Once Upon a River Page 0,38
my own brother if he messed with you, Maggie. If I ever see Cal Murray again, I’ll kill him.”
“Nobody has to kill anybody,” she said. “You’re hurting my wrist.”
“Oh.” Brian pulled away with exaggerated care. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He reached out clumsily to touch her hair at the side of her face, and the motion, performed in drunken slowness, spooked her. “I promised myself when you came to me that I’d never hurt you, that I’d always be gentle. I told God, I said to God in my head, If she’ll stay with me, I’ll treat her good. Please don’t leave me, Maggie. Promise you won’t leave me.”
Margo would have liked to ask him not to drink whiskey, but she knew he wouldn’t listen when he was this drunk. The best thing now would be to get him to bed.
“Where else would I go, Brian? I got nobody else.”
“I never knew I’d be so lucky, to have a girl like you in my life, a beautiful girl who cooks me dinner and makes love with me and doesn’t ask me for anything.” He pulled her around the table to sit on his lap, and he wrapped both arms around her. Margo usually liked the feeling of being contained by and connected to Brian—it was like being attached to a powerful weapon.
When Brian went outside to relieve himself, Margo sat at the table listening to the croaking snore of leopard frogs through the walls. She wondered how much longer she could stay here.
“I’m doing my best, Daddy,” she whispered, in case Crane was aware of what was going on. “Don’t worry about me.” This was the first time she had spoken aloud to him. If there was a heaven or hell, Margo worried about how Crane was getting along in either place without her.
The river never flooded that year. The late spring rains were steady and mild. It wasn’t until June that the first pair of seventy-degree days came up with a wind out of the south. Brian came home from the bar on the second of those warm days with his knuckles cut up again. A man had taken his jacket, he said.
“You let somebody take your jacket, he thinks he owns you. You don’t know what he’ll do after that. Next thing you know, he’ll be screwing your woman.”
Margo looked at him, startled.
“You know about evening the score, girl. I know you understand that. I know you’ll get even with your cousin someday.”
She nodded. She knew better than to want revenge, but she couldn’t let go of her desire for it. She did not tell Brian what else she knew and knew too well: you couldn’t always keep things even, that in trying to keep things even, you could lose everything.
• Chapter Nine •
One day in August, Brian went to town and did not return by nightfall or by the next morning. Several days later, he had still not come home. Each morning when Margo woke up alone she listened for a long time to a phoebe calling its own name from a branch outside the window, until she could copy it perfectly. Each night he was gone, she listened to the orchestra of crickets, cicadas, and tree frogs and wrote letters to her mother. Sometimes she tried to sound lighthearted, and other times she demanded Luanne explain about her delicate situation. Whenever she finished a letter, she tore the paper into pieces and sprinkled them on the water from Brian’s dock.
For the last few months she had feared Brian coming home drunk, but now she worried he might not come back at all. At first she found sleeping difficult without his big body beside her, but she soon was stretching out and using the extra space.
At dusk on the eighth night, Margo saw the Playbuoy coming downstream. She stood on the dock and waved. The black-haired, bearded driver turned out to be Paul. At the noise of the boat’s big outboard motor, the yellow dog across the river moved up the lawn toward its house, and a great blue heron that must have been fishing below the cabin launched itself into flight. Margo watched it ascend. Another guy was with Paul, not Johnny, but a smaller man. She hoped they had brought some meat or store-bought food. She was tired of eating fish. She had run out of rifle cartridges and shotgun shells and had no money left to buy more until she got up