Once Upon a River

• Chapter Nineteen •


Margo followed Smoke’s directions for registering the boat. She filled out the form Fishbone got for her and mailed it in, listing her new Greenland PO box as her address. The transferred boat title was in her pocket twelve days later, and Smoke handed her the key to the padlock on the door. He talked her through filling up the water tanks, and while she had the hose down there, she washed the cabin’s outside walls and scrubbed the deck with a brush. Margo carried Smoke’s only working outboard—an old Johnson two-horsepower trolling motor—down from the back porch and fixed it in place, fed some unleaded gasoline mixed with two-stroke oil into the tank, but found herself unable to start it. Smoke tried to give instructions from the patio, but finally she had to help him down the stairs to the boat, where he leaned against the cabin. When he couldn’t catch his breath after five minutes, Margo ran up to the patio and got his oxygen tank. Together they got the outboard going, though the action exhausted Smoke. Downstream with the current would be no problem for the trolling motor, but Smoke was right that she couldn’t go upstream even at full throttle. She would have to find a bigger outboard.

“I’m going to miss this boat,” he said when he was back in his wheelchair on the patio, reconnected to his oxygen. “My Pride & Joy. I designed and built every damned inch of that cabin myself, even welded up that little wood stove. Couldn’t find one small enough.”

“Do you want me to keep it here?”

He shook his head. “Go down to Harland’s.”

“Who’s Harland?”

“The farmer who owns that land you’re camped out on. You’re legally registered now, so just keep your flotation devices visible, and don’t screw around with the DNR. Same thing for that trapping license. I don’t know why a kid like you wants to kill muskrats,” he said and stopped to catch his breath.

“It really is mine, isn’t it?”

“You’ve got the title. I think I’m out of my mind selling it to you, but there’s nobody else who would go along with me.”

The title was in the camper, closed in Annie Oakley: Life and Legend. Before she headed downriver, she would go inside and look at it again.

“I wish I didn’t have to be on any person’s land.”

The farmer hadn’t come around since the day she had seen him on the ridge, though occasionally she spied on him near his house and in his barnyard.

“And I’m sure he’d rather you wasn’t on his place, but you can’t motor around all the time. It’s not that kind of boat.”

“I’ll look out for someplace that doesn’t belong to anybody.”

“Good goddamned luck with that.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to live,” Margo said, but didn’t know how to go on and so crossed her arms over her chest.

“Me, too. Haven’t figured it out yet,” Smoke said and held out his hand. Margo uncrossed her arms and took the hand in hers so it stopped shaking. She wished she could see his eyes. He said, “You’ve got every right to try to live any goddamned idiotic way you want to.”

Margo waved at his slumped, silver-haired figure as the boat sputtered downstream. She pulled the crumbling old rudder out of the water and steered the boat using the outboard, keeping close to the north bank of the river. The boat was heavy and hard to maneuver, and she had to lean down over the back to work the motor and use the mirrors to see what was in front of her. Finally she cut against the current and steered up onto the sandbar above where the springwater trickled into the river. She lifted the motor out of the water as the propeller scraped bottom. By the time she could get off the boat to secure it with a rope, it had drifted, so she had to drag it back upstream, a few inches at a time. Finally she moored it above where the springwater trickled in, just upstream of her campsite, where the water was deep enough that the boat sat level. She tied it to a tree so it couldn’t slip any farther downstream. She anchored the boat near shore using the five-gallon buckets half filled with concrete that she’d pulled up out of the water at Smoke’s. At first she thought she would not need to be tied to shore, but the boat kept edging out into the river. There were two coils of rough manila rope on the boat, along with two five-foot-long stakes she pounded into the ground; she tied up to those to keep herself from drifting.

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 f*cking earth.”

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

“I’m going to a doctor,” Smoke said. “Just not the a*shole 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 lady 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?”

“I used a low-velocity ammo.” She didn’t mention she’d screwed up three hides before getting it right. “The bullet is still in the brain.”

