She pulled herself away from the dog, and he barked behind her. The beagles barked in their kennel. When she reached her boat, she was shaking so badly that instead of dropping the rifle onto the back seat, she dropped it into the icy river. She pulled it out quickly, but not before it was entirely submerged.
She shook the gun and wiped it as best she could with a towel from her pack. Braced now by the cold and her fear of being seen, Margo laid the rifle on her tarp and swaddled it as she would a baby. She thought the sound of her getting into The River Rose echoed all across the river and through the woods. She took a few bites from the loaf of bread, the first thing she’d eaten all day. When she set out onto the water, she felt an urge to let herself go with the current, to slip effortlessly downstream. Her mother was upstream, though, so she began to row.
• Chapter Six •
When Margo heard three shotgun blasts in succession, the sound rattled her, made her want to shoot in response. It would still be deer hunting season for a few more days. When she saw the Slocum camping trailers on the north bank, she rowed as hard as she could to pass quickly and avoid being seen. A few hundred yards beyond that, the river curved, and Margo heard voices and laughter coming from outside the abandoned cabin that Junior called the marijuana house. She ran her boat onto the sandbar just below the place and decided to wait for full darkness, rather than risk being seen. She took off her leather work gloves and breathed onto her hands. The tiny cabin here was owned by the Murrays and until three years ago had been used by one of Grandpa’s brothers for weekend fishing. Margo listened to the teenage voices. A girl’s laughter exploded like automatic weapon fire and then was muffled by a closing door. When all was quiet for a while, Margo climbed up on the bank for a better look.
A white-tailed buck approached the river only twenty-five yards away, near the dock. Margo loaded six cartridges from her pocket into the magazine tube of the Marlin, chambered a round as quietly as she could, and cocked the hammer into the safety position. The loaded rifle felt good in her hands. When the buck stopped at the riverbank and turned to look in her direction, Margo slowed her breathing. With the rifle resting on one knee, she studied the creature, counted ten points, saw a raw V-shaped tear on his cheek, maybe a wound from fighting another male. Her hands stopped shaking. She could take it down with the .22 if she hit it in the eye or the temple. The deer lowered its head to drink from the river. The lever-action Marlin was slightly heavier than her daddy’s bolt-action rifle, but while she aimed the gun, she felt weightless and free from her exhaustion.
“Don’t shoot!” a female voice whispered loudly from behind her. The deer started at the sound, doubled up its legs, and bounded from the water’s edge.
Margo jumped back down the bank, climbed into her boat, and pushed off.
“Hey, are you Junior’s cousin? Come back and hang out with us!” the girl shouted. Margo kept rowing. The girl said to someone else, “I think that was Junior’s cousin.”
Margo recognized her voice. She was one of Junior’s friends, a girl Ricky had once referred to as a slut. She cleared her throat and managed to say, “I got no cousins. My name is Annie.”
Margo rowed upstream, warmed herself against the current. She was glad the girl had stopped her from shooting the buck. The meat would have gone to waste on the riverbank. Margo rowed harder when she realized she had left the Murray house unlocked in her hurry. She wondered if Joanna would make her family another loaf of swirled cinnamon bread to replace the one Margo had taken. After about two hours of hard pulling in the dark, she found a shallow stream, maneuvered herself a few yards up into it, out of view of river traffic, and tied her boat to the roots of a tree. She curled up in her sleeping bag on the back seat of her boat as she used to curl on the couch to wait for Crane to come home, and fell asleep. Rocked by the motion of the river, she slept hard and for a long time, until the sun was high the following day. She woke up cold, stiff, and confused about where she was, and also grateful no one had bothered her. She’d heard no one shouting her name, but she felt eyes on her. She moved her toes to warm them inside her boots and saw on shore a big buck. When she sat up and made a noise with the tarp, the buck turned to show a V-shaped gash and then walked a few yards deeper into the woods. She ate half the loaf of cinnamon bread and began rowing again.
