Once Upon a River

• Chapter Nine •


One day in August, Brian went to town and did not return by nightfall or by the next morning. Several days later, he had still not come home. Each morning when Margo woke up alone she listened for a long time to a phoebe calling its own name from a branch outside the window, until she could copy it perfectly. Each night he was gone, she listened to the orchestra of crickets, cicadas, and tree frogs and wrote letters to her mother. Sometimes she tried to sound lighthearted, and other times she demanded Luanne explain about her delicate situation. Whenever she finished a letter, she tore the paper into pieces and sprinkled them on the water from Brian’s dock.

For the last few months she had feared Brian coming home drunk, but now she worried he might not come back at all. At first she found sleeping difficult without his big body beside her, but she soon was stretching out and using the extra space.

At dusk on the eighth night, Margo saw the Playbuoy coming downstream. She stood on the dock and waved. The black-haired, bearded driver turned out to be Paul. At the noise of the boat’s big outboard motor, the yellow dog across the river moved up the lawn toward its house, and a great blue heron that must have been fishing below the cabin launched itself into flight. Margo watched it ascend. Another guy was with Paul, not Johnny, but a smaller man. She hoped they had brought some meat or store-bought food. She was tired of eating fish. She had run out of rifle cartridges and shotgun shells and had no money left to buy more until she got up her nerve to cash her money order. She grabbed the siderail of the boat as Paul idled alongside the dock. The boat was riding heavy in the water.

“You got Brian’s boat,” Margo shouted. Paul cut the engine just as she asked, “Where is he?”

Margo was shocked to hear her own voice over the river sounds. She had not spoken aloud in a while, and she didn’t usually talk to Paul at all. There was something in the center of the boat, covered by a blue tarp. By its shape, she figured it was a fifty-five-gallon plastic drum. That explained why the boat was sunk up over its pontoons. Water sloshed over the Astroturf carpeting.

“Brian’s in jail.”

“For what?”

“For beating on Cal Murray.”

“What? He didn’t hurt him?”

“The hell he didn’t. He hurt him bad. Did it for you.”

“I never asked him to do anything to Cal.” Margo felt spooked by the intensity of Paul’s voice.

Paul got out of the boat and tied it off. “Brian should have known better, but he couldn’t stand it when Cal Murray walked in the bar like he owned it. Cal thinks he owns Murrayville.”

Cal did own Murrayville, thought Margo, didn’t he? “What happened?”

“It ain’t good,” Paul said. He turned his head to favor his bad eye. “Stop staring at me, damn it.”

Margo had not meant to stare. She looked back at the cabin. The green building, tippy on its stilts, blurred as her eyes filled with tears. Margo wiped her face and pointed at the fish pail that Paul was lifting off the boat. “Give me that,” she said.

“Maggie, honey, crying about it ain’t going to do him any good. There’s nothing that’s going to do him any good except a better lawyer than he can afford.” Paul’s voice turned softer. He rested the bucket on the dock and put his arms around her. Paul was a little fatter than his brother. She thought he smelled odd, of ammonia. She thought of pushing him away and running, but it would be crazy to run into the woods, which were full of stinging nettles and poison ivy.

She pulled away from the embrace and grabbed the bucket, sloshing water on herself and Paul. Two of the three bullhead catfish inside were the length of her forearms, with long barbels. Those seaweedy whiskers brushed the sides of the bucket as the fish slid over one another. “These are big catfish,” she said.

“They come from around Willow Island upstream,” Paul said.

“Who you got with you?” she asked. The other man had made no motions to disembark, as though waiting for the signal from Paul.

“That’s just Charlie. He works at the plant with me.” Paul had long held a job at a pharmaceutical plant that made generic drugs. Paul was a factory rat, Brian said, though Paul didn’t like the phrase. Charlie was skinny, and one cheek was sunken where he was missing some teeth.

Paul took the fish from the bucket one by one, used his knife to slit the skin all the way around their necks, and nailed each head to the nearest oak; the three tails strained and curled against the bark. The men stood by while Margo stunned one with a hammer and began tearing off its skin with pliers.

