Once Upon a River

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “Your nieces are busybodies. Why do they want the township to tear down my lovely cottage?” Fishbone noticed a tiny burr stuck on the bottom of his trousers, and he lifted his foot and brushed it off. “You ought to ask those girls to clean your house, Smoky. Get some good out of them.”

  “You live in that garage?” Margo asked.

  “I live in Kalamazoo. That there’s my river cottage, where I skin deer and tan hides. There’s more rats in Smoke’s house than in that garage.” Fishbone wore a thick gold band etched with a cross on his ring finger. “By the way, here’s your death sticks, Smoky.”

  Smoke accepted the carton of cigarettes from Fishbone. He turned to Margo. “Why are you so late?”

  “You didn’t tell me to be here at a certain time,” she said.

  “Old folks get up early. Isn’t that right, Fishbone?” His breathing sounded better.

  “What would I know about old? I ain’t old like you,” he said.

  “At the print shop I had to open the doors at seven in the morning or the Dutch folks would take their business elsewhere. It used to kill me to get up so early. Now that I got nothing to do, I can’t sleep past sunrise,” Smoke said. “Fishbone here, my setup man, felt all right wandering in with half a doughnut at ten o’clock.”

  “I prefer a more relaxed lifestyle.”

  “Why were you hiding, sir?” Margo asked.

  “Didn’t want those harsh ladies seeing me. I try to keep clear of that kind of woman.”

  “You’ve got to meet this girl, Fishbone. She can shoot that cigar out of your mouth.” Smoke brushed an unfiltered cigarette butt, half burned, from the seat of his chair onto the stone patio. It must have been hidden there while his nieces visited.

  “So I hear,” Fishbone said. He took the burning cigar out of his mouth, studied the plastic filter, and then stuck it back between his teeth.

  “I saw your skins, Mr. Fishbone. I can skin animals, too.”

  “Not many girls know about skinning nowadays.” He regarded her, head to toe.

  “I do. Rabbits, squirrels, deer. I helped my grandpa skin a bear once. And I know how to cook wild meat, too.”

  “My wife’ll cook me a squirrel, but I got to bring it to her skinned and gutted with the tail cut off. So she can pretend it’s a chicken.” He regarded her again, this time more suspiciously. “What are you coming around here for, anyway? Smoky’s got no money.”

  “He said for me to come today.”

  “I’ve got plenty of money,” Smoke said. “I’m a desirable man in every way, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Fishbone said.

  “I’m finished with school. I’m eighteen.” She was less than two months away from being eighteen.

  “Thought all you people went to college nowadays.” As they’d been talking, Fishbone had relaxed his posture. “Smoky, will you tell that dog to stop growling at me? I do believe he’s showing off for the young lady.”

  Smoke yanked the dog’s collar and the big dog flattened himself against the ground.

  Fishbone stood about six feet tall, and his neat appearance contrasted with what Margo imagined to be her own. She wished she had taken the time to wash her face and hands and to brush her hair before dragging it up on her head.

  “Two of my boys dropped out, said they don’t need school, said the teachers are racist, and they don’t got a chance.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Smoke said. Margo flinched, thinking she was in trouble for staring again, but he was speaking figuratively, to Fishbone. “I’m not disagreeing with you.”

  “They’re right about the racists,” Fishbone said, “but they still need to go to school.”

  “Is your name really Smoke?” Margo asked.

  “Terry here doesn’t know any better than Smoke’s a black man’s name. So he’s got it all wrong on two counts.” Fishbone winked.

  “Go to hell,” Smoke said. “And this fellow in the stylish clothes is Leon Barber, the Fishbone.”

  “He wishes he was black,” Fishbone said, “so he’d have something more to complain about.”

  Fishbone’s thin face was clean-shaven. His eyes bulged, giving him a slight look of panic, though his calm demeanor countered that impression. Margo had hardly ever looked at a black man, and now she couldn’t stop looking. “That’s a funny name, Fishbone,” Margo said.

  “Because of the way he smells,” Smoke said. “Believe me, I worked with him on a daily basis.”

  “I’m Margo Crane.”

  “You come close to me, Margo Crane, and you’ll know I smell like a flower,” Fishbone said. He reached out and took her hand. His long fingers were callused, warm, and dry.

  “You smell okay,” she said. He smelled a little like flowery aftershave, but mostly he smelled like his cigar.

  “Them cigarettes tell you why this white man’s called Smoke.” He gently released her hand.

  “Could I sell you animal skins?” Margo asked. “If I had them?”

  “You got to be licensed with the state of Michigan before you start dealing in skins. I won’t even talk to anybody who hasn’t got a license from the DNR.”

  “I can get one.”

  “You get one, and I can get you a few bucks for a muskrat skin. Russians want them, but they don’t hardly want to pay for them. And raccoons are worth something for the skin and the meat. But you have to leave a coon paw on the pelt in order to assure folks you didn’t skin a cat.”

  She nodded. Until now she had not known why Grandpa had left a paw on a coon’s hide. It was one of the many questions she’d wished she’d asked the old man.

  “Pelts have to be perfect, no bullet holes. Shooting cuts them up.”

  “What if I shoot them through the eye with my .22?”

  “Lord, Smoky. Where’d you find this girl?” Fishbone pulled the butt of the little cigar out of the plastic holder, let it drop to the patio, and crushed it with his shoe. He put a new, unlit cigar in it, stuck it in the side of his mouth, maybe to cover a smile. “Thinks she’s going to shoot critters in the eye.”

  Margo knew she’d have to solve the problem of the bullet continuing out the other side of the head.

  “See, you old stink,” Smoke said, “girls are capable of anything these days. If you want her to shoot that cigar out of your mouth, you just say the word.”

