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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.
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.
• CHAPTER FOUR •
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.
“Cal?” Joanna said. “Is that right?”
“That’s right,” Cal said weakly. “Crane shot me. I thought he might shoot again. Billy was protecting me.”
Joanna moved as though in slow motion. She took off her long plaid coat, lifted Margo up—she felt incapable of resisting—and draped the coat over Crane’s head and chest. Margo pressed her face onto the plaid wool. Joanna moved to Billy, took him in her arms. He folded himself into his mother’s embrace and sobbed. Junior appeared. He took the shotgun from Cal and leaned it against the shed. Margo had not seen Junior in five months. He knelt at her side and put an arm around her for a few moments, before Joanna asked him to go get the car.
The two county cops assigned to Murrayville arrived a few minutes later, as dusk gave way to darkness. They confiscated Crane’s rifle and Billy’s shotgun and wrapped them in plastic. They said an ambulance was on its way. The bigger cop said, “Somebody bring a washrag to clean that poor girl’s face,” and Margo let Aunt Carol Slocum wipe her with a warm, wet cloth. Margo listened to Cal lie to the officers in a pinched voice. He said between shaky breaths that Crane had been upon him with the rifle, that Crane had shot out his tires a few days ago. Cal had been afraid something like this would happen. Cal guided Margo through the lie that condemned Crane but saved Billy and her. He said the girl was welcome to stay with them until they could find her ma.
After that, the officers spoke softly to Margo. She nodded in agreement about her father shooting Cal and pointing the gun at Billy. She repeated in a whisper what Cal had said. She hated involving the cops, and even if she had been inclined to tell what had really happened, she didn’t have the strength to disagree with Cal. And what would have been the point? Her father was dead, and nobody alive had any use for the truth. She did not want Billy imprisoned for murder. She wanted to deal with Billy herself, as she always had. An officer led him away. Junior and Joanna followed the police car out of the driveway in the family’s white Suburban.
When the ambulance first arrived, the paramedics checked Crane for vital signs and shook their heads, and one of them made a phone call. They countered Cal’s objections, convinced him to get into the ambulance, leaving Margo and a dozen others waiting in the cold for the medical examiner. Aunt Carol Slocum urged Margo to go inside the house and get warm, but she would not leave her father. The longer she clung to his body, the more the others seemed wary of her, as they had been wary when she sat with her grandpa during the weeks when he was dying. The rest of the family had avoided Grandpa at the end, and Margo had pitied them for not seeing the last part of his life, when pain made the big, opinionated man quiet and thoughtful.
They were all Murrays gathered around her now. For the first time in a year, she was, horribly, part of the family. When Julie Slocum came close to her, Margo reached out and grabbed her arm.
“Let go of me.” Julie pulled against Margo’s grip.
Margo looked her in the eye.
“Ma, she’s hurting my arm,” Julie yelled, and everyone looked over.
Margo whispered, “Why’d you have to go and get my dad?”
“You’re covered with blood,” Julie said. “You’re getting it on me.”
“Last year. That’s why all this happened,” Margo said. She held Julie’s arm like an oar handle. The girl was thicker now, with heavy breasts. She had a toughness in her face.
“Cal doesn’t want you anymore,” Julie said and pounded on Margo’s wrist with her free hand.
When Margo let go of her, Julie scrambled to her feet and moved away.
The police seemed satisfied with Margo’s minimal testimony. They also seemed to think Margo was with family, so she would be okay for the night. Why would a Murray kid need a social worker or a place to sleep in Murrayville? Carol Slocum grabbed Margo and wiped her face again with a warm rag. It was two hours before the medical examiner arrived in a white van. By then Margo’s fingers felt brittle with cold. The examiner’s assistant lifted her gently away from her father. They wrapped him in a plastic sheet and loaded him into the van. She watched the van depart. The river flowed in the direction of the funeral parlor, which was five miles downstream, beside the cemetery and across the river from the big Murray Metal shop building, which covered five acres of Murrayville under its metal roof.
Some of the women milled beside her. The men who remained were drunk or dumb with excitement. A few exhausted children stared with glittering eyes. Their ears were red, and their cheeks were flushed. Margo thought somebody should get them to bed.
