Once Upon a River (41 page)

Smoke tipped up a bottle of codeine syrup to get the last drops. He readjusted his tubes and folded himself so his body seemed like a leathery shell surrounding his brittle lungs. After the coughing subsided, he breathed sharply through pursed lips. He disconnected his oxygen and lit and smoked a cigarette. He lit a second cigarette from the first, and finally a third. Margo saw how cigarettes were Smoke’s slow-acting angels of death, the agonizingly slow hands of his strangulation. After putting out the third cigarette in the ashtray on the floor, Smoke lay back down, and Margo placed a hand on his shoulder. She leaned in and kissed his cheek.

“Smoke, you shaved. You’re so smooth.” She took his hand in hers, and they fell asleep.

Margo awoke alone to the sounds of Smoke’s wheelchair squeaking in the other room. She heard the door to the patio opening, wind roaring, and Nightmare whining. The door closed and she heard windowpanes rattling against the storm. These days she had a hard time pulling herself out of sleep, even to feed the woodstove, because the creature in her belly always tried to drag her back to dreams, sapping her consciousness until she’d gotten eight, nine, even ten hours of sleep. She shook off her exhaustion, dressed, and gathered together her things in order not to leave any evidence in case Smoke’s nieces stopped by. A long time ago, back in Murrayville, she had sometimes awakened early like this from a dead sleep with a desire to hunt. Back then she had awakened fully with the abruptness of a light switched on. She’d dressed in silence, gotten her daddy’s shotgun from behind his truck seat or out of his closet, and set out into the woods. Now when that feeling came—and she felt a ghost of it even this morning—she found she could simply imagine shooting a buck and the feeling would subside, or she could go out and check her traps for muskrats or coons.

Margo went into the kitchen and did not see Smoke, but found Nightmare sniffing at the door. The lighted clock read six-twenty. Margo checked the bathroom, but Smoke was not there. She had earlier dreamed he had growled into the phone, or maybe it had not been a dream. The predawn sky was brightened by the blowing snow, but Margo did not turn on any lights in the house, did not spoil her night vision. She put on her fake-fur-lined parka, picked her rifle off the rack in the kitchen, and hung it over her shoulder. Though Smoke had given Margo his shotgun, Margo had left it in the rack, worrying that taking it away would make him feel diminished. She did not let Nightmare out because he would run down to the water and howl at the wind, and she would have to wait for him to return before she could go to sleep again. If Smoke was out there, Margo would get him back inside in a matter of seconds.

She stepped outside into the swirling snow and found him sitting in his wheelchair at the edge of the patio, looking down the steep hill toward the water. He wore only his glasses, his long underwear, and an unbuttoned work shirt with his name on it. Snow was accumulating on his shoulders and bare head, and the wind must have been biting his face, but he didn’t behave as if he were cold. Margo took one of his half-clenched hands in both of hers and warmed it.

“You shouldn’t be out here in a snowstorm, especially without your jacket. And without your oxygen,” Margo said. “Come back to bed.”

Nightmare barked.

“Sunrise in a few minutes,” Smoke whispered through puffs of breath, sounding stronger than he had the previous day. “I think the neighbors are out of town.”

“You want to see the sunrise in a snowstorm? Pink sky in the morning?”

Smoke sighed, and Margo felt his gaze move from the river, to her, and to the river again.

“Come sleep a little more. The sun rises every day.”

“My jacket. My smokes,” he finally said with those quick puffs of voice. “Don’t let the dog out.”

Margo went into the house and tried to calm Nightmare. “I’ll get Smoke back inside, and we’ll all go back to sleep,” Margo said. She grabbed the cigarettes from the bedroom, the jacket from the back of a kitchen chair. There on the table, she saw the note. She switched on the table lamp to read the heavy, neat print:
To my busybody nieces. I cannot go to All Saints. I will not go.
She stopped reading, dropped the cigarettes and the jacket, and after a brief struggle to keep Nightmare inside, she stepped outside into the storm. Smoke was gone.

