Once Upon a River (33 page)

“You want to get her in trouble with the law?”

“Nobody’s going to care about a sick old man dying,” Smoke said.

“If this young lady shoots you with that Marlin,” Fishbone said, “they’ll trace the bullet to her microgroove barrel. And if she shoots you with a shotgun, everybody is going to hear the blast. You’re not thinking about what happens to anybody else after you’re gone.”

“So drown me in the river.”

Fishbone shook his head, as though giving up on serious talk for the day.

“Maybe I’ll die in my sleep and you’ll both be off the hook. Kid, you give me a hundred dollars and I’ll sign over my
Pride & Joy
, and you can go register it in your own name. You’ll have to take her a little ways downstream. But don’t go far.”

“Don’t take the girl’s money. What do you need a hundred bucks for? Just let her use the old thing.”

“To prove I sold it and didn’t give it away. If I start giving things away, the judge will say I’m losing my faculties. I’ll write her a receipt saying she paid for it and keep a carbon copy.” His color looked healthier the longer he argued with Fishbone.

“Probably your nieces won’t even notice if it’s gone.” Fishbone bit the plastic cigar filter and spoke through his teeth. “They are not your most observant ladies.”

“A hundred dollars.” Margo pulled from her wallet five twenty-dollar bills. She would have paid a lot more.

“And a promise you’ll help me at the end,” Smoke said. He took off his glasses again and let them lie in his lap while he looked at her.

Margo was afraid to look back at him to see how serious he was. Instead she watched Fishbone’s wiry figure descend the concrete-block steps. Still shaking his head, he untied the aluminum boat, stepped in, took the cover off the outboard, and started it up. The boat moved upstream. He took the boat out for a run most days, Margo would learn, weather allowing.

• Chapter Nineteen •

Margo followed Smoke’s directions for registering the boat. She filled out the form Fishbone got for her and mailed it in, listing her new Greenland PO box as her address. The transferred boat title was in her pocket twelve days later, and Smoke handed her the key to the padlock on the door. He talked her through filling up the water tanks, and while she had the hose down there, she washed the cabin’s outside walls and scrubbed the deck with a brush. Margo carried Smoke’s only working outboard—an old Johnson two-horsepower trolling motor—down from the back porch and fixed it in place, fed some unleaded gasoline mixed with two-stroke oil into the tank, but found herself unable to start it. Smoke tried to give instructions from the patio, but finally she had to help him down the stairs to the boat, where he leaned against the cabin. When he couldn’t catch his breath after five minutes, Margo ran up to the patio and got his oxygen tank. Together they got the outboard going, though the action exhausted Smoke. Downstream with the current would be no problem for the trolling motor, but Smoke was right that she couldn’t go upstream even at full throttle. She would have to find a bigger outboard.

“I’m going to miss this boat,” he said when he was back in his wheelchair on the patio, reconnected to his oxygen. “My
Pride & Joy
. I designed and built every damned inch of that cabin myself, even welded up that little wood stove. Couldn’t find one small enough.”

“Do you want me to keep it here?”

He shook his head. “Go down to Harland’s.”

“Who’s Harland?”

“The farmer who owns that land you’re camped out on. You’re legally registered now, so just keep your flotation devices visible, and don’t screw around with the DNR. Same thing for that trapping license. I don’t know why a kid like you wants to kill muskrats,” he said and stopped to catch his breath.

“It really is mine, isn’t it?”

“You’ve got the title. I think I’m out of my mind selling it to you, but there’s nobody else who would go along with me.”

The title was in the camper, closed in
Annie Oakley: Life and Legend
. Before she headed downriver, she would go inside and look at it again.

“I wish I didn’t have to be on any person’s land.”

The farmer hadn’t come around since the day she had seen him on the ridge, though occasionally she spied on him near his house and in his barnyard.

“And I’m sure he’d rather you wasn’t on his place, but you can’t motor around all the time. It’s not that kind of boat.”

“I’ll look out for someplace that doesn’t belong to anybody.”

“Good goddamned luck with that.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to live,” Margo said, but didn’t know how to go on and so crossed her arms over her chest.

“Me, too. Haven’t figured it out yet,” Smoke said and held out his hand. Margo uncrossed her arms and took the hand in hers so it stopped shaking. She wished she could see his eyes. He said, “You’ve got every right to try to live any goddamned idiotic way you want to.”

Margo waved at his slumped, silver-haired figure as the boat sputtered downstream. She pulled the crumbling old rudder out of the water and steered the boat using the outboard, keeping close to the north bank of the river. The boat was heavy and hard to maneuver, and she had to lean down over the back to work the motor and use the mirrors to see what was in front of her. Finally she cut against the current and steered up onto the sandbar above where the springwater trickled into the river. She lifted the motor out of the water as the propeller scraped bottom. By the time she could get off the boat to secure it with a rope, it had drifted, so she had to drag it back upstream, a few inches at a time. Finally she moored it above where the springwater trickled in, just upstream of her campsite, where the water was deep enough that the boat sat level. She tied it to a tree so it couldn’t slip any farther downstream. She anchored the boat near shore using the five-gallon buckets half filled with concrete that she’d pulled up out of the water at Smoke’s. At first she thought she would not need to be tied to shore, but the boat kept edging out into the river. There were two coils of rough manila rope on the boat, along with two five-foot-long stakes she pounded into the ground; she tied up to those to keep herself from drifting.