  “You get yourself a license, and then come talk to me. Do you live around here?”

  “I want to live on that houseboat down there.”

  “Is this child living on her own?” Fishbone asked.

  “The Mexican left town,” Smoke said.

  “Young ladies living on their own get taken advantage of. Girls aren’t as smart as they think they are.”

  “He was an Indian,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Smoke said. “Girls are almost as dumb as boys. Almost as dumb as grown men.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Margo said.

  “Maybe not if the farmer’s brother’s around,” Fishbone said. “The fellow is reputed to pluck the fresh fruits wherever he can find them.”

  “Your daughter thought he was a charming fellow,” Smoke said.

  “Back in the day, I wouldn’t let my younger daughter near that boy,” Fishbone said. “Now I’ll have to worry about my granddaughters. And the man’s only, what, thirty-five?”

  “Thirty-three, I think. Just a pup.” Smoke tore the foil off a fresh pack of cigarettes and held the pack out toward Margo. “You’ll have to worry about your great-granddaughters.”

  “Don’t offer her a cigarette,” Fishbone said. “Just because you want to kill yourself by smoking don’t mean you’ve got to drag this young lady into it.”

  “Can I please sleep in your houseboat, Mr. Smoke?” Margo said. “I’m sleeping outside on the ground right now.”

  “Neighbors’ll tell my nieces there’s a girl hanging around. That, along with a black man gutting out raccoons in my yard, and they’ll
say I can’t look after myself. They’ll lock me up in the All Saints home on principle.”

  Margo looked around and saw that if she stayed in the camper, people might see her from the windows of several houses. She would not want to become a curiosity for the neighbors.

  “Better somebody uses it,” Fishbone said. “You’re not using it.”

  “I had a serious plan for that boat. Now my big outboard won’t run. Try moving that thing upstream with the five horsepower.”

  “You got plans, all right,” Fishbone said. “Especially that plan to smoke yourself to death. That’s working out fine.”

  “That boat saved my sanity,” Smoke said to Margo. “It’s my Pride & Joy. It’s got everything a man needs. If I could drag the hose down, I’d fill up the tank and have running water again.”

  “Your pride and joy is that set of lungs you turned black and crusted up with tumors by smoking all them cigarettes,” Fishbone said. He took a seat on an upside-down milk crate at the edge of the patio, pulled his unlit cigar out of his mouth, and looked at the plastic filter again, this time more critically.

  Smoke turned to Margo. “I lived in that trailer every time my damned sister and her daughters had to move in with me. I couldn’t stand to be around that cackling bunch of females.” His choked laughter caused him to drop his burning cigarette onto his lap. Margo plucked it up and handed it back to him. Smoke took one more long drag and then dropped the cigarette onto the patio. He rigged up his oxygen tubes to run below his nose.

  “Don’t you got nobody?” Fishbone asked Margo. “No place?”

  “I’m waiting to hear from my ma. She lives in Lake Lynne.”

  Smoke looked at Margo intently.

  “How is she going to get ahold of you?” Fishbone asked.

  “I need to write her a letter.”

  “Don’t give her my address,” Smoke said. “I don’t need another woman poking around.”

  “I’m getting a post office box. If they’ve got them in that town of Greenland.”

  “Smoky, maybe you ought to let this young lady stay in the boat until she finds her ma. I don’t like to see a girl out alone with nobody looking after her.”

  “Take her to your house.”

  “I got fifteen people living in my place this week. The folks I’m related to seem to think I’m a free hotel. There’s nobody on your boat but a few mice.”

  “Well, she’s going to have to give me something for it,” Smoke said. He turned toward Fishbone and then back to Margo. “You can buy that boat from me on one condition. That you shoot me in the head before they take me to a nursing home.”

  Margo wished she could read his expression through the glasses.

  “What you saying that for?” Fishbone said. “I’m not going to help you, and she isn’t, either. You’d take killing more seriously if you’d been in the war, Smoky.”

  “It ain’t my fault I couldn’t go in the army,” he said.

  “Well, if you had, you’d’ve seen how killing anyone, yourself included, is nothing to joke about.”

  “You spend too much time at church,” Smoke said. “You’re becoming a regular church lady.”

  Fishbone shook his head. “Smoky, you ought to be careful what you say to people.”

  “You heard my nieces. They have it all figured.” The old man paused to catch his breath. “They’re having me declared unfit in court. I’m going to lose my freedom.”

  “Don’t ask other people to do your dirty work, Smoky. I could probably shoot and bury all the black men I wanted, but I’ll go to the electric chair if I start killing white people, even useless old ones like you.”

  “A hundred bucks for my boat,” Smoke said to Margo and took a breath. “But you’re going to help me when the time comes. And I reserve the right to buy my boat back if you don’t hold up your part of the bargain.”

  “Do it yourself if you’ve got to do it. Don’t go dragging anybody else into it,” Fishbone said, leaning down and brushing a bit of cigar ash off his black leather shoe.

  “I’m going to try,” Smoke said to Margo in a quieter voice. “But if you want my boat, my Pride & Joy, you’re going to owe me.”

  “You people always surprise me,” Fishbone said. “Talking that way is unnatural. Life and death is God’s business, not yours.”

  “I went to that goddamned nursing home every day for lunch when my sister was in there. I saw people turning into ghosts made out of those mashed potatoes they got, taste like plaster of Paris. I’m not going to die in that prison.”

  Margo nodded at the word prison.

  “I need somebody to shoot me before they come get me. I need a beautiful kid like you to finish me off. You’ll kiss me on the cheek and then blow my head off.”

  “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.