American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Marylou squeezes her daddy around his middle, and he puts his arms around her as he hasn’t done in a while. Over his shoulder, across the river, she notices Billy, who is her age, dragging out the pig-roasting barrel from the barn. At last year’s party, Marylou ran around with Billy and a whole flock of cousins, and some of the boys spit into the men’s foamy draft beers while the men were tossing horseshoes. Billy has gotten tall this year, maybe tall enough to staple an invitation way up a tree, but when he or any of the other cousins see Marylou in school, they always turn away.

  Aunt Anna appears by the water’s edge, wearing insulated boots and a coat almost as long as her dress. She messes with an orange extension cord to light up the waterproof tube lights before she even starts stringing them around the dock. Last year Marylou helped Anna attach hooks for those lights.

  Strong pulls away from Marylou’s embrace and turns to look at what’s caught her attention.

  “I know you miss your aunt Anna,” he says, shaking his head. “But don’t you even think of going to that party.”

  Before Marylou can look away, Anna drops her string of lights into the river, and Marylou sees the end waggle and sparkle a few yards downstream. Anna is probably laughing as she fishes the lights from the cold current. Anna has always pulled Marylou out of being serious by saying, Quit brooding and sing with me, Loulou! or by letting Marylou bake something sweet in her kitchen, a place with all kinds of sweet smells, like vanilla and nutmeg.

  “You don’t seem to understand what’s been done to you by those people,” Strong says. “If you would have spoken against Cal at the trial, he would not have been able to plea bargain down to a damned ankle bracelet.”

  When her father goes inside, Marylou lets herself puzzle again about what they did to her, what Cal did. She still doesn’t know why she followed Cal into his shed—Strong had told her a hundred times to stay away from Cal when he was drinking. Even before Uncle Cal shut the door, she knew something was wrong by the anxious way he was breathing, but she never grabbed the door handle to leave the way she thought about doing.

  What the men did to each other afterward was more violent than what got done to her, wasn’t it? Just after she crawled into a corner to gather herself together, Strong busted into the shed.

  Marylou heard bones crunch, and two red and white nuggets—Uncle Cal’s front teeth—bounced on the plank floor. The men growled like bears. With all the noise and fury, Marylou forgot how Cal had insisted he had to teach her that afternoon how to dress out a deer—he said if she wanted to hunt, nobody was going to do her gutting for her. When they entered the shed, she was surprised to see it was a doe hanging there.

  Anna Murray showed up a minute after Strong clobbered Uncle Cal. First she knelt beside Marylou and said, “What’s the matter, honey? What happened?” But when Anna saw Cal’s bloody mouth, she moved away to help him. Then Cal sputtered those words Marylou has just remembered.

  “The little slut lured me in here,” Cal said. “And don’t let her tell you any different.” After that, Anna didn’t look at Marylou anymore.

  Cal had busted open Strong’s cheek, and later at the hospital they shaved off his beard for the stitches. Marylou hardly recognized him as her father—going home with him afterward was like going home with a stranger. He hasn’t grown his beard back because of his new job, which pays only about half what he made at Murray Metal Fabricators. The nakedness of his face still sometimes startles Marylou.

  On Thanksgiving morning, Strong says, “I can’t have you killing any more deer, child. I’m taking the shotgun with me. I’ll be home from work at six.” He slides the twelve-gauge into its case and hangs it in the truck’s window rack. His old job with Murray Metal gave him holidays off, and Marylou can’t help thinking that everything was better the way it used to be. Used to be when Strong was at work, she could spend time across the river being the girl that Anna and Cal said they always wanted, maybe still wanted. Grandpa Murray used to say that your family was all you had, and that a strong family like the Murrays could protect a person. He said it even when he was sick and dying, said he didn’t care what her last name was, she was a Murray.

  Instead of stalking another buck, Marylou sits on the bank all morning and watches vehicles pull in at the farm across the river, and she studies each Murray through the scope of her Marlin rifle. After a few hours, Marylou is sick with yearning to be on the other side of the river, to hear the old-fashioned country music from the outdoor speakers, to smell the meat roasting, and to see heaps of Murray cousins wrestling in their winter jackets. She pulls the rifle strap over her shoulder and rows her boat across. She ties up at the willow near Cal’s shed. She slowly narrows the distance between herself and the shed as she kicks out rabbit holes in the yellow grass to keep warm. She is listening to the clinks and shouts from the horseshoe pit, wondering what the Murrays would do if she walked over and took a can of pop off the table. But then Strong’s truck pulls into the driveway at home, hours before he is supposed to return.

