Once Upon a River

• Chapter Sixteen •


The Indian turned into a driveway marked by a wooden post, and they parked in front of a gate beside an unpainted barn. Once out of the car, Margo saw a whale-sized tangle of rusting scrap metal, the largest chunks of which seemed to be old broken farm implements. They stepped around the gate to see, at the back of the barn, a pile of tree stumps, twisted branches, and uprooted bushes. On the opposite side of the driveway was the foundation of what must have once been a house. She couldn’t see the river, but she was soothed by the smell of it in the distance and by the way the land sloped toward it. She returned to the car, uncovered her rifle, and slung it over her shoulder.

A line of trees served as a windbreak between a field of corn and a field of soybeans and led from the road to the river. As Margo and the Indian walked along it, the windbreak widened, and they discovered a trickle of water running beside them. Margo picked a bean pod, cracked it open, and nibbled the soybeans raw as they walked. They were hard and chewy, ready to harvest, she guessed. Eventually the trees became a patch of woods, mostly maples and walnuts. The land sloped gently for about a third of a mile, until it dropped off near the river. When they stood on the riverbank, Margo guessed the Kalamazoo here was almost twice as wide as the Stark was in Murrayville, maybe fifty yards across. On the other side of the river, the land rose abruptly. Margo scanned the far steep bank and saw no path leading to the river, only an orange-and-black sign reading NO HUNTING NO TRESPASSING. Downstream there was another such sign.

“We can camp right here tonight,” Margo said.

“I suppose we’ll have to leave the car up by the road,” the Indian said. “We’ll carry down what we need.”

Margo wondered how long it would take the water that had flowed by them on the Stark earlier today to flow over the dam and reach this part of the Kalamazoo. The river’s chemical smells were different from the chemical smells on the Stark. There was a tinge of mold in the air. The river water was brown, and the edge of the river looked mucky. The only sandy area was where the spring they’d walked beside emptied into the river. Margo noted a disturbance in the water and wondered if Crane’s ghost would accompany her this far downstream. A muskrat surfaced, saw her, and plunged back under.

“Oh, Lordy,” the Indian said. He looked around. “My cousin said he’d heard stories about this river valley. There were so many trees you never ran out of firewood. The sugar maples filled every barrel and bucket with their sweet sap. Too bad it’s all cleared for farmland.”

“With woods by the river like this, there’s probably lots of creatures we’re not seeing now. They’ll come out at night to eat the corn and beans.”

“My cousin heard stories that deer in Michigan would pose in front of your arrows,” the Indian said, “and ask to be rendered into food and skins. They were tired of their rich earthly lives and wished to be released to the spirit realm, or something like that. He said ducks used to shed their feathers upon dying to make themselves easier to prepare. Fish leapt from the water so you needed only to reach out and grab those you had a taste for. The women used to grow vegetables, what they called the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. The soil was black and fertile, and they used the gardens of the ancient ones, whatever that means.”

“Did they swim in the river?”

“Probably. It wasn’t polluted back then.”

“Look. There’s your Indian dinner. I’ll only charge you five dollars.” Margo pointed at a male mallard alone by the river’s edge about fifteen yards away. She pulled the Marlin off her shoulder, rested the butt on her knee, and loaded two cartridges into it.

“You can barely reach the end of that gun barrel to load it.”

“Shhh.” Margo chambered a round, moved closer, and aimed at the duck’s head. The duck drifted a few inches and then was treading water at the river’s edge. She lifted the butt to her shoulder, pressed her left arm against the sling for stability, and aimed, and the duck moved again, away from shore. She dropped to one knee and raised her gun barrel. She sighted the duck’s eye and shot it dead.

“Ouch,” said the Indian.

Margo retrieved the duck with a stick and held it by the foot to drain the blood.

The Indian set off for town, and Margo tugged at the duck’s feathers for a few minutes, until she realized she didn’t want to wash and soak the duck in the river if it was polluted. The trickling stream was too shallow. She needed a bucket to fill with clean water, and she had not noticed one up at the barn. She looked downstream and upstream; she decided that when in doubt a person should go upstream because if she found a boat, then she could float back down. She had her gun over one shoulder, and she held her duck over the other by one foot.

An animal path followed the riverbank. She encountered an electric livestock fence running across the path and almost all the way to the water. She jumped down to the water’s edge and scrambled up the bank on the other side of the fence to find herself in a pasture full of plump beef cattle. One by one the cows looked up at her with white, red, or black faces, and one by one they returned to grazing. When a red-and-white Hereford stared and tossed its head, she imagined shooting it at close range; she wondered if she could take down a bony-headed cow with a shot through the eye. She knew how killing and eating somebody’s cattle would create a whole new host of problems, and that was why she was thinking rather than acting. She wove through the pasture, avoiding cow pies.

