Once Upon a River (27 page)

She lifted the rifle to her shoulder, pressed it into her cheek, took a breath, and exhaled. She fired. She knew she had released her trigger finger too soon. Maybe the tip of her barrel went slightly up as the bullet left the chamber.

“No cigar,” he said.

She had feared that not having paper targets to give her feedback these last months was going to result in her losing her edge. On the other hand, she had been shooting grazing rabbits with great accuracy. Mr. Peake had always said every shot was a matter of probability, and Margo knew an occasional miss was part of that.

“Wait,” she said. “I said one shot for the Osage orange. I get two shots for the acorn.”

“Okay, one more, but that’s it.”

She put one more cartridge into the Marlin while the Indian watched. In her pocket she had her remaining seven.

“You’re standing too close to me,” she said and flapped her left arm.

He took one exaggerated step back away from her. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and felt it shaking slightly. Mr. Peake had always said she should wait to pull the trigger until she could make a good shot. She dropped her arms, held the rifle loosely in her right hand, studied the river beside her. She had never wanted to leave the Stark when she was young, but now, without her father and her boat, she thought she could not bear to stay here one more day. If she couldn’t go with the Indian, she’d walk.

She held the gun in her left hand, while she shook out the right. There was no reason that having somebody there with her should screw up her shooting. She’d won the 4-H competition with plenty of onlookers. And even though it had been two months since she’d shot paper targets at Michael’s, she had been shooting well then, better than ever in her life. She took a deep breath, relaxed her shoulders, and slowed her heartbeat.

She studied the railroad-tie fence post from its base to its top, as it rose to about her own height. She studied the green fruit with the burr acorn on top. Beyond it was the smooth expanse of river. She wrapped the sling around her left hand and elbow and pushed against it. When she nestled the stock in her shoulder and pressed her cheek against it, her stance and grip were solid. The Indian disappeared, and she was alone with her gun and her target. She looked through her sights. Her instructor had talked about the “wobble” in a person’s hold, had said a person could never be absolutely solid, but for Margo there usually came an instant like now when she felt solidly rooted to the planet. Without a conscious decision to do so, she smoothly pressed the trigger straight back and held it there as the rifle sent the bullet down the barrel on its way to the acorn. She knew it was a good shot. She held steady even after she heard a sound like the final hard tap of a woodpecker’s beak against an oak branch.

They walked to the tree and found the acorn gone and the big fruit untouched.

“Dang,” he said. “Was that a lucky shot?”

She shook her head. Unless you considered skill and probability luck. When she caught her breath she noticed him looking at her in a very intense way.

“That ability of yours is something special,” he said. He retrieved the Osage orange and sniffed it again. “That’s as good as proving a mathematical theorem. I guess I’ll put this thing in my car to keep the spiders out. There’s too dang many spiders in this state.”

She put the Marlin over her shoulder and returned to where her pack was sitting.

The man kicked the ground, looked back at Margo, and then burst out laughing. “I’ve got to be out of my mind. You know, if the police pull me over I’ll say heck yes, we’ve got a gun.”

Margo found herself smiling, as she hadn’t in a while, at her own excellent shooting, at the warmth of the sun, at the Indian’s surprise, and at the prospect of finding a new river. The Indian opened the car’s rear hatch, and she laid the gun on a sleeping bag. He covered it with loose clothes. She put her pack in beside it.

Once he got into the driver’s seat and shut the door, she rolled down the window and took a last look at the Stark, a river she had never expected to leave.

“Are you sure you’re not running away from home?” the Indian said as they pulled away.

She nodded and watched the river disappear behind them.

“I talked to an anthropologist up north to figure the most likely places the Potawatomi might have lived around Kalamazoo,” he said, once they’d negotiated themselves onto a highway. “There’s a farmer there who’s given me permission to camp on his land for a night.”

“You don’t act like an Indian, going to anthropologists. Shouldn’t an Indian follow animal trails?”

“You know, you ought to be grateful. I’m only taking you to save you from whoever else might give you a ride if you go out hitchhiking. There’s a lot of bad men out there.”

