Once Upon a River Page 0,35
over her long hair, and no one at the store paid her any special attention. She loved the freedom of traveling alone. She spent the forty dollars she had and wanted to cash the money order from her mother, but she feared for her name coming up at the post office. As far away as she felt from home, Heart of Pines was only thirty-five miles upstream from Murrayville. The DNR official who she feared would find her dead doe was the same guy who could have nailed her for killing more than her fair share back home. She had visited the doe’s body all spring, kept her covered with branches, and noted, day by day, how much of her the coyotes, raccoons, and crows had eaten, how her skeleton collapsed with the cartilage fetus inside, how her bones disappeared from the heap one after another. Last week, she had been able to pluck her deer slug from the flattened remains.
As the weather warmed and the ground thawed, Brian picked up jobs removing trees, landscaping, and digging, either using machines he rented or a shovel when it was a tight space or when folks were worried about the ornamental bushes over their septic tanks. Margo didn’t miss her father any less as the weather warmed, but by then her body had absorbed the habit of sadness, so that sadness flowed all through her and became a natural part of her movements. Missing her mother was different; her mother was an agitation and a puzzle. She tried to imagine situations her mother might be in that were so delicate that they couldn’t meet, not even for a visit. Was her mother being held prisoner? Was she taking care of some man’s children, a dozen of them, so that she couldn’t take care of one more person? Luanne should have known that Margo didn’t need much taking care of.
The most satisfying part of Margo’s days was watching the yellow dog downstream on the opposite bank. The creature hardly ever barked, and it remained still for as much as an hour, its nose just above the water. Whenever the man or the woman returned home and let the dog out, whenever it bounded to the water’s edge, Margo shared its pleasure at being released. In the early spring, the woman seemed to be gone more often, and then the woman and her car stopped appearing at the house at all. After that, in early May, she watched the man spend hours alone in the evening, repairing the oil-barrel float before launching it and setting out the gangplank, trimming the hedges around the house, and painting the little shed. She watched the man sweep debris off the roof of the house and then watched him clean the gutters, even wiping them with a towel. Brian’s cabin didn’t have gutters.
The first night Margo saw Brian drunk as a skunk, she was sitting up late, cleaning the shotgun, when she heard the sound of his boat pulling up to the dock. Paul and another man wrestled Brian up the stairs and onto the screen porch.
“Here’s your man,” Paul said. “Do what you want with him. He was too drunk to drive himself. We passed a sheriff’s boat on the way down, so we’re all going to stay the night here.”
She determined from the slowness of Paul’s gaze, as it moved from her throat to her face, that Paul, too, was drunk.
“Paul dropped his glasses in the drink.” Brian got up from the couch on the porch where they had placed him and stumbled to the doorway and stood there.
“You knocked my goddamned glasses in the drink,” Paul said. “I didn’t drop them.”
“Sorry about that, bro. Listen,” he said, but then seemed to forget what he was going to say.
Margo knew it would take forty-five minutes to get the place warm again after the men had left the door wide open for this long.
“What’s your point, Brian?” Paul said.
“Well, I know I love my brother. I love you, man. And I’m sorry I shot you in the eye.” He supported himself on the doorframe, and then suddenly lurched toward the table, knocking dishes to the floor. A plate and a glass broke. Margo’s gun-cleaning supplies scattered. She righted her bottle of solvent before much leaked out, but the oily smell filled the room.
She picked up the pieces of the orange plate. Brian grabbed her shoulder and pulled her onto his lap so suddenly that she cut herself