At the far boundary, she ducked through strands of nonelectrified barbed wire to get out. Here the river curved. There were a dozen oaks towering over tall grasses near another sandbar, where Margo saw the footprints of water birds, and she noticed a cluster of houses up ahead. She walked along until the overgrown path led away from the river up to a paved road. The road dead-ended at a rundown white house and then curved to follow the river above a row of houses. Below the first house, at the water’s edge, was a homemade camping trailer the size of the smaller of the Slocum trailers. It was surrounded by a low metal fence, and she saw there inside the fence two five-gallon plastic buckets. The overgrown yard contained a half a dozen concrete lawn ornaments. There was a twelve-foot length of wooden dock that ran parallel to shore and extended five feet over the water. Tied to it was an aluminum rowboat with an outboard motor on the back, sheathed in plastic. Margo felt comforted by the modesty of the house and the rustic surroundings.

An empty wheelchair sat on the flagstone patio in back of the house. The property was separated from the one beyond it by a wooden privacy fence, and over it Margo could see the top of a newer cedar-shingled house. There was a kind of freedom in knowing nobody would recognize her here. She was only about forty-five miles downstream of Murrayville, but she’d never known the Murrays to come beyond the dam or to travel to Kalamazoo for any reason. She didn’t see anyone around and so walked onto the backyard patio and followed the steep steps down to the river. From here, she could see the back of the camper, where PRIDE & JOY was written in stylized block letters. The camper, it turned out, was not sitting on the riverbank, but was affixed to a sort of platform on pontoons in the water. The camper was the cabin of a boat that had been dragged up against the retaining wall. A big black dog lay beside the camper. The dog’s ears lifted as she approached. She stepped off the retaining wall and onto the boat through an opening in the galvanized metal fence. It barely moved under her weight. The buckets were on the other side of the dog.

“Hey, dog,” she said and barked. The dog nodded his head. “You must weigh at least a hundred pounds.”

“Is somebody out there?” a weak voice called.

Margo peered inside the camper through a curtained window. Inside was a miniature sink, a set of small cupboards, a tiny woodstove. And then a ghostly pale face, half covered by sunglasses, appeared before her. She yelped, and the dog yelped, too.

“Pull open the door. I’m stuck in here.”

Margo twisted the aluminum door handle until it came unstuck and found an old man with a thick hank of silver hair leaning against the doorframe. “I was just petting your dog,” she said.

“Long as he’s not drinking out of the river.”

“Why do you care if he drinks out of the river?”

“It’s polluted.”

“Do you live in this trailer?” Margo looked out at the houses upstream and across the river, all three of them tidy, two with small boats up on sawhorses. At the nearest house, an upside-down canoe was chained to an oak. The chain holding the canoe appeared to have grown into the tree’s bark.

“Help me up to the patio,” the old man said. Margo switched her rifle to her right side and let him drape his bony arm over her shoulder. He was only a couple of inches taller than she was, and thin, but he grew heavy as they traveled up the concrete-block steps, the dog at their heels. Margo helped him into his wheelchair. An air tank was hooked to the back, and the old man affixed plastic tubes to his face. He adjusted his black glasses. He took a few breaths, and then color came into his cheeks.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Okay?” He took another labored breath. “You mean, except that I’m dying? Hell, no, I’m not okay. Can’t even get up the damned steps.”

“Never seen a boat like that,” Margo said, “with a camper on it.”

“Life is a lousy goddamned business at this end. You take note, kid.”

“Is your wife here?” Margo asked. “Should I get her?”

“Got no wife. Dog’s better company than any wife.”

From where she stood, Margo thought she could see a raccoon skin drying over the back of a lawn chair outside the garage. Behind it a deerskin was stretched on a pallet on the ground.

“That’s Fishbone’s deer hide.”

“But it’s out of season.”

“He’s got the crop-damage permit from the farmer.”

“A permit that lets you hunt out of season?” Margo asked.

“Lucky son of a bitch got himself a deer. Nowadays Fishbone usually can’t hit the broad side of a barn. He won’t admit he’s getting old.”

“Who’s Fishbone?” she asked.

“Fishbone is the man who needs to get here with my smokes.” He nodded at the little aluminum boat tied to the dock.

Margo squatted beside the hundred-pound black dog. She stroked him with both hands.

“Do you sell those skins? I mean, does your friend sell them?”

