Once Upon a River (39 page)

“Please take care of him,” Fishbone said to Margo. “I would if I could, but I’ve got a house full of family and guests waiting on me.”

After Fishbone closed the door behind him, Smoke said, “Like hell he would.”

“How come he’s not cold with only that jacket and hat on?” Margo asked.

Smoke thought for a moment. “That there is a man who decides how he wants to feel, and then that’s how he feels. Temperature be damned.”

“Can you do that?” Margo put Fishbone’s plate and fork in the sink and filled up Smoke’s coffee cup again. “Can you just decide how to feel?”

“Some people can,” Smoke said. “Tell me something, kid, is he right? Do I smell bad?”

“Why won’t you let the health aide help you wash like she’s supposed to?” An aide from senior services was stopping by once a week, and Smoke only allowed her to tidy the house, change the sheets, and put away the groceries she brought. Margo leaned close and smelled the collar of Smoke’s shirt.

“My body is none of them bitches’ business. But it has been a few weeks since I’ve been able to bathe.”

“Let me wash you, Smoke, before you go to your niece’s place tomorrow for Christmas. You don’t want them to think you’re not taking care of yourself,” she said. “I told you I helped my grandpa when he was sick.”

Smoke nodded. Margo didn’t really want to wash him, but she was the only one he would let near him. And Fishbone had asked her to take care of him.

Margo turned up the thermostat on the furnace and heard it kick on. Smoke unbuttoned his work shirt and revealed a dirty long underwear shirt. She pulled it off him and the smell was stronger. She helped him into the bathroom, and she put a milk crate in the shower and a folded towel for him to sit on. She washed his arms and chest with a washcloth.

Margo found a sore under his armpit that might be getting infected. She did the best she could in the low light of two candles—he wouldn’t let her turn on the overhead light, nor would he take off his glasses. As she worked, he seemed to relax in her hands. There were swollen red areas on his back that emanated heat. “What’s this?”

“Pressure sores,” Smoke whispered and winced at her touch. “I’m supposed to change position in my chair. And I’m supposed to sit up straight. I asked the doc how I’m supposed to do both at once.” He had another pressure sore on his tailbone.

Focusing on each part of his body made her forget the awkwardness and strangeness of what she was doing, and she found she liked caring for him this way. She emptied and refilled her pan of water a few times to keep it warm and clean. She let him wash his privates, which he did with care.

“I never washed anybody else before,” Margo said.

“I’d rather wash myself.”

Margo washed Smoke’s thin legs, on which there were only a few wisps of hair. She had to be gentle in touching the backs of his knees, where there were more sores. His shins were scarred and marked with a variety of new and fading bruises. She washed his callused feet. Margo wondered if she would care for her mother in old age; maybe it would take her mother until then to need her.

She dried Smoke by patting him with a towel and helped him into clean long underwear and a work shirt with
Smoke
on it. They hooked his oxygen back up.

“My dad had shirts that said
Crane
on them,” Margo said. “I wish I had one of those old shirts, but they belonged to the uniform service.”

“Thank you, kid,” Smoke said when they returned to the kitchen.

Margo poured him more coffee; it was astounding how much black coffee Smoke drank at all times of day. He said it helped keep his lungs and his bronchial tubes open.

“Fishbone is afraid he’ll end up like this if he touches me. We’re almost the same age, though you wouldn’t know it.”

“How come you didn’t get married, Smoke?”

“I did once.”

“What happened to your wife?”

“Lousy eight years for both of us, until she figured out to leave and go off with somebody else.”

“Why does Fishbone help you and look after you?”

“Why do you help me, kid? Why does anybody help anybody? Do you think we ought to just stay home and help ourselves? Is that how you want to live?”

Margo felt herself blush. “Do you love Fishbone?”

“You’re an observant girl. What the hell else have you managed to figure out after all these months of staring at me?”

“I mean, like loving a woman?” She said this hesitantly, thinking it might anger him.

“I wouldn’t know,” Smoke said. “I haven’t ever loved a woman the way I love him.”

“But he’s got a wife. And kids and grandkids.”

“So he does,” Smoke snorted. “And I do not. That’s why I have no one to take care of me in my old age.”

Margo nodded.

“Every person out there is a nut you can’t crack,” Smoke said. “That’s what I’ve learned, kid. We can’t even crack ourselves.”

“Well, I’ll take care of you, Smoke.”

“You’re a good girl. I’m sure even your crazy mama knows you’re a good girl.”

One clear, cold morning between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when Margo was in the cow pasture, halfway to Smoke’s house, she could make out the sounds of saws and a big diesel engine. On the road were a dump truck and a huge backhoe. Margo stood behind a tree outside Smoke’s house as two men in insulated coveralls cut into the old unattached garage that Fishbone called his river cottage. Then a third man operating the backhoe began working with the bucket, stabbing at the wall of the garage like a big yellow bird, punching through the wall boards. When the backhoe tapped the roof, the whole thing collapsed with a whoosh. With a few more artful gouges, the building was down, and the men on the ground began loading the bucket with debris, which was then dumped into the back of the truck. At this time, Smoke rolled his chair out onto the patio. Margo went inside to retrieve his coat and hat. She brought out the milk crate and sat on it to watch.

