Rivers

by Michael Farris Smith

  He stepped back. Stood in the middle of the room. It felt as though a great hole might open up beneath him and swallow him into the earth and he wished that such a thing were possible.

  He stood there, still and insignificant, with unfocused eyes.

  Minutes later, he walked back to the dresser and opened the drawer and took out a pair of the tiny socks and stuck them in the front pocket of his jeans. Then he picked up his boots and left the room.

  He sat down on the floor in the front room and took off the wet boots and put on the dry ones and tied double knots. Then he walked outside to look for Habana and the dog followed him.

  At the back of the house he expected to find her door open and he was right. He looked inside the converted family room and was surprised to see her saddle and bridle there. He called out and whistled for her as he looked across the back fields. He asked the dog where she was but the dog didn’t answer. He walked out into the backyard and stepped across the mangled barbed-wire fence and he stood out in the field with his hands on his hips and turned in a circle, calling for her and looking for her and hoping she would appear from somewhere along the tree line once she knew it was him. “Go look for her,” he said to the dog, but the dog stayed at his side. He called for her three times more and then he walked back to the house shaking his head as he looked for what might have been left outside. Below the kitchen window he found the generator and he was certain now that they would be back. That they had put everything they could into the Jeep and were unloading and coming back for the rest. Nobody left a generator.

  The dog barked and Cohen turned and looked and Habana was walking across the field toward them. He walked out to meet her and he stroked her neck and then he hugged her. With her mane across his face, he began to cry a tearless cry, short rhythmic pulses of hurt. He held on to her and his body shook and the hacking sound of anger and pleading came from his mouth and the horse stood still for him as if she understood. A passive sunshine bled through the veiled sky and found them and he held on and cried as they stood together in the soft, wet ground and then when he was done he raised up and told her not to ever tell anybody what had just happened. Don’t know what somebody might say if they knew about this. Promise me, he said and in her large glassy eyes he saw that he could trust her. He sniffed and then he spit and then they walked back toward the house. The dog had waited in the backyard and watched them and Cohen tried to swear the dog to secrecy as well but the dog turned and twitched its tail as if it were jealous that it hadn’t been included.

  He put the saddle and bridle on Habana and left her grazing in the backyard and he started walking out across the back field. A hundred yards away was the tree line and he splashed his way there, the ground sucking at his feet. The trees had the look of losing the fight, some splintered, some on the ground with their massive roots reaching out like flailing arms, some sagging from the rain like old men. Scattered around in the trees were two-by-fours from his efforts with the child’s room. He walked to the base of a fractured oak to the two tombstones. Only one body but two tombstones.

  He knelt in the wet earth.

  Around him the blue-gray world. The world that he tried to hold on to, that he tried to keep alive with the old colors. The gray world that he didn’t think could win but was winning.

  He stared at Elisa’s tombstone. Only her name and the dates of her birth and death. He stared at the baby’s tombstone. Only her name.

  The stones were slick, splashed with dirt and wet leaves. Cohen leaned forward and with his hand he wiped them clean. Once he had walked out to the graves with a hammer and chisel with plans of carving a cross for each of them, but when he got there, he changed his mind. The rain tapped and the sky rumbled.

  She was difficult to see now. She had been for a while. Even the photographs seemed to change her image, shifting her eyes and ears and nose slightly, making her out to be a little different than the way she was. She appeared most clearly in his subconscious. In the dreams. As an apparition shifting with the clouds or flashing in the lightning crashes. Her voice in the thunder or the drone of the rain. He leaned over and pushed his fist into the soggy ground and wondered if she were even there. If he started to dig, whether he would hit a casket, whether she would be in it if it was there, or was there only a bottomless, muddy hole where she used to be and a wet earth that would suck at his feet and drag him down, farther and farther from the surface into a never-ending tunnel of mud, an earth soaked to its core and slowly devouring itself.