In the middle of the afternoon, Margo sighted ahead a riverside gas station where boats refueled, and where a person who was not afraid of being seen could tie up and buy a sandwich and some chips without going more than a few yards from the water. Margo hid out in the channel of an island cottage just downstream of the place. Nobody was home. She wondered what it would be like to live on a little island like this, with water flowing around her on all sides. She was about twelve miles upstream of Murrayville, and she knew she could only cover about a mile an hour when rowing against the current.
At dusk she saw a ten-point buck approaching, so she set out rowing again. Behind her she felt the flapping of a big bird’s wings, but turned and saw nothing. She passed the gas station unseen, and after that she mostly passed moonlit woods and fields, houses and cottages with floating docks and oil-barrel floats not yet taken out for the winter. In the dark, her rowing became as constant as her breathing. She saw the backs of car dealerships and machine shops. Some places were familiar: a cliff in which swallows dwelled in summer, a stone wall and tower that her grandpa had said were built by Indians, some ancient trees whose branches hung over the water in ways that seemed to Margo generous, the way Grandpa had been generous, or big and graceful the way Aunt Joanna always seemed big and graceful. The shimmer of security lights on the surface of the water reminded Margo that her mother was up ahead. She rowed much of the night, taking bites of bread until it was gone. When she was too tired to stay awake, she pulled over at a snag and slept again.
She awoke the next morning to a splash beside the boat, and when she looked into the dark water, she saw her father’s angry face reflected there. But then it was her own weary face, framed by dark hair. Her cheeks and lips were chapped from the cold, and her muscles ached. She set out slowly, switching sides of the river whenever it curved, knowing how the water was shallow and slow-moving on the outside of curves, and fast and deep on the inside where it was in the process of wearing away the riverbank. As she traveled around an oxbow, she remembered what Grandpa used to say, that such a bend in the river was a temporary shape, that eventually, over thousands of years, the river would reroute itself to the most direct path, never mind the houses folks had built in its way, never mind the retaining walls or the concrete chunks, the riprap they’d piled along the riverbank. The river persevered, Grandpa had said, and people would eventually give up. Margo remembered thinking she would not give up on making the river her own. It occurred to her now that Grandpa might have been speaking about his own house, the big Murray house, being eventually swept away. He might have been saying that the Murrays would not always be kings of the river. What had seemed permanent to Margo, the Murray river paradise, could have seemed fleeting to the man who’d created it.
By the afternoon of that second full day of rowing, she was tired and hungry beyond any exhaustion or hunger she had known. With each pull of her oars, she felt herself liquefying. A few times she paused and put her hands into the water to soothe them. When snow began to fall around her, she wondered if she might dissolve before she got where she was going, like the big flakes that fell on the water. When her legs cramped, she slipped backward with the current for a while, watched the same trees she had just struggled to pass fall behind her. She slipped easily by a whitewashed dock she had inched past with such effort a few minutes ago. She passed a great blue heron, four feet tall, standing in a few inches of freezing water, and the sight startled her awake. Before she let herself get carried away, she guided her boat to a sandbar. She turned to watch the heron, which should have flown off south months ago. The bird stiffened all the feathers on its head and neck and then stabbed at the water. It
gulped down a finger-length fish and flew off upstream. Margo opened the plastic bag Junior had given her. She took the joint out and lit it with a safety match from her backpack. She smoked half of it, hoping to numb herself, and when it made her feel sick, she tossed the rest of it into the water. Within minutes, she was even hungrier.
She was light-headed at dusk. The marijuana’s pleasant effects had worn off hours before, and she was left with an emptiness that began in her growling stomach and stretched all through her. The water jug, too, was empty. It was well into night when a familiar cabin on stilts rose before her like a miracle, with its windows of dim, wavering light. She rowed past it to give herself room to maneuver, but when she stopped rowing she slipped downstream too fast and had to approach again. She tried to flex her fingers on the oars, but they had frozen into a curled position inside her leather gloves. The times she had seen this place with Grandpa, it had been daylight. The flickering lantern light made the cabin look mysterious. Brian had invited her to come for a visit, but she’d imagined sneaking in while he was gone. From here it was only a few miles more to Heart of Pines.