“You’ll stay here tonight?” a woman said.
Margo shook her head and spoke as clearly as she could. “First I have to go home.”
“Do you know where Luanne is?” a woman asked eagerly from a few yards away. Margo was at first startled, thinking somebody knew and might tell her, but nobody knew. When her mother had first disappeared, Cal often asked Margo where she was. He said he’d like to set her straight about abandoning her child, he’d like to drag her back home.
When a woman Margo didn’t know snaked an arm around her, she slipped away and headed down to the water and into The River Rose. She wished she could have carried her daddy’s body with her across the river, as she had carried that buck’s carcass. In what there was of the moonlight, she paused to study the Red Wing work boots Crane had bought her a few months ago when he figured her feet had stopped growing. Some drops of his blood pooled on the oiled leather. She pushed off with an oar.
Once she reached her own dock, she climbed out and tied up her boat. The water was inky black. At Grandpa’s graveside ceremony last January, everyone had been lost in grief: Luanne wept nearby with Cal and his older sister, and Joanna tried to comfort her sons. Margo had felt the desire to step into the icy river and flow downstream. The only thing keeping her from doing it had been the solid body of her father beside her.
Margo took off her jacket and boots and put them at the base of the dock. She rolled off her socks and stuck them in her boots. Her feet were already numb from the cold. She eased into the water. She let her bare feet slide into the cold muck, stepped out farther from shore, sank deeper into the river’s bottom, screamed without making a sound when the water rose to her thighs. She walked out until her water lily—her mother’s phrase—was electrified by the cold. People across the way were milling under the yard lights, and she kept quiet so no one would notice her and think she needed rescuing. Margo’s hips pressed against the current, and her belly clenched when the cold reached it, and finally her heart rattled inside her chest. She shivered inside the electricity formed by her own body, felt carp and stinging catfish whipping by her. She imagined water snakes and black snakes coiling around her legs. Instead of feeling trapped by the river, which might freeze her or drown her, she felt terribly, painfully free. Without her father, she was bound to no one, and with the water flowing around her, she was absolutely alive.
She imagined the scent of cocoa butter in the cold air, that smell that had never quite left her mother’s skin, not even in winter, when she smoothed on cocoa butter lotion after showers. Margo held on to the floating dock and was able to pull her right foot free of the muck. She pulled the other bare foot free with as much difficulty, almost forgetting about her father in her own struggle. She dragged herself to shore.
She carried her boots into the kitchen and found the room bitterly cold. Crane had disconnected the furnace to save money, figuring they’d be fine heating the place with wood. Margo had meant to split kindling today, but hadn’t gotten to it, and now she didn’t know if her frozen fingers worked well enough to grip a hatchet or even to ball up newspaper. She looked around the kitchen. There were three pine chairs. And in the corner there was the wooden baby chair, made of maple. Margo retrieved the axe from the screen porch and struck the baby chair with the side of the blade, and then struck again. After the chair’s old joints rattled loose, she continued busting the wood into kindling on the kitchen floor. With those dry pieces and sheets of newspaper, she was able to start a fire.
She warmed her hands in the flames, and then took the axe to the other chairs. As the fire crackled, she stripped off her wet clothes and wrapped herself in a blanket. The wood from the chairs created such heat that the creosote must have burned clean out of the chimney. Eventually she put on two split logs from the screen porch and climbed into her daddy’s bed. As she went to sleep, she smelled cigarette smoke and sulfur from matches, spice shaving cream, and the mildew of their river house. She smelled the river in every corner of the house, in every molecule of the air, in every pore of her own body. Even the fire smelled of the river, even the flames.
• CHAPTER FIVE •
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Junior Murray came into the house without knocking, something that was normal within the Murray family, though it had driven Margo’s daddy crazy.
“It’s after noon. Everybody’s worried about you,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed where she was lying. “I came over to tell you that the cops are on the way.”
“What?”
“Ricky’s working in the township office, so he heard they were coming over. That’s Ricky in the kitchen.”
“Why are they coming here?” Margo heard a vehicle pull into the driveway.