  He pushed his fists into the ground and they sank and the brown water covered his knuckles and he felt there was nothing there, only this wet, sucking ground that had taken everything he had loved. And what had he loved? He had loved the sweet, sticky ocean breeze and swimming in the ocean and the salty taste on his lips and the gritty feel of the sand on his hands and feet. He had loved the pier on Friday nights and the buckets of wings and ribs and bottled beer and the two guys with the guitars who played Buffett and Skynyrd and Steve Earle and whoever else you called out. He had loved the bush hog and its rhythm and cutting in the hot-ass sun in July and sweating until he couldn’t sweat anymore and the neat rows he cut and the nameless cows and their calves that had fed off their land. He had loved the girl with the red toenails and their quiet spot along the gravel road and what they had discovered together in the summer nights with the windows down and the mosquitoes at their bare bodies. He had loved baseball practice and the thwack of the ball coming off the bat and sliding headfirst and the ridiculous dugout conversations and winning. He had loved the sting of a sunburn. He had loved the blooming dogwood trees in the sprawling lawns of the antebellum homes in Biloxi. He had loved riding up and down Highway 90 with a cooler of beer and two or three buddies and all the bullshit they fed one another and cranking up the radio to the hair metal. He had loved the excitement of the coast once the casinos started going up and he had loved the jingle-jangle of the slot machines and the free drinks you got while playing blackjack and he had loved the long-legged waitresses in the fishnet stockings who brought them to you. He had loved the first warm day and smell of her suntan lotion and he had loved taking a blanket to the beach at night and her falling asleep with her head on his chest and the way the stars looked as he held his hand on her back and felt her breathing. He had loved marrying her in bare feet, standing on the dock with the ocean out before them. He had loved the buildings that he framed and he had loved going to the cooler he kept in the back of the truck at the end of a long, hot day and the sound the beer can made when he popped it open. He had loved the gleam in her eyes when she came out of the bathroom and nodded and said you’re gonna be a daddy and he had loved that she wasn’t scared of the storms and he promised her he would stick it out because this is our home and it can’t last forever and he had loved sitting on the living room floor and thinking about baby names. He had loved that it was going to be a girl.

  He lifted his fists out of the ground. Small imprints where he had been pressing filled with water. He didn’t know if she were there or if the earth beneath her tombstone was as vacant as the earth beneath the child’s.

  His fingers dripped with muddy water and he held out his hand and watched the brown drops fall from his fingertips. He then got up from his knees and walked back to the house, refusing to turn around and look again.

  He went inside and in the kitchen he climbed up on a chair and slid over the ceiling tile and took out the cigar box. He took out all the money, a stack of hundred-dollar bills. He then reached up into the ceiling again and felt around once more and his fingers found the knife his grandfather had given him. It was a bowie knife in a leather sheath and he took out the knife and the blade was a smooth and clean silver from the years that the boy and then the man had taken care to shine it. He slid the knife back into the sheath and then snapped the sheath onto his belt loop. He tossed the cigar box back up into the ceiling and moved the tile into place. Then he stepped down from the chair and folded the stack of bill
s and put them in the front pocket of his jeans.

  In the front room the pillow from the cot was on the floor. He picked it up and removed the pillowcase and began rummaging through the kitchen, filling it with whatever he could find. The remaining bottles of water and the nearly empty pint of whiskey and the aspirin. Knocked onto the floor in haste were a can of pears and small tins of Vienna sausage and two cans of green beans and a pack of crackers. In the bottom cabinets he had a spare flashlight and a few feet of rope and some duct tape. It all went into the pillowcase and then he walked to the hallway closet, and what clothes were left he put in. Some random socks and faded T-shirts and underwear and a long-sleeve shirt. In the front room he looked again in the closet where the shotgun and .22 had been. A couple of paperbacks were on the floor and a pair of work gloves and half a box of dog biscuits. He took the random items and he tossed the pillow case over his shoulder like a white-bearded man with a sleigh waiting outside. He walked around the side of the house and set the sack on the ground next to the generator, then he pulled the cap off the spark plug and unscrewed the plug and put it in his pocket. He took out his knife and cut the gas line and he unplugged the extension cord and sliced it through.

  The dog was in the backyard with Habana and he came over to them and said, “It could be the start of one long day. Longer than it has been. Thought I’d let you know. Especially you, girl.” He scratched at Habana’s ear. Thought of the day she had appeared across the field, wet and muddy and saddled but without a rider, her name engraved across the saddle. He thought of how he had approached her slowly, and she had let him, and he had checked her for cuts or scratches or the blood of whoever had been on her last. How she had helped him survive, taking him places the Jeep couldn’t go, into the swamplands that now extended by miles from the flooding rivers, where pieces of boats and the tin roofs of wooden shacks hung in the clutches of the gray monsterlike moss trees. Along the highways obstructed by trees and telephone poles and covered in lower stretches by still, tepid waters. Along the beachfront that had shrunk back and served as the dumping grounds for whatever the storms could drag in or haul away. Half-trailers and metal signs from flattened hotels and gas stations and dead animals. Poker tables and mattresses and steel pieces from crumbled oil rigs and a school bus. He thought of filling garbage bags with canned foods and paperback novels and blankets and batteries and gas cans and whatever else seemed necessary, how for weeks they had moved across the countryside until he felt like he had hoarded all there was to hoard.