“Tell me what happened.” Though she knew better, Margo brushed against the catfish dorsal fin, and her middle finger burned.

“Well, we left The Pub and was at The Tap Room in Murrayville having a few beers, and Brian and this guy he’s playing pool with get to arguing, and then Cal Murray comes in. It’s like my brother has been waiting for Cal Murray but Cal’s been keeping a low profile. So Brian says to him, ‘I heard a guy shot your dick off. Heard all you got now is a nasty little stub,’ which is funny, but everybody’s scared to laugh. Cal Murray asks Brian does he want to suck it, and Brian tells him there ain’t no forgiving what you done to that girl. Brian hits him a couple times, and Cal don’t hardly even defend himself, which seems odd. I don’t know if he was drunk or what. Brian pushes him down some stairs, don’t seem to notice Cal isn’t fighting back, so he stomps the shit out of him on the steps. He broke both Cal’s legs.”

“What?” The fish skin split.

“Broke bones in his legs. You heard me.”

Margo took a deep breath and regripped the skin with her pliers. “Why’d you guys go to Murrayville?”

“It’s a free country, that’s what Brian said. We can drink anywhere we want. But you know it’s been eating away at Brian what you said Cal done to you. He didn’t have any choice but to fight him.”

Margo had never seen Brian hit anybody, but she could imagine him, drunk beyond talking to, slugging and kicking Cal. Margo’s finger trailed the pectoral fin of the catfish. The pain was so sharp this time she was surprised not to see blood on her knuckle. Brian was a weapon, all right, but more like a land mine or a grenade than a gun or a knife.

“Next thing you know, the ambulance and the cops are there, and Brian’s going to jail. And now that they got him locked up, they’re getting him for killing that man.”

“Cal’s not dead, is he?”

“No. It’s the manslaughter charge.”

“What manslaughter charge?”

“Well, whatever the hell they’re calling it. Up in Rapid River, in the UP last summer. Brian must’ve told you. Why do you think he’s been out here in the woods laying low?”

The trees became thicker and taller around her. She tugged on the second catfish skin, trying not to let it split, but she stung her wrist on the spine of a dorsal fin and jerked away, making a mess of it. As she worked, the half-skinned catfish woke up. It curled its tail out away from the tree, still trying to swim.

“Hey, Charlie, toss me a beer,” Paul said. Margo looked up to see the can fly through the air with surprising speed and accuracy. Paul caught it with a smack, and when he opened it, foam poured onto his hand. “I thought you knew, Maggie.”

She worked slowly with the pliers on the last catfish, tugging around the sides evenly, removing the skin in one piece down to the tail and slicing it free. If what Brian had done in the UP was an accident, why hadn’t he mentioned it?

“All the police had on that trouble up north was a description, but it included them knife scars on the back of his hand. It was the same deal, Brian drunk and not knowing when to quit.”

“Can I see him?”

“It’d be better if you didn’t, honey. His wife isn’t going to like you.”

“His ex-wife.”

“He’s got an ex-wife, his first wife. He was planning on getting a divorce from his second wife soon, but the dumb son of a bitch hadn’t told her about it yet. He was hoping she’d take up with another guy, make it easier, get him better terms for the divorce. I’m not saying they were together exactly, but now she’s rallying ’round him. And she can do him more good now than you can.”

Inside the cabin, Margo moved numbly. She filleted and fried the catfish the way she would have for Brian, with cornmeal and flour, in the last of the bacon grease, which was on the verge of going

rancid. When they finished eating, Paul turned on a brand-new

battery-powered lantern with a humming fluorescent bulb. Margo was distressed at how bug-stained the walls were, how ratty the rug looked in the cold bluish light, and how grimy she had let herself become. She pulled her braid over her shoulder and looked at how frayed it was. Paul and Charlie took the lantern outside and started digging a hole with round-end shovels, and Margo was grateful to be out of the harsh light. She undid her braid and brushed her hair. When Paul came inside to get another beer, she asked him to tell her more.

“There ain’t nothing more to it.”

“Does Brian own this cabin?” she asked.

“Me and Brian own it together. You can stay here as long as you want, Maggie. Don’t you worry your pretty head about that. But I’m going to be storing a few things here, and I got to warn you, don’t touch any of them. You’d better take me seriously when I say that.”