“That’s all fine and good,” he said and smiled, “but you really want to get a perfect eye hole with the lid and eyelash still on. For that you’re going to have to use traps. I’ll show you how to run a drowner line. You got hip waders?”

“There’s some on the boat,” Margo said.

“How old are they? If they’re Smoky’s, they probably leak.”

“The goddamned things are only five years old,” Smoke said. “I forgot I left them on there. Cost me seventy-five dollars.”

“And you’re going to need some stretching boards.”

Margo nodded.

“Smoky’s got traps he ain’t using. Maybe a couple of them wire stretchers.”

“Stop giving all my things away before I’m dead.”

Margo felt better about talking to Fishbone when he was occupied, so she finally asked what she’d been wanting to ask for more than a week.

“Smoke told me to ask you, Fishbone, where a girl goes to get rid of a baby.”

“What do you mean?” He stopped cutting.

“The girl’s pregnant,” Smoke said. “She doesn’t want to have a goddamned baby.”

“I don’t like that kind of business.” Fishbone went back to working the hide off the head of the carcass. “And you should know it, Smoky.”

Margo said, “I can’t have a baby. I can’t take care of it.” She noticed he left the muskrat’s nose on the skin.

Smoke sipped from the bottle of over-the-counter medicine, which did not work as well as the codeine prescription stuff, but he’d already gone through all that.

“If she wants help, I would ask you to please help her as a favor to me,” Smoke said.

Fishbone removed the skin the rest of the way off the head. Margo stepped closer to see the naked skull. Without warning, Fishbone pulled the skin off the muskrat’s belly, and the guts slipped out onto the brown paper bag on the patio floor.

Margo looked down to see splashes of fluid beading on her boots and soaking into her pant leg. Fishbone’s shoes were still clean.

Fishbone looked up at her. “Now get rid of these guts, young lady. You got a hole to bury them in?”

“The ground’s frozen,” Smoke said. “Nobody’s digging a hole.”

Margo couldn’t tell if this was real discord or their usual banter.

“I’ll pay you for gas to take me,” Margo said. “I’ve got enough money.”

“How far along are you?”

“Since the middle of September, not three months.”

“I figured that Mexican was going to be trouble,” Smoke said.

“I’ll see about it. I’ll tell you, though, there’s too much freedom in this country when you got freedom to do that. Get rid of these,” Fishbone said and nodded at the entrails.

“What are you going to do with the meat?” she asked.

“You want to cook it? Tastes like rabbit, only fishy. You got to cut out these glands on the belly here, or you’re going to get a nasty smell.” He pointed at the thumb-knuckle-sized sacs with his knife. He hacked off the muskrat’s tail, laid it on top of the guts, and then wrapped the little carcass in newspaper. “You mess up those glands, even Nightmare won’t touch the meat.”

Margo knelt down and tugged the brown bag away from Fishbone’s feet, and Fishbone pulled the hide gently down onto one of the stretching boards, inside out, and showed Margo how to remove the fat and membrane from the skin with the edge of the spoon. Then he took a bandanna from his pocket and wiped his hands with it. Fishbone’s disapproval was making Margo feel uncertain, but she took some strength from Smoke’s crossed arms.

Margo carried the guts down to the river and dumped them in. The snapping turtles would be deep in the muck hibernating, but there was always something hungry in the river.




A week later, Fishbone didn’t speak as he drove her toward Kalamazoo in his old two-toned Chevy pickup, and his body seemed stiffer and more angular than usual. He hardly looked in her direction except to shake his head. He had insisted she leave her rifle in Smoke’s kitchen, and she felt uneasy without it. The scenery as they approached the city seemed homely; the yards were small, and some contained decorations put up for Christmas, less than two weeks away—hard plastic Santas, snowmen, holy men, reindeer, and human-sized candy canes. Margo imagined that at night when the lights were lit, the decorations would seem cheerful. In Smoke’s riverside neighborhood of one-story houses with big yards, people had hung lights on their front windows and over trees near the road, but nobody decorated near the river, which was where holiday lights looked prettiest, reflecting off the water.

