Once Upon a River

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  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 GLUTTON, 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 CONDEMNED 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.

  As Margo was finishing a second piece of pumpkin pie, Smoke said, “To help my sister out, I paid those girls’ college tuition, and now they think I should ease their minds by going into a nursing home. If my sister were alive, I’d tell her she raised those girls wrong.”

  Margo nodded. There was a knock, and the riverside door opened before they could respond. When a blond man entered the kitchen, Smoke grinned.

  “Grab Nightmare,” Smoke said. Margo got hold of the big dog’s collar just as he lunged at the man’s leg. “Put him in my bedroom.”

  “Why doesn’t that dog love me the way every other dog in the neighborhood does?”

  The man’s voice was familiar to Margo.

  “Dog can read your mind, that’s why,” Smoke said. “He knows another dog on the prowl when he sees one.”

  “Who’s this?” the man said as Margo was dragging the complaining dog from the room.

  “Keep your paws off her. Or I’ll let my dog bite you.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Johnny,” he said when Margo returned. “You look very familiar. Are you some kind of movie star?”

  At the full-on sight of him, Margo’s stomach seized so hard she thought she might throw up the Thanksgiving meal. It was Paul’s friend, Johnny. Her cheeks burned. Nightmare growled from the other room.

  “She’s nobody you need to know, Johnny,” Smoke said, still grinning. Whatever harsh things Smoke might say, Margo could see he liked this man and was made lively by his presence.

  “I was just up at the big farmhouse eating a fine, sober meal with my upstanding, sober brother George and his attractive, angry wife.” Johnny took a can of beer out of one pocket of his jacket and another can out of the other pocket and set them on the table in front of him.

  “Your brother George is a fine fellow, and you know it. Salt of the fucking earth.”

  “Are you still refusing to go to the doctor, Smoke?” Johnny asked.

  “I’m going to a doctor,” Smoke said. “Just not the asshole in Greenland. He’ll tell everybody in this town all about the pimple on my ass the next morning at the café.”

  “You just don’t want him getting into your l
ady parts, do you?” Johnny took a long slug of beer and seemed to relish his own outrageous question.

  “You wish I had lady parts,” Smoke said, his cheeks coloring, “but you’re going to have to find your fun somewhere else.”

  “I don’t want this lovely creature to think I’m crude, now, Smoke.”

  “Well, that doctor is the reason everybody knows when you get the clap, Johnny. That’s how the girls know when to avoid you.”

  “Don’t listen to him, sweetheart,” Johnny said, addressing Margo. “I’m clean as a whistle.” His laugh was the same bright sound Margo had heard in Brian’s cabin so long ago. She glanced at the door, beside which her rifle leaned, and took a good look at Johnny. She remembered his arms clamped around her middle on the couch. He’d been drunk, and she had stayed still for him like a cow in heat, curious to learn what a new bull might do. Margo began to feel desire now as she had not expected to feel it again anytime soon. She thought the smartest thing to do would be to get up and walk out.

  Smoke grumbled a few harsh words that his smile belied, and Johnny laughed again.

  “I guess I don’t have time to mess around, anyhow,” Johnny said. “I’m meeting somebody up the road in forty minutes. Just wanted to come by and see how you’re doing. See if you’d taken up with a woman yet.”

  “Well, if I could find one around here who didn’t have your fingerprints all over her, I might consider it.”

  “I’m on my way down south tonight, to Florida, and we’ll make a little delivery back here in a few weeks. Or a few months, depending.”

  “Florida, eh?” Smoke said. “Be nice to be somewhere warm.”

  “When I come back, I’ll bring you two a little Florida sunshine.” He winked.

  Johnny could not have known that Margo had spied on him swimming naked. He didn’t know that back in Murrayville she had watched him fall onto the carcass of the deer she had sold to Brian.

  “Are you going to visit your old man?” Smoke asked. “Be sure to tell that bastard I still want my money back for those tires.”

  “More likely you’ll get blood out of a stone,” Johnny said. “I might stop and see old Jim and Doris in trailer land. Dad ought to be happy to see me, his prodigal son, but he isn’t always.” Johnny smiled at Margo and said, “I’m already looking forward to coming back to Michigan.”

  “Well, you’d better leave this child alone, you lousy son of a bitch.” Smoke shook his head in mock despair. “They ought to send you off to the vet, get you fixed.”

  “You sure do look familiar.” The way Johnny grinned assured Margo he still didn’t recognize her. He must have been truly drunk that night at Brian’s cabin. Drunkenness Margo could understand, of course; what she didn’t understand was why she couldn’t stop grinning back at him, why she imagined herself stripping naked to dive into the river beside him. It was something basic about the man, his smell, maybe. She knew to resist him, and so long as she wasn’t alone with him, she would be fine.

  Margo saw Smoke shaking his head. She finally looked away from Johnny’s gray eyes.

  He stayed long enough to drink the two cans of beer he’d brought with him. He had offered the second one to Smoke and to Margo, but both refused. Margo couldn’t stop looking at him. The whole thing was crazy, but she couldn’t snap out of it. This was exactly how women got sunk, she knew. A woman would be doing okay, finding adequate shelter and feeding herself, and then a guy would start touching her and combing her hair. Electricity would start moving through her, and she would think she had found some great new fishing spot nobody knew about. A girl went off with a guy like this, and the next thing, she wouldn’t care about finding her ma, or about making any sense of her life.