She rowed past the cabin again, guided herself toward the water’s edge, and then grabbed the wooden dock as it came toward her, almost pinching her hand between the boat and the dock. She tied up beside the Playbuoy pontoon she’d seen a few days ago. Tied on the other side of the dock was an aluminum bass boat. The pontoon tapped against her boat a few times, but its prow was tucked close to shore. She approached the cabin on foot, carrying only the rifle and making as little noise as possible. She could hear men’s voices as she climbed the wooden steps. The smoke churning from the cabin’s chimney smelled of cherry wood. She noted a hip-high stack of split logs filling the space between two trees a few yards from the cabin. The primitive place seemed all set for winter, giving the impression that somebody was planning on living there rather than just visiting on the weekends. A clothesline was strung near the dock. There was a five-quart plastic bucket of clothespins just outside the porch door, under the overhang of the tin roof. Margo entered the screen porch silently and stood outside a glass-paneled door for a few minutes. She made out Brian and his brother Paul inside, with their black hair and beards. So much had happened since three days ago when she had seen them. Brian got up and opened the door, still holding a hand of cards. “Who’s out there?”
Margo inhaled.
“Sweet Mother of Jesus,” he said and folded his cards into a stack. “Am I seeing a beautiful ghost, or has the maiden of the river come upstream to bless me? Come in out of the cold and shut the door.” He returned to the table, sat down, and leaned back in his chair to take a wider view of her. He seemed genuinely overwhelmed by Margo’s presence. Paul was sitting with his back to the door, looking over his shoulder. He squinted one eye. “Jesus, Brian. What’s a woman doing here with a gun? Is she going to shoot us?”
“Put on your glasses, Pauly. It’s Maggie Crane,” Brian said.
Margo might have cried in relief at being anywhere she could rest. She was grateful to be out of the elements, but the sheer size of the two men spooked her. Both of them were as tall as Cal and bigger around. She was at their mercy. If they didn’t feed her, she would starve; if they sent her away, she would probably freeze; if they wanted to force her to do anything with them, they might well succeed.
“Put down your rifle, Maggie, and come sit.” Brian pulled a chair away from the table and patted the seat with his hand. She rested the butt plate of the Marlin on the pine floor and leaned the barrel in a corner, next to a broom. She sat in the chair beside Bryan.
“You came just in time for my winning hand,” Paul said.
Margo didn’t know why she had earlier thought the two
men seemed alike. They were the same size and their features were similar—black hair, beards, and blue eyes—but where Brian was broad-shouldered and solid in the middle, Paul was rounded in his shoulders and belly. Brian’s hair was too short to go into a ponytail like the one Paul wore. Paul’s face was thinner and paler and intensely focused on his cards, which he now put down reluctantly. He fished a pair of glasses from the pocket of his sheepskin-lined vest and put them on. One eye looked big through the glasses, and the other was half closed. Margo couldn’t stop looking at him.
“One hand isn’t going to drag you out of your five-year losing streak, you sorry bastard,” Brian said.
“I beat you last week.”
“Like hell you did.” Brian turned to Margo. “We heard the news about your daddy. We’re so sorry. I worked with him for a couple years in heat-treating. Old Man Murray said he was smart and very careful. That’s what he always said about him. Loved him like a son. I mean, he was his son, I guess. I never knew the story there.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Paul said. “I never met him, but that’s a rough business.”
Brian said, “Paul and I lost our daddy five years ago, and it wasn’t easy, not even for us grown men. Even though the son of a bitch used to beat the hell out of us.”
“He sure did,” Paul said. “That mean bastard beat us and made us tough.”
“Made us the mean bastards we are today,” Brian said.
Paul smiled and took off his glasses. One eye remained squinted.
