When Crane got home from work, Margo was dragging the warm, soft body of her ten-point buck by the antlers up onto the riverbank.
“What the hell?”
She stopped pulling and looked at him.
“You have got to stop this slaughter, child.” He shook his head. “They’ll fine us if you get caught, and I don’t have the money to pay. Lord, I wish I could have a drink about now, just one goddamned drink.”
Margo resumed pulling, but one of the deer’s hind legs was tangled in poison ivy roots. She tugged and tugged again, not wanting to let go of the buck, fearing it would tumble down the bank and she’d have to start all over.
“Listen,” Crane said. “The Murrays could make one phone call, and if those state of Michigan sons of bitches show up and find the meat we already got in the freezer, we’re in trouble.”
He didn’t need to worry, Margo knew. Cal had not even reported Crane for shooting out his tires the other day. She couldn’t expect her father to understand why she had to kill these bucks—she didn’t understand it herself—but when she got one in her sights, she had to take it down as naturally as she needed to take her next breath.
When Margo tugged again, Crane jumped down the riverbank and pulled the hoof and leg free from the roots. He shook his head as he pushed from below, helping her get the buck up onto the riverbank, and then into the air with the pulley.
“You are one hell of a hunter. I don’t know where you got your aim, but you sure hit what you’re shooting at.” He patted her back, wiped away some dirt, and rested his arm there. “Did you wrestle this buck in the mud?”
Margo smiled at him. She thought it was the first time he’d put his arm around her since she won first prize at the 4-H Rimfire Target Competition last month. She’d been standing right there when Mr. Peake had told her father that her shooting was uncanny, and also it was possibly a miracle, considering she was shooting with Crane’s old single-shot Remington 510 with iron sights.
“Don’t you ever forget, Margo, you’re the only reason I’m alive and sober in this world.” He sniffed at the air and then sniffed her jacket. “You look like an angel, but you smell like a rutting buck.”
When he went inside to get his knife, Margo sniffed her sleeve. She saw, across the river, Billy coming out of the barn, dragging the heavy pig roaster by its legs over the frozen ground a few feet at a time. The roaster was made out of a 275-gallon fuel-oil tank cut in half. Margo had been lucky to get the buck home without anybody seeing.
Aunt Joanna, meanwhile, came out of the house wearing insulated rubber boots and a long plaid coat and dragging one end of an orange extension cord. She walked out onto the oil-barrel float carrying a strand of colored Christmas lights that were already twinkling in her hands. Last year Margo had helped her screw in cup hooks around the edge of the float, so it would look festive after dark with the lights reflecting off the water. After the Thanksgiving party, the Murrays would pull their float up onto land and chain it to a tree to protect it from ice and floods.
“I know you miss your aunt Joanna,” Crane said when he returned. “I know it’s hard to be without a ma. But don’t you even think of going to that party.”
“I got a ma,” she whispered. “Somewhere.”
Across the way, Joanna dropped her string of lights into the river, and Margo saw the end waggle and sparkle a few yards downstream. Despite the risk of electrical shock, Joanna was probably laughing as she fished the lights from the cold current. Margo could hear Joanna’s voice in her head now, saying, Quit brooding and sing with me, Sprite! Nobody likes a sullen girl.
Joanna had been the one to pull the book Little Sure Shot off the hall shelf for Margo as soon as she’d taken an interest in shooting. The Murray boys had all refused to read about a girl. The cover drawing of Annie Oakley’d had a beard and mustache drawn on with a black crayon, but Margo had been able to scrub most of it off, leaving only a gray shadow over Annie’s face. Margo was curious about the strange clothes that covered Annie head to toe, including high collars and leggings under her skirts. Margo loved to study the melancholy expression on Annie’s face.
