Once Upon a River (24 page)

Billy squatted at the river’s edge. He touched the prow, pressed his hand where
The River Rose
was burned into the wood. People considered .22 rifles to be squirrel guns, but a .22 bullet in the temple at this range would penetrate Billy’s skull, bounce around and scramble his brain, and he wouldn’t make any more trouble for anyone. Something scratched her throat. She had to resist coughing with such effort that her eyes watered.

Billy looked on the other side of the prow and probably saw the discoloration where the registration numbers were before she pried them off—a boat with no motor did not need to be registered, and since she’d left Brian’s, she’d had no motor.

“Nympho!” he shouted. He stood and looked around. “Where are you?”

Margo hated the way the nickname echoed over the river. He might disturb Joanna and the baby. Didn’t he know how hard it was to get a baby to sleep sometimes? When he turned more or less in
her direction, she saw that he was wearing, under his jean jacket, a black T-shirt with a rock-and-roll decal resembling a bull’s-eye, directing her to shoot just above his solar plexus. The sun was at the top of the sky behind the haze, so this was as bright as the day was going to get. He shouted again, not quite as loudly or with such confidence, “Nympho?”

“Get away from my boat,” she said and stood up. From this angle, she noted that the gun in his hand was his old pellet rifle, the one he’d gotten for his fourteenth birthday. He could take out an eye with a lucky shot, but he wasn’t going to kill anything more than a bird or a squirrel.

“You’re supposed to be in summer school,” Margo said. Every muscle in her body was tensed to slide the Marlin up to her shoulder and press the trigger. If only her eyes would stop watering. She swallowed again to get rid of whatever was in her throat.

“This morning Ma asked me what if you wanted to stay with us for a while, how would I feel about that? I said
no way
. I figured that meant you were hanging around. That’s why I skipped school today.”

Margo wished she had anticipated this situation and thought it through so her brain wouldn’t feel so muddled now.

“This is a Murray boat,” Billy said. “You know it was never meant for you. And because of you, Dad’s crippled. Everybody knows you told that guy to beat Dad up.”

She wanted to protest, to say she was a Murray, too, and she had not wanted Cal beaten up. Instead she said, “I could shoot you easy.”

“Go ahead and kill me. You’ll rot in prison. I’ve been in the juvey. I know what it’s like.”

“Your ma said you didn’t go to jail.”

“I went to the juvey this year, for two months.”

“For what?”

“A little problem with a fire getting out of hand.” He smiled, but it seemed forced. “We were just trying to keep warm, but nobody would believe us.”

“Why’d you have to shoot my dad?”

“You know why, Nympho. That ain’t no kind of thing for a man to do, shooting my dad that way. That ain’t something you do, shooting a man’s dick.” He spat into the river.

Margo wondered again if there was anything to be gained by telling the truth.

“And I don’t care if you shoot me. Go ahead. Life around here sucks, anyway. We’re poor now. Junior went away to Alaska, and the new baby’s a retard.”

Margo aimed and fired, right at the butt of his pellet rifle, knocking it out of his hands. He yelped, and the rifle hit the prow of the boat and fell onto the sandy muck. She expected him to run or at least beg her not to shoot him, but he stood his ground. When he reached down and picked up the gun, she shot the stock again, knocking it into the boat this time. Billy pulled his hand away as though he’d been stung by a wasp. Margo could feel his fear, but he did not outwardly express any. He let the gun lie on the prow seat and stood up and crossed his arms. “You been off with your ma? You two should stick together, seeing how you’re both whores.”

“You don’t know anything about my ma.”

“Junior saw her with Dad once. In the barn. He said not to tell you, but I don’t care.”

“Shut up.”

“I know she ran off with a man and didn’t care nothing about you. That’s what Ma said.”

Margo fired once more past him, so he would hear the bullet whiz two feet from his ear before it went into the water. She hoped he would shut up and run away, but he hardly flinched.

“Aren’t you even sorry you killed my dad?” Margo was surprised to find herself asking this question, so similar to the one Michael had asked her about Paul. She felt the muscles twitch in her arm.

