Once Upon a River Page 0,71
boat with no motor did not need to be registered, and since she’d left Brian’s, she’d had no motor.
“Nympho!” he shouted. He stood and looked around. “Where are you?”
Margo hated the way the nickname echoed over the river. He might disturb Joanna and the baby. Didn’t he know how hard it was to get a baby to sleep sometimes? When he turned more or less in
her direction, she saw that he was wearing, under his jean jacket, a black T-shirt with a rock-and-roll decal resembling a bull’s-eye, directing her to shoot just above his solar plexus. The sun was at the top of the sky behind the haze, so this was as bright as the day was going to get. He shouted again, not quite as loudly or with such confidence, “Nympho?”
“Get away from my boat,” she said and stood up. From this angle, she noted that the gun in his hand was his old pellet rifle, the one he’d gotten for his fourteenth birthday. He could take out an eye with a lucky shot, but he wasn’t going to kill anything more than a bird or a squirrel.
“You’re supposed to be in summer school,” Margo said. Every muscle in her body was tensed to slide the Marlin up to her shoulder and press the trigger. If only her eyes would stop watering. She swallowed again to get rid of whatever was in her throat.
“This morning Ma asked me what if you wanted to stay with us for a while, how would I feel about that? I said no way. I figured that meant you were hanging around. That’s why I skipped school today.”
Margo wished she had anticipated this situation and thought it through so her brain wouldn’t feel so muddled now.
“This is a Murray boat,” Billy said. “You know it was never meant for you. And because of you, Dad’s crippled. Everybody knows you told that guy to beat Dad up.”
She wanted to protest, to say she was a Murray, too, and she had not wanted Cal beaten up. Instead she said, “I could shoot you easy.”
“Go ahead and kill me. You’ll rot in prison. I’ve been in the juvey. I know what it’s like.”
“Your ma said you didn’t go to jail.”
“I went to the juvey this year, for two months.”
“For what?”
“A little problem with a fire getting out of hand.” He smiled, but it seemed forced. “We were just trying to keep warm, but nobody would believe us.”
“Why’d you have to shoot my dad?”
“You know why, Nympho. That ain’t no kind of thing for a man to do, shooting my dad that way. That ain’t something you do, shooting a man’s dick.” He spat into the river.
Margo wondered again if there was anything to be gained by telling the truth.
“And I don’t care if you shoot me. Go ahead. Life around here sucks, anyway. We’re poor now. Junior went away to Alaska, and the new baby’s a retard.”
Margo aimed and fired, right at the butt of his pellet rifle, knocking it out of his hands. He yelped, and the rifle hit the prow of the boat and fell onto the sandy muck. She expected him to run or at least beg her not to shoot him, but he stood his ground. When he reached down and picked up the gun, she shot the stock again, knocking it into the boat this time. Billy pulled his hand away as though he’d been stung by a wasp. Margo could feel his fear, but he did not outwardly express any. He let the gun lie on the prow seat and stood up and crossed his arms. “You been off with your ma? You two should stick together, seeing how you’re both whores.”
“You don’t know anything about my ma.”
“Junior saw her with Dad once. In the barn. He said not to tell you, but I don’t care.”
“Shut up.”
“I know she ran off with a man and didn’t care nothing about you. That’s what Ma said.”
Margo fired once more past him, so he would hear the bullet whiz two feet from his ear before it went into the water. She hoped he would shut up and run away, but he hardly flinched.
“Aren’t you even sorry you killed my dad?” Margo was surprised to find herself asking this question, so similar to the one Michael had asked her about Paul. She felt the muscles twitch in her arm.
“I didn’t have no choice. He was going to kill Dad.”
When her arm twitched again, she lowered