“Sells them to a guy on the north side.” The old man wore a dark blue uniform-style shirt. The name tag said Smoke. He readjusted his oxygen tubes on his bristly cheeks.

“How much money does he get?”

“Not enough to pay back what he owes me.” He looked around, as though hoping the man in question would come out of the garage or rise up out of the river to argue with him. The orange sticker on the window of the garage said CONDEMNED.

“Could I borrow a bucket?” Margo asked. “Oh, crap. I left my duck on the boat.”

“Wait,” he said. “Nightmare, go get the duck, boy.”

The big dog barreled down the concrete steps, onto the boat. He picked up the mallard by the shiny green head and brought it to the old man, laid it at his feet without a tooth mark on it.

“That’s a good dog you got, Mr. Smoke.” Margo noticed that the porch door was missing, and just inside, plain as day, was an enameled canning kettle being used as a garbage pail. If she had that pot, she could not only wash the duck, but could make duck soup afterward. “Can I borrow that kettle?” Margo pointed.

“Hell, no.”

“Can I buy it?” She was surprised at his harshness. “I’ve got some money.”

“What do I need with money? Here in paradise.” He laughed and disconnected his oxygen tubes. Then he lit a cigarette.

“Everybody needs money.”

“What about that fancy rifle? Is it just for poaching ducks?”

“I can’t give you my Marlin.” After a moment she added. “I’m a trick shooter.”

“You’re no goddamned trick shooter,” he said and then grew thoughtful. “Unless you can shoot an apple off my head.”

“I could.”

“I haven’t got an apple. How about a peanut? Can you shoot a peanut off my head?”

Margo paused to study the old man. “I could shoot the ash off that cigarette in your hand.” The cigarette’s burning end was about as big a target as a duck’s eye. Hitting the cigarette in someone’s hand was a shot that Annie Oakley had done again and again. From ten paces, Margo estimated she had about a fifty percent chance of making such a shot, if everything went perfectly.

“How about out of my mouth? Can you do that?”

“Same thing,” she said. “But a .22 bullet can travel a mile and a half. Might go through that fence.”

“Shoot it into the garage.”

“It could hit something, a can of paint or acid on a shelf.” She thought of Crane’s old shed, stuffed with paint and lighter fluid, carburetor cleaner, and six kinds of lubricant. But the wall of the garage would give her the best sight picture.

“Nothing to hit that I care about.” He coughed into his fist.

“You really want me to shoot a cigarette so close to your face?”

“You want my canning kettle?”

“Does it have a lid?”

“You’ll have to dig in the cupboard for it. But I’m not giving it to you for doing nothing.”

“What about the dog? Won’t the shooting bother him?” The Murrays’ black Lab went crazy when guns went off. He was a great swimming dog, but no good for hunting.

“Nightmare doesn’t mind gunshots. He just doesn’t like strange men. Dog doesn’t believe me that women are just as dangerous.”

The old man dropped his unfiltered cigarette butt, still burning, and lit another. He turned away from her so he was looking out over the river. She was now facing the right side of his body in profile. Margo’s head cleared as she began to imagine her shot, the beginning, middle, and end of it.

“What do you do with that camper?” Margo watched the man to see whether he tended to make sudden movements that could screw up the shot.

“Built it myself to be lightweight. Used to stay in there when the house got too hot. Took it up and down the river. Lived in there for three years once when my sister and her brats were staying here.”

“It’s got an inboard motor?” She asked. If the man suddenly lurched forward at the wrong time, she’d take off his jaw or knock out a few of his lower teeth, but she saw his motions were slow, measured, even when he coughed. She loaded another cartridge into the magazine tube—the probability was good she could hit it within two shots—and then she changed her mind and put in three more, saving just one in her pocket. If she missed the first, she would keep aiming, sighting, and shooting, so long as he remained still. She opened and shut the lever, and the hammer cocked. The man’s spine straightened at the sound.

“Rigged up for an outboard, but I didn’t go anywhere in a hurry,” the man said. He dropped the lighter into a pocket on the side of the wheelchair and put the cigarette between his lips. “So what are you waiting for? High command?”

She knew she ought to do this while the cigarette was still long, so she would be shooting as far from his face as possible. She noted the man’s whole body was shaking very slightly, but not enough to screw up the shot. She nestled the rifle butt into her shoulder, pressed her cheek into the stock, stretched her hasty sling tight, and sighted, but didn’t feel stable enough. She squatted down, with one knee on the ground, and finally sat cross-legged on the flagstones and rested her elbows just below her knees.