“I’m not afraid of men.”

“Right, by golly, you shot a man’s pecker.” He slapped his leg for emphasis, and the car jerked to the left. “For crying out loud, I am crazy for bringing you along.”

“That’s what I mean when I say you don’t sound like an Indian.” Margo had never liked being on the highway, and this was as bad as driving with Junior when he’d first gotten his license. Maybe the sick feeling in her gut was sadness about leaving the Stark, but his driving wasn’t helping.

“What do you think an Indian sounds like? You don’t know anything about Indians.”

“Sitting Bull wouldn’t say
for crying out loud
and
heck
and
dang
and
by golly.
” Arguing this way helped settle Margo’s stomach, so long as the Indian kept his hands on the wheel. She sat rigid while they moved into the left lane to pass a semi truck that seemed a mile long. The forty-five minutes on the highway felt like an eternity, and she was relieved when they finally slowed on the exit ramp.

“I don’t suppose I can ask you to navigate,” he said, as they continued on a two-lane road. He looked at the horizon and then at her again. “You’re looking rather pale, girl.”

She opened her mouth, wanting to make a comment about being a paleface, but changed her mind. She rolled down the passenger window as they turned onto a smaller road. She reached behind her and felt around. She put her hand on the box of ashes, steadied herself. Then she smelled the river, and her muscles relaxed.

• Chapter Sixteen •

The Indian turned into a driveway marked by a wooden post, and they parked in front of a gate beside an unpainted barn. Once out of the car, Margo saw a whale-sized tangle of rusting scrap metal, the largest chunks of which seemed to be old broken farm implements. They stepped around the gate to see, at the back of the barn, a pile of tree stumps, twisted branches, and uprooted bushes. On the opposite side of the driveway was the foundation of what must have once been a house. She couldn’t see the river, but she was soothed by the smell of it in the distance and by the way the land sloped toward it. She returned to the car, uncovered her rifle, and slung it over her shoulder.

A line of trees served as a windbreak between a field of corn and a field of soybeans and led from the road to the river. As Margo and the Indian walked along it, the windbreak widened, and they discovered a trickle of water running beside them. Margo picked a bean pod, cracked it open, and nibbled the soybeans raw as they walked. They were hard and chewy, ready to harvest, she guessed. Eventually the trees became a patch of woods, mostly maples and walnuts. The land sloped gently for about a third of a mile, until it dropped off near the river. When they stood on the riverbank, Margo guessed the Kalamazoo here was almost twice as wide as the Stark was in Murrayville, maybe fifty yards across. On the other side of the river, the land rose abruptly. Margo scanned the far steep bank and saw no path leading to the river, only an orange-and-black sign reading N
O
H
UNTING
N
O
T
RESPASSING
. Downstream there was another such sign.

“We can camp right here tonight,” Margo said.

“I suppose we’ll have to leave the car up by the road,” the Indian said. “We’ll carry down what we need.”

Margo wondered how long it would take the water that had flowed by them on the Stark earlier today to flow over the dam and reach this part of the Kalamazoo. The river’s chemical smells were different from the chemical smells on the Stark. There was a tinge of mold in the air. The river water was brown, and the edge of the river looked mucky. The only sandy area was where the spring they’d walked beside emptied into the river. Margo noted a disturbance in the water and wondered if Crane’s ghost would accompany her this far downstream. A muskrat surfaced, saw her, and plunged back under.

“Oh, Lordy,” the Indian said. He looked around. “My cousin said he’d heard stories about this river valley. There were so many trees you never ran out of firewood. The sugar maples filled every barrel and bucket with their sweet sap. Too bad it’s all cleared for farmland.”

“With woods by the river like this, there’s probably lots of creatures we’re not seeing now. They’ll come out at night to eat the corn and beans.”

