the river, at least when the weather was warm, but now she wanted to cover every part of herself as Annie Oakley had. Margo had the feeling that her newly shaped body had a power that she needed to keep secret. She put on clean underwear, a turtleneck shirt, and her fresh pair of jeans.
With the door closed, the bedroom grew gradually cooler, until finally Margo was starved for the stove’s warmth.
“Good morning, beautiful,” Brian said when she stepped into the main room.
When she saw her rifle in the corner, her heart pounded. “I dropped my rifle in the mud. I have to clean it.”
“We’ll eat first,” Brian said, “and then we’ll clean and oil your rifle. Everything will be okay.” He held out his arms until she sat on his lap and let herself be kissed. Despite all she had eaten the night before, she was ravenous.
She followed Brian outside to a hand pump, where he began to refill the galvanized bucket. The iron pipe was wrapped in insulation to keep it from freezing. He pointed the way to an outhouse a few yards farther on.
When she returned to the kitchen, she watched how Brian battered and fried the fish fillets he took from a cooler, so that she could cook them next time. The smell of frying fish and bacon was so powerful that she felt light-headed. For as long as she needed to stay, she would make herself handy, helpful to Brian, and not take anything for granted. Brian placed the plate of fish, bacon, potatoes, and toast in front of her. He sat beside her rather than across from her, as though they were sitting at the drugstore lunch counter in Murrayville, and he ran his scarred hand along her arm. Her muscles were loosening up, but she couldn’t eat with him touching her, so she reluctantly put down her fork.
“I’m sorry,” he said and let go of her. “Eat!”
While they drank their second cups of instant coffee, he kept reaching out and touching her shoulder or her face or petting her hair. He told her again how he’d been fired from Murray Metal Fabricating in the last round of layoffs, how he’d fought with Cal and knocked out his teeth. She didn’t mind hearing the story again, because it meant that, already, something was familiar between them.
They washed the dishes in a big aluminum roasting pan full of water they heated on both burners of the propane stove, and finally Margo and Brian sat down with her rifle. Margo showed him how removing one screw revealed all the moving parts of the Marlin, as Cal had shown her.
Upon studying the chrome and the carving of the squirrel on the stock, Brian said, “I think this is a limited edition. It’s probably worth something. Was it your papa’s?”
“Cal’s.”
“Good girl.” He laughed.
She let Brian separate the stock from the barrel. They spent the morning disassembling the Marlin and reassembling it, drenching the air in the room with the heavy scent of solvent and then gun oil. When Brian wasn’t explaining something or telling stories, he often was humming popular songs from the last decades, Beatles songs especially. For a long time, he was humming “Norwegian Wood.” They found a few drops of water in the barrel, but no harm had been done. They put the rifle back together, well oiled. Then she and Brian went out in the pontoon boat, parked at a snag, and caught bluegills for dinner.
“So why would your papa have shot Cal’s dick? Did Cal Murray mess with you?” Brian asked, while Margo was cleaning the fish in the sink.
Margo said nothing, even when Brian turned and looked right at her.
“He did, didn’t he? Cal raped you.” It wasn’t a question by the time he finished asking. “Holy shit. That’s why you took the man’s gun.”
She grimaced. She still didn’t think that word made sense in relation to what had happened.
“Your papa was revenging you. Well, it’s not enough. If I see Cal, I’ll knock another tooth out of the son of a bitch’s head. I’ll knock them all out.”
While Brian was frying the fish, Margo stood at the window and searched the river until she saw a shadow fly across—a red-tailed hawk, maybe, or at least a crow—and she was able to imagine following its flight path with the barrel of the Marlin. She figured that whatever Brian wanted to do to Cal, it had only a little to do with herself. She might be the spark that got Brian riled up, but any fire would be all about Brian and Cal and whatever was already between them.
“ALL RIGHT, MAGGIE, let’s test your rifle, make sure it still works,” Brian said after breakfast the following morning. Margo carried the Marlin, wishing again it had a sling, and Brian carried a bigger rifle, an M1, something from World War II. While they were cleaning the Marlin, he had mentioned that he’d been in Vietnam, but volunteered only that his “damn M16 jammed about every fucking day.” Knowing how Crane had not wanted to talk about his Vietnam experience, Margo didn’t consider asking Brian about his. Brian set up a couple dozen empty beer cans and plastic bottles on a railroad tie twenty-five paces farther down the river and handed Margo the pair of ear protectors he had on his arm. He loaded the big rifle and fired eight rounds. He went through two more clips, and when he was done, after twenty-four shots, he’d hit about half of the targets. He replaced the cans and bottles he’d destroyed with new ones, including two sardine cans he propped up. “I think I’m out of practice,” he said. “Maybe my sights need adjusting.”
Margo lifted her .22 with some difficulty. Her arm muscles were still strained from rowing. She experienced some kind of electrical shock when she first pulled the trigger, and she missed the first can. She focused and dinged it on the second shot, and then caught the top on the third, sent it flying. She inhaled the faint smell of gunpowder. She reloaded the Marlin with fifteen of the long-rifle cartridges she’d carried from Cal’s gun cupboard and listened for a moment to the river. Holding the rifle steady would have been easier with a sling, but she held her arm up until her body remembered it as a natural position. She hit the next can and each can after that, and she reloaded and knocked all the bottles from their perches. And in that several minutes of intense focusing, she felt peaceful. Margo lowered the gun, pressed the barrel against her face to feel its heat.
“Holy shit,” Brian said. “A guy has got to respect that.”
Afterward, he exchanged his M1 for a shotgun, an old Winchester 97 twelve-gauge pump-action with a full choke. He shot at some frozen hunks of driftwood he’d dragged over from the edge of the river, and she saw that the buckshot created a tight pattern of holes only a few inches wide at thirty feet. With her first shot, the kick of the thing knocked her back. After that, she jammed it tightly into her shoulder and absorbed the recoil with her whole body. She loaded and shot until she knew she would be bruised. Though the sound was muted by the ear protectors, each blast moved through her and settled and soothed her.
Brian offered to stay at the cabin with her the following day, but said there was two hundred bucks cash if he cleaned the roof and gutters at an apartment complex. There was no road leading to the cabin, meaning a boat was the only way in or out, and this made Margo feel easier about being alone there. If anyone came for her, she would see him coming on the water. Brian said that if the river froze over this winter, they’d be stuck, so they needed to keep their supplies of food, bait, and ammo laid in, and the prospect of winter preparation seemed to please him. After he disappeared upstream, Margo found a piece of a rope that was too short to use for much of anything, so she unraveled it and then set about braiding the sections to create a rifle sling.
That evening, Brian visited Carpinski and got a report on Margo’s mother. After a few months of living with Carpinski, Luanne had apparently gone off with a truck driver. Carpinski provided an address in Florida, but the first letter Margo wrote came back the next week to Brian’s post office box with a note handwritten across it, No longer at this address. Brian said he would keep asking around, would talk to Carpinski again to see if he remembered anything else. According to Brian, the man was still pretty broken up about Luanne more than a year after she had left.
Brian was a storyteller, recounting his own tales and others he had collected, and in the evenings he often told about growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in logging camps,