Though the air inside the truck was smoky from Fishbone’s cigar and sickly from the pine air freshener hanging from the mirror, Margo did not dare open the window for fear of irritating him. After fifteen minutes on the road, Fishbone pulled into the driveway beside a brick building and parked at the far end of the adjoining lot. He slipped an eight-track tape into the player—B. B. King—and as a guitar solo lurched forward, he crossed his arms.

She took a deep breath and looked toward the solid double doors beneath the sign reading CLINIC ENTRANCE. Four people stood alongside the building holding their own signs: STOP KILLING BABIES and MURDER SANCTIONED WITHIN.

She shut the truck door and walked across what seemed a long stretch of asphalt. She felt small and unsteady when she reached the sidewalk.

“Baby killer!” shouted the tallest of the three women protesters.

Margo noticed there was a bit of water flowing in the ditch behind the building, and she figured that every stream, no matter how small or dirty, eventually made its way to the river. If Fishbone was gone when she came out, she could follow the flow through ditches to successively bigger streams to the Kalamazoo. She would be able to follow the river upstream to her boat.

Margo tugged open one of the painted steel doors, like the doors of her high school back in Murrayville. Her footfalls were silent on the greenish carpet of the lobby.

She approached the counter beneath the words CHECK IN. The receptionist seated there in a red-and-green sweater gave her a quiet smile.

“Good afternoon. Are you here for counseling?” She reminded Margo of her fifth-grade teacher, who’d had the same chubby figure and curly hair and had dressed up special for every holiday, even the Day of the Dead, the day after Halloween, when she drew skeleton bones on her face and arms. The lobby was decorated for Christmas, with gold-and-green garlands behind the desk and a Santa-with-elves statue on the counter. “Is this your first visit?”

Margo nodded. The receptionist jotted down her name and handed her a clipboard with a stapled form attached. “You can sit over there and get started on this. Just give us a shout if you need anything. The nurse will call your name in a few minutes.”

As Margo crossed the lobby to the waiting area, the perfume smell reminded her of Fishbone’s air freshener, only worse, and she feared she might sneeze. The fluorescent lights hurt her eyes, and maybe they were the source of the dull hum that was making her ears feel clogged. At Smoke’s house, he and Margo usually sat in the sunlight coming through the window, and sometimes they even sat in the dark, because Smoke found it restful on his eyes. When Margo was on the Glutton, she cleaned her rifle, oiled her boots, read books, and repaired her clothes by the light of an oil lamp—Smoke had given her a bottle of clean-burning lamp oil and convinced her not to use kerosene. Now she longed for the muted movement of the river beneath her feet.

Two other women sat in the waiting area, one Margo’s age, one older. Both held magazines in their laps. Margo took a seat and started filling out the form. For the address (where it said a PO box was not acceptable), she wrote Smoke’s address, and then crossed it out for fear that Smoke would somehow get in trouble with his nieces.

When the door opened, a nurse called in the younger of the two other women. That woman closed her magazine and placed it carefully on the table so that its edges lined up with the magazine beneath it. The older woman glanced after her.

The form asked when Margo’s last period had been, and she tried to calculate, but the calendar on the wall did not have the phases of the moon. The last several months had been a relief from that concern, from those five days of washing and drying the cloths she used. The form asked whether any relative of hers had high blood pressure or high cholesterol. She got up and walked to the window and looked out. She saw dirty snow and high curbs painted safety-yellow and a dozen cars, each parked far away from the others, and finally Fishbone’s truck. The people with signs were chanting at a girl walking past them, and the girl was hiding her face. Margo grabbed at her shoulder for her rifle sling. As the girl entered the lobby from outside, Margo returned to her chair. A painting on the wall featured a white farmhouse, similar to the Murray house, with a big red barn beside it. She figured where the river should be in relation to the house—just below the bottom of the painting—and where she had long ago shot targets beside the barn. The hum of the lights or the machines behind the closed doors got louder. Margo took a deep breath and focused on the pages before her. They asked for her insurance information. On the last page, she read the question: “Do you understand the following procedures?” and it listed three options that were written in what seemed like a foreign language.

