Once Upon a River

• Chapter Fifteen •


Early one evening in September, Margo heard a car pull into the Pokagon Mound parking lot. She went ahead and sawed the front feet off the good-sized cottontail she had shot. She continued on with the back feet and then paused, listening to the ratcheting sound the car door made. After two months of living alone on the river, Margo was dismayed to find that her army knife had been rendered dull. She had tried sharpening it on some stones by the river, but that had made it worse. A dull knife made the work bloodier and more difficult than it would otherwise have been. She knew it was easier to cut herself with a dull knife, so she used great care.

At this time of the year, the local gardens were brimming with peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. A few days ago, she had even snagged a small cabbage and managed to steam a few leaves in her pie tin. She gleaned some starchy sweet corn left in a farmer’s field across the road. She had pilfered three big Brandywine tomatoes, so ripe their skins were bursting. She would eat some alongside the rabbit, which she’d killed with one shot to its eye on a hillside upstream.

She was running low on ammunition, and would have to save her nine remaining cartridges for critical shots. Since she’d been here, she hadn’t had any paper targets, so she’d been practicing by hitting acorns and hickory nuts off the top of a fence post. Today she’d found the season’s first Osage orange, and she put it on the post and dry-fired at it whenever she felt the need to shoot, though she wasn’t sure if that was good for her Marlin’s firing pin. She was surviving fine as autumn approached, but she was in a holding pattern, waiting for a sign that would point her where to go next.

Margo slit the rabbit’s fur, groin to chest, and then did the same to the membrane below the skin and emptied the guts onto a paper bag. She scraped out the cavity with her fingers, finally tugging free the lungs. Suddenly a man was standing beside her. She slipped and almost jabbed her own wrist. She stood up, knife in one hand, eviscerated rabbit in the other, and took a look at the stranger who was standing way too close. He was probably Michael’s age, but he looked softer and slower.

“Good evening, miss,” he said, stepping back. “Don’t let me interrupt you.” He had a short, thick frame and black hair and was wearing a sweatshirt with a university crest on it. After he took another step back, she squatted down again and returned her attention to her carcass, cut around the tail and made a slit across the middle of the back left to right. This was not how her grandfather had taught her to skin a rabbit, but was Brian’s much faster method for retrieving the meat if you didn’t want to save the skin. She held the rabbit’s head in one hand and reached the fingers of the other into the slit she’d made and dragged the back half of the skin all the way off the back legs so only the tail area still had fur on it. She did the same with the front end, working her fingers underneath the skin, and then tugging the skin off the shoulders and front legs, up to the neck. She sawed off the rabbit’s head and twisted to finish disconnecting the spine. She kept an eye on the man’s loafers. She’d read in the Indian hunter book about slashing an enemy’s Achilles tendon so he couldn’t give chase.

“Are you poaching?” the man asked.

Margo removed the tail and laid that beside the head on the bag with the guts. The man didn’t look dangerous, and if he grabbed her, she figured she would stab him or clunk him with the butt of the Marlin.

“That’s impressive, what you’re doing,” he said and pushed coarse black hair out of his eyes. “I’d like to know how to skin a rabbit.”

“I’d show you for five bucks,” she said. Five dollars would get her enough ammo to keep her going for a while. She fished through the intestines for the liver, ran her finger over it to assure herself it had no spots that could signal rabbit fever. The man followed her to the river’s edge, where she tossed the guts to the fish and turtles. She put the rabbit in a potato chip bag, mushed it around in the salt, tied it up with a string, and submerged all but the top of the bag in the water. She held it down with a rock.

“What if I asked to see your hunting license?” he asked. He was standing behind her, smiling. One front tooth lapped over the other.

She ignored him.

“My people used to live in this place, I’m pretty sure.” He clasped his soft, puffy hands in front of his chest. “Would you share your food with me?”

“You just go around asking people for food?” Margo watched four blue jays swoop in and screech in unison.

