Once Upon a River Page 0,43

still in the sifter, so she dumped those in and stirred.

As Paul and Charlie powered upstream, Margo traced their progress with the barrel of her unloaded rifle, sized Paul up as a target, and dry-fired at him. Before pulling away, Paul had given her food from his cooler—a hunk of cheese with a hardened edge, summer sausage, and a couple sleeves of saltines—and though she thought of knocking it all off the table where he’d placed it, she was too hungry to waste it. When Paul had tried to kiss her mouth before boarding the Playbuoy, she moved away and spit on the ground. He laughed as though she’d been making a joke. Later Margo discovered two twenty-dollar bills on her pillow.

She went back outside, took off her jeans, squatted beside the pump, and scrubbed between her legs with the cold water until she felt raw.

She slung her empty rifle over her shoulder to feel its weight, and the rope dug into her shoulder. It had been hurting her for a while. She found two leather belts on a wall hook in the bedroom and cut both buckles off. She punched holes in them with a hammer and a Phillips screwdriver, sewed them together with fish line, and threaded the leather through the sling swivels. She practiced to get the length right, flipping the rifle from her left side quickly up to aim and press the trigger with her right index finger. When she finished, she thought her homemade hasty sling felt as fine and solid as the one on her daddy’s old Remington, the rifle with which she’d performed that miracle of winning the 4-H competition.

Margo made herself a supper of cheese, crackers, summer sausage, and wild blackberries and was grateful not to be eating fish.

Though she knew revenge was as likely to hurt as it was to heal, she hoped she would make Paul regret what he had done.

Hours later, after the Jeep returned to the house across the river, the fishing dog appeared in its usual place on the water’s edge. To lighten the boat, Margo lifted off Brian’s outboard and placed it carefully on blocks so as not to bend the propeller, and then she rowed across. She had never touched the fishing dog or even seen it up close, but when she called, the dog walked out onto the oil-barrel float and stepped down into her boat without hesitation. Margo petted the yellow head. “I’ll call you King,” she whispered, thinking of the big-headed kingfisher bird who had always fished just upstream from her house in Murrayville.

Then she noticed that this was absolutely a female fishing dog, a female kingfisher, a female king.

She didn’t consider it stealing when she rowed the dog back to her side of the river and let her out to sniff the water’s edge. She always used to row the Murrays’ dog Moe across the river to her side for a visit. If this dog wanted to stay and chase raccoons up trees, that was her choice. Margo followed the dog on foot along the river and into the woods. With a companion like a fishing dog, Margo wouldn’t mind staying here alone. She could train the dog to bark when an intruder came. But it wasn’t long before Margo heard a man’s voice shouting, “Cleo! Where are you? Come, Cleo!” The dog jumped off the riverbank, plunged into the water, and swam downstream and to the other side. She shook herself and ran up the lawn to greet the man.

Margo looked around where the dog had been sniffing, and she found some ragged shelf fungus, yellow as an egg yolk, growing on the base of a tree: a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom. Clearly this dog was good luck. She snapped off a hunk of mushroom and brushed away a few ants. She would cook it for dinner tomorrow with her last two chicken bouillon cubes.

A week of heavy rain made Margo a prisoner in the cabin. When Brian was there she hadn’t minded being without a phone or a radio, but now she longed to hear a voice. The rain banged on the tin roof, reminding her of the sound of rain on the roof of the big Murray barn. The water rose until it was level with the dock. Most kids her age would have been getting ready to go back to school in a few weeks; Margo hadn’t looked forward to school in past years, but at least school would