Before lifting the muzzle, she took a breath and considered everything around her: the wheelchair, the black dog, the soft autumn sun lighting up the green-and-gold-tinged leaves of the sugar maples, the red ribbons of poison ivy climbing a swamp oak at the river’s edge, water flowing under the houseboat, geese clacking, the smell of wood burning somewhere nearby. She had only just arrived on the Kalamazoo, but this world was one she understood. She studied the old man’s feet and legs in the chair. His hands were in his lap, long-fingered, stained yellow from smoking. She considered the top of his head, where the thick, shiny hair belied the rest of his physical condition, and then the rectangle of his black glasses. She was startled when he took off the glasses and looked at her through wide-open, red-tinged eyes. For a moment he reminded her of her grandpa, though of course he looked nothing like him—Grandpa had been a tall man with a crooked nose and a gray beard, while this guy was compact with a round, shaved face. But there was something about him that struck her: he was dying, as surely as her grandpa had been dying.

“Shoot, goddamn it,” he grumbled.

She was as much aware of the man’s jaw as she was of her own breath and heartbeat. The man growled to the dog, “It’s okay, boy.”

Margo knew she had to make a good shot of this for the old man and for herself. She looped her hand through her sling and tightened it against her left arm. She knew the glowing tip of that unfiltered cigarette as well now as she knew her own finger on the trigger. There was nothing in the world but herself, her rifle, and her target. She exhaled and pressed the trigger. She held steady as the bullet left the chamber and then the barrel. She heard it hit the side of the garage and then there was silence. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, the old man was slumped forward in his chair. She got up and ran across the patio to him. She lifted his shoulders to look into his face. Tears were rolling from his naked eyes. His lips still pinched a cigarette end. When she let go of him, he laughed a low rumble, and the dog nuzzled his empty hand.

“You weren’t shitting me you can shoot,” he said between breaths. He put his glasses back on. “Of course, I was hoping you’d miss and shoot me in the goddamned head.”

Margo got the canning kettle from the porch, removed the paper bag of trash that was in it, and stuck the bag in a ceramic crock, the kind Joanna used for making bread-and-butter pickles.

“The lid is in the lower cupboard to the left of the stove, and you’d better wash the pan out if you’re going to cook with it. And you are filthy, kid. Don’t you ever take a bath?”

“I’m staying with a friend.”

“A man?”

She nodded.

“Thought so. Then you’re making your own bed, I guess.” He turned away and spoke to the river. “Girl your age ought not to be out fooling around. You ought to go home to your ma.”

“My ma doesn’t want me.” Saying it aloud hurt.

The man’s hand moved to his glasses as though to take them off again, but he only touched them and let the hand fall back into his lap. “If you want a shower, you’d better ask for it.”

“Could I take a shower in your house, sir?” Margo said.

“You can take a shower. But don’t bring your boyfriend around. My dog will bite him.” He fiddled in the pocket of his wheelchair for a cigarette and the lighter and lit up. After a drag from the cigarette, his voice was calmer. “My last cigarette. Unless you got some more.”

She shook her head. “It’s been two months since I had a shower with hot water. We’re camping out, on the riverbank on a farmer’s land.”

“Young girl ought to be wary of men,” the old man said and smiled a little. His open mouth showed he had no upper teeth, and this made him look like a little kid. “Even I might not be as harmless as I seem.”

“Are you blind?” she asked.

“Not yet.” The man rested his cigarette on the patio, inhaled through his nasal tubes a few times. Then he disconnected the oxygen and picked up his cigarette again. “Don’t worry, there’s nobody else here to bother you.”

The kitchen, the first room beyond the porch, was cluttered with dishes, books, papers, and tools, as was the hallway. The windows were all closed. She meant to hurry through her shower, but she couldn’t make herself turn off the water until the hot ran cold. She inspected the towels hanging on the towel bars and across the chair beside the tub. She reached all the way to the back of the closet shelf for the one folded towel. It smelled a little of mildew, but it looked clean. She put her clothes back on and opened the bathroom door to find the dog right outside. He followed her out onto the patio, where she found the old man slumped, asleep in his chair with his oxygen hooked up.

She could go back to her camp, or she could dress out the duck right here where there was running water. She sat on a milk crate and worked silently, plucking the duck’s chest feathers, then its wings, and finally its back, using the dragging motions of her fingers. She enjoyed being in the presence of the dog and the old man, whose slumped body emanated a sweetness in sleep. She dumped the guts into the river and washed the pan out at the spigot at the side of the house. The big dog watched. After checking to be sure the man was still asleep, she tossed his dog the raw, rinsed heart. He caught it in his jaws and swallowed.