“When you’re in a strange land, you have to depend on the generosity of the local inhabitants.”

Margo thought about the rabbit and decided there was plenty for two people.

“I’ve been trying to eat Indian food while I’m out here,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m an Indian, for starters. That’s what I mean that my people came from around here.”

Margo studied him more carefully. Ever since reading Michael’s book, she had been hoping to meet an Indian hunter. She had imagined he would be a strong, wolverine-hearted Indian with a bow and arrow, not some soft-looking guy with a weird way of talking and no weapons.

“That rabbit and those vegetables over there look good.”

“You don’t seem like an Indian,” Margo said, although when she studied him more closely, she saw that he did resemble the guy in the Indian hunter book, though he wore jeans and a sweatshirt instead of buckskin.

He squatted down so close to her she could feel his breath on her neck. “Why on earth is a young woman skinning a rabbit in a picnic park? I’ve seen some weird things since I’ve been in this state.”

“I shot a man’s pecker once,” she said. “Just so you know not to bother me.”

He stood up and moved to look at her from another angle. “Don’t worry about me. I’m a happily married man. Listen, if that meat’s safe, I will give you five dollars and some delicious dried papaya and pineapple in exchange for dinner,” the man said.

She held out her hand. She had never heard of papaya, wondered if it was Indian food.

“How old are you?” He dug in his wallet for a five-dollar bill and handed it to her.

“Twenty-one.”

The setting sun put a gold sheen in the man’s hair. His skin was golden, too, the same color Brian’s had been in summer after he’d worked outside. This Indian was pretty, she thought, much prettier than Sitting Bull, who looked in his photos like a man carved out of stone and not happy about it. And unless this man really intended to report her to the DNR, he posed no danger. When the potato chip bag in the water beside her floated up, she put another rock on it to keep it under. She knew if she left it even for a few minutes, one of the park’s fat, bold raccoons would grab it.

“Why do you chill the meat like that?”

She wished she had asked her grandpa or Brian the same question. Maybe it had something to do with parasites or bacteria. The Indian hunter had also cooled his game before eating it. “Seems like an Indian would know,” she said.

“I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. We didn’t cook rabbits. Closest I came was watching Elmer Fudd.” The man squatted again beside her at the water’s edge. “You aren’t twenty-one. You look seventeen, nineteen tops.”

“So why’d you ask me, if you think you know?”

“It’s hard to see you underneath all that dirt. Shouldn’t your parents be calling you home soon? Or are you out here waiting for some man your parents disapprove of?”

“I don’t like men,” she said.

He laughed and gave up on his squatting, let one knee fall to the ground. Margo didn’t shift her weight, though her legs were growing stiff. The man studied the river, but Margo knew she could study it longer.

“This place used to be called River of Three Herons, from what I can deduce. This part of it anyway,” he said.

“It’s the Stark River,” Margo said. “Named after the explorer Frederick Stark.”

“Well, there were folks here long before Mr. Stark wandered by with his cap and fife and tweed vest,” he said and eyed her. “I’m following the Potawatomi migration route. The whole tribe walked down from the Upper Peninsula, all the way to the Kalamazoo River, four or five hundred miles.”

“Why?”

“Why did they walk down? Or why am I following their route?”

“You’re not walking.”

“What’s your name?”

“Margaret,” she said. “Margo.”

“Names matter a lot. Do you want to know my name?” He asked this in what seemed to Margo an arrogant way, as if he imagined his name had some special importance.

“No. I don’t care about your name.”

“Then I won’t tell you. You’ll have to guess. It’ll be like Rumpel-

stiltskin.”

“You’re not from around here, are you?” Margo meant it as an insult, but the Indian just shook his head.

“I spent the summer teaching some kids math at a reservation in the Upper Peninsula. Now I’m on my way home. Unless eating that rabbit kills me.”

