Bonnie Campbell - Once Upon a River

“You got a buck for me?” Brian said.

She pointed to the deer, gutted and skinned, laid out on a blue tarp under the swing set.

“I talked to your papa last night. I hear you’ve become quite the hunter, Maggie. A crack shot with that rifle, too.” He winked.

She didn’t know why Brian called her Maggie, but she liked the way he grinned.

The two big men hoisted the carcass onto the boat and put their own tarp over it. She had been to Brian’s cabin with her grandpa, usually when nobody else was there. The cabin was more than thirty miles upstream on a wild section of the river, with no road access or electricity. His cabin seemed to lean on its stilts as though wanting to be even closer to the water than it was. The trees there, Margo remembered, were tall and mossy, snaked with poison ivy vines. The time she remembered best was when somebody had caught a possum in a live trap. Grandpa had been ready to shoot it when Margo pointed out the babies stuck in the wiry fur, a dozen tiny pink clinging creatures with bulging eyes and translucent limbs and noses. He had seen how fascinated she was and let the clumsy mama amble off.

“I admired the old man, your grandpa, may he rest in peace,” Brian said, “but I’ve got to tell you, girl, I’m not so fond of some of them other Murrays of Murrayville.”

“Brian knocked out a couple of Cal’s teeth,” the other bearded man said, squinting one eye. His voice was thinner than Brian’s and nervous sounding.

“Hey, the sonbitch fired me,” Brian said. “Didn’t have the nerve to do it himself, sent his secretary. So I went into his office and told him what I thought. Said he didn’t like my attitude, so I figured I’d better show him some attitude, just so’s he’d know next time he saw it.”

Mumbled words came out of the man passed out on the bench seat of the boat. He shifted on the seat cushions, and Margo saw he had a mustache.

“Will somebody wake that asshole up? Or throw him overboard,” Brian said. Both men laughed.

“Darling, no,” the drunk man moaned.

“They seem to have put the teeth back into Cal’s mouth,” Brian said. “It makes me want to knock a few more out just to see how that works, putting them back in.”

Margo wondered if Brian knew Crane, too, had knocked out Cal’s teeth. She wondered if they had knocked out the same ones.

“Meet my brother, Paul. Pauly, meet my dream girl. Prettiest thing on the river. If you’d put on your glasses, you’d probably faint dead away like Johnny here.” And then to Margo, “I’m keeping my brother off the drugs. No need for speed out here on the river, unless it’s in your boat motor.”

“Don’t tell her that,” Paul said. “For Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t worry, she won’t say anything,” Brian said, and winked. “I’ve about got him cured of all that junk, Maggie.”

“Will you shut the fuck up, Brian?” Paul turned so he was looking at Margo out of his left eye, and she wondered if he might be blind in the other.

Margo accepted two twenties from Brian—more than she had hoped for—and shoved them into her jeans pocket. Her jeans were getting tight, but she didn’t want to waste her ammunition money on new ones.

The man lying in the boat moaned again.

“Five bucks says Johnny falls onto that deer,” Paul said.

“He can rub up against it if he feels romantic,” Brian said. His big hand was resting on the boat’s steering wheel again, and Margo saw the back of it was covered with scars, white lines, as though somebody had cut him and cut him, but was not able to hurt him. She would have liked to touch him, see what those scars felt like.

“You come upstream and see us sometime, Maggie,” Brian said. “You know where the cabin is.”

The blond man rolled over, fell off the bench seat and onto the tarped deer, but didn’t wake up. Brian and Paul roared with laughter. When the man’s open hand moved across the buck’s haunch, Margo had to smile, too.

“Let’s get going,” Paul said finally, looking back and forth from Margo to Brian. “If you and jailbait here can bear to separate.”

“I just can’t get enough of a girl who don’t talk,” Brian said to Paul and started the boat’s motor with a roar. “Goodbye, Maggie.”

The men headed upstream. Margo watched their boat get smaller until it disappeared around the curve. Directly across the river, Junior Murray arrived at the wooden steps leading to the kitchen door of the big house, maybe just home from the military academy. Joanna, who was outside, put down the pan she was carrying and took him in her arms, held him for a long time before ushering him up the stairs and inside.

When Margo could no longer sit still, at about five o’clock, she got into her boat. She laid the rifle across the back seat and floated a bit downstream, so no one across the way would see her coming. She then moved upstream and tied The River Rose at the willow near the whitewashed shed where all the trouble had started. She kicked at the frozen grass to warm herself. She aimed her rifle at patches of frosted ground a few times, pretending she saw rabbits. When she saw a squirrel pause on the ground near the shed, she closed her eyes, lifted the rifle to her shoulder and her cheek, aimed it blindly where she had been looking, and then opened her eyes. Her sighting was almost perfect. The squirrel scampered off. She listened to the clinks and shouts from the horseshoe pit, listened to Hank Williams Sr. wailing. The next song was Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” She wondered what would happen if she walked up and took a can of pop off the table, served herself a slice of apple pie, and acted like everything was okay. Like she was part of the family again.

Back home, across the river, there was movement. Crane’s blue Ford pulled into the driveway, hours before he was supposed to return home. He got out of his truck, went into the house, came right back out, and looked across the river. She realized Crane would notice her boat tied on the wrong side of the river, so she hurried down to the water to wave and let him know she was not at the party, but by the time she got to where he would have seen her, he was already back in his truck. Crane’s tires spat mud from beneath the crust of frozen ground. Margo was grateful Cal was nowhere to be seen. But then, as if conjured by her thoughts, Cal appeared on the riverside path, walking in her direction, looking drunk. Maybe Crane had seen him, maybe that was why he was driving here instead of just yelling across the river. Margo silently backed away and then hoisted herself into the apple tree above her and up onto the wooden platform Grandpa and Junior had built a few years ago. She knelt and watched and listened as Cal approached. When he stopped beside the shed, he was only twenty feet away, close enough that she could see him blink, close enough to see that one of the buttons was missing from the plaid shirt he wore under his unzipped Carhartt vest. She wondered if there might be a girl in the shed, but through the dirty window glass she saw only a skinned deer carcass hanging from the ceiling. It was hard to tell, but it looked smaller than any of those she had killed this year.

Cal stood facing the river. He put his plastic cup of beer on the window ledge next to the door, so he was in profile between her and the white shed wall. Margo heard Crane’s noisy exhaust on the road bridge downstream, but Cal lit a cigarette and did not pay any attention to the sound. She watched Cal inhale, saw his chest rise and then fall as he exhaled a blue cloud. The air was colder than it had been last Thanksgiving. The platform was just high enough off the ground that Margo could see the roof of her daddy’s Ford when it pulled up to the rail fence a few hundred yards away. Cal fumbled with his fly. He didn’t seem to hear the truck door creak open or slam shut. He drew on his cigarette and stared down at his pecker in his hand, waiting for something to come out. Margo shifted to sit cross-legged, nestled the butt of the rifle into her shoulder, and looked at her uncle Cal over the sights.