Junior said, “That sounds like a cop car to me. They probably want to ask you a few more questions. They have to make sure you’re okay. It’s the law that cops have to hassle people who don’t want them around.”
“Cops are here,” Ricky yelled from the other room. Ricky was their youngest uncle, Cal’s littlest brother, twenty years old. He was studying to be a paralegal.
Margo wrapped the covers around herself, sat up, and leaned against her cousin. She was afraid that Junior would go away if she didn’t say something. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered.
“I’ve missed you, too, Margo,” Junior said and put an arm around her. “I’ve missed everything and everybody. It makes me suicidal to even think about going back to that academy.” Someone knocked on the door, and when voices sounded in the next room, Junior stood up. “You’d better cover up those tiny titties before you come out.”
Margo adjusted her blanket. When he left the room, she put on a pair of Crane’s jeans, one of his turtlenecks, and a flannel shirt. She went into the kitchen, where two officers were talking to Junior, who was taller than either of them. The smaller cop, whom everyone at school knew as Officer Mike, said, “We wanted to make sure you were okay, Margaret.”
“See, everybody was worried about you, Margaret,” Junior said. Margo had the feeling he was making fun of the cop, but she didn’t understand exactly how.
“We need to look around, see if there’s anything here to help us figure out why Mr. Crane would have been shooting at Cal and Billy Murray. Did he keep anything like a diary?”
Margo shook her head. The most they would find from Crane would be a grocery list jotted on an empty matchbook. His anger at Cal would not be written on anything they could find.
“Any other firearms here? Any unregistered pistols? Can we look around?”
She shrugged, and they took that as a yes.
“Cal Murray said if your daddy didn’t have any money, he’d pay funeral expenses,” said the bigger cop, when the two had given up on finding anything of interest. “Can we give you a ride to Cal’s?”
She shook her head.
“Are you sure?”
“I want to row my boat over there,” she said. When they kept looking at her, she began to fear they wouldn’t leave. “My mom will come to get me. When she hears about my dad.”
“We’ll get her over to our house, Officer Mike,” Junior said, adopting a trusty Boy Scout demeanor.
“Let us know as soon as your mother contacts you,” said Officer Mike. “We may need to talk with her. And we’ll contact you again in a few days if we need an additional statement.”
“And if there’s anything for your ma in the estate, we’ll have to track her down,” Ricky said.
Margo knew there’d be no estate. Crane still owed payments to a guy on his ten-year-old Ford, and he owed the dentist, too. He had sent Margo to get her teeth cleaned every six months—even when he had been drunk and unemployed, he’d sent her with a twenty-dollar bill against the account.
“There won’t be a trial, will there?” Junior said.
“Nobody’s denying what your brother did was self-defense, but he did kill a man. Someone’s evaluating him now.”
“I’m sorry, Margaret,” Officer Mike said. He held up a business card and placed it on the counter. “Call my number if you need a ride to Cal’s. Or if you need anything.”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” the bigger cop said.
When they closed the door, Ricky Murray spoke up. “We ought to find your dad’s papers, any official documents. If he’s got a will, you’ll want to locate that.”
Margo’s eyes were swollen from crying, and when she leaned down beside her father’s bed, her head ached. From beneath it, she produced an army-green tin box. It felt like a violation putting it on the kitchen table and opening the lid in front of Ricky and Junior. The first thing she saw inside was her cut-off ponytail, wrapped in wax paper. In a bulging envelope, she found dozens of photos of her mother smiling ear-to-ear at the camera. While Luanne had rarely smiled enough to show teeth in real life, she had smiled that fake way for every camera snap. There were no photos of her parents together, not even a wedding photo. The only picture of Crane was a tiny dark image on his Murray Metal Fabricating employee ID card.
A business-sized envelope contained a piece of lined yellow paper on which was handwritten, Last Will and Testament. Please cremate me and don’t waste money on any service. Give everything I have to my wife and daughter. Sorry it’s not much. Signed, in full faculties, Bernard Crane, October 14, 1971. Margo would have been almost eight years old then. Nothing bad had happened yet.
“That’s clear and simple,” Junior said. “Are the cops all the way out the driveway?”
“The Man is gone,” Ricky said.
