Once Upon a River Page 0,75

the big blue fabricating plant churning orange smoke across the river. A flatbed semi truck was backing into an open loading bay. The parking lot was half full, mostly with pickup trucks. She hung her tarp, sleeping bag, and wet clothes over gravestones to dry and kept watch on the river, something she never tired of doing.

When she finally set off walking, she tucked the ashes under her arm. The box was going to slow her down even more, but she knew she could not leave her father behind this time. She trudged downstream a few miles before resting in a windbreak beside a farmer’s field. She was beginning to fear she might have missed Billy rowing back upstream while she slept more heavily than she’d meant to. Or maybe he’d hidden the boat somewhere on the opposite side of the river, though she knew there weren’t any creeks over there. Maybe it was behind someone’s oil-barrel float, though she’d looked pretty carefully. She hiked farther until she heard the diesel thrum and whir of a big haybine. Somebody was mowing an alfalfa field. She camped at the river’s edge.

The following two days she continued downstream, covering only a mile or so between rest stops, and finally found herself in the state park, the Pokagon Mound Picnic Area. She realized it was night when she arrived only because of how brightly a campfire ahead of her burned against the darkness. She was about twenty-four miles downstream from the Murrays’, but she felt as though she had traveled farther, to another land.

She snuck as close as she could without letting the teenagers around the fire see her. Two of them were smoking cigarettes, a couple were making out, and one of the remaining two seemed focused on creating a line drawing with a pencil. She recognized some of them from her class at school; though their names didn’t come to her, she was sure they were Billy’s friends. Seemingly an eternity had passed in the last twenty-one months, when she would have passed these people in the hallway at school. Though she had never sought out their company before, she now wanted to be near their wood smoke and cigarettes, their mint gum, and even the perfume that used to irritate her in the classroom. She wanted to sit with them and let their voices roll over her, but she didn’t want them to tell Billy she had been there so she moved on. Margo unrolled her sleeping bag and tarp on the other side of the Pokagon Mound, a hillock maybe six feet high, twenty feet in diameter, that was full of Indian bones, if the stories about it were true.

The following morning Margo awoke dreaming of cinnamon bread and apple butter so vividly she could taste it. She investigated the fire pit where the kids had been sitting. There she found a stack of dark wood that somebody had cut with a chain saw. Beyond this pile was another pile.

“Oh, God. Oh, God.” It took her a while to realize that the moaning she was hearing was her own. She bent down and picked up an eighteen-inch-square chunk of wood that resembled a slightly curved cutting board. The wood was heavy, dense as stone. Teak. She hugged the piece to her chest and wondered how her boat had ever floated. Her ability to maneuver that boat had been magic, her grandpa’s magic passed down to her. She fished through the pieces until she found one that said River Rose with only a tiny bit of the first R cut off. She ran her finger across the embedded bullet, flush with the wood. She put the piece of scarred teak with her daddy’s ashes and her pack. She and Billy had come from the same place, had learned the same skills, and they had both killed someone. But Billy’s meanness and his desire for revenge had grown so strong inside him that he was willing to destroy even what he, himself,

loved.

The following night, the teenagers returned, again without Billy. They reduced the pile of slow-burning teak one piece at a time. From the shadows Margo listened to their chatter. One girl was going to the community college in the fall, and she sounded excited. Another boy was leaving town to go to a state university. A third was starting a job with an insurance agent. Margo admired how carefree they sounded, despite some of them not knowing where they’d live