Once Upon a River

• 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.

“Then it’s time to light up.” Junior dug something out of the pocket of his jean jacket. It was a plastic baggie containing several joints. He sat on the kitchen table. “What happened to your chairs?”

Margo shrugged and sat next to him.

“They shouldn’t have let you come home last night.” Junior straightened out one joint carefully and lit it with a white lighter. He took a long toke and held it out to her.

“I don’t know.” Margo let her legs dangle beside Junior’s. She noticed how her cousin’s hair had been cut short at the military school, so it no longer curled down his neck. She’d heard last night that he’d be going back to the academy again right after the holiday weekend, so this might be her only chance to see him.

While still holding his breath, he elbowed her and said in a squeaky voice, “This will help you. I stayed high for three months when Grandpa died.”

Margo accepted the joint, took a long draw, and coughed. She passed it to Ricky, who inhaled as he studied the will, turning it over several times, though the back was blank.

“Too bad this will isn’t notarized,” Ricky said.

The next time Junior passed her the joint, Margo inhaled deeply and held the smoke. She didn’t like to feel disoriented, but she hoped the pot would dull her feelings. They passed the joint in silence until it was gone. Then Ricky began to rifle through the papers in a more serious way. “Divorce papers,” he said. “Finalized eight months ago.”

Margo wished she could puff on the joint once more. Crane had never mentioned anything about a divorce.

Junior was reading over the land contract with an absurd intensity. On the third page it was signed by both their fathers.

“Are you going to stay with Cal and Joanna?” Ricky asked.

“Ma said you’ll have to stay with us,” Junior said. He was gazing intently at Crane’s employee ID card now. “You can’t stay alone when you’re fifteen. Where else are you going to stay?”

“I turned sixteen on the twentieth.”

“If you’re staying with an aunt and uncle,” said Ricky, “maybe the cops won’t have to get social services involved.”

“Social services?” Margo took the ID card out of Junior’s hand. She had heard that kids who got involved with social services ended up living in group homes and with strangers who did weird things to them. And she was sure it would mean living far from the river. “I wish you were going to be home, Junior,” she said in a voice that felt slow. “Then it would be easier to stay at your house.”

“Me, too. I’ll be back at Christmas. Maybe then I can talk them into letting me stay home after that.”

Ricky and Junior seemed to move in slow motion as they pulled papers from the box—birth certificates, the title to the Ford. Margo noticed something else: a pink envelope with a handwritten address in the upper left corner, an address in Heart of Pines, Michigan. Her mother’s name was not written above the address, but Margo recognized her loopy, back-slanted handwriting.

“Daddy kept some of his papers on the counter by the toaster,” she said, and when Junior’s and Ricky’s eyes went to Crane’s pile of bills, Margo slipped the envelope out of the box and into her back pocket. She took out her own birth certificate and Crane’s and set them aside.

“Do you know about any other assets?” Ricky asked. “We need to get information on what he owned.”

“You’re not a lawyer, man,” Junior said.

“So? Somebody’s going to have to figure this out. And Nympho here can’t afford a lawyer.”

“He’s got his truck and a chain saw and his tools,” Margo said. She wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve. She didn’t mention his rifle or shotgun.

“Savings account?” Ricky asked. He went into the bathroom and came out with a roll of toilet paper for Margo to use as a tissue. She unrolled a handful of it.

“He paid all his spare money against the land contract. Or to the dentist.”

“According to the land contract, it looks like the house goes back to my dad after two missed payments,” Junior said. “That’s bogus. I hope the dentist doesn’t want your teeth back.”

“Life insurance?” Ricky asked.

She shook her head.

Junior picked up one of the many photos of Luanne and nodded his head. “Do you know where your ma is? Dad always says we should drag her ass back to Murrayville. Maybe she’ll come back on her own now.”

“Look at this,” Ricky said, holding out a full-body photo of Margo’s ma smiling in a two-piece bathing suit. “She looks like a movie star. I remember her lying in the sun with her top off.”