“What’s in that barrel?” Margo noticed that Paul’s hiking boots looked brand-new, as did his watch.

“Don’t you worry about what it is, Maggie. I’ve got a drum full of a very valuable substance, and you’re just going to have to leave it alone.”

She nodded. “Do you know if Brian checked his PO box?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Paul said.

“Maybe my ma wrote a letter saying she wants me to come.”

“He didn’t say nothing about a letter. I can ask him next time I visit him.”

When Paul went back out to dig more, Margo washed the dishes with water she’d lugged in and heated on the propane stove.

Margo didn’t usually drink, but she needed to do something different as a kind of protest against this new situation. She opened a beer and, though the first few sips sickened her, she drank it down. She folded up the letter she’d been writing to her mother—in it she’d asked what Luanne thought about being loyal to a man, what it was worth. All these questions she was asking her ma added up to one question: how should Margo live? She had chosen this life for now, and she had chosen Brian to be her anchor, keeping her steady and in place. Now she was adrift. She opened a second beer and found she didn’t mind the taste so much. After finishing the dishes, while the men were still working outside, she reread her mother’s old letter on the yellow stationery with the bumblebees—the flower scent had faded—and she drank a third beer. Afterward, she stumbled to the bedroom and passed out.




Just before sunrise, she awoke with a parched mouth and a headache, and with a man’s heavy arm over her in the bed. She gasped when she realized it was Paul beside her. She extricated herself with difficulty. After more than a week without Brian, Margo had almost forgotten how a big man generated heat around him. The bedroom was stifling. She was grateful he was dead asleep, more grateful to find herself still fully clothed. She heated water for instant coffee. There wasn’t much propane left; Brian had intended to get some in town the day he disappeared. Charlie was curled in a strange position, half on, half off the narrow couch.

She carried her coffee outside, and from the dock she watched the Jeep pull away from the yellow house downstream. She admired the straight diagonal lines the man had mowed into his lawn, all the way down to the river, where he trimmed with a weed whip he swung like a golf club. In contrast to the rangy wild bushes on her side, the hedges around his house were trimmed flat as tabletops. She looked forward to this evening, after Paul and Charlie were gone, when the man would come home and let his dog out to hunker at the river’s edge. The dog was able to catch fish in its jaws; she’d seen it do so a half dozen times.

Margo found her siphon hose and sucked gas out of the Playbuoy’s tank into a milk jug, enough to mix with two-stroke oil for a trip up to Heart of Pines with the small outboard motor, or two trips maybe, if she rowed back down without power. Or maybe she would take a fishing trip to Willow Island, where one time she had seen a heron carry a snake up to its chicks in the trees.

Margo had never given Brian any details about her and Cal, had never suggested he should punish Cal.

She rinsed the fuel taste from her mouth with coffee, spat it into the river. She thought she might be okay living alone here, having the bed to herself, making the breakfast she wanted at the time she wanted, not worrying about what state Brian would be in when he got home from work or the bar. She would have to cash the money order and lay in supplies for the winter, including bacon, flour, and powdered milk. Maybe she would make bread, something she hadn’t gotten around to doing. She would miss Brian, but if she could stay here, she could survive on her own. She would get ammo and sleep with her rifle beside her.

Charlie was stirring on the couch. Margo sifted meal-moth larvae out of the last of the flour for pancakes. Paul and Charlie would appreciate a cooked breakfast. She opened a beer, poured half of it into her dry ingredients, and then handed the open can to Charlie, who sat up to accept it. He tipped it up and drank the remainder in one long slug.

“Are you hungry, Charlie?” she asked. “Did you sleep good?”

“You’s got a toilet around here?” he asked. She led him outside and directed him along the path that led to the outhouse.

Paul called her name from the bedroom. She pushed open the door and stepped inside, where she smelled smoke that wasn’t from cigarettes. She saw a glass pipe on the windowsill by the bed, alongside a pack of matches. He turned to favor his bad eye.

“I’m mixing pancakes,” she said. “Charlie went to the outhouse.”