  She knows he will see her rowboat tied up, so she runs down the path to the river and waves her arms until Strong sees her, to let him know she is not at the party. As he pulls out of the driveway, Marylou notices her shotgun in the truck’s window rack. Luckily Cal is nowhere around.

  But then, as if conjured up by her thoughts, Cal stumbles out the shed door, looking drunk and sleepy. Marylou silently hoists herself onto the lowest branch of the snake-bark sycamore. Uncle Cal doesn’t even glance up as she climbs higher into its leafless branches. She straddles a smooth branch and looks through the window into the shed, looks for another girl like herself who might have gone in there with Cal, but she sees only a skinned carcass hanging.

  Cal closes the shed door and steps around to the river side of the building. He puts a red-and-white beer can on the windowsill, and he leans against the unpainted shed wall. Marylou hears Strong’s noisy exhaust on the road bridge, but Cal lights a cigarette and doesn’t pay any special attention to the sound. Marylou is fifteen feet off the ground, high enough to see her daddy’s Ford when it pulls up outside the rail fence a hundred yards away. Cal fumbles with his zipper, and when Marylou realizes he is going to pee right there on the path, she looks away. Then she looks back. Cal doesn’t seem to hear the truck door creak open or slam shut. He continues to draw on his cigarette and stare down at his pecker in his hand, waiting for something to come out.

  Marylou concentrates with her breathing to slow everything down so she can think better.

  Strong might kill her uncle, and Marylou knows he would not survive being locked in jail. She also knows he won’t shoot a man on the ground, so maybe Marylou should take Cal down herself before Strong gets there, injure Cal rather than kill him. Marylou grips the branch with her legs, pulls the rifle off her shoulder and takes aim at one of Cal’s work boots. At this short distance, she could shatter the white radio box tethered to his ankle.

  Marylou sights Cal’s kneecap. Strong won’t kill a man who has fallen forward as though he is praying or begging forgiveness.

  She aims at his thigh. For a split second Cal wouldn’t know what hit him. A stray horseshoe?

  A biting snake? Then he would clutch his leg in confused agony. The bullet would continue through the side of the shed, bury itself in a floorboard.

  Years ago Marylou’s cousins held her down and put a night crawler in her mouth, and Billy once put a dead skunk in her rowboat to set her off. But she always got revenge—she chased Billy down that time and rubbed his face in cow manure until he bawled. Her cousins always enjoyed teasing her, enjoyed her shrieks, and afterward she evened the score, and they all got along again.

  Uncle Cal wasn’t teasing her, though—he wasn’t even listening to her begging him to stop.

  Over the last year, she has been going back and forth, not knowing for sure if she had begged out loud, but looking at him now, she knows she said, “Please no, Cal,” over and over.

  “I know you wa
nt this, Loulou,” he said, as though having him on her was a nice thing, like a hunting trip, like sitting down to a piece of pie. That afternoon, she saw past Cal’s shoulder, through the dirty window glass, three little Murray kids peeking in. They looked terrified, and when she looked back at them, they ran off. Whatever they saw scared them enough to go get her daddy from the party.

  Marylou looks past the beer can on the windowsill, past the table with the knives and saws, past the newly skinned carcass, to the place on the floor where Cal pushed her down. She has been puzzling about whether he really did push her down, but when she looks at Cal from up high in this tree, things get clearer. A year ago Marylou didn’t know about slowing down time to study a situation, to make sure her aim was perfect or to avoid a terrible mistake. Those little kids were two girls and a boy, and Marylou thinks she knows what they saw, what scared them: they saw Cal had opened up Marylou and was gutting her there like a deer on the plank floor.

  As Strong reaches the place where the path widens, Marylou realizes he doesn’t have the shotgun or even his pistol. Seeing him unarmed now is as shocking as first seeing him without his beard at the hospital. Under his Carhartt jacket he still wears his blue work smock. He hasn’t left work for the day, but has just come home to check on her.