When she had filled out the form to register the boat, she had considered naming it
The River Rose II
. She considered
The Indian
, but decided he didn’t deserve the honor. She painted over the words
Pride & Joy
with some white enamel she’d taken from Smoke’s back porch and let it dry for a few days before painting in plain block letters
G
LUTTON
, her grandpa’s name for the wolverine, the animal she had seen right here when the Indian told her to close her eyes and she did not.

Smoke had given her a chain saw and a splitting maul along with the boat—said he couldn’t use them anymore and neither could Fishbone, who lived in Kalamazoo. Margo set to work right away sawing fallen trees from the windbreak and splitting the logs into small chunks for the woodstove. The first day, she sawed and split until her back ached. She was grateful to have work to do.

She quickly adjusted to her new home, discovered all the storage spaces, found the odd bits of equipment Smoke had stashed on the boat, including fishing gear and kitchen utensils. The design of the cabin was clever, to make the most space for cooking, and plenty of room for sitting and sleeping. This was how she wanted to live. Because the whole big river was her home, her shelter against the elements could be small and efficient, inexpensive to maintain. Her gratitude toward Smoke nearly overwhelmed her when she thought about it.

Margo wrote her mother a letter saying she was settled outside Kalamazoo and she’d like to come visit. After that, Margo checked her PO box six days a week. Most mornings she stopped at Smoke’s on the way, to visit him and to use his bathroom and hot water. There was a shower on her boat, with a hot water tank heated by propane, but using it splashed water around, and she would have to refill both the water and the propane when they emptied. The shower in Smoke’s house was much improved after she scrubbed the mildew out of it. Even after cleaning, though, the yellow walls and white ceiling were coated with a rust-colored film, the same stuff that was on her houseboat camper ceiling. The same color stained Smoke’s fingertips and, no doubt, the inside of his lungs.

Smoke liked having her wander in and out of his house, and every day he wanted to hear what she’d done, whether it was shooting a critter, cutting firewood, or repainting the inside of the houseboat with white paint to make it feel brighter—afterward, it stank so much of latex that for three nights she had to sleep outside by her campfire. Margo had never known anybody who took such an interest in her life as Smoke did. He gave her books from his shelf, including three volumes of
Foxfire
, which had stories about hunting wild turkey, boar, and bear. One of them told how to cure pork for bacon. Some days Smoke hardly said anything because of his breathing, but otherwise he told her about how dirty the river had been when he bought this property decades ago and how much cleaner it was now that the factories and the cities upstream couldn’t dump their waste and sewage into the water. Margo thought of the Murray Metal elimination pipe, near which nobody fished. As far as she knew, it still spewed junk. He showed her a leather bag of lead type, opened it up on the kitchen table, said it was all that remained of his print shop. The notion that Smoke might really expect her to end his life seemed more remote with every passing day.

Margo thought there would come a day when she knew exactly what to do about the baby growing inside her. Almost every morning through October and November, before venturing out, she threw up into the river.

The day before Thanksgiving, Smoke told Margo his nieces would be taking him to one of their apartments for a midday dinner. The following afternoon, Margo walked the half mile upstream and hid outside, watching the house and waiting for him to come home. The thought of those nieces having Smoke’s company made her jealous, and she didn’t trust the women to take care of him.

Margo stood out in the cold, leaning her back against his house. She stared at the deteriorating old garage with the C
ONDEMNED
sticker on the window and willed it to collapse before her eyes with a
whoosh.
She listened to the birds on the neighbor’s feeder, watched them rise and fall in the air above the privacy fence. After a while she sensed Nightmare inside the house sensing her outside. Always she sensed the tiny, ferocious thing inside herself, only two and a half months along. She felt it stealing her nourishment, her energy, and even her balance when she walked.

When Smoke’s nieces arrived, there was some confusion in helping him out of the car and into his wheelchair so that he almost fell, but Margo stayed out of sight. While they were all in the house, she continued watching three chickadees descend in a rotation onto the bird feeder and up to a branch to eat the seed. She loved how these little black-and-blue birds showed up everywhere: in the woods, at the water’s edge, outside houses, calling
chicka-dee-dee-dee
. When she had been in middle school, she had sometimes looked out through the window of a classroom and seen chickadees on the little trees. There had been moments like that when she had thought school could be a natural part of life.

A year ago, Margo and Michael had spent all day cooking two pies and a turkey breast and stuffing, and they had eaten dinner, just the two of them. She wondered where Michael was eating today. Brian was still in prison, probably telling his stories and jokes and learning new ones. Luanne was twenty-some miles away according to the map in Margo’s wallet, in her
delicate situation
, whatever that was. The Indian was with his wife, no doubt. And the Murrays would be getting ready for a big party, though she had a hard time picturing such a thing, given the state in which she had last seen them. Smoke said she could decide how she wanted to live, but it was hard to figure out what she wanted for the future when there was so much from the past that she had not yet puzzled through.

As soon as Smoke was alone, Margo slipped inside. At his invitation, she opened the plastic containers his nieces had put in the refrigerator and ate everything in them, including turkey, stuffing, and buttered slices of bakery bread.