Margo returned to the section on “personal medical history.” Had she ever had seizures? Back pain? She checked the box yes and wrote Chopping wood in the space provided, and then she wished she could erase it, because she suddenly did not want to share anything more about herself with strangers. When a woman in a lab coat called her name, Margo stood and followed her through the doorway, down a hall, and into a small room.

“Are you okay, honey?” the woman asked. Her cheeks were powdery and her lipstick was pearly like the inside of a clamshell. When Margo realized the woman seemed concerned and was waiting for a response, she nodded and raised her eyebrows.

“Keep working on the questionnaire. The doctor will be right with you,” she said. “Don’t be nervous. He’s very nice. He’ll examine you and then talk to you about your options. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Undress and put on this gown.” She patted the gown that lay folded on the examining table. Then she held up a paper sheet and said, “You can cover your legs with this. It’ll just be a couple of minutes.”

The perfume smell overwhelmed the room, which was about the size of the room in which she’d had her teeth cleaned as a girl. She took off her daddy’s Carhartt jacket, rested it on the back of the chair, and folded its worn arms over the seat. She smoothed its frayed collar and then put it back on. The small window was too high to look out of, but she imagined it looked onto the flowing ditch. She studied a poster that featured a girl Margo’s age with long blonde hair; her button-up striped shirt had wide lapels. She was smiling and holding hands with a boy who was all in shadow. PROTECT YOURSELF, it said in big yellow letters. Below that it said, in small type, AGAINST UNWANTED PREGNANCY AND VENEREAL DISEASE. Other posters depicted birth control pills in beige packets, one that had the twenty-eight green, white, and pink pills arranged like tick marks on a clock face. (Margo counted the marks while she waited.) The plastic thing the size of a loaf of bread beside the sink appeared to be a three-dimensional female body part, and in another situation, Margo would have liked to take a good look at it, but now she was too distracted. She put down the clipboard and tried to catch her breath. She had learned all she knew about birth control in a two-hour sex-education assembly in seventh grade, but it hadn’t stuck with her how careful a person should be.

She imagined the doctor telling her where to sit. When to lie down. She’d never undressed for a doctor before. She ran her hand across the clean paper on the examining table. She picked up the gown and then put it down.

She wanted the thing inside her to slip out and disappear into the air. She wanted it to have never been there at all. But beyond that, she didn’t know what she wanted to do about it. She only knew she couldn’t stay here any longer. She wasn’t ready to open herself up and put herself into the hands of the strangers here. No more than she could go back to tenth grade and sit in the stifling classroom and answer a question posed to her, no more than she could turn herself in to the police as Michael had wanted her to do. No more than she could let someone burn her with cigarettes. Now that she’d come here, now that she’d seen what was here, she needed to go home and think about it.

She walked out the door, down the hall, and turned left. Her heart pounded in fear that someone would stop her and want her to explain. She pushed on the door that led to the lobby. She pushed again, but it did not move. A pretty, freckled woman in a white lab coat walked over to her, patted her shoulder, and pulled the door toward her. It opened. Margo walked through the lobby, through the steel doors, back out onto the sidewalk. When she got a few steps from the building and away from the protesters, she inhaled deeply, as though she had gone the whole time inside without breathing. She trudged through the slush of the parking lot and climbed into Fishbone’s truck, onto the seat that had been repaired with duct tape.

“I didn’t think you’d do it,” Fishbone said, putting out his little cigar in the truck’s ashtray.

Margo knew there was no sense trying to explain why she’d left, since she wasn’t sure herself. She crossed her arms.

“You need to go see your mother, young lady.”

Margo uncrossed her arms, opened her wallet, and took out the address and the section of map that showed the way to her mother’s house.