the effort to talk to Julie during the last year in Murrayville, but back then she’d been unable to shake her anger at her cousin for telling Crane what she’d seen in the shed.

As July melted into August, Margo listened to gangs of newly fledged robins picking at the underbrush in such numbers that the woods floor seemed alive. She watched nuthatches spiral down trees headfirst to the ground and back up again. She watched turkey vultures spiral high above, searching by scent for those creatures that had not survived the summer. And Margo still did not see police boats searching the river for her.

She rediscovered her favorite old mossy places in the Murray woods, where there grew lichens, fiddlehead ferns, and toadstools—some of them brightly colored. She searched for giant puffball mushrooms and chicken-of-the-woods, and each evening at dusk she watched thousands of fireflies charge and discharge. She kept herself hidden as best she could, and was happily surprised that nobody came around to investigate the modest fire she burned each evening and put out each morning. She kept her belongings in the boat, which she covered with her old green tarp and branches. Unless it was raining, she stayed outside. She collected pine needles to create a soft bed beside her campfire, and she gathered mattress stuffing into a plastic bag to make a soft pillow. She found that on the nights when she felt safe and comfortable under the stars, on the nights when she had fed herself well, that was when she felt particularly lonely. Loving a person the way she had loved Michael was something she couldn’t shake off or be done with when it was over. Even having lost Brian saddened her; she had come to know him so well and had learned so much from him, and now the part of her that had been Brian’s companion was of no use.

Michael had given her a regional map with Lake Lynne on it, and they’d discovered that her mother’s road ran alongside the big lake, which was almost a mile across and five miles long. Maybe there was a way to get there by water, if only Margo could get her heavy boat around the dam at Confluence. If only she weren’t, in her grandfather’s words,
stuck on the Stark
. Margo usually kept the map in her Annie Oakley book, but one night, while sitting at her fire, she tore out the portion of the map surrounding her mother’s place and put it in her wallet so she’d always have it close at hand.

After dark, if the weather was mild, Margo rowed the several miles downstream into town, stood on the unlit iron walking bridge over the waterfall in the park, where a dammed pond flowed into a little stream that led to the river. She walked past the small brick high school she had been so eager to leave every day, and she wondered if she should have tried harder to be more like other kids. She couldn’t see herself ever being very much different than she was, but maybe when she had a chance to make friends in the future she would try harder.

Margo sometimes ate leftover pizza slices from the dumpster behind the Murrayville pizza shop. One night she was sitting on the high curb there reading discarded newspapers by the streetlight, and she came across a news story from Heart of Pines. It detailed how gunshot victim Paul Daniel Ledoux was discovered in a pontoon boat that was found parked in Heart of Pines two weeks after he was shot. A shotgun was found beside the body, under a tarp. The only fingerprints on the gun were the victim’s, but officials did not think the death was a suicide. The boat was found to contain a gallon jug of some raw material for making an amphetamine that was capturing the attention of law enforcement. The killing was assumed to be drug related. There was no mention of the cabin or the drum of liquid or a riverside informant. The victim left behind a wife and three children, ages five, seven, and nine. Margo put her mushroom-and-sausage slice back in the pizza box. She read the last paragraph again. She had not thought of Paul’s wife when she pulled the trigger, or of their three children, who would now grow up without a father.

From the dark river, she sometimes watched her daddy’s house and the stranger living there, a tall, stoop-shouldered, gray-haired woman Margo had seen at a Thanksgiving party a few years before. The woman smoked a pipe the way a man would. Margo saw her toss things into a big hole someone had dug behind the house. Margo didn’t dare approach because the woman kept a white pit bull chained to the swing set frame Margo had used for stringing up her bucks. It occurred to Margo that two years ago she had been gutting and skinning her deer in the most obvious place, so that all the Murrays must have known about her kills. Her daddy had been right that she was reckless. She felt sorry for the white dog for being chained up, but the one time she approached, it barked a high-pitched, manic rhythm and strained against its tether as though wanting to attack her. The old woman came out with a pistol in her hand and shouted into the darkness, “Who’s out there?” but Margo was already on the water, rowing away.