“Come here, river princess.” He grabbed her before she’d even realized she was within reach of him. He pulled her down onto the bed.

“Paul, what?”

“Kiss me,” he said.

“No, Paul. What if Brian . . . ?”

“Brian’s not here. He’s not going to be here.”

“No. Don’t,” she said, but he pulled her against him.

He seemed not to notice her complaints. He pulled down her loose jeans without unzipping them—she had grown thinner in these last months—and pushed her T-shirt up around her shoulders. She bent her knees and tried to sit up, but he held her down with one hand and ran the other along her stomach and over her right breast. In school she had wrenched away from boys who had grabbed her in the stairwell, but she had never fought a big man. She tried to push Paul away, tried to get her feet up to kick. As her leg came up, he pushed her knee out to the side and heaved himself onto her. When she continued to push at him, he flipped her over with an ease that shocked her. His fingers held her down like straps. She had always thought of herself as strong, but compared to Paul she was nothing. She yelled and tried to push him off.

While her arms were trapped beneath her, he forced her onto her stomach and worked his way into her. She cried out loudly enough that Charlie would have heard her if he’d returned from the outhouse, but there was no sound from the next room. She couldn’t take in a full breath, crushed as she was against the mattress, and she feared she was suffocating. The time she had crawled beneath the buck’s carcass back in Murrayville, she had been able to calm herself, but there was no way to be calm with Paul on her. She tried to lift herself to throw Paul off, but he was heavier than the buck. She smelled Brian’s musk in the sheets and Paul’s sweat and rotten breath. She wished for him to be as dead as that buck. When she croaked his name and begged him to stop again, he responded, “Oh, Maggie,” as though she had said something sweet. She struggled to free her arms until she felt too weak to struggle anymore. Paul was on her for a long time.

After he rolled away to the other side of the bed, he looked at her and smiled. She wanted to punch him and kick him, but she feared he would grab her fist or foot if she did, and more than anything she wanted to get away from him. She picked her clothes up off the floor and carried them into the other room. She dressed with shaking hands and wished she had more clothes to put on. Her rifle and shotgun were in the rack beside her, useless without ammunition, though the shotgun might work as a club until Paul could wrestle it out of her hands. She had wasted her cartridges on target practice, expecting Brian to bring her more. From now on, she knew better. She would count on no one to help or protect her.

She tied her boots, buttoned her shirt. She thought about running into the woods in order not to face Paul, but she did not want to leave her boat behind. She could get in her boat and row away from the cabin, but in the pontoon boat he could chase her down if he wanted. And there was no point of leaving now that he had already done what he had wanted to do with her. Once she was dressed, she picked up the butcher knife and moved to the bedroom doorway. While she stood there, she tested the sharpness by puncturing her skin near her wrist. A drop of blood formed there. If he came after her again, she would protect herself with it.

“I ain’t used an outhouse in years,” said Charlie, as he entered the cabin from the screen porch. “It’s mighty relaxing.”

Margo returned to her pancake batter and put down the knife.

“You making us breakfast?” Charlie asked. “You’re a nice girl.”

“Charlie, do you do drugs?”

“Nosirree,” he said. “But Paul says that shit out there’s going to make us some serious money.”

“How about Paul? Brian said he was off the drugs.”

Charlie shrugged. When he looked away, Margo spat into the pancake batter. She saw the dozen meal-moth larvae were still in the sifter, so she dumped those in and stirred.




As Paul and Charlie powered upstream, Margo traced their progress with the barrel of her unloaded rifle, sized Paul up as a target, and dry-fired at him. Before pulling away, Paul had given her food from his cooler—a hunk of cheese with a hardened edge, summer sausage, and a couple sleeves of saltines—and though she thought of knocking it all off the table where he’d placed it, she was too hungry to waste it. When Paul had tried to kiss her mouth before boarding the Playbuoy, she moved away and spit on the ground. He laughed as though she’d been making a joke. Later Margo discovered two twenty-dollar bills on her pillow.

She went back outside, took off her jeans, squatted beside the pump, and scrubbed between her legs with the cold water until she felt raw.