  Marylou looks through the scope at Cal’s eyes, where she sees the same expression of concentration as when he was holding her down, so far from the door handle she could never have reached it. She looks at a patch of Cal’s chest—it is amazing Strong was able to hurt such a big man at all. She moves her sights down farther to where a button is missing from his flannel shirt—why hasn’t Anna sewn that button back on for him? Marylou moves the tip of her rifle down to Cal’s hand, loosely clutching his pecker, from which a poky stream dribbles. She has to do this thing for herself; nobody is going to do it for her. She aims just past his thumb. She knows she is good enough to take off the tip of his pecker without hitting any other part of him.

  The shout of her rifle is followed by a silent splash of blood on the shed wall and one last horseshoe clink from the pit. Cal’s mouth is open in a scream, but it must be a pitch discernible only by hunting dogs. Marylou grasps the branch above with her free hand to keep herself from falling.

  The weight of the .22 in the other keeps her from floating up. She closes her eyes to lengthen that perfect and terrible moment and hold off the next, when the air will fill with voices.

  Winter Life

  Harold had been happily married to Trisha four years, despite Trisha’s occasional late night drinking and her bouts of weeping, which had become more frequent since the war in Iraq, where her brother was now on his third tour of duty. Late evening, on the day a blizzard dropped nine inches of snow on their corner of Michigan, Harold was stretched out in bed reading a gardening book. Trisha leaned against the bedroom doorframe to keep her balance and said, “I think I’ll call Stuart.” Usually Harold would have said, “That sounds like a bad idea, Trish,” but this evening he could only shake his head and return to his book. Although Trisha didn’t weigh a hundred pounds, he heard the floor creak beneath her all along the hallway and into the kitchen. The wood of these old floors expanded in summer, shrank in winter.

  In the kitchen, Trisha made herself another vodka martini. She had dated Harold’s best friend Stuart for two years before she’d made the switch over to Harold, whom she’d married abruptly, maybe out of guilt. Although Stuart had a wild temper and although he could be a jerk—he still accused Trisha of being a lesbian because she had several times danced with a girlfriend at a bar—and although he was now married to an on-again-off-again meth addict, Trisha still longed for the intense intimacy she had once shared with Stuart, who was talkative and clever and had been, after all, her first love.

  Trisha’s heart sparked at the sound of Stuart’s brisk hello, and she ended up having a nice conversation with him. He asked about her brother in Iraq; he told her that he’d caught his wife smoking meth behind the garden shed the other day. He said that his little sister, Pauline, “that sullen bitch,” had dumped her fiancé tonight for no apparent reason. Stuart said the fiancé, Nick, had called him to ask if Pauline was having some kind of mental problems. No more than usual, Stuart had said.

  By the time Trisha put down the phone, the details about Stuart’s wife and sister were hazy.

  Trisha didn’t like the wife and had never felt at ease with Stuart’s little sister, who perpetually frowned. Pauline wore her hair the same way every day of her life—a long black braid—and her hands and feet were as big as a man’s. Trisha didn’t like the gloomy way Pauline looked at Harold through her thick glasses whenever they ran into her at the Farm N Garden, as though she was always about to ask him a time-consuming favor.

  When the phone rang a few minutes later, it was Stuart’s wife, who screamed through the wires, “Don’t call here anymore, you bitch!” Stuart had said he was deleting Trisha’s number from the caller ID, so the wife must have star-sixty-nined her. “Don’t you ever call my husband again!”

  “Go to hell, crack whore,” Trisha said and hung up. She looked out her kitchen window across the unbroken snow cover, lit by their security floodlight. She imagined her brother standing alone in the windswept desert with sand in his socks, and she began to cry.

  “Why don’t you turn down the thermostat and come to bed,” Harold said when Trisha came in and leaned against the bedroom doorframe again, with her lower lip stuck out, arms crossed, shoulders hunched. He folded his book over his chest and patted her side of the bed. “It’s never peaceful when you two talk.”

  “Stuart’s not the problem. Stuart was fine. It’s his wife that’s the problem and his stupid little sister.” Trisha tried to stand up straight, but tipped a little and caught herself on the doorframe again. She didn’t notice her husband grip his book more tightly. “His wife is smoking meth again.”