Margo knew Crane wanted her to make friends outside the family. And Margo was curious about other kids at school, but they took her quietness for snobbery, her slowness to respond in conversation as stupidity. Crane wanted her to speak more, but the calm and quiet of the last year had created in her a desire for more calm and quiet, and Margo wasn’t sure there was going to be any end to it. Silence allowed her to ruminate not just about Cal and what had happened last year, but also about her grandfather, to know again the papery feeling of his skin and the sadness and fear he’d expressed on the sunporch when he was dying. Silence brought back the sound of her mother sighing when she felt too dreary to get out of bed on winter days. Margo wasn’t sure she could move forward in time, when the past kept calling for her attention the way it did.
“You don’t seem to understand what’s been done to you by those people,” Crane said when he saw how intently Margo was watching Joanna. He grabbed her shoulders. “If you would have spoken against Cal, we could have sent him to jail. Damn it, he raped you! That Slocum girl told me.” He let go of her and stomped off toward the house, shaking his head.
Rape sounded like a quick and violent act, like making a person empty her wallet at the point of a knife, like shooting someone or stealing a TV. What Cal had done was gentler, more personal, like passing a virus. She had not objected to Cal’s actions in the shed, had even been curious about what was happening. For the last year, however, it had been gnawing at her, and Margo had been forming her objection.
• Chapter Three •
On Thanksgiving, Margo and her daddy had a meal of turkey breast, grocery-store stuffing, potatoes, and cranberry sauce shaped by the can. They played Michigan rummy until Crane fell asleep in his chair. On the following morning, Friday, Margo served him scrambled eggs and toast. The phone rang, and when Crane hung up, he said, “Brian Ledoux’s going to come get the venison. He’ll give you some money for it.”
Margo nodded.
“You keep the money. You earned it. You probably need it for ammunition. But I can’t have you killing any more deer, Margo. I’m taking the shotgun. I don’t have to take the rifle, too, do I? Nobody else is going to kill a deer with a single-shot .22, but I’m afraid you might.”
She shook her head no.
“Promise. Say it, or I’ll take the rifle.”
“I promise,” she whispered.
“I guess you need something to protect yourself if one of them Murrays comes over here,” he said. “But don’t you do anything unless you got no other choice. You think before you shoot. You consider the consequences.”
Margo nodded.
“And you know better than to go to that party. If you even set foot on that Murray property, I’ll drive over and drag you home by your ear.”
She nodded again, didn’t know how much longer she could stand her imprisonment here. Next summer she would swim, no matter what he said.
“I’ll be home at seven. We’ll have dinner together, Margo. We’ve got the leftover turkey, and I’ll try to get us an apple pie if they got one left in the grocery deli. That’s the best I can do. You know you’re the only reason I’m still alive on this earth. Don’t you?” He looked at her until she nodded, and then he slid the twenty-gauge into its case and folded down the truck seat to place it back there. Margo was glad for his affection, but maybe it was too much to be the only reason another person was alive.
After Crane went to work, Margo took his rifle out and shot at the auto-reset target he had welded together for her at his old job. It had four hanging targets along the bottom that flipped up when struck, and when she shot the fifth target on top, it reset all five. She repeated that cycle twenty times without missing, reloading for each shot. She even wore the spongy yellow earplugs that Mr. Peake had insisted on; he’d given her a big plastic bag of them, along with a stack of paper tar
gets. Then she got the little shaving mirror out of the bathroom and held it against the butt of the rifle and shot over her shoulder, copying one of Annie Oakley’s tricks. After twenty-some rounds going awry into the side of the hill, she hit the paper bull’s-eye affixed to a piece of plywood, and then she hit it ten times in a row. The shooting warmed her enough that she could unzip her Carhartt jacket—one of her daddy’s that she had claimed.
At noon she sat on the riverbank and ate a fried egg sandwich on store-bought bread. Joanna would have baked at least a dozen loaves fresh for the party, plus a cinnamon loaf for breakfast tomorrow. Margo raised her rifle and aimed across the river at each person who showed up at the Murrays’. After a few hours, when the wind shifted, she smelled the meat roasting. She could hear the music coming out of the outdoor speakers. She aimed at Billy.
“You planning to take out some partygoers?”