Margo blotted her tears with her shirt sleeve.

“Show a little class, man,” Junior said and kicked at Ricky.

“I’m sorry, Nympho. You know we all miss her.”

Margo wished she could find a photo of her mother looking the way she remembered her, smiling sadly or frowning, even. Luanne used to lie in bed sometimes through whole winter days. She had let Margo cuddle with her or read a book in the bed. Luanne had seemed to take comfort from Margo’s presence.

Ricky Murray pulled from the tin box a new chocolate-colored leather wallet, identical to the one her father carried, and he handed it to her. Margo took from her pocket the wadded-up twenty-dollar bills she’d received from Brian Ledoux, straightened them, and put them into the wallet. She put in the Murray Metal ID card and the folded birth certificates, too.

“Did you know your dad wanted to be cremated?” Junior said.

She shook her head. “There’s no money for it.”

“You heard the cops. My dad will take care of it.”

She nodded. Though her sadness was powerful, the smoking had helped—Junior was right. Maybe she could survive her daddy’s death if she stayed outside herself this way.

Junior lit a second joint, and after his first exhalation, he said, “I won’t get to smoke again until Christmas. It’s hard as hell to smuggle anything into that prison. I’ll promise Mom and Dad anything if they let me come home. Or I’ll figure out a way to run off to Alaska and work on a fishing boat like Uncle Loring.”

“Do you think Billy will go to prison?” she asked.

“I don’t know what’ll happen to my hotheaded little brother. I know he’d end up in solitary if he went to my school.” Junior stood up. “I’ve got to go home, Nympho—I mean, Margo—and Ricky’s got to get back to work. He’ll drop us off at the house. Come on.”

“I want to bring my boat.”

“Grandpa’s boat? We can come back for it later.”

“I need to take a shower first. Please, just let me be alone for a little while.”

“All right. Don’t wait too long,” he said. “You’ll want to get there in time for Ma to make you go to church with her tonight. She really wants everybody to go.”

“I promise I’ll come along soon. Just go.”

He hugged her, gave her a joint in a baggie, and said, “Just in case.” He put a wintergreen candy in his mouth, popped one into hers, and left with Ricky.

When Margo was alone, she took the envelope out of her back pocket, opened it, and smoothed out the letter, one small pink page that matched the envelope, featuring a cartoon flamingo:

Dear Bernard,

I’m sorry it had to be this way with the divorce. You know I never belonged there with you people. I don’t think I can bear to see Margaret Louise right now. It would be too painful. I’ll contact you again, soon, when I’m in a better situation, and she and I can visit. Please don’t use this address except for an emergency, and please don’t share it with anyone else.

Love, Luanne

More important than what she said was the address on the envelope: 1121 Dog Leg Road, Heart of Pines, Michigan. Heart of Pines was the town thirty-five miles upstream, just beyond Brian Ledoux’s place, a town with lots of rental cabins and restaurants and bars, a place where you could buy hunting and fishing supplies. It had been an all-day trip when she’d motored up there and back with Grandpa. Beyond Heart of Pines the river was too shallow to navigate.

She went through the tin box one more time, chose three photos of her mother and closed them in the pages of Little Sure Shot. She put the book in her daddy’s old army backpack with Crane stenciled on it. She loaded the pack with her favorite items of clothing, plus a few bandannas, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, a bottle of shampoo, some tools and paper targets, and what her daddy called female first aid. When she stepped outside, she could not take her eyes off the sparkling surface of the water; maybe it was the pot she’d smoked, but the river was shimmering in the late afternoon sun as though it were speaking to her with reflected light, inviting her to come out and row. She loaded up The River Rose, tossed in an army sleeping bag, two life vests, a vinyl tarp, a gallon jug of water, and her daddy’s best fishing pole. She climbed in, fixed her oars, and pushed off.