As the men lifted away chunks of wood, roofing materials, and window glass and deposited everything in the dump bed of the big truck, Smoke alternated puffs of oxygen and cigarettes. The men finished the job in a few hours, hardly offering a nod to her or Smoke. Neither she nor Smoke said anything much to each other, either, until, finally, all that remained was a square slab of pitted concrete between the patio and the fence line. While one potbellied man swept it clean with a wide broom, the other two negotiated the front-end loader onto a trailer. Then the three men got into the front seat of the dump truck, and they hauled it all away.

“They’ll send me a bill,” Smoke said. “Wait and see. And you tell me if you see one damned rat.”

Margo saw no evidence of rats, but she knew that wherever there were people, there were rats, especially on the river. Nobody wanted the skins or meat, but Margo did not despise them the way everybody else seemed to. Rats were just creatures getting by on the river as best they could. People exaggerated the grubbiness of river rats the way they exaggerated the ferocity of wolverines.

“Do you see how people will take away your right,” Smoke said and paused to catch his breath in the cold air, “to live the way you want? Remember this.”

Though she would not say so to Smoke, she would remember, as well, the pleasure of watching the demolition. Margo knew they should go inside, but she wanted to keep taking in the strange new landscape, the pitted slab, the length of fence she’d never seen from the patio.

“We could build a new garage,” Margo said, “right on that same spot. Fishbone will help us. He says you know how to build just about anything.”

“I can’t think about it.”

“I can imagine us all putting up wall studs and maybe a metal roof so we can come out and listen to the rain on it. As soon as the snow’s off the ground.”

“Was nothing wrong with the old garage.”

“We should’ve fixed it up.”

“You know, Fishbone used to visit me.”

“He still visits you.”

“Now he comes to visit the river. He comes to get out of his house in the city, to get away from screaming grandchildren. He even comes to see you, I think. You know, I never told anybody what I told you.”

“Can I tell you something?” Margo said, and her voice began to warble. “Something I didn’t think I’d tell anybody?”

Smoke lit another cigarette and looked at her.

“You know how you joke about how I should kill you?”

“I’m not joking.”

“Well, I did once kill a man,” Margo said. “Last year.”

“With that .22?” He sounded skeptical.

“A shotgun. I thought I had to kill him. He was hurting somebody I loved. For a while I thought I didn’t regret it. But I wish I hadn’t done it.”

“You going to turn yourself in?”

“Heck, no.”

Smoke laughed. “Was he a lousy son of a bitch of a man?”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“He had little kids and a wife. They probably miss him. And thinking about you dying, and my dad and my grandpa dying. If I could undo it and make him alive again, I would.”

“If you could kill a man once, you can do it again,” Smoke said. He took off his glasses and squinted at her, but Margo, who was hugging herself against the cold, just kept looking at the empty slab.

The neighborhood Christmas lights came down after New Year’s, and the winter trudged on through short days and long, cold nights. Margo took trips into town to get essentials for herself and Smoke, but she felt she was in a kind of semi-hibernation, a state in which she moved slowly and quietly and did only what she had to do. Her fake-fur-lined parka reached halfway down her thighs and more than covered up the fact of her slightly swollen middle to strangers she might come across, but whenever Smoke or Fishbone saw her taking off her jacket in Smoke’s kitchen, they smiled at her belly as though she were bringing somebody prettier than herself into the room. Margo’s body had always been her reliable friend, whether in handling a rifle, splitting firewood, rowing for miles, or keeping her balance despite physical strain, but now her body was becoming strange to her.

Fishbone was right that Margo had hidden from the farmer the first time he came to her boat; she had gone inside and curled up under her sleeping bags. She hadn’t been ready to meet a new man, especially one who could ask her to leave. She didn’t know if she’d be attracted to him the way she was to his brother Johnny. When he next came to her boat, in the middle of January, she couldn’t hide. She was standing on a stepladder, raking the roof of her camper, dragging the snow off—it was something she had not thought about until Smoke mentioned it, that the weight of snow on the flat roof could collapse the structure. Margo climbed off the ladder and walked across her shoveled and sanded gangplank to meet the farmer. He was very tall and very thin.

“You must be Margo Crane,” he said. “I’m George Harland.”

When he offered his hand, she stepped forward and shook it.

“Smoke’s boat,” the man said and nodded. “He tells me he sold it to you. Tells me I ought to go along with you anchoring it here on my property so his nieces don’t get upset.” The farmer looked up and down the river and concluded, “It’s an odd sort of proposal. But here you are in person.”

She nodded. She liked his patient manner. When she had spied on him arguing with his wife, his slow calm had made him seem a little stupid. Margo wondered if that was how she seemed to other people. She focused on his right hand, which was missing most of its index finger.