The man’s voice startled her. He was in the driver’s seat of a pontoon boat, maybe sixteen feet long, that was drifting toward her. It said Playbuoy across the siderail. She had been focusing so intently that she hadn’t heard the boat approach. She lowered her rifle and moved down to the water’s edge and out onto the dock. When the boat drifted near enough, she reached out and grabbed the side. Two of the three men on board had beards and curly black hair; they were so similar that one might have been a copy of the other. The third man, thinner and blond, was sleeping across a bench seat on the port side. The black-haired man behind the wheel was Brian Ledoux, Grandpa’s friend, though he was Crane’s age. The man standing beside him had the same giant’s body, but his skin was pale, and that made his dark hair seem more striking. There was something strange about his eyes.
“You got a buck for me?” Brian said.
She pointed to the deer, gutted and skinned, laid out on a blue tarp under the swing set.
“I talked to your papa last night. I hear you’ve become quite the hunter, Maggie. A crack shot with that rifle, too.” He winked.
She didn’t know why Brian called her Maggie, but she liked the way he grinned.
The two big men hoisted the carcass onto the boat and put their own tarp over it. She had been to Brian’s cabin with her grandpa, usually when nobody else was there. The cabin was more than thirty miles upstream on a wild section of the river, with no road access or electricity. His cabin seemed to lean on its stilts as though wanting to be even closer to the water than it was. The trees there, Margo remembered, were tall and mossy, snaked with poison ivy vines. The time she remembered best was when somebody had caught a possum in a live trap. Grandpa had been ready to shoot it when Margo pointed out the babies stuck in the wiry fur, a dozen tiny pink clinging creatures with bulging eyes and translucent limbs and noses. He had seen how fascinated she was and let the clumsy mama amble off.
“I admired the old man, your grandpa, may he rest in peace,” Brian said, “but I’ve got to tell you, girl, I’m not so fond of some of them other Murrays of Murrayville.”
“Brian knocked out a couple of Cal’s teeth,” the other bearded man said, squinting one eye. His voice was thinner than Brian’s and nervous sounding.
“Hey, the sonbitch fired me,” Brian said. “Didn’t have the nerve to do it himself, sent his secretary. So I went into his office and told him what I thought. Said he didn’t like my attitude, so I figured I’d better show him some attitude, just so’s he’d know next time he saw it.”
Mumbled words came out of the man passed out on the bench seat of the boat. He shifted on the seat cushions, and Margo saw he had a mustache.
“Will somebody wake that asshole up? Or throw him overboard,” Brian said. Both men laughed.
“Darling, no,” the drunk man moaned.
“They seem to have put the teeth back into Cal’s mouth,” Brian said. “It makes me want to knock a few more out just to see how that works, putting them back in.”
Margo wondered if Brian knew Crane, too, had knocked out Cal’s teeth. She wondered if they had knocked out the same ones.
“Meet my brother, Paul. Pauly, meet my dream girl. Prettiest thing on the river. If you’d put on your glasses, you’d probably faint dead away like Johnny here.” And then to Margo, “I’m keeping my brother off the drugs. No need for speed out here on the river, unless it’s in your boat motor.”
“Don’t tell her that,” Paul said. “For Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t worry, she won’t say anything,” Brian said, and winked. “I’ve about got him cured of all that junk, Maggie.”
“Will you shut the fuck up, Brian?” Paul turned so he was looking at Margo out of his left eye, and she wondered if he might be blind in the other.
Margo accepted two twenties from Brian—more than she had hoped for—and shoved them into her jeans pocket. Her jeans were getting tight, but she didn’t want to waste her ammunition money on new ones.
The man lying in the boat moaned again.
“Five bucks says Johnny falls onto that deer,” Paul said.
“He can rub up against it if he feels romantic,” Brian said. His big hand was resting on the boat’s steering wheel again, and Margo saw the back of it was covered with scars, white lines, as though somebody had cut him and cut him, but was not able to hurt him. She would have liked to touch him, see what those scars felt like.
“You come upstream and see us sometime, Maggie,” Brian said. “You know where the cabin is.”
The blond man rolled over, fell off the bench seat and onto the tarped deer, but didn’t wake up. Brian and Paul roared with laughter. When the man’s open hand moved across the buck’s haunch, Margo had to smile, too.
