Once Upon a River (35 page)

“The girl’s pregnant,” Smoke said. “She doesn’t want to have a goddamned baby.”

“I don’t like that kind of business.” Fishbone went back to working the hide off the head of the carcass. “And you should know it, Smoky.”

Margo said, “I can’t have a baby. I can’t take care of it.” She noticed he left the muskrat’s nose on the skin.

Smoke sipped from the bottle of over-the-counter medicine, which did not work as well as the codeine prescription stuff, but he’d already gone through all that.

“If she wants help, I would ask you to please help her as a favor to me,” Smoke said.

Fishbone removed the skin the rest of the way off the head. Margo stepped closer to see the naked skull. Without warning, Fishbone pulled the skin off the muskrat’s belly, and the guts slipped out onto the brown paper bag on the patio floor.

Margo looked down to see splashes of fluid beading on her boots and soaking into her pant leg. Fishbone’s shoes were still clean.

Fishbone looked up at her. “Now get rid of these guts, young lady. You got a hole to bury them in?”

“The ground’s frozen,” Smoke said. “Nobody’s digging a hole.”

Margo couldn’t tell if this was real discord or their usual banter.

“I’ll pay you for gas to take me,” Margo said. “I’ve got enough money.”

“How far along are you?”

“Since the middle of September, not three months.”

“I figured that Mexican was going to be trouble,” Smoke said.

“I’ll see about it. I’ll tell you, though, there’s too much freedom in this country when you got freedom to do that. Get rid of these,” Fishbone said and nodded at the entrails.

“What are you going to do with the meat?” she asked.

“You want to cook it? Tastes like rabbit, only fishy. You got to cut out these glands on the belly here, or you’re going to get a nasty smell.” He pointed at the thumb-knuckle-sized sacs with his knife. He hacked off the muskrat’s tail, laid it on top of the guts, and then wrapped the little carcass in newspaper. “You mess up those glands, even Nightmare won’t touch the meat.”

Margo knelt down and tugged the brown bag away from Fishbone’s feet, and Fishbone pulled the hide gently down onto one of the stretching boards, inside out, and showed Margo how to remove the fat and membrane from the skin with the edge of the spoon. Then he took a bandanna from his pocket and wiped his hands with it. Fishbone’s disapproval was making Margo feel uncertain, but she took some strength from Smoke’s crossed arms.

Margo carried the guts down to the river and dumped them in. The snapping turtles would be deep in the muck hibernating, but there was always something hungry in the river.

A week later, Fishbone didn’t speak as he drove her toward Kalamazoo in his old two-toned Chevy pickup, and his body seemed stiffer and more angular than usual. He hardly looked in her direction except to shake his head. He had insisted she leave her rifle in Smoke’s kitchen, and she felt uneasy without it. The scenery as they approached the city seemed homely; the yards were small, and some contained decorations put up for Christmas, less than two weeks away—hard plastic Santas, snowmen, holy men, reindeer, and human-sized candy canes. Margo imagined that at night when the lights were lit, the decorations would seem cheerful. In Smoke’s riverside neighborhood of one-story houses with big yards, people had hung lights on their front windows and over trees near the road, but nobody decorated near the river, which was where holiday lights looked prettiest, reflecting off the water.

Though the air inside the truck was smoky from Fishbone’s cigar and sickly from the pine air freshener hanging from the mirror, Margo did not dare open the window for fear of irritating him. After fifteen minutes on the road, Fishbone pulled into the driveway beside a brick building and parked at the far end of the adjoining lot. He slipped an eight-track tape into the player—B. B. King—and as a guitar solo lurched forward, he crossed his arms.

She took a deep breath and looked toward the solid double doors beneath the sign reading C
LINIC
E
NTRANCE
. Four people stood alongside the building holding their own signs: S
TOP
K
ILLING
B
ABIES
and M
URDER
S
ANCTIONED
W
ITHIN
.

She shut the truck door and walked across what seemed a long stretch of asphalt. She felt small and unsteady when she reached the sidewalk.

“Baby killer!” shouted the tallest of the three women protesters.

Margo noticed there was a bit of water flowing in the ditch behind the building, and she figured that every stream, no matter how small or dirty, eventually made its way to the river. If Fishbone was gone when she came out, she could follow the flow through ditches to successively bigger streams to the Kalamazoo. She would be able to follow the river upstream to her boat.

Margo tugged open one of the painted steel doors, like the doors of her high school back in Murrayville. Her footfalls were silent on the greenish carpet of the lobby.

She approached the counter beneath the words C
HECK
I
N
. The receptionist seated there in a red-and-green sweater gave her a quiet smile.

“Good afternoon. Are you here for counseling?” She reminded Margo of her fifth-grade teacher, who’d had the same chubby figure and curly hair and had dressed up special for every holiday, even the Day of the Dead, the day after Halloween, when she drew skeleton bones on her face and arms. The lobby was decorated for Christmas, with gold-and-green garlands behind the desk and a Santa-with-elves statue on the counter. “Is this your first visit?”

Margo nodded. The receptionist jotted down her name and handed her a clipboard with a stapled form attached. “You can sit over there and get started on this. Just give us a shout if you need anything. The nurse will call your name in a few minutes.”