“I didn’t have no choice. He was going to kill Dad.”

When her arm twitched again, she lowered the gun.

“You were there,” he said. “He already shot Dad once, and he was pointing it at me, pointing it at Dad. You saw him, Nympho. You told the police the same thing.”

“He wasn’t going to kill your dad. There wasn’t even a bullet in that rifle. He was just trying to save me. I’m the one who shot your dad.” Margo heard some blue jays fussing, and one made a sound like a crow. She smelled wood smoke from the Murray house. She wondered if Joanna were calming the baby. She reminded herself to stay focused on Billy.

“You’re lying, Nympho. Your dad came over and shot my dad’s tires out. He was crazy. We all saw him do that from upstairs. All of us were too scared to come down ’cause he might kill us.”

“He only shot the tires, though. Not any people.” Margo wanted to convince Billy how wrong he was, how they all were wrong about her dad, but the energy was going out of her. It occurred to her that she might have been wrong, too, about what Paul had been doing to Michael.

“He shot dad’s dick,” Billy said, and his voice took on an angry urgency. “What kind of man does that, Nympho? A crazy man, that’s who. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I had to.”

Margo began to feel tired, too tired to lift her rifle. Billy was a jerk, had always been a jerk, and was no doubt a criminal, but he was not a cold-blooded killer. She thought back to the day her father was shot. Crane had been holding the rifle as he’d helped her to her feet, and then he’d lunged toward Billy. Billy should have known Crane wasn’t trying to shoot anybody, that the gun wasn’t even loaded, but everything had happened so fast. Billy had fired, thinking he was saving himself and his dad, just as Margo had been thinking she was saving Michael from Paul. Billy was a lousy punk, but he didn’t deserve to die for doing what he thought he had to do. And Margo did not want to kill her cousin. When she had shot Cal beside the shed, she had felt calm and confident in every cell of her body that she was doing what was right and necessary. Before she had fired at Paul, she had felt that certainty again. She did not feel any such calm or certainty now.

“You can go ahead and shoot me if you want. I’ll stand right here. In the juvey, I bet guys money to burn my skin with cigarettes, and I never moved. The smell of it made them gag before I’d make a sound.”

She held down the hammer and slowly pressed the trigger to put the Marlin into safety position, and then she let the rifle hang half cocked at her side. She thought of Cal and Joanna, how sad they would have been if she had killed Billy, how miserable Toby or Tommy would have been if either had come upon their brother’s body while digging night crawlers or fishing in a snag. She felt plain relief at Billy’s not being dead. The whole world would have changed, as profoundly as it had changed when her own father died or when she shot Paul. And if she had shot Billy for what he had done, then maybe somebody would have had to shoot her for what she’d done to Billy. She took another deep breath and let it out.

“I’m taking this boat,” Billy said. He had always wanted
The River Rose
. Not long after Grandpa Murray died, Billy had taken the boat from her, and Cal had made him return it.

“Grandpa gave it to me,” Margo said.

“Grandpa was out of his mind and you tricked him. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me, and if you kill me, you’ll go to prison because you’re seventeen now. Ma probably already heard you shooting. She’d be out here except for the retard is probably crying.” Margo thought she saw those Murray ghosts again, standing beside Billy, supporting him, whatever he decided to do.

“Please don’t take it, Billy.”

“Too late, Nympho. It’s mine now.” He pushed off from shore and jumped into the boat as it was moving away. Margo laid her rifle in the grass and ran down the bank and into the water. She grabbed hold of the back of the boat and got dragged into deeper water by the force of Billy’s rowing. She was slowing him down, almost stopping him, but then, with both feet, Billy kicked her pack off the back seat and onto her, and she had to let go to catch it. He rowed hard toward the center of the river.

“I’ll get it back,” she said, standing hip-deep in water, trying to hold her pack and sleeping bag out of the current. “There’s nowhere you can hide that boat, Billy. I know every hiding place on this river. If you lock it to a tree, I’ll chop the tree down.”