“Let’s get going,” Paul said finally, looking back and forth from Margo to Brian. “If you and jailbait here can bear to separate.”
“I just can’t get enough of a girl who don’t talk,” Brian said to Paul and started the boat’s motor with a roar. “Goodbye, Maggie.”
The men headed upstream. Margo watched their boat get smaller until it disappeared around the curve. Directly across the river, Junior Murray arrived at the wooden steps leading to the kitchen door of the big house, maybe just home from the military academy. Joanna, who was outside, put down the pan she was carrying and took him in her arms, held him for a long time before ushering him up the stairs and inside.
When Margo could no longer sit still, at about five o’clock, she got into her boat. She laid the rifle across the back seat and floated a bit downstream, so no one across the way would see her coming. She then moved upstream and tied The River Rose at the willow near the whitewashed shed where all the trouble had started. She kicked at the frozen grass to warm herself. She aimed her rifle at patches of frosted ground a few times, pretending she saw rabbits. When she saw a squirrel pause on the ground near the shed, she closed her eyes, lifted the rifle to her shoulder and her cheek, aimed it blindly where she had been looking, and then opened her eyes. Her sighting was almost perfect. The squirrel scampered off. She listened to the clinks and shouts from the horseshoe pit, listened to Hank Williams Sr. wailing. The next song was Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” She wondered what would happen if she walked up and took a can of pop off the table, served herself a slice of apple pie, and acted like everything was okay. Like she was part of the family again.
Back home, across the river, there was movement. Crane’s blue Ford pulled into the driveway, hours before he was supposed to return home. He got out of his truck, went into the house, came right back out, and looked across the river. She realized Crane would notice her boat tied on the wrong side of the river, so she hurried down to the water to wave and let him know she was not at the party, but by the time she got to where he would have seen her, he was already back in his truck. Crane’s tires spat mud from beneath the crust of frozen ground. Margo was grateful Cal was nowhere to be seen. But then, as if conjured by her thoughts, Cal appeared on the riverside path, walking in her direction, looking drunk. Maybe Crane had seen him, maybe that was why he was driving here ins
tead of just yelling across the river. Margo silently backed away and then hoisted herself into the apple tree above her and up onto the wooden platform Grandpa and Junior had built a few years ago. She knelt and watched and listened as Cal approached. When he stopped beside the shed, he was only twenty feet away, close enough that she could see him blink, close enough to see that one of the buttons was missing from the plaid shirt he wore under his unzipped Carhartt vest. She wondered if there might be a girl in the shed, but through the dirty window glass she saw only a skinned deer carcass hanging from the ceiling. It was hard to tell, but it looked smaller than any of those she had killed this year.
Cal stood facing the river. He put his plastic cup of beer on the window ledge next to the door, so he was in profile between her and the white shed wall. Margo heard Crane’s noisy exhaust on the road bridge downstream, but Cal lit a cigarette and did not pay any attention to the sound. She watched Cal inhale, saw his chest rise and then fall as he exhaled a blue cloud. The air was colder than it had been last Thanksgiving. The platform was just high enough off the ground that Margo could see the roof of her daddy’s Ford when it pulled up to the rail fence a few hundred yards away. Cal fumbled with his fly. He didn’t seem to hear the truck door creak open or slam shut. He drew on his cigarette and stared down at his pecker in his hand, waiting for something to come out. Margo shifted to sit cross-legged, nestled the butt of the rifle into her shoulder, and looked at her uncle Cal over the sights.
She slowed her breathing and heartbeat in order to focus more clearly. Her daddy had threatened to kill her uncle, and that was likely what he was coming to do. Margo thought Crane could not survive being locked up for the crime he was about to commit. She also knew Crane wouldn’t shoot a man who was hurt or lying on the ground. She wondered if she should take Cal down herself before Crane got there, injure Cal rather than kill him. Margo took aim at one of Cal’s insulated work boots. At this distance, her bullet would cut through the leather and insulation to strike his ankle bone.
Once Upon a River Page 3