She slung her empty rifle over her shoulder to feel its weight, and the rope dug into her shoulder. It had been hurting her for a while. She found two leather belts on a wall hook in the bedroom and cut both buckles off. She punched holes in them with a hammer and a Phillips screwdriver, sewed them together with fish line, and threaded the leather through the sling swivels. She practiced to get the length right, flipping the rifle from her left side quickly up to aim and press the trigger with her right index finger. When she finished, she thought her homemade hasty sling felt as fine and solid as the one on her daddy’s old Remington, the rifle with which she’d performed that miracle of winning the 4-H competition.

Margo made herself a supper of cheese, crackers, summer sausage, and wild blackberries and was grateful not to be eating fish.

Though she knew revenge was as likely to hurt as it was to heal, she hoped she would make Paul regret what he had done.




Hours later, after the Jeep returned to the house across the river, the fishing dog appeared in its usual place on the water’s edge. To lighten the boat, Margo lifted off Brian’s outboard and placed it carefully on blocks so as not to bend the propeller, and then she rowed across. She had never touched the fishing dog or even seen it up close, but when she called, the dog walked out onto the oil-barrel float and stepped down into her boat without hesitation. Margo petted the yellow head. “I’ll call you King,” she whispered, thinking of the big-headed kingfisher bird who had always fished just upstream from her house in Murrayville.

Then she noticed that this was absolutely a female fishing dog, a female kingfisher, a female king.

She didn’t consider it stealing when she rowed the dog back to her side of the river and let her out to sniff the water’s edge. She always used to row the Murrays’ dog Moe across the river to her side for a visit. If this dog wanted to stay and chase raccoons up trees, that was her choice. Margo followed the dog on foot along the river and into the woods. With a companion like a fishing dog, Margo wouldn’t mind staying here alone. She could train the dog to bark when an intruder came. But it wasn’t long before Margo heard a man’s voice shouting, “Cleo! Where are you? Come, Cleo!” The dog jumped off the riverbank, plunged into the water, and swam downstream and to the other side. She shook herself and ran up the lawn to greet the man.

Margo looked around where the dog had been sniffing, and she found some ragged shelf fungus, yellow as an egg yolk, growing on the base of a tree: a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom. Clearly this dog was good luck. She snapped off a hunk of mushroom and brushed away a few ants. She would cook it for dinner tomorrow with her last two chicken bouillon cubes.




A week of heavy rain made Margo a prisoner in the cabin. When Brian was there she hadn’t minded being without a phone or a radio, but now she longed to hear a voice. The rain banged on the tin roof, reminding her of the sound of rain on the roof of the big Murray barn. The water rose until it was level with the dock. Most kids her age would have been getting ready to go back to school in a few weeks; Margo hadn’t looked forward to school in past years, but at least school would have put her with other people. She wished Brian had more books at the cabin, something besides the guidebooks for tying knots and identifying animal tracks, both of which she’d read and reread.

The first day the rains let up, Margo crossed the river. She called the dog out to the float, and the dog jumped in her boat. But before Margo could push off, the man appeared from behind the shed and stepped knee-deep into the water in his swim trunks and tennis shoes. He grabbed the back end of her boat. He was thin and at least a few inches taller than Margo. “Evening,” he said calmly. “Where are you taking my dog?”

“A-cr-cr-cross the river. I live over there.” She glanced behind her at the dog sitting on the prow seat. The dog’s mouth was open in what looked like a smile. She barked happily.

“I know where you live, but why are you taking my dog?” His biceps strained against his bones. Tendons stood out on one side of his neck, and he was losing his balance as Margo continued rowing in place. “You’re just plain not going to answer me.”

Mosquitoes landed on Margo’s legs and arms, and they bothered the man, too. When he let go of her boat with one hand to swat at them, Margo broke free. The man folded his arms and stood in the water watching her, looking more perplexed than angry as she rowed away.

“Cleo, you and I probably need to have a talk,” the man said in a loud but conversational voice. To Margo’s relief, he did not call the dog right away. His figure grew smaller as she rowed upstream and approached the cabin. She parked at the dock, and King jumped over the side of the boat and swam to shallower water to sniff along the muskrat holes and twisted roots. The man across the river disappeared and returned with binoculars. A while later he called, “Cleo!” and the dog dove into the water and headed home.




