Once Upon a River Page 0,11

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