Margo had not considered how close he had been to the edge of the patio. He must have pushed against the wheels with a burst of force strong enough to move him off the patio and to the edge of the hill. Once descending, it would have taken no strength to roll down the snow-covered hillside on the upstream side of the concrete steps and the dock. She followed the wheelchair tracks down the hill. In the pale light reflecting off the blowing snow, she thought she saw Smoke push his wheels once more. At the river’s edge, one wheel caught in the gap between the lawn and the retaining wall, stopping the chair abruptly. Smoke, however, continued moving forward through the blowing snow and onto the river, breaking through the slushy ice on the upstream side of the dock. Margo’s boots slipped out from under her as she was running down to help. She inadvertently kicked the chair forward, along with its oxygen tank, so it tumbled off the wall and into the water on top of Smoke’s legs. The oxygen slid away and disappeared. The current dragged Smoke’s body and the chair against some branches that had gotten caught under the dock. He was tangled in the debris there.

Moving with what felt like slow, clumsy motions, Margo crouched on the retaining wall and leaned down and tried to drag the wheelchair out of the water, but her position was all wrong, and she could not lift its weight. She slid her rifle off her shoulder and stuck its butt end into the snow. She wished she had left it in the house. She braced herself against the dock and the retaining wall and tugged at the chair again, but still she could not lift it off Smoke’s legs. When she moved the branches, Smoke’s head went underwater. Inside the house, Nightmare was barking.

Margo jumped off the retaining wall, through the slushy ice into knee-deep water, and her calves clenched at meeting the cold. She stepped into deeper water, up to her thighs, and her legs burned. She pulled Smoke’s head and torso from beneath the water.

“I’ll come visit you if you go to that place. I’ll sit with you, Smoke. I’ll sneak you coffee and cigarettes,” she said. “Let’s get you out of the water.”

Smoke’s dark glasses had been swept away, and his eyes were closed. His legs were stuck under the wheelchair. They did not come free when she pulled as hard as she dared. Meanwhile the bottom of her parka floated around her and soaked up icy water.

Looking into Smoke’s face, Margo felt foolish. She hadn’t realized how much she loved him. What she felt was no less than what she’d felt for her grandpa, maybe even for her daddy.

“Let me go under.” Smoke tipped his head back and opened his red, raw eyes. The sky was growing pink and Margo saw snowflakes fall on his eyelashes, but he didn’t blink. The current tugged at the soggy fabric of Margo’s parka, making her whole body feel heavy. She should have left the jacket on shore with her rifle, so it would have been dry when she put it on again. Smoke seemed heavier than he should have been.

“I need to go get help.” Margo pressed her cheek against Smoke’s cheek, spoke to him at such close range that their lips were almost touching. “I need to get your other bottle of oxygen.”

“Please don’t leave me,” Smoke whispered in a thinner voice. “I don’t want to die alone.”

“I have to,” Margo said, but she didn’t budge. She knew the current would drag Smoke under, and he would drown before she could return. She held him above the surface. His shirt was waterlogged, but that didn’t explain his heaviness in her hands. Margo pulled her feet out of the muck into which they were sinking, one, then the other. The cold of the river reached up through her and chilled her belly. Nightmare kept barking from the house.

“Let me go under.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Smoke.”

He whispered into her cheek, “This isn’t killing, kid. You can do this.”

Margo felt the vibration of Smoke’s mouth against her face, heard words flowing out of him, but she didn’t know if he was saying them aloud. His face was growing purplish.

“Let me go under,” Smoke whispered again, and he took hold of her free hand with a fierce grip. The water beaded and fell from his thick silver hair, tinted pink by the light. His lips had gone colorless. She noticed then a leather thong tied around his shoulder and under one arm. She felt around him with the hand that was supporting him and found, tied to it, the bag of lead type he’d kept on the kitchen table. She tried to yank it off, but couldn’t manage with one hand, and he still gripped her other hand tightly.

Margo kicked at the wheelchair again and it broke free from the branches and moved downstream under the dock a few inches. Margo saw how one of Smoke’s feet was caught in it, and she thought maybe if she let go of him and wrenched her hand from his grip, she could possibly free his foot before he drowned. If he were still alive after that, maybe she could lift him onto the retaining wall. Maybe she could get him up the hill. If he were still alive when the paramedics came, he might survive another hour, or a day or a week in the hospital or nursing home, probably with pneumonia. His forehead was twisted with pain.