A few days later, Margo motored to the gas station at Heart of Pines to buy food, ammo, toilet paper, and bottled gas with the money Paul had left. She had not dared bring her rifle. She couldn’t carry it into the store for fear someone might recognize it as Cal’s, but she didn’t want to leave it in the boat and risk it being stolen. She tied her boat a ways from the other boats and draped her tarp over it. Inside the store, she added up prices, calculated tax in her head, and managed to put together a purchase totaling $33.82. She had planned to buy gasoline, but there was a line at the single pump and she didn’t want to wait around with the dozen men who were hanging out there. She figured she would get gas next time.

Halfway back, just above Willow Island, she cut the engine and floated downstream with the current to save gas, rowing only to fix her direction, keeping an eye out for dogs, birds, and kids—any sign of life—along the water’s edge. The miles of dark, empty river belonged to her. She drifted near the riverbank and imagined some people inviting her to a meal or just to sit and listen to stories. Instead, as she rounded the last bend above her cabin, she saw Brian’s boat parked at the dock. A bright, cold light shone from inside the cabin—Paul’s fluorescent lantern. She steered herself toward the opposite bank and hoped Paul would not be watching the river as she floated past. She pulled over at a snag just below the yellow house and watched the cabin until she saw Paul and Johnny go outside. A few minutes later, they returned to the cabin, carrying a jug of something. She wished she had taken her chances with her rifle and hadn’t left it under the bed with her backpack. The night grew darker, and she waited for the men to leave, but they did not. A half-moon appeared and disappeared behind the trees. The night grew cool. When their light went out, she unfolded her canvas tarp and curled atop it on the boat’s back seat. She pulled the rest of the tarp over her like a blanket and used her orange life vest as a pillow.

Margo awoke shivering to the sound of barking. The light of the rising sun was diffuse behind a haze of clouds. She was no longer in the boat, but was wrapped in her tarp in the sand. And then King was beside her, licking her face. Margo studied the beautiful eyes and perfect dark nose. She pushed her fingers into the dog’s fur, but when she saw a man standing over her, she stood up, stepped into her boat, and fumbled with her oars. “I’m sorry,” Margo said.

“Sorry for what?”

“For taking your dog.”

He shrugged. “Dogs are loyal. You feed them, and they come back to you.” He nodded upstream toward her cabin. “If you’re hiding from this guy, you can come to my house. Once the sun rises, he might see you if you stay out here.”

With the sun rising behind him, the man’s face was in shadow, but he seemed harmless. He hadn’t bothered her about his dog, even. Unsure what else to do, but sure she did not want to be seen by Paul, she decided to trust him. She checked the rope and knot she’d tied around a fallen maple, a clove hitch, according to Brian’s book. She had also learned the name of the knot on the ring at her boat’s prow: round turn and two half hitches. The spray of leaves along the branch would camouflage the boat so long as no one was looking right at it. So long as Paul hadn’t replaced his glasses, there was nothing to worry about. She carried her oars and the bag from the store and followed the man along the river path. The dew that coated the weeds and grass soaked the bottom of her pant legs. Where the poison ivy had climbed to the tops of trees for sunlight, she saw those triple leaves had already turned blood-red. Autumn was coming.

Margo put down her oars, food, and ammunition before they entered the yellow house by the side door. She found herself in a kitchen with white walls, yellow countertops flecked with black and white, and a glossy wooden floor. But the baseboards were missing, revealing an uneven gap at the bottom of the wall around the room. Though the kitchen counters were clean and orderly and the floor was swept, the table was comfortably messy with newspapers and books. “Bathroom’s through there if you need it. Do you drink coffee?” the man asked.

She nodded and ventured through the kitchen, into what should have been a living room but contained a big bed with an unwrinkled bedspread. She walked around it and looked through the sliding glass door. Upstream, parked at the dilapidated green cabin on stilts, was the Playbuoy. She unlocked the glass door and tugged it open a few inches, to assure herself she could leave that way if she needed to.