The following midday, Margo was poking around in the woods upstream when she saw a white Murray Metal Fabricating truck pull into the driveway of the marijuana house. Out of it toppled a tall man, who leaned against the truck’s door pillar until he could get hold of forearm crutches. Margo was too far away to make out features, but she knew who he was. He unlocked the door and entered the little building. Margo hoped she’d left the plywood flush against the window so he wouldn’t notice it had been messed with. A few minutes later a dark-haired girl came running to the door, and she looked both ways before entering. Julie Slocum. Margo did not approach the house, but headed upstream to her camp. She had been foolish and unkind to ever be angry with poor Julie.

Margo returned to the Murray place that night and climbed the riverbank to investigate the barn beside which she had shot clay disks with Billy and Junior. A lone pig snorted under a corrugated metal hut. Grandpa had always kept the barn painted, but now the red was peeling all along the side by the river. The whitewashed shed was padlocked from the outside. The golden light of incandescent bulbs showed in the windows of the big house, giving the impression of safety and warmth. Margo was wary of setting off the beagles, but when she got up her nerve to come close to the house, she heard no barking. The kennel was empty. Moe was nowhere to be seen, either. Margo stood beneath Junior’s bedroom window, listening to the squeaks of flying squirrels. She was readying to toss a rock when she saw the figure of a younger kid, Toby or Tommy, looking out. She considered knocking on the kitchen door, but chickened out and instead went behind the house and stole pole beans and Brandywine tomatoes from the garden. More beans were toughening on the vines than usual, and more tomatoes had been left to rot, suggesting Joanna was behind on her canning.

Margo returned the following night and circled the house, trying to get a glimpse inside. The house was built on concrete block footings that raised it above the hundred-year flood level, so in order to see into the living room at close range, she pulled herself up into an old apple tree. She saw Joanna sitting in her chair sewing only a few feet away. She was wearing a blue print dress, and as always her hair was pulled back in a knot. Her shoulders looked a little more stooped, her face slightly more lined, her hands a bit more arthritic than a year and a half ago, but Cal, sitting beyond her, looked very different. He was gray-haired now, though he couldn’t have been much more than forty years old, and his face looked pinched and stern. His arms and shoulders were bigger than before, maybe from working wheelchair wheels and those crutches that lay on the floor beside him. His legs were straight out in front of him on a footstool, covered with a blanket. His gaze was trained on the TV. A sleeping figure that Margo took to be Junior lay on his back on the floor, his body impossibly long, his arms folded under his head, on which he wore headphones. Robert Murray, who must have been eleven years old by now, sat cross-legged on the couch and was watching TV intently. Toby and Tommy, aged seven, sat with their backs to her. What shocked Margo was the stillness of the room, apart from the movements of Joanna’s hands working needle and thread. So different from the lively old river paradise they had once all been a part of.

She leaned out of the tree, closer to the window, figuring she was well hidden by the foliage and darkness. She wished she could somehow get Junior’s attention. Then Joanna looked out the window. Her face was so sad that Margo had to swallow hard. She’d been naive to imagine that, after all they’d been through, the Murrays would have been the same family she’d known, full of fun, stories of their escapades, and plans for hunting trips. Margo wondered if Joanna ever worried about her. Joanna had plenty of other things to worry about, Billy, of course, and Cal especially. Margo understood the sadness and exhaustion in Joanna’s face. Margo had to shake that same sadness out of her joints in order to get up every morning and work up the energy to hunt for food to eat that day.

A white-bellied flying squirrel flashed above her—her grandpa had referred to them as sprites when he glimpsed them at night, the same as he’d sometimes called her. Margo was shifting her weight, and she slipped a little. She caught herself by grabbing a branch, and when she looked back into the room, Joanna was looking out at her. Margo slowly raised her hand to wave, but instead made a gesture of peace the Indian hunter from Michael’s book might have made when he was trying to hide his wolverine heart. Joanna glanced toward Cal and her sons. She laid aside her mending—it was Junior’s jacket with the pot leaf stitched on the back. Margo slid down the tree, followed Joanna from outside the house, climbed the wooden steps, and waited among the mosquitoes at the riverside kitchen door. She slid the Marlin off her shoulder and leaned it against the house where Joanna wouldn’t see it. Joanna opened the door and then took hold of the knob to steady herself.