  “Yep, going down to the Keys to see some Cubans I know down there,” Johnny said. “I’m looking forward especially to one certain lovely Cuban lady.” As he was leaving, he reached out and tugged Margo’s braid.

  “That man is something,” Smoke said after Johnny left. Smoke’s cheeks were still flushed. “If he could package it and sell it, he’d be rich.”

  Margo let Nightmare out of the bedroom. He sniffed where Johnny had been sitting and growled.

  The first time Margo got a muskrat without putting a bullet hole in it she brought it to Smoke’s as per Fishbone’s request, with the fur brushed and cleaned, and she was glad to find Fishbone there, getting out of his boat. He accepted the long, limp creature she held out to him, took hold of it by the tail.

  “What kind of trap did you use?” he asked.

  “I didn’t use a trap. I shot it through the eye.”

  “Are you really that good of a shot?” Fishbone squinted and smiled enough to show teeth, and Margo saw that he was missing a canine. “Smoky, I believe our Margo is blushing. Young lady, I think you should ask the farmer to let you use his crop-damage permits. Tell him I’m tired of shooting his deer.”

  “Tired of aiming at them and missing, you mean?” Smoke said.

  “I got me two deer this year. That’s more than you got the last ten years.”

  “Can we keep the venison?” Margo asked.

  “You can eat it or give it away, or donate it to the gospel mission. But you’ve got to talk to Mr. Harland.”

  Though the farmer must have seen where the boat was parked, he hadn’t approached her. She’d taken to sneaking around close to the farmhouse to spy on him, and once she’d seen him arguing with his wife, standing still and silent while his wife stomped around and yelled passionately. Margo also liked to watch the woman across the road from the hay barn. She spent a lot of time outdoors, feeding the birds and working in her garden. Margo watched through the slats of the barn, and tried to imagine starting a conversation, but hadn’t yet figured out what she’d say.

  “Do you have a shotgun?” Fishbone said.

  Margo shook her head.

  “Do you know how to use one?”

  “Of course.” She nodded.

  “I would’ve married a girl like you, if I’d known there was one out there,” Fishbone said and laughed.

  Smoke shook his head. “You need another wife, all right.”

  “Smoky, you’re going to have to give her your shotgun for deer hunting. She’s got to do this right. I don’t want her out there trying to shoot deer in the eye with a .22.”

  “Give her your own damned shotgun. I might need mine.”

  “Ignore that complaining old woman, Margo. You go get me a kitchen chair, a grocery bag, and some newspaper and bring it out here to the patio,” he said. “Oh, and a big soup spoon.”

  “Who’s an old woman?” Smoke said. “Speak for yourself, you old church lady.”

  Once Fishbone was sitting on the chair, he flattened the brown bag on the ground, piled some newspapers there. “Yeah, Smoky, you need that shotgun, all right. Like you need a hole in the head.”

  “Aren’t you going to mess up those fine leather shoes?” Smoke said.

  “I’m not going to. And this is going to take me two minutes to show this girl how to skin a muskrat. You watch this, too, Smoky. You might still learn something in your old age.” He produced a heavy hunting knife. With one hand on the back of the blade and the other on the handle, he cut off the muskrat’s back feet using the stack of newspapers as a cutting board. Then he put his foot on the muskrat’s tail, stuck his knife into the back of one of the legs, and sliced up to the side of the tail. He made the same cut on the other side and then cut all the way around the tail. Drops of blood fell onto the paper between his shoes.

  “What the hell are you going to teach me after all these years?” Smoke muttered.

  Fishbone laid his knife on the milk crate beside him and pushed his fingers under the skin, used his fingers to peel the hide from around the tail and back legs, toward the front of the animal. Margo noticed his fingers were long and straight, not crooked with arthritis like Smoke’s, not even scarred. He rolled the hide off the backside of the animal. “See? I’m careful with the belly, saving it
till the end, trying to keep the guts from popping out.”

  Margo nodded. She watched Fishbone work his fingers around each hind leg and break the hide loose and work over the back toward the front legs, leaving the belly skin attached. Fishbone’s creased jeans remained clean. Smoke was watching intently. So was Nightmare.

  “Now you hook your thumbs into the loose hide, with the rat’s back facing up,” he said. Margo noted the muskrat’s head was pointed away from him. She would copy his position and his grip. He continued, “Use your fingers on both hands to push the rat’s head into the hide as you turn the whole thing inside out. Now, work each front leg loose and pull the hide loose from each front foot. See how it snaps off at the feet? You don’t even have to cut those off.”

  Smoke lit another cigarette and leaned back to take a draw. Fishbone worked his fingers under the hide around the neck. From inside the skin, he cut the ear openings close to the skull and then pulled the hide toward the nose.

  “See the white parts above the eye here?” Fishbone said. “Cut in here above both eyes and keep squeezing until the hide comes loose. Of course, you messed up the one eye here by shooting it. How come you don’t have an exit hole?”