Margo headed across the river toward the Murray place, rowing at first in slow motion so she ended up downstream and had to struggle back up. As she tied off her boat, she felt her daddy’s disapproval of the Murrays sift over her. Without him, she could cross the river and swim if she wanted, and she could pet the Murray dogs without getting yelled at. Crane could no longer get angry, and she would no longer be the reason for his or anyone’s living. Maybe if she kept reminding herself of this, she could survive without him. The thought of surviving without him made her cry again.

Margo made her way to the whitewashed shed—someone had rinsed the blood off the wall and placed a blanket-sized piece of mill felt over the ground where her father had been lying. Margo picked up the trail that led to the road. When she saw the Ford truck still parked on the gravel driveway, the scene was so ordinary that she expected to see Crane sitting behind the wheel. After a few deep breaths, she opened the door of the truck and folded down the bench seat, but found no gun there. If the police had taken the shotgun, as well as the rifle, she knew she was out of luck. If Cal or someone from the family had taken it, she would find it in Cal’s office off the living room with the rest of his guns. Margo wondered how she would be better off now, with the Murrays or without them.

Margo moved closer to the house and hid behind some maples. The dog Moe pulled against his chain and whimpered. If Margo moved in with the Murrays, she would have to wait for her mother to come get her, and there was no telling how long that would take. It was hours later when Joanna walked outside and started the Suburban. Margo ducked down. She heard boys’ voices arguing, maybe the twins. Junior came out of the house, held the door open for Cal, and walked slowly beside him down the stairs and to the driveway. Cal was taking small steps, as though just learning to walk. Junior opened the front passenger door and held out his arm as if to support his father.

“I don’t need any damned help,” Cal said in a strained voice.

He got into the front passenger seat, and Junior got into the back seat. Finally, one of the twins climbed from the back to sit between his parents. None of them looked in Margo’s direction. The Christmas lights on the oil-barrel float were still on, their colors muted in the early evening light. Saturday evening Mass would keep them away from home for at least an hour and a half. Usually Joanna went alone or with the littler kids—Cal had about as much interest in religion as Margo’s father’d had—but today Joanna might have convinced them that they ought to pray for Billy and have their souls worked on. Maybe Joanna thought there was something to be gained by showing the family in public at this time. Maybe Cal wanted to show he had not been crippled.

Margo climbed the steps, found the door key under the flowerpot where it had always been, used it in the lock, and replaced it. The kitchen was warm from the woodstove, which someone had damped down to last until they returned. The house smelled of cinnamon bread. Margo smelled turkey soup, too, which meant that Joanna, despite last night’s events, had boiled turkey carcasses as she always had done the day after the party. Margo had last been in this big, bright room last Thanksgiving when she was helping Joanna with the dishes, before she’d gone out to join the party. Margo ventured into the living room, where she’d argued with Billy for years without feeling uneasy—it was only in the last year that Billy had become strange and scary to her. The Murray house never did feel empty, even when everybody was gone. Always the place was full of scents, warmth, and energy. This evening she could feel the Murray spirits hiding around corners, hanging from the ceiling and wall fixtures. Even when she’d been welcome in this house, she had preferred to stay in the kitchen. When she’d gone into the living room to watch TV, she sat on the floor beside Cal’s chair, and he had sometimes patted her head and said, “Good girl.” Billy had whispered, “Good dog,” or “Good Nympho,” whenever Cal did it, but she hadn’t cared.

But she couldn’t stay here now, after what had happened. Where would she sleep while she waited for her mother to come?

She found a sheet of paper and a pencil and wrote a note. Dear Joanna and Cal: Thank you for your generous offer to let me stay with you. My mother wants me to come to her, but she asked me not to say where she is. Please don’t tell anyone. Love, Margaret. She left it on the kitchen table.

Margo walked into Cal’s office, a room she had never entered. Kids were not allowed, and it was a rule they all followed. The room smelled of Cal, of leather and gun oil and citrus shaving cream. It also smelled a little of sweat and whiskey.