As Margo crossed the lobby to the waiting area, the perfume smell reminded her of Fishbone’s air freshener, only worse, and she feared she might sneeze. The fluorescent lights hurt her eyes, and maybe they were the source of the dull hum that was making her ears feel clogged. At Smoke’s house, he and Margo usually sat in the sunlight coming through the window, and sometimes they even sat in the dark, because Smoke found it restful on his eyes. When Margo was on the
Glutton
, she cleaned her rifle, oiled her boots, read books, and repaired her clothes by the light of an oil lamp—Smoke had given her a bottle of clean-burning lamp oil and convinced her not to use kerosene. Now she longed for the muted movement of the river beneath her feet.

Two other women sat in the waiting area, one Margo’s age, one older. Both held magazines in their laps. Margo took a seat and started filling out the form. For the address (where it said a PO box was not acceptable), she wrote Smoke’s address, and then crossed it out for fear that Smoke would somehow get in trouble with his nieces.

When the door opened, a nurse called in the younger of the two other women. That woman closed her magazine and placed it carefully on the table so that its edges lined up with the magazine beneath it. The older woman glanced after her.

The form asked when Margo’s last period had been, and she tried to calculate, but the calendar on the wall did not have the phases of the moon. The last several months had been a relief from that concern, from those five days of washing and drying the cloths she used. The form asked whether any relative of hers had high blood pressure or high cholesterol. She got up and walked to the window and looked out. She saw dirty snow and high curbs painted safety-yellow and a dozen cars, each parked far away from the others, and finally Fishbone’s truck. The people with signs were chanting at a girl walking past them, and the girl was hiding her face. Margo grabbed at her shoulder for her rifle sling. As the girl entered the lobby from outside, Margo returned to her chair. A painting on the wall featured a white farmhouse, similar to the Murray house, with a big red barn beside it. She figured where the river should be in relation to the house—just below the bottom of the painting—and where she had long ago shot targets beside the barn. The hum of the lights or the machines behind the closed doors got louder. Margo took a deep breath and focused on the pages before her. They asked for her insurance information. On the last page, she read the question: “Do you understand the following procedures?” and it listed three options that were written in what seemed like a foreign language.

Margo returned to the section on “personal medical history.” Had she ever had seizures? Back pain? She checked the box
yes
and wrote
Chopping wood
in the space provided, and then she wished she could erase it, because she suddenly did not want to share anything more about herself with strangers. When a woman in a lab coat called her name, Margo stood and followed her through the doorway, down a hall, and into a small room.

“Are you okay, honey?” the woman asked. Her cheeks were powdery and her lipstick was pearly like the inside of a clamshell. When Margo realized the woman seemed concerned and was waiting for a response, she nodded and raised her eyebrows.

“Keep working on the questionnaire. The doctor will be right with you,” she said. “Don’t be nervous. He’s very nice. He’ll examine you and then talk to you about your options. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Undress and put on this gown.” She patted the gown that lay folded on the examining table. Then she held up a paper sheet and said, “You can cover your legs with this. It’ll just be a couple of minutes.”

The perfume smell overwhelmed the room, which was about the size of the room in which she’d had her teeth cleaned as a girl. She took off her daddy’s Carhartt jacket, rested it on the back of the chair, and folded its worn arms over the seat. She smoothed its frayed collar and then put it back on. The small window was too high to look out of, but she imagined it looked onto the flowing ditch. She studied a poster that featured a girl Margo’s age with long blonde hair; her button-up striped shirt had wide lapels. She was smiling and holding hands with a boy who was all in shadow. P
ROTECT
Y
OURSELF
, it said in big yellow letters. Below that it said, in small type, A
GAINST
U
NWANTED
P
REGNANCY AND
V
ENEREAL
D
ISEASE
. Other posters depicted birth control pills in beige packets, one that had the twenty-eight green, white, and pink pills arranged like tick marks on a clock face. (Margo counted the marks while she waited.) The plastic thing the size of a loaf of bread beside the sink appeared to be a three-dimensional female body part, and in another situation, Margo would have liked to take a good look at it, but now she was too distracted. She put down the clipboard and tried to catch her breath. She had learned all she knew about birth control in a two-hour sex-education assembly in seventh grade, but it hadn’t stuck with her how careful a person should be.

She imagined the doctor telling her where to sit. When to lie down. She’d never undressed for a doctor before. She ran her hand across the clean paper on the examining table. She picked up the gown and then put it down.

She wanted the thing inside her to slip out and disappear into the air. She wanted it to have never been there at all. But beyond that, she didn’t know what she wanted to do about it. She only knew she couldn’t stay here any longer. She wasn’t ready to open herself up and put herself into the hands of the strangers here. No more than she could go back to tenth grade and sit in the stifling classroom and answer a question posed to her, no more than she could turn herself in to the police as Michael had wanted her to do. No more than she could let someone burn her with cigarettes. Now that she’d come here, now that she’d seen what was here, she needed to go home and think about it.

She walked out the door, down the hall, and turned left. Her heart pounded in fear that someone would stop her and want her to explain. She pushed on the door that led to the lobby. She pushed again, but it did not move. A pretty, freckled woman in a white lab coat walked over to her, patted her shoulder, and pulled the door toward her. It opened. Margo walked through the lobby, through the steel doors, back out onto the sidewalk. When she got a few steps from the building and away from the protesters, she inhaled deeply, as though she had gone the whole time inside without breathing. She trudged through the slush of the parking lot and climbed into Fishbone’s truck, onto the seat that had been repaired with duct tape.