A while later, she skewered the rabbit on a sharpened hickory stick and cooked it over the fire. She tried to pay attention to the birds and water creatures near her camp, but the Indian was a distraction, and it took all her energy to remain quiet. When the rabbit was close to being done, she propped the ears of corn up at the edges of the fire and steamed them in their husks. Then they sat cross-legged on opposite sides of the fire, eating from paper plates the Indian had brought from his car.

“I like eating the food of my ancestors,” he said.

Margo thought it was an especially good rabbit, probably fattened on beans and cabbage from somebody’s garden.

By the time they finished, the sun was setting. They burned the plates in the fire, and the Indian went and got a pint of Wild Turkey from his car. He sat back down and held the bottle out to her. “Do you want a sip?”

“No. Is that what your ancestors drank?”

“Oh, I guess the Europeans brought us a few valuable things.” He cracked open the bottle and inhaled deeply. He seemed to relax even before he took a drink. He said, “I do have a bottle of whiskey from the reservation, but I’m saving it until I get to the Kalamazoo River.”

“There’s a dam between here and there.”

“In a car, that’s not a problem.” As he drank, he watched the darkening river. “The problem is that the Kalamazoo River is polluted all to heck, polluted beyond any possibility of rejuvenation. It’s the same all across the country. Everything’s poisoned,” he said. After only a few sips, his voice was different, deeper.

Margo took her gun-cleaning kit from where she kept it tied on her pack. Without breaking her rifle down, she cleaned the barrel, stinking up the air with her Hoppe’s #9 solvent. Then she disassembled her cleaning rod, wrapped it in an old T-shirt of Michael’s, and put it away. The air chilled and the sky went mad with stars. Margo wrapped herself more tightly in her father’s Carhartt jacket and watched the Indian get drunk. By the firelight, she saw his eyes grow red and his lids droop. She watched his shoulders relax until he was slumping. Finally he tipped over, still clutching the empty pint bottle in his right hand. With his left arm, he held his knees to his chest.

At this time of night, usually Margo would have raided a garden for more vegetables, but instead she stayed put. Letting herself look, really look, hard and long at somebody was a pleasure, almost as soothing to her as aiming and shooting. Margo had needed food and shelter from other people, but this was the first time somebody needed her; this guy had come to her, and she had fed him. She liked the idea of him paying her for the food. She was still too close to Murrayville to cash her mother’s money order. There was no expiration date on it, but the edges of the paper were starting to fray.

She folded the tarp over the Marlin to keep the dew off, thought of it as tucking the rifle in to sleep. Later in the night, the Indian stumbled to his car, peed in the dirt behind it, and went to sleep inside. Margo put the metal box of ashes between herself and the fire and listened for a barred owl that she’d heard a few nights ago. She softly called into the silence, “Who-who, who cooks for you?” again and again, but got no response.

The Indian paid her four one-dollar bills the following morning for a breakfast of tomatoes, tiny river clams she steamed in a frying pan the Indian had, and two eggs from the domestic ducks she’d been luring over. After they burned their paper plates, he announced he was heading south to the Kalamazoo River to have a look before returning to California.

She heard some goose honks and looked up to see a V of geese crossing the river high above. The thought of creatures migrating, moving effortlessly through the sky, made her miss her boat. Margo looked around her campsite, at her bag, which was all packed. Her sleeping bag was rolled up and attached to it.

“Can I go with you?” Margo asked. She tucked her jeans into her boots and retied them; she did this out of habit, though the mosquitoes weren’t bad today with the breeze blowing. “My ma lives near Kalamazoo.”

“I’m not taking a girl with me.” He stood and looked down at her. “I’m a married man.”

“My dad is dead, and I need to find my ma.”

“I’m sorry about your dad. But I’m not in the business of helping lost girls find their mothers.”

“I can show you some plants Indians ate. Watercress, wild onion, ramps, hickory nuts.” Of course, the ramps and onions were out of season already. Maybe she could get him some rose hips—that was something the Indian hunter ate—or crab apples or sweet, custardy pawpaws, which must be about ripe now if she could find a tree. Black walnuts were starting to fall. She stood up to look into his face. “As soon as there’s a rain we’ll have giant puffball mushrooms.”

