into his big chest, felt his thick flannel shirt against her cheek. She loved the leathery smell of him, though it was tinged with pork and beer. He reached down, tightened his arms around her, and lifted her whole body so she was in front of his face, something he might have done when she was a little kid. She had just turned fifteen.
“You want to come out hunting with me tomorrow? Five a.m.?”
Margo nodded, though she had seen the horror on Aunt Joanna’s face when Cal suggested a few days ago that he would take Margo hunting on opening day rather than one of their five sons. Margo kicked her legs as though swimming.
While still holding her a foot above the ground, Cal kissed her mouth. He whispered, “How’s that? Is that so bad?”
Margo swallowed a gasp. She had kissed a few guys in the stairwell at school and had kissed a friend of Junior’s in the abandoned cabin upstream, had tried out all kinds of kissing—soft and hard, fast and slow. When they were sure Junior was passed out, Margo and that friend of his had undressed. Margo thought nobody knew she’d gone all the way with him, but maybe Cal knew. Cal moved her in his arms so he was carrying her like a bride over a threshold. He was the handsomest man—her mother had said it all the time. When Cal laid Margo down on his big jacket on the dirt floor, Margo tried to keep breathing normally. When Cal’s hands were on her, she reminded herself of when he was first showing her how to shoot, adjusting her hands and arms, telling her to press, not pull the trigger. Firing the gun should come as a surprise to the shooter, he said, though everything he was doing was moving him toward it.
“You’re so lovely,” he whispered. “It’s unholy.”
Cal was the finest man in this town, her mother had said, but where was her mother to explain what was happening now? Margo knew it was all messed up, and she knew her father would be furious, but she didn’t say no. Saying no would be like releasing a bullet from the chamber—there would be no way to take it back. Shouting no was something she might practice, once this was over, but for now she would trust Cal. The jacket beneath her head slipped, so when she turned to look at the door, her ear was pressed against the dirt. She smelled blood and mold and mouse piss as Cal moved on top of her. The golden light from the window to the west was warm on her cheek, and she saw a girl’s face in the window. At first Margo thought it was her own reflection, but it was Julie Slocum. The girl’s hand went to her mouth, and then she disappeared.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Cal said afterward.
She knew Cal didn’t expect her to say anything. Nobody ever expected her to say anything. Not even her teachers. Before she could answer a question posed in the classroom, she always had to figure out how a thing she was being asked connected to all the other things she knew. She might answer hours later, when she was alone in her boat studying water bugs on the river’s surface. It was easier to practice math problems in her head while she rowed, easier to understand how cells divided while she was underwater.
Had it been so bad? Margo slipped her underpants back on. She thought that if she didn’t concentrate on her breathing, she would forget to breathe. She looked around to see what else had changed. Not the deer carcass, not the cobwebs or the blood smell. Uncle Cal smiled his same smile. She needed to get out of this shed, to look at it from outside and figure out what had just happened.
Then Margo’s father burst through the door. Cal was getting up, buttoning his fly, when her father, barely taller than Margo, kicked open the door and kicked Cal in the mouth with a work boot. Margo heard bones crunch, and two red-and-white nuggets—Uncle Cal’s teeth—bounced on the ground. The half-brothers, famous for their tempers, growled at each other like bears. Cal punched Crane in the jaw hard enough that Margo heard a bone break.
Aunt Joanna entered the shed just after Margo’s daddy head-butted Cal hard enough to crack a rib. A dozen or more people gathered and watched, some from inside the shed, others through the open door or the dirty window. Julie Slocum slipped in and rubbed her hand over Margo’s hair. Margo could smell kerosene on her from the space heaters her family used in their camping trailers. Cal lay on the ground now, and Joanna’s long spine curved over his body. She wiped blood from his mouth with a handkerchief and whispered something angrily to him. Then Cal whispered his defense to Joanna, but everyone went suddenly quiet. “The little slut lured me in here, Jo, but I swear I never touched her.”
Everyone stayed still and quiet until Julie backed away toward the door. Someone coughed, and people began to murmur.
Joanna looked at Margo. “Damn you,” she said.
Margo squinted at Cal, studied him as though over the Marlin’s iron sights, waiting for an explanation or a wink, even, that would suggest he had not meant what he’d said. It had started with the death of Margo’s grandfather in January and the departure of her mother in July, and now the severing was complete between Margo and all the rest of them. Even her daddy, bleeding from his cheek and mouth beside her, telling her to stand up, seemed far away.
IN THE FRONT SEAT of the truck, her daddy demanded she tell what had happened, but she said nothing. He drove her to the police station parking lot and begged her to go inside with him. He briefly tried to drag her out of the truck, but she gripped the gearshift knob with her left hand and the armrest with her right and held fast. She had not resisted Cal, but resistance was a lesson she was learning quickly. At home that night, sleepless in her bed, she heard an owl call, Who-who, who cooks for you? She whispered in imitation. She imagined aiming and shooting the bird off its foolish perch in the cedars. From her window, she saw lights still shining at the Murray house across the way and heard music quietly playing.
The next morning, Margo awoke to her daddy moaning through the wall. She forced open his locked door with a butter knife and found him in bed, smelling of blackberry brandy, his face swollen and crusted with blood. He asked her to bring him a beer. Margo took his unopened twelve-pack from beside the refrigerator and kicked it off the porch and end-over-end into the woods outside his window until the cardboard busted open. She cracked one beer and let it foam all over her hand, took a big slug of what remained, and spit it out. She set the can on a stump. She put a second can, unopened, in the crook of a tree and paused to listen to a mourning dove coo from the frosted earth. Using its own sad call, she told the bird to go away. She placed a third can of beer beneath a cluster of barbed raspberry spears. She went on to set up all twelve cans in the woods. In one hand she had her daddy’s twenty-gauge shotgun, and in her pocket she had a dozen shells. She stood a few yards away, loaded four shells in the magazine, chambered a round, pulled the trigger, and pulverized the first can. She absorbed the recoil without flinching. She racked the pump, jammed the butt tighter against her shoulder, fired again, and watched the second can explode. Beer foamed eight feet in the air. One by one, in the dim light, she blasted the cans of beer to smithereens, pausing only to reload. She inhaled deeply the sweetness of the gunpowder. Each shot echoed through the woods and across the water.
A light came on in her father’s bedroom. She would get him to the hospital. As she waited for him to come outside, she listened to the water flowing beside her in its journey down the Stark, heading toward the dam at Confluence, beyond which lay the Kalamazoo River and, finally, Lake Michigan. Her ears were alive with her blasts. Her shoulder throbbed.
• CHAPTER TWO •
A YEAR LATER, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Margo was kneeling between two cedars in the predawn dark, just upstream of her house, watching a six-point buck rooting for acorns in the frozen leaf litter. Margo had all the time in the world to study the creature, its dark hooves and slender legs, its dusky chest, wide as a man’s, its heavy crown, white beard, and arrogant gaze. The buck lifted its head and flared its nostrils as it caught the scent of a doe. Margo lifted the shotgun to her shoulder, pressed her cheek against the stock. The river seemed to guide her arm and her eye as she aimed into the heart and lungs, touched the trigger, and bang. Only when she stood up did she notice her knee was wet and that ice was forming on the fabric of her jeans.
Her father’s bedroom light came on. By the time he dressed and