Once Upon a River Page 0,42
bad eye.
“I’m mixing pancakes,” she said. “Charlie went to the outhouse.”
“Come here, river princess.” He grabbed her before she’d even realized she was within reach of him. He pulled her down onto the bed.
“Paul, what?”
“Kiss me,” he said.
“No, Paul. What if Brian . . . ?”
“Brian’s not here. He’s not going to be here.”
“No. Don’t,” she said, but he pulled her against him.
He seemed not to notice her complaints. He pulled down her loose jeans without unzipping them—she had grown thinner in these last months—and pushed her T-shirt up around her shoulders. She bent her knees and tried to sit up, but he held her down with one hand and ran the other along her stomach and over her right breast. In school she had wrenched away from boys who had grabbed her in the stairwell, but she had never fought a big man. She tried to push Paul away, tried to get her feet up to kick. As her leg came up, he pushed her knee out to the side and heaved himself onto her. When she continued to push at him, he flipped her over with an ease that shocked her. His fingers held her down like straps. She had always thought of herself as strong, but compared to Paul she was nothing. She yelled and tried to push him off.
While her arms were trapped beneath her, he forced her onto her stomach and worked his way into her. She cried out loudly enough that Charlie would have heard her if he’d returned from the outhouse, but there was no sound from the next room. She couldn’t take in a full breath, crushed as she was against the mattress, and she feared she was suffocating. The time she had crawled beneath the buck’s carcass back in Murrayville, she had been able to calm herself, but there was no way to be calm with Paul on her. She tried to lift herself to throw Paul off, but he was heavier than the buck. She smelled Brian’s musk in the sheets and Paul’s sweat and rotten breath. She wished for him to be as dead as that buck. When she croaked his name and begged him to stop again, he responded, “Oh, Maggie,” as though she had said something sweet. She struggled to free her arms until she felt too weak to struggle anymore. Paul was on her for a long time.
After he rolled away to the other side of the bed, he looked at her and smiled. She wanted to punch him and kick him, but she feared he would grab her fist or foot if she did, and more than anything she wanted to get away from him. She picked her clothes up off the floor and carried them into the other room. She dressed with shaking hands and wished she had more clothes to put on. Her rifle and shotgun were in the rack beside her, useless without ammunition, though the shotgun might work as a club until Paul could wrestle it out of her hands. She had wasted her cartridges on target practice, expecting Brian to bring her more. From now on, she knew better. She would count on no one to help or protect her.
She tied her boots, buttoned her shirt. She thought about running into the woods in order not to face Paul, but she did not want to leave her boat behind. She could get in her boat and row away from the cabin, but in the pontoon boat he could chase her down if he wanted. And there was no point of leaving now that he had already done what he had wanted to do with her. Once she was dressed, she picked up the butcher knife and moved to the bedroom doorway. While she stood there, she tested the sharpness by puncturing her skin near her wrist. A drop of blood formed there. If he came after her again, she would protect herself with it.
“I ain’t used an outhouse in years,” said Charlie, as he entered the cabin from the screen porch. “It’s mighty relaxing.”
Margo returned to her pancake batter and put down the knife.
“You making us breakfast?” Charlie asked. “You’re a nice girl.”
“Charlie, do you do drugs?”
“Nosirree,” he said. “But Paul says that shit out there’s going to make us some serious money.”
“How about Paul? Brian said he was off the drugs.”
Charlie shrugged. When he looked away, Margo spat into the pancake batter. She saw the dozen meal-moth larvae were