“Let me think about this.” He squatted, and after a few minutes he gave up on squatting and sat down cross-legged. “Stop staring at me. A person can’t think with another person staring at him.”

“I’ll cook you a duck when we get there. Your ancestors probably ate duck.”

“I do love duck.”

“There’s tons of mallards.” She walked to the river and washed her hands and face, rubbed her skin with a little sand, and rinsed. Then she looked back at him across the distance.

“If you get there and change your mind, I can’t bring you back,” he shouted. “And if I take you, you’re not taking any guns. And don’t try to feed me any weird mushrooms.”

“I only got a rifle,” she shouted back.

“I’m against guns. And anyhow there’s laws about transporting guns.”

“You can carry a rifle in a car so long as it’s in the back, unloaded.” She walked over to him, took her rifle off her shoulder, and showed him the stock. “See, it’s got a squirrel carved in it. Annie Oakley had one like this, for trick shooting. This metal is chrome.”

“I don’t care if a gun is pretty. And you’re not a trick shooter.”

Margo wondered if practicing trick shots had made her into a trick shooter yet. “If I can shoot that fruit off that fence post from here, will you take me to the Kalamazoo?”

“What is that thing anyway?” He walked over with Margo and picked up the Osage orange she had put there. He put it back and wiped his hands on his jeans. “It looks like a green brain. Did my ancestors eat these?”

“No, but they keep bugs and spiders away. As kids we called them brain fruit.”

He picked it up again, this time with two fingers, sniffed it, and put it back. “It’s sticky.”

“If I can knock that off the post from twelve paces with one shot, can I come with you?” The sun was shining on the Osage orange, lighting it up.

“Even I could probably hit that,” the Indian said. He picked up a nut from the ground and held it out to her. “What’s this? It looks like a miniature one of those things.”

“It’s an acorn from a burr oak.”

He put it on top of the Osage orange. “How about this? If you can hit this acorn without hitting the ugly fruit here, you and your gun can come along for the ride, so long as you’re both unloaded.”

“That’s pretty small.” It was big for an acorn, really, an inch and a half in diameter. Before she’d run low on ammo, she’d been consistently hitting crab apples smaller than that off this same fence post eight out of ten times.

“So’s my car when it comes to girls and guns.” They counted out the paces, and he stood beside her. She rested the butt of the rifle on her bent knee, removed the magazine tube, dropped in one of her nine remaining cartridges, and secured it. She worked the lever to chamber the round. She never tired of that motion.

She lifted the rifle to her shoulder, pressed it into her cheek, took a breath, and exhaled. She fired. She knew she had released her trigger finger too soon. Maybe the tip of her barrel went slightly up as the bullet left the chamber.

“No cigar,” he said.

She had feared that not having paper targets to give her feedback these last months was going to result in her losing her edge. On the other hand, she had been shooting grazing rabbits with great accuracy. Mr. Peake had always said every shot was a matter of probability, and Margo knew an occasional miss was part of that.

“Wait,” she said. “I said one shot for the Osage orange. I get two shots for the acorn.”

“Okay, one more, but that’s it.”

She put one more cartridge into the Marlin while the Indian watched. In her pocket she had her remaining seven.

“You’re standing too close to me,” she said and flapped her left arm.

He took one exaggerated step back away from her. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and felt it shaking slightly. Mr. Peake had always said she should wait to pull the trigger until she could make a good shot. She dropped her arms, held the rifle loosely in her right hand, studied the river beside her. She had never wanted to leave the Stark when she was young, but now, without her father and her boat, she thought she could not bear to stay here one more day. If she couldn’t go with the Indian, she’d walk.

She held the gun in her left hand, while she shook out the right. There was no reason that having somebody there with her should screw up her shooting. She’d won the 4-H competition with plenty of onlookers. And even though it had been two months since she’d shot paper targets at Michael’s, she had been shooting well then, better than ever in her life. She took a deep breath, relaxed her shoulders, and slowed her heartbeat.