“My cousin heard stories that deer in Michigan would pose in front of your arrows,” the Indian said, “and ask to be rendered into food and skins. They were tired of their rich earthly lives and wished to be released to the spirit realm, or something like that. He said ducks used to shed their feathers upon dying to make themselves easier to prepare. Fish leapt from the water so you needed only to reach out and grab those you had a taste for. The women used to grow vegetables, what they called the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. The soil was black and fertile, and they used the gardens of the ancient ones, whatever that means.”

“Did they swim in the river?”

“Probably. It wasn’t polluted back then.”

“Look. There’s your Indian dinner. I’ll only charge you five dollars.” Margo pointed at a male mallard alone by the river’s edge about fifteen yards away. She pulled the Marlin off her shoulder, rested the butt on her knee, and loaded two cartridges into it.

“You can barely reach the end of that gun barrel to load it.”

“Shhh.” Margo chambered a round, moved closer, and aimed at the duck’s head. The duck drifted a few inches and then was treading water at the river’s edge. She lifted the butt to her shoulder, pressed her left arm against the sling for stability, and aimed, and the duck moved again, away from shore. She dropped to one knee and raised her gun barrel. She sighted the duck’s eye and shot it dead.

“Ouch,” said the Indian.

Margo retrieved the duck with a stick and held it by the foot to drain the blood.

The Indian set off for town, and Margo tugged at the duck’s feathers for a few minutes, until she realized she didn’t want to wash and soak the duck in the river if it was polluted. The trickling stream was too shallow. She needed a bucket to fill with clean water, and she had not noticed one up at the barn. She looked downstream and upstream; she decided that when in doubt a person should go upstream because if she found a boat, then she could float back down. She had her gun over one shoulder, and she held her duck over the other by one foot.

An animal path followed the riverbank. She encountered an electric livestock fence running across the path and almost all the way to the water. She jumped down to the water’s edge and scrambled up the bank on the other side of the fence to find herself in a pasture full of plump beef cattle. One by one the cows looked up at her with white, red, or black faces, and one by one they returned to grazing. When a red-and-white Hereford stared and tossed its head, she imagined shooting it at close range; she wondered if she could take down a bony-headed cow with a shot through the eye. She knew how killing and eating somebody’s cattle would create a whole new host of problems, and that was why she was thinking rather than acting. She wove through the pasture, avoiding cow pies.

At the far boundary, she ducked through strands of nonelectrified barbed wire to get out. Here the river curved. There were a dozen oaks towering over tall grasses near another sandbar, where Margo saw the footprints of water birds, and she noticed a cluster of houses up ahead. She walked along until the overgrown path led away from the river up to a paved road. The road dead-ended at a rundown white house and then curved to follow the river above a row of houses. Below the first house, at the water’s edge, was a homemade camping trailer the size of the smaller of the Slocum trailers. It was surrounded by a low metal fence, and she saw there inside the fence two five-gallon plastic buckets. The overgrown yard contained a half a dozen concrete lawn ornaments. There was a twelve-foot length of wooden dock that ran parallel to shore and extended five feet over the water. Tied to it was an aluminum rowboat with an outboard motor on the back, sheathed in plastic. Margo felt comforted by the modesty of the house and the rustic surroundings.

An empty wheelchair sat on the flagstone patio in back of the house. The property was separated from the one beyond it by a wooden privacy fence, and over it Margo could see the top of a newer cedar-shingled house. There was a kind of freedom in knowing nobody would recognize her here. She was only about forty-five miles downstream of Murrayville, but she’d never known the Murrays to come beyond the dam or to travel to Kalamazoo for any reason. She didn’t see anyone around and so walked onto the backyard patio and followed the steep steps down to the river. From here, she could see the back of the camper, where P
RIDE &
J
OY
was written in stylized block letters. The camper, it turned out, was not sitting on the riverbank, but was affixed to a sort of platform on pontoons in the water. The camper was the cabin of a boat that had been dragged up against the retaining wall. A big black dog lay beside the camper. The dog’s ears lifted as she approached. She stepped off the retaining wall and onto the boat through an opening in the galvanized metal fence. It barely moved under her weight. The buckets were on the other side of the dog.