The top drawer of a dresser at the foot of the bed was open a few inches, exposing a cache of white bras and underwear. She traced her finger along the scalloped lace edge of a bra. These were the kinds of fancy underthings her mother used to like to wear, and now probably wore all the time in Lake Lynne. Luanne had complained about how the iron in the water stained her white clothes, just as she had complained about the green mold that crept over her leather shoes in the closet.

When the man appeared in the doorway, Margo hurriedly shut the drawer.

“Oh, don’t worry. She’s long gone. I guess she left those for my next girlfriend.”

“I’m sorry.”

The man handed Margo a mug of coffee, light with cream. She and Brian drank their coffee strong and black, and what they had at the cabin was instant. She inhaled the aroma from the cup so deeply that she had to touch the dresser to steady herself. She had eaten potato chips from the gas station in Heart of Pines yesterday, but nothing else.

“Do you want to take a shower?” he asked.

“No, thank you.”

“You can’t wear those wet clothes. Take something of Danielle’s.”

Margo looked at the dresser and back at him.

He laughed. “I was going to throw all her clothes in the river, anyway, let them float downstream. Go ahead and take anything you want out of there.”

Margo kept her eyes on the fishing dog lying on a rug at the foot of the bed, and after a minute the man went back into the kitchen. She took a long draw of the coffee, which tasted so good she didn’t want to swallow.

She looked for a place to rest her cup, but she didn’t want to leave a ring on the dresser top. In fact, she didn’t want to leave any trace of herself. Finally, she set the cup on the unfinished plywood floor. In the middle dresser drawer she found neatly folded blouses in pink, white, and mint green. The other dresser contained the man’s blue jeans. She put on a faded pair and cinched the waist with the most worn of his belts and cuffed the legs. In the same drawer, she found a T-shirt and a dark blue sweatshirt. She draped her muddy clothes over the side of the tub in the adjoining bathroom.

She retrieved her coffee from the plywood floor. Another room opened off this one and was probably supposed to be the bedroom, when it wasn’t torn down to wall studs. In the middle of the room, balanced on sawhorses, was the curved wooden skeleton of a rowboat, bigger and deeper than her flat-bottomed boat. Back in the kitchen, she found the man cooking, and she might have felt at ease if only her gun and her backpack were leaning in the corner by that corn broom rather than lying under the bed wrapped in rabbit skins at the cabin with Paul. The man apologized for what he called “this mess” and placed items on the round table one at a time. Each thing glowed as it passed through a shaft of sunlight: plates, forks, two glistening jars of preserves, and a stick of yellow-white butter in a glass dish. She wondered if she was losing her grip; otherwise why did butter and jelly seem like otherworldly miracles?

“Sorry this place is such a construction zone,” he said. “I’m determined to do all the work myself, save money. I want to learn how to fix and build everything. That’s one of my goals in life.”

She nodded.

“You’ve got to be hungry.” He held out his hand, and she shook it. “I’m Michael. Mike Appel.” The stress was on the second syllable, like the word repel. “I’ve lived here all alone for four months, and you’re the first person from the neighborhood who’s been in my house. You’d think on a river people would always be socializing.” He gestured with the spatula. “You haven’t told me your name.”

She almost said Maggie. “I’m Margaret,” she said, and when he didn’t seem entirely satisfied, she added, “Louise.”

“That’s a pretty name.” He repeated it wistfully. “Margaret Louise.”

That was what her mother had called her, as if one name weren’t enough.

“People don’t use two names so much these days.” He laughed.

“Or just Margo,” she offered.

“What’s your last name?”

“Crane.”

“Margaret Louise Crane. Very nice.” He pushed aside several books

that lay open on the table and set a glass of orange juice and half an omelet in front of her. One book with a library sticker was called Building Bookshelves.

“Thank you,” Margo said.

“I shouldn’t let this table get so cluttered,” Michael said. “So what do you do over there at that little house?”

“I fish.” The omelet was buttery and cheesy.

“I’ve never fished,” he said. “Don’t even know how to fish, but I’m building a boat. I’d like to be more self-sufficient, like you.”