“Why don’t you leave them on so you can see?” Brian said.
“The damned things give me a headache. Worry about your own eyes, Brian.”
“When we were kids, I shot my brother in the eye with a BB, blinded him in his right eye, so I have to take care of him now,” Brian said.
“You don’t take care of me, asshole.”
“Kept him out of Vietnam. Probably saved his goddamned life,” Brian said.
“Can we just finish the game?”
“The other eye went blind for the usual reason. Too much yanking his own chain.” Brian winked at Margo. “The priest warned us.”
“Will you shut the fuck up, Brian?”
Margo took off her leather gloves and laid them on the table. They remained in the shape of her curled hands.
“Oh, poor Maggie. Paul, this child is freezing. Look at her fingers.” Brian took both her hands in his and exhaled hot breath on them. Earlier, when she had breathed on them herself, it had done little good, but Brian’s big body—even his lungs must be big—created real heat. Even as she felt wary, she wanted to lean her head against him.
Paul said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Miss Maggie, but isn’t your family wondering where you are right now?”
“Her family’s the Murrays, Pauly. Would you want to be with them Murray bastards?”
“Still, her family’s got to want her,” Paul said. “What about her ma?”
“Her ma run off and left her a year and a half ago, run off with a man from Heart of Pines. Maggie, is that who you’re trying to get to? Your ma?”
Margo inhaled sharply. She hadn’t considered Brian might know her mother.
“Give me two cards,” Paul said.
Brian let go of Margo’s hands and gave Paul two cards, took two himself. Paul gripped his cards so tightly his fingertips whitened.
“We’ll get you on your way tomorrow, wherever you want to go,” Brian said. “Don’t you worry. You’re fine here tonight.”
“I understand a woman might leave her old man,” Paul said, anger coming quickly into his voice. “But what kind of woman would leave her kid? Her daughter especially? My wife would die before she’d leave one of my kids behind.”
“Ours is not to judge,” Brian said and picked up Margo’s hands again. After he rubbed them on and off for a few minutes, the pink began to return. Margo wanted to go stand by the woodstove, but she knew if she did she would never want to leave its intense warmth. As if reading her mind, Brian stood up, surprising her again with his great size, and fed the stove some split logs from a pile behind it.
Paul spoke up again. “There’s something else I heard rumor of. Brian heard it, too. Is it true, Maggie, that your papa shot Cal Murra
y’s dick off?” Paul’s voice was uneven. She was grateful to be sitting near Brian, who seemed steady and calm.
“No need to be crude, Pauly,” Brian said, grinning to show that he appreciated this particular sort of crudeness. Then he frowned. “But maybe it’s good you know the kind of rumors that are flying, Maggie.”
“Can I have some water?” Margo whispered.
“So she does talk!” Brian said. “I never heard you talk before. Well, don’t you say anything you don’t want to say. We’ll figure it all out tomorrow.”
“Brian don’t believe your daddy did what they said,” Paul said.
“Never mind all that,” Brian said. “You stay here tonight. We’ll get you where you need to go. Or stay as long as you like. Will you have to get home for the funeral?”
Margo shook her head. There would be no funeral, no fuss.
Brian poured a glass of water from a kettle on the counter. “We boil the well water here just to be safe,” he said.
Margo drank the glass down and accepted a refill.
“Let’s get some food into you, Maggie,” Brian said. “We’ve got some leftover trout and a piece of venison steak from that deer of yours. I took it to do your daddy a favor, but now I’m glad, because I haven’t gotten a deer myself. Maybe beautiful girls are luring away all the bucks, leaving nothing for us big, ugly men.”
Though Paul complained about another delay in the game, Brian lit the propane stove, and within a few minutes he presented her with an orange plate containing meat, a section of fish with the bone in, a couple of chunks of potato, and some greasy green beans with bits of bacon on them. While Paul and Brian played, she ate. When Brian handed her a piece of store-bought white bread, she wiped the plate clean with it.
Once Upon a River Page 6