She looked at him one long, last time. She kissed his cheek and let go. He slipped below the surface. His coughing stopped and his chest convulsions slowed and stopped. Margo felt his tension and pain slip away, and his grip on her hand gradually loosened.

She wanted to lift Smoke’s body out of the river and onto land, but she had to get out of the freezing water. She climbed onto the retaining wall and stood dripping, her teeth chattering. The blowing snow had already covered her tracks and the wheelchair marks. The water on her pant legs and parka quickly froze, and the snow stuck to her. Water beaded on the outside of her greased leather boots, but it had soaked in through her laces and into her socks so that her feet were blocks of ice. She looked up at the house and saw through the snow a thin man in a fedora walking across the patio. Then he was staring down at her, his arms crossed over his chest. She inhaled sharply, and it hurt.

Margo plucked her rifle from the snow, put the strap over her shoulder, not pausing to tap the snow out of the barrel, and moved up the steps. At the top, she stood before Fishbone and tried to say something, but his stony gaze stopped her from trying, and Nightmare’s wild barking overwhelmed her. She made her way onto the porch, stomped the snow off, and moved inside. Nightmare followed her across the kitchen, agitated but silent. She grabbed her cloth bag from the kitchen, took the bottle of shampoo from the bathroom, two pairs of new socks from Smoke’s bedroom drawer, a shirt with a label that said
Smoke
from the closet, and the rest of the jar of strawberry jam from the refrigerator. She grabbed the Remington from the gun rack and dropped two boxes of twelve-gauge shells into her wet pockets, where they weighted her like anchors. Before she walked out, she crouched and hugged the big dog and scratched his ears and his neck. “Goodbye, Nightmare,” she said. “I wish I could take you with me. I wish I could take care of you.”

She walked back outside. Through the blowing snow, she saw Fishbone’s figure down at the water’s edge. She clutched the shotgun in her bare hand—her gloves were in her pockets, soaking wet, under the shells. She set off on stiff legs downstream along the path toward the
Glutton.
For a long time, Margo heard the dog barking behind her. She wondered if the police might notice her tracks. Or was Smoke right when he had said nobody would care enough about the death of a sick old man to investigate?

Margo managed to slip through the barbed wire without snagging her parka. She slowed as she moved on her numb feet across the pasture, where no livestock were about. When she had almost reached the far side, she stumbled over something, maybe a frozen cow pie under the snow and fell to her knees. She crawled forward for a while, but had to rest before continuing on. She studied the river, could make out only gray and white blurs. The river was too cold even to stink, and according to last night’s radio weather report, it might freeze again tonight after the storm. Her Marlin remained on her shoulder, but she had somehow dropped the shotgun into the snow. She felt around, but couldn’t find it. She would rest for just a minute.

She was exhausted beyond anything she could remember feeling. She thought she had survived losing her father, but she had not yet survived it, nor any of her other losses. She pressed her cheek against the snow, felt the snow compress and melt slightly. Snow began to accumulate on her other cheek. She would lie there for a moment, until she was rested, until she understood what had happened this morning, and what had happened in her life. Her obligations had been met, and she was free, more free than she had ever been. Within minutes she was hardly feeling the cold. If she could return to her boat, she would start a fire to thaw herself out, or else she would remain right here, at rest.

She was awakened by a jolt, as though someone had kicked her from behind, but when she opened her eyes and looked around, she saw she was alone. The jolt had been as painful as an electrical shock.

After the sensation passed, Margo closed her eyes and returned her cheek to the snow, only to receive another blast of electricity so strong her eyes flew open. She rose to her knees and found she was beside a fence post near the water’s edge, closer to the fence and to the river than she had thought. She pulled herself up to standing. She must have grabbed the electric fence with her bare hand and shocked herself, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the jolt had come from inside her own body. She continued toward the river, and she negotiated her way around the fence somehow without falling into the water. She made her way slowly to her boat through snow that now glowed pure pink from the rising sun. She was carrying her bag over one shoulder and her rifle over the other, and she was weighed down by her frozen parka.