“Fishing is easy,” Margo said. She lifted the edge of the omelet and admired the tiny, uniform cubes of green pepper, onion, and mushroom inside. “Mostly you just have to sit there and wait.”

“Maybe you can give me a lesson, tell me what tastes good out of this river. Hell, I don’t even know what to put on a hook.”

“I use worms and minnows. Sometimes crayfish.” She moved her feet so the dog could lie under the table, next to a neat stack of newspapers.

He said, “I work for the power company, so I know you’ve got no power over there. Have you got a generator? A two-way radio of some kind?”

She shook her head. Margo worked her bare feet beneath the heavy body of the fishing dog. Her boots and socks sat beside her chair.

“It’s incredible you live like that. And you don’t have a job or go to school?”

“I’m nineteen,” Margo said, as if that would explain it. She looked across the river at the cabin. She was eager to open the brick of ammo and load her Marlin. She hoped Paul would have no reason to look under the bed.

“Your place looks like a hideout, you know, like a place in a movie where criminals get away from the cops. Would you be the gangster’s daughter?” He lifted his eyebrows. “Or his girlfriend, maybe?”

A knot began to form in Margo’s stomach. He probably meant to be playful, but she feared answering his questions could get her into trouble somehow.

“You don’t talk much. Now, Danielle, she could talk.” He pointed a fork at Margo. “And yet she never thought to mention she was sleeping with a very good friend of mine. Funny. Of course, he didn’t mention it, either. But they’re in love now, so everything’s swell.”

Margo clung to her silence. She looked into his face, into his clear eyes, for as long as she dared. He was lonely, she saw, maybe as lonely as she was. She pulled her feet out from under the fishing dog and put on her damp socks and then her boots. She tucked Michael’s jeans into the boots before tying them, in case she had to sit outside and fend off mosquitoes. She glanced around for her gun again, though of course it was back at the cabin.

“I moved up here from Indiana three years ago for my job,” he said. “With Danielle. That was before I realized how materialistic she was. Where are you from?”

She saw he was going to wait for an answer. “Murrayville,” she said.

“That’s thirty-some miles down the river, halfway to the dam.”

She nodded and watched out the window. Paul was messing around on the dock.

“When Danielle was here, I hardly noticed the river as a backdrop. Now it’s all I think about. I watch it going by for hours.”

By the time Margo finished her omelet, Paul had gotten into his boat and pulled away, heading upstream. When he was out of sight, she let her fork drop onto her plate, and the sound startled her. “I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Can’t you stay a few minutes longer? I promise to stop complaining about women. Here, I’ll make you another piece of toast.”

She sat back down, but kept her weight on the balls of her feet.

“You seem like a girl who was raised by wolves or something.” He dropped two slices of bread into the shiny toaster.

She squinted at him.

“I guess I didn’t say that right. I don’t mean you seem like an animal.” He pushed down the knob, and right away she smelled toast. It made her miss the way Joanna’s kitchen smelled in the mornings, like fried ham slices and toasted cinnamon bread. Michael went on, “There’ve been lost kids who were taken in by wolves. Even after the kids were rescued, they never could stand being in enclosed spaces. They wanted to spend all their time outdoors. That’s what I meant.”

Margo didn’t have to pay attention. She’d only come here to be safe from Paul.

“Thank you for the food.” She stood and hurried out the kitchen door, leaving the toast to pop up behind her. She picked up her things and made her way downstream to her boat. Out in the middle of the river she felt a momentary sense of freedom, but upon reaching her dock the first thing she noticed were the rotting catfish heads still nailed to the big oak. She unlocked the padlock with her key, squatted beside the bed, and retrieved her rifle and pack. Both were undisturbed. Then she realized she had forgotten to buy matches—she had only two left in the box.

She balled up the last few letters she had written to her mother on the backs of used targets and put them in the woodstove. On top of those she assembled a pile of chipped kindling. She started a fire in order to drive the dampness from the cabin and dozed off. When she woke up, the fire was out, and she didn’t want to use her last match to try again. The sky was fully lit, so she moved to the dock for the sun’s warmth. She looked down and was surprised to be wearing Michael’s clothes. After his Jeep rolled away across the river, she pressed her face into the clean sweatshirt.