Once Upon a River

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“Good girl.” He laughed.

She let Brian separate the stock from the barrel. They spent the morning disassembling the Marlin and reassembling it, drenching the air in the room with the heavy scent of solvent and then gun oil. When Brian wasn’t explaining something or telling stories, he often was humming popular songs from the last decades, Beatles songs especially. For a long time, he was humming “Norwegian Wood.” They found a few drops of water in the barrel, but no harm had been done. They put the rifle back together, well oiled. Then she and Brian went out in the pontoon boat, parked at a snag, and caught bluegills for dinner.

“So why would your papa have shot Cal’s dick? Did Cal Murray mess with you?” Brian asked, while Margo was cleaning the fish in the sink.

Margo said nothing, even when Brian turned and looked right at her.

“He did, didn’t he? Cal raped you.” It wasn’t a question by the time he finished asking. “Holy shit. That’s why you took the man’s gun.”

She grimaced. She still didn’t think that word made sense in relation to what had happened.

“Your papa was revenging you. Well, it’s not enough. If I see Cal, I’ll knock another tooth out of the son of a bitch’s head. I’ll knock them all out.”

While Brian was frying the fish, Margo stood at the window and searched the river until she saw a shadow fly across—a red-tailed hawk, maybe, or at least a crow—and she was able to imagine following its flight path with the barrel of the Marlin. She figured that whatever Brian wanted to do to Cal, it had only a little to do with herself. She might be the spark that got Brian riled up, but any fire would be all about Brian and Cal and whatever was already between them.

“ALL RIGHT, MAGGIE, let’s test your rifle, make sure it still works,” Brian said after breakfast the following morning. Margo carried the Marlin, wishing again it had a sling, and Brian carried a bigger rifle, an M1, something from World War II. While they were cleaning the Marlin, he had mentioned that he’d been in Vietnam, but volunteered only that his “damn M16 jammed about every fucking day.” Knowing how Crane had not wanted to talk about his Vietnam experience, Margo didn’t consider asking Brian about his. Brian set up a couple dozen empty beer cans and plastic bottles on a railroad tie twenty-five paces farther down the river and handed Margo the pair of ear protectors he had on his arm. He loaded the big rifle and fired eight rounds. He went through two more clips, and when he was done, after twenty-four shots, he’d hit about half of the targets. He replaced the cans and bottles he’d destroyed with new ones, including two sardine cans he propped up. “I think I’m out of practice,” he said. “Maybe my sights need adjusting.”

Margo lifted her .22 with some difficulty. Her arm muscles were still strained from rowing. She experienced some kind of electrical shock when she first pulled the trigger, and she missed the first can. She focused and dinged it on the second shot, and then caught the top on the third, sent it flying. She inhaled the faint smell of gunpowder. She reloaded the Marlin with fifteen of the long-rifle cartridges she’d carried from Cal’s gun cupboard and listened for a moment to the river. Holding the rifle steady would have been easier with a sling, but she held her arm up until her body remembered it as a natural position. She hit the next can and each can after that, and she reloaded and knocked all the bottles from their perches. And in that several minutes of intense focusing, she felt peaceful. Margo lowered the gun, pressed the barrel against her face to feel its heat.

“Holy shit,” Brian said. “A guy has got to respect that.”

Afterward, he exchanged his M1 for a shotgun, an old Winchester 97 twelve-gauge pump-action with a full choke. He shot at some frozen hunks of driftwood he’d dragged over from the edge of the river, and she saw that the buckshot created a tight pattern of holes only a few inches wide at thirty feet. With her first shot, the kick of the thing knocked her back. After that, she jammed it tightly into her shoulder and absorbed the recoil with her whole body. She loaded and shot until she knew she would be bruised. Though the sound was muted by the ear protectors, each blast moved through her and settled and soothed her.

Brian offered to stay at the cabin with her the following day, but said there was two hundred bucks cash if he cleaned the roof and gutters at an apartment complex. There was no road leading to the cabin, meaning a boat was the only way in or out, and this made Margo feel easier about being alone there. If anyone came for her, she would see him coming on the water. Brian said that if the river froze over this winter, they’d be stuck, so they needed to keep their supplies of food, bait, and ammo laid in, and the prospect of winter preparation seemed to please him. After he disappeared upstream, Margo found a piece of a rope that was too short to use for much of anything, so she unraveled it and then set about braiding the sections to create a rifle sling.

That evening, Brian visited Carpinski and got a report on Margo’s mother. After a few months of living with Carpinski, Luanne had apparently gone off with a truck driver. Carpinski provided an address in Florida, but the first letter Margo wrote came back the next week to Brian’s post office box with a note handwritten across it, No longer at this address. Brian said he would keep asking around, would talk to Carpinski again to see if he remembered anything else. According to Brian, the man was still pretty broken up about Luanne more than a year after she had left.

Brian was a storyteller, recounting his own tales and others he had collected, and in the evenings he often told about growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in logging camps, about damming creeks to catch fish, about dipping smelt, about men who were killed by walking too close to the edge of the road when a wagon full of logs was passing. There was a long, complicated story about killing and eating rattlesnake in Idaho. He told her about two men who went out in a boat with one of their wives and came back without her, neither of them realizing she was missing, so relieved had they been by the quiet. She’d shown up hours later, having walked from the other side of the lake, mad as hell. He told a story about a Michigan Department of Natural Resources official going out with his friend fishing in the middle of a big lake. The DNR man watched his friend light a quarter stick of dynamite and toss it into the water. After the blast, twenty fish floated up dead, and the man collected them. When he lit another stick of dynamite, the DNR man said, “You know I’m going to have to arrest you for this.” So the guy handed the DNR man the lit dynamite and said, “Well, are you going to talk or fish?”