She studied the railroad-tie fence post from its base to its top, as it rose to about her own height. She studied the green fruit with the burr acorn on top. Beyond it was the smooth expanse of river. She wrapped the sling around her left hand and elbow and pushed against it. When she nestled the stock in her shoulder and pressed her cheek against it, her stance and grip were solid. The Indian disappeared, and she was alone with her gun and her target. She looked through her sights. Her instructor had talked about the “wobble” in a person’s hold, had said a person could never be absolutely solid, but for Margo there usually came an instant like now when she felt solidly rooted to the planet. Without a conscious decision to do so, she smoothly pressed the trigger straight back and held it there as the rifle sent the bullet down the barrel on its way to the acorn. She knew it was a good shot. She held steady even after she heard a sound like the final hard tap of a woodpecker’s beak against an oak branch.

They walked to the tree and found the acorn gone and the big fruit untouched.

“Dang,” he said. “Was that a lucky shot?”

She shook her head. Unless you considered skill and probability luck. When she caught her breath she noticed him looking at her in a very intense way.

“That ability of yours is something special,” he said. He retrieved the Osage orange and sniffed it again. “That’s as good as proving a mathematical theorem. I guess I’ll put this thing in my car to keep the spiders out. There’s too dang many spiders in this state.”

She put the Marlin over her shoulder and returned to where her pack was sitting.

The man kicked the ground, looked back at Margo, and then burst out laughing. “I’ve got to be out of my mind. You know, if the police pull me over I’ll say heck yes, we’ve got a gun.”

Margo found herself smiling, as she hadn’t in a while, at her own excellent shooting, at the warmth of the sun, at the Indian’s surprise, and at the prospect of finding a new river. The Indian opened the car’s rear hatch, and she laid the gun on a sleeping bag. He covered it with loose clothes. She put her pack in beside it.

Once he got into the driver’s seat and shut the door, she rolled down the window and took a last look at the Stark, a river she had never expected to leave.

“Are you sure you’re not running away from home?” the Indian said as they pulled away.

She nodded and watched the river disappear behind them.

“I talked to an anthropologist up north to figure the most likely places the Potawatomi might have lived around Kalamazoo,” he said, once they’d negotiated themselves onto a highway. “There’s a farmer there who’s given me permission to camp on his land for a night.”

“You don’t act like an Indian, going to anthropologists. Shouldn’t an Indian follow animal trails?”

“You know, you ought to be grateful. I’m only taking you to save you from whoever else might give you a ride if you go out hitchhiking. There’s a lot of bad men out there.”

“I’m not afraid of men.”

“Right, by golly, you shot a man’s pecker.” He slapped his leg for emphasis, and the car jerked to the left. “For crying out loud, I am crazy for bringing you along.”

“That’s what I mean when I say you don’t sound like an Indian.” Margo had never liked being on the highway, and this was as bad as driving with Junior when he’d first gotten his license. Maybe the sick feeling in her gut was sadness about leaving the Stark, but his driving wasn’t helping.

“What do you think an Indian sounds like? You don’t know anything about Indians.”

“Sitting Bull wouldn’t say for crying out loud and heck and dang and by golly.” Arguing this way helped settle Margo’s stomach, so long as the Indian kept his hands on the wheel. She sat rigid while they moved into the left lane to pass a semi truck that seemed a mile long. The forty-five minutes on the highway felt like an eternity, and she was relieved when they finally slowed on the exit ramp.

“I don’t suppose I can ask you to navigate,” he said, as they continued on a two-lane road. He looked at the horizon and then at her again. “You’re looking rather pale, girl.”

She opened her mouth, wanting to make a comment about being a paleface, but changed her mind. She rolled down the passenger window as they turned onto a smaller road. She reached behind her and felt around. She put her hand on the box of ashes, steadied herself. Then she smelled the river, and her muscles relaxed.