  “And what’s the problem with Pauline?” Harold made himself put his book down. He sat up against the headboard and studied his wife’s body. Her smallness surprised him in that moment, the thin bluish wrist, the tiny hand, tiny ring finger wearing the thin gold wedding band, the feet in pink doll slippers. He hadn’t mentioned to his wife that he’d run into Pauline today at the Farm N

  Garden, during the blizzard.

  “She dumped her fiancé tonight for no reason, a few hours ago. Listen, Stuart’s wife doesn’t have to be such a bitch to me,” Trisha said, forming a small fist. “She had no right to call up and attack me that way.”

  “Did he say why Pauline broke up with Nick?” When she didn’t respond, Harold patted his wife’s side of the bed again.

  “Oh, Harold, I can’t go to sleep now.”

  Trisha knew perfectly well Stuart’s wife was a meth addict, not a crack whore—it bothered her that she’d gotten that insult wrong in the heat of the moment.

  Harold admired that his wife never wore makeup, but he was finding it hard to look at those naked, bloodshot eyes. Before he’d married her he’d been lonesome, but back then he’d focused on growing his vegetables and herbs, and he’d managed to forget for long stretches of time that the whole world was a place of bone-aching loneliness. Looking into her face now reminded him that people were in pain a lot of the time, reminded him he would never leave his wife no matter what, never would create more pain that way. He adjusted his glasses and continued reading about the organic heavy-mulch system. The photos and instructions assured him that spring would come, that he would prepare the soil, that the sun would nourish what he planted.

  He felt bad for Trisha this evening, understood that sometimes she needed to talk to Stuart, but he knew the passionate knot of that old affair was too complicated to untangle even in broad daylight, stone cold sober. And after four years, Harold still felt bad about the abrupt shift in his and Trisha’s loyalties. Harold and Stuart had always known each other, and Harold had lived with Stuart’s family in their farmhouse during several years of high school. Back then
, Harold’s parents were fighting and fighting with no end in sight. Stuart’s mother Mary Beth had not only let him move in, but she let him use part of her big barnyard garden to plant vegetables, his first garden plot.

  After finishing her vodka martini in the kitchen, Trisha still didn’t want to go to bed, although Harold had switched off his reading light. Instead, she called Stuart’s mother, Mary Beth—

  they had stayed in touch over the years—and at the sound of Mary Beth’s calm voice, she began to cry again. “How could Stuart’s wife talk to me that way?” Trisha wailed. “She doesn’t even know me.” Trisha had always taken comfort in Mary Beth’s saying that she, Trisha, was her favorite of all the women Stuart had dated.

  “Mary Beth, how do I know if I married the right man?” Trisha surprised herself by asking this question aloud. She must have been drunker than she thought. “Is there a right man?”

  “Don’t ask me, Trisha. I got divorced. I didn’t even try to get married again.”

  “But sometimes I look at Harold and wonder, what was I thinking? All he cares about is gardening. When I was with Stuart, life was more exciting.”

  “I love Harold like my own kid.”

  “I know. I’m just having a rough night.”

  The next morning, at Mary Beth’s farm, Mary Beth was talking to her daughter Pauline in the driveway. Mary Beth slipped off her gloves and warmed her hands on the eggs in her coat pockets. She said, “Trisha called me last night, at about midnight. She was all weepy, poor soul. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she woke me up.”

  “Geez, Ma, why is she calling you?” In all the years Pauline had known Trisha, she’d never once seen her on an even keel. Always, Trisha was furious or on the verge of crying or ecstatically happy.

  “I’ve always liked Trisha,” Mary Beth said. “She’s a loving, caring person. Her brother’s in Iraq, you know. Talking to her got me remembering one night six or seven years ago when she was staying the night here with your brother. It was February, I think. I woke up to them fighting at four in the morning, screaming at each other, calling each other bastard and bitch and lesbian. Something hit my bedroom door, and I got up and found a snowmobile boot. I didn’t even want to be in my own house with that kind of racket, so I got dressed and went to the Halfway House and got some coffee and an omelet. Too bad they closed that truck stop down. It used to be open all night.”