“You’ll never touch this boat again,” he shouted. “How dare you shoot at me with Dad’s rifle.”

“Uncle Cal will make you give that boat back, and you know it.” She didn’t feel as confident as she was trying to sound—Cal might not side with her against his own son this time. The other time, when Cal had made Billy return the boat, Billy had given it back with four snakes in it, including one orange-and-white milk snake that was halfway through devouring one of the three smaller garter snakes. At the time, Margo had simply lifted the mess of snake flesh out with an oar and flipped it into the shallow water, but that memory sickened her now.

Margo climbed onto the riverbank and threw down her damp pack with the folded tarp, sleeping bag, and little shovel attached. She picked up her rifle, cocked the hammer, and got Billy in her sights again. As she watched him, her rage doubled, tripled, and she had to shoot at something. She aimed and shot at the prow of her boat, between the words
River
and
Rose
.

“All I care is that you don’t have it, Nympho,” he shouted. “And if you shoot me, you won’t have your precious boat in prison, either.”

She had to admire Billy’s coolness. She could never have let herself be burned with cigarettes to prove a point. He slipped downstream, along with her fishing gear, the kerosene lantern, and her water jug.

“There’s nowhere you can hide
The River Rose
that I won’t find it!” Margo shouted, though Billy was too far away to hear. She wiped tears from her eyes and looked toward the big Murray house. If she walked up to that door, Joanna would greet her and cook something delicious for her, might even ask her to move in. Margo imagined Joanna welcoming her, embracing her, the way she’d always embraced her sons after their troubles. But Joanna was not her mother. In that house Margo could only be a ghost of herself, an overaged tenth-grader with no rifle, at the mercy of Billy’s temper, following the rules Cal and Joanna would set for her. Trying to make her life with the Murrays would be like trying to back up the current of the river, like gathering up the water that had already flowed over the dam, into the Kalamazoo, and out into Lake Michigan and bringing it back to the Stark. Margo couldn’t bear to see Joanna again, not even to say goodbye. She would never again help Joanna in the kitchen. Instead, she had helped Joanna one last time in a way Joanna would never know about. She had not shot Billy as a gift to Joanna and the family who had once cared for her.

Margo wanted to walk along the riverbank after Billy, but she reconsidered. If Margo didn’t show up at the house, Joanna might be worried enough to contact the police or to send somebody out looking for her. Margo dug a pen out of her pack and wrote on the back of her last paper target.
Dear Joanna. You’re right. I need to go to my ma’s house. My friend will take me. Thank you for the bread and jam. Love, MLC.
Margo pinned the note to the clothesline beside a row of little T-shirts.

With her wet pack and sleeping bag, her progress over land was slow. Billy had rowed out of sight, but she figured she would see the boat wherever he might park it or when he headed back upstream to the Murray house. Nobody was going to try to wrestle that heavy boat onto a trailer, so it had to pass her on the water.

In the nearly four years since Old Man Murray had gotten sick and given her the boat, Margo had not gone a day without seeing it. When the river had threatened to freeze, she and her father had winched the boat out of the water and chained it to a tree to await spring outside her bedroom window. The new oars Michael had bought her were covered with a shiny preservative that made them move through the water smooth as glass without ever giving her splinters. She had rowed silently in the water with those oars, the way the Indian hunter with the heart of a wolverine stalked silently through the woods.

It took Margo until early evening to hike to the Murrayville cemetery, though it was only a few miles downstream. She had searched both sides of the river along the way and was certain Billy had not brought the boat upstream past her.

The cemetery was located right across the river from the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, and the biggest thing in the cemetery was Grandpa Murray’s memorial, a six-foot-high stone, which he had commissioned himself, with two leaping trout and a buck’s head sculpted in relief on the front and a bear and a wolverine carved on the back. She had seen a bear her grandpa had brought home from up north—it had nearly filled the back of his pickup truck. She had helped him skin it, and she had felt spooked and thrilled when the skin was off, when the body looked like a man’s.