Bonnie Campbell - Once Upon a River

She slowed her breathing and heartbeat in order to focus more clearly. Her daddy had threatened to kill her uncle, and that was likely what he was coming to do. Margo thought Crane could not survive being locked up for the crime he was about to commit. She also knew Crane wouldn’t shoot a man who was hurt or lying on the ground. She wondered if she should take Cal down herself before Crane got there, injure Cal rather than kill him. Margo took aim at one of Cal’s insulated work boots. At this distance, her bullet would cut through the leather and insulation to strike his ankle bone.

Margo lined up the side of Cal’s right knee, saw how she could shatter the kneecap.

She aimed at his thigh. For a split second Cal would not know what hit him. A stray horseshoe? A hornet’s stinger? If the bullet grazed the front of his thigh, it could continue on through the wooden siding of the old shed, bury itself in the dirt floor.

Years ago, Billy and Junior had held Margo down and put a night crawler in her mouth, and she, in turn, put dozens of night crawlers in the boys’ beds. Junior had stopped picking on her after that. The time she had revenged Billy with the dead skunk he’d put in her boat, she had to endure Joanna’s tomato juice bath—a consequence she had not considered, as her daddy pointed out—and she stank for a week anyway. But it had been worth it to rub that skunk in Billy’s face and hair. Her cousins had teased her, enjoyed her shrieks when they could elicit them, but they were also scared of her because she always evened the score. Except that she had not done so with Cal.

As Crane reached the place where the path widened, Margo realized he had left his shotgun in his truck. Seeing him unarmed now was as shocking as first seeing him without his beard a year ago at the hospital—they’d shaved his face for the stitches on his cheek and along his jaw, and he’d never grown it back. The grocery store didn’t allow employees to have beards. Under his Carhartt jacket he still wore his aqua smock. He hadn’t left work for the day—he had only come home to check on her. And he had not come to get revenge—he was here to bring her home by her ear as he’d said he would. Her daddy, angry as he might be, was never going to shoot Cal, never in a million years. And it was better this way, better that she would do this thing herself.

Her father would beg her, Think before you act, but she had thought long enough, and now she had only a short time to do something.

Margo fed a cartridge into the breech silently and the bolt made a gentle tap when she engaged it. Cal was still concentrating on peeing. He looked out over the river. She studied the side of his head and knew an apology was not what she was looking for. She lowered her sights to a patch of Cal’s chest and then looked away again, at her father approaching, empty handed. It was amazing Crane had been able to hurt such a big man last year. If they fought again, Margo feared her father would get more than a broken jaw.

Margo had made a shot like this from ten paces a thousand times with these Winchester long-rifle cartridges. She had shot from this very tree stand in years past, had shot and missed running squirrels, but Cal was a nonmoving target. Margo aimed the muzzle of her rifle down at Cal’s hand, still loosely clutching his pecker, from which a poky stream dribbled. She aimed just past the thumb of that hand. Cal had taught her to shoot tin cans, crab apples, and thread spools off fence posts, and she was steady enough to take off the tip of his pecker without hitting any other part of him. And then Cal let go with his hand, lifted his beer off the windowsill, and took a drink, leaving her a clear shot.

The shout of her rifle was followed by a silent splash of Murray blood on the shed’s white wall. She kept her arm steady through the shot, did not blink, and heard one last horseshoe clink from the pit. Cal’s mouth was open in a scream, but it must have been a pitch discernible only by hunting dogs. Margo grasped the branch above with her free hand to steady herself. She gripped the rifle firmly in the other. She closed her eyes to lengthen that perfect and terrible moment and hold off the next, when the air would fill with voices.

FOR SEVERAL SECONDS the job seemed done. She and Cal were even, and they could all resume their lives as before the trouble. She saw her father arriving, but didn’t notice Billy running toward them, gripping a shotgun in one hand. Crane reached up into the tree and grabbed Margo’s hand. He pulled, and she fell onto him. He took the rifle into his own hands awkwardly as he tried to get her on her feet, despite her jacket being twisted around her. Billy saw Crane holding the rifle. He saw his father down and blood splashed on Cal’s pants and the shed wall. Blood was smeared on Cal’s face. Billy aimed his shotgun at Crane’s chest.

“Put that down, Billy!” Crane yelled and moved toward him. “You hyperactive punk!”

“You shot my dad, you bastard.”

Cal was trying to zip his pants.

“Put the gun down now,” Crane said.

“Billy, no,” Margo said, but her voice didn’t carry. Maybe Crane didn’t realize how he was pointing the Remington as he approached Billy. And Billy was focused only on Crane, so he did not see how Cal was getting to his feet and urgently gesturing to him.

“Put the damn gun down,” Crane said, “before somebody gets hurt.”

Margo found her voice as Billy fired. It came out as a dog’s howl. Crane staggered backward. Billy grinned at her as if to say she was not the only one with dead aim, but the smile fell away instantly.

Crane landed hard on his back, and Margo crouched beside him. She smelled metal, as though the blood rolling out of his chest were liquid iron, as though he had worked for too many years at Murray Metal Fabricating to be regular flesh and blood anymore. Grandpa Murray had died slowly, gradually disappearing and giving Margo time to imagine life without him, but Crane, whose eyes had flown open at the blast, was dead in an instant. Cal fell to his knees. He spoke to Billy in a strained voice. “You dumb little fuck! What did you do?”

Billy looked stunned. “He shot your dick, Dad. He was going to shoot me.”

Margo saw pain in Cal’s face, and fear, and then she saw calculation.

“Call an ambulance,” Cal said thinly. He lurched forward and grabbed the shotgun out of Billy’s hands. “Somebody run get Jo. Tell her a man’s been shot. Jesus fucking Christ. Run!”

At Cal’s command, two Murray kids and two Slocums who’d been lurking nearby took off running.

Crane’s chest was torn open. The fabric of his aqua-colored work smock was soaked with blood. Joanna arrived at her husband’s side and put an arm around him.

“You’re covered with blood,” she said, breathless. She touched the crotch of his pants.

“I’m fine,” Cal whispered, “but Billy just shot Crane. The dumb little fuck just shot a man in the heart with a deer slug. Call an ambulance.”

“I did,” Joanna said. She gasped when she saw Crane.

One of Cal’s cousins, a former military medic, got between Margo and her father and placed both hands on Crane’s chest. He pushed rhythmically, causing more blood to pump out, but gave up on CPR in less than a minute. He moved away, and Margo moved to take his place.

“He shot Dad,” Billy said and began to whimper. “Look at the blood on Dad. He had that rifle. I thought he was going to kill me. And kill Dad.”

Margo let her face fall to her daddy’s chest, but she felt Cal’s gaze on her. When she turned and met his eyes, she saw there a look she knew from her own father, a look that said, Be careful, think about the consequences. Cal’s face was wet from tears, though he wasn’t crying exactly.