The gun cabinet was closed but not locked. Maybe in his rattled condition, Cal had forgotten to lock it, or maybe he was so confident no one would mess with his guns that he never locked it. She opened both doors. Inside were a dozen rifles and six twelve-gauge shotguns, but not her daddy’s twenty-gauge with his initials burned into the stock.

Margo’s heart pounded as she extracted the Marlin, the gun Cal had let her use on special occasions, because it was like Annie Oakley’s, he said. Margo ran her hands over the squirrel carved into the walnut stock, the chrome lever. Cal had kept the gun oiled and polished. An electrical charge passed through her as she touched the gold-colored trigger. When she had last shot with it, there had been a tooled leather strap attached, but it had been removed, leaving only the sling swivels. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and pointed it out the window. She pressed her cheek against the stock and looked over the iron sights at a bit of orange plastic ribbon stapled to a fence post. If she was going to leave this place and all its familiar landmarks, she would have to take this gun. She pocketed a box of .22 cartridges and gripped the Marlin in her left hand. She felt the ghosts of Murrays watching her as she returned to the kitchen. She grabbed the loaf of cinnamon bread off the counter and then headed out the same way she’d come in. The black Lab chained outside barked, and though she knew she should hurry away, she dropped to her knees on the ground beside him, held the bread away from his jaws. “Oh, Moe, I’ve missed you terribly. I should have come over to see you, I know.”

She pulled herself away from the dog, and he barked behind her. The beagles barked in their kennel. When she reached her boat, she was shaking so badly that instead of dropping the rifle onto the back seat, she dropped it into the icy river. She pulled it out quickly, but not before it was entirely submerged.

She shook the gun and wiped it as best she could with a towel from her pack. Braced now by the cold and her fear of being seen, Margo laid the rifle on her tarp and swaddled it as she would a baby. She thought the sound of her getting into The River Rose echoed all across the river and through the woods. She took a few bites from the loaf of bread, the first thing she’d eaten all day. When she set out onto the water, she felt an urge to let herself go with the current, to slip effortlessly downstream. Her mother was upstream, though, so she began to row.

• CHAPTER SIX •

WHEN MARGO HEARD three shotgun blasts in succession, the sound rattled her, made her want to shoot in response. It would still be deer hunting season for a few more days. When she saw the Slocum camping trailers on the north bank, she rowed as hard as she could to pass quickly and avoid being seen. A few hundred yards beyond that, the river curved, and Margo heard voices and laughter coming from outside the abandoned cabin that Junior called the marijuana house. She ran her boat onto the sandbar just below the place and decided to wait for full darkness, rather than risk being seen. She took off her leather work gloves and breathed onto her hands. The tiny cabin here was owned by the Murrays and until three years ago had been used by one of Grandpa’s brothers for weekend fishing. Margo listened to the teenage voices. A girl’s laughter exploded like automatic weapon fire and then was muffled by a closing door. When all was quiet for a while, Margo climbed up on the bank for a better look.

A white-tailed buck approached the river only twenty-five yards away, near the dock. Margo loaded six cartridges from her pocket into the magazine tube of the Marlin, chambered a round as quietly as she could, and cocked the hammer into the safety position. The loaded rifle felt good in her hands. When the buck stopped at the riverbank and turned to look in her direction, Margo slowed her breathing. With the rifle resting on one knee, she studied the creature, counted ten points, saw a raw V-shaped tear on his cheek, maybe a wound from fighting another male. Her hands stopped shaking. She could take it down with the .22 if she hit it in the eye or the temple. The deer lowered its head to drink from the river. The lever-action Marlin was slightly heavier than her daddy’s bolt-action rifle, but while she aimed the gun, she felt weightless and free from her exhaustion.

“Don’t shoot!” a female voice whispered loudly from behind her. The deer started at the sound, doubled up its legs, and bounded from the water’s edge.