  And then he thought of how they were back in the same spot, starting all over again, and he hoped Habana knew how much he needed her.

  He left the animals and walked inside, once more into the bedroom.

  Closing his eyes, Cohen listened for their voices. The voices of the two people who had made a home here. In the house they had built. On the land that had been in his family for generations. The ocean so close. Everything seemingly where it was supposed to be. He listened for those voices. Tried to hear the laughter. Tried to hear what they were talking about as they stood together in the kitchen or sat in the living room with the windows open on a cool night. He couldn’t hear them, so he tried harder. Squeezing his eyes shut with his face tense as if fearful of some imaginary, invisible, yet very real monster.

  Still he couldn’t hear them. He opened his eyes.

  He walked to the window and looked out at the concrete slab. Looked at the pile of lumber. In the wildest part of his mind he thought that maybe one day, when all of this was over, he’d be able to come back and finish like he had promised.

  He walked over to the nightstand and opened the drawer. He found a pencil and a piece of scrap paper and he wrote a note. At the doorway, he looked around the room once more, and then he felt in his back pocket to make sure he had the photograph and it was there. He stepped across the hallway and looked at the child’s clothes and toys and he said good night. And then he walked into the kitchen and left the note on the counter and he walked outside into the damp, chilling world where he picked up his pillowcase and climbed onto Habana and told the dog to come along. They moved lazily down the driveway to the gravel road. At the end of the driveway, Cohen turned Habana and he looked again at the house. He had said goodbye to them a thousand times, but this time felt the most real.

  And then he nudged Habana and they moved on.

  8

  THEY ARRIVED HALF AN HOUR after Cohen rode away with habana and the dog.

  The Jeep stopped on the carport slab and the four of them got out. Joe walked over to the generator and noticed the cut gas line and said, “Looks like your boy has been here. Damn cut the gas line. And took the spark plug.”

  Aggie said grab it anyway and they each took an end and loaded it onto the trailer hitched on to the Jeep. The boy and the girl went inside and searched through what they had left on the first run, taking anything that might matter but mostly happy about the clothes. The girl went into the bedroom and she stood in front of the dresses, looking through them as if spending a leisurely day in a department store. The men came in and began taking the furniture out of the bedrooms and they called for the boy to help them. Piece by piece the nightstands and dressers and mattresses were taken out and loaded onto the trailer.

  “I didn’t know there was nobody down here still living this good,” Aggie said as he carried out a set of bed rails.

  “Me neither,” said Joe. “He ain’t no more, though. What you reckon he’s doing?”

  “He might be sitting out there behind a tree somewhere with his sight on the back of your head.”

  “Evan said they got all the guns. Didn’t you?”

  “Think so.”

  “Think? Better goddamn well know.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Aggie. “If he was sitting behind a tree with something to shoot we’d be shot.”

  They went back to work. Around the back of the house, Joe noticed the foundation and the wet, discolored pile of lumber. He called out to Aggie and Aggie came around.

  “Looks like we got a winner for most ambitious resident,” Aggie said.

  They kept on and soon the house was emptied and Evan called out to Mariposa to come on. She was lingering in the bedroom, had picked five dresses, and they were folded and stuck into her overcoat. She came out of the front door and said, “Go see if that horse is still back there.”

  “That horse is long gone,” said Joe. “But there’s a cellar back around there, about two feet of water in it. Got some shelves, though. A bunch of saws and nail guns and stuff.”

  “That’s gonna do a lot of good,” Aggie said. “Leave that stuff. We know where to find it if we change our minds.”

  “All right,” Joe said. He turned to Mariposa. “You and Evan sit back there on top of the stuff to keep it from bouncing off.”

  “I ain’t sitting back there,” she said.

  He reached over and slapped her hard across the face and told her to shut her goddamn mouth and get back there. One of the dresses fell out of her coat and onto the ground and the man said, “Where the hell you think you going? To the ball, Cinderella?”

  The two men laughed and Evan picked it up for her and looked to see if she was okay but she pushed him back and walked to the trailer and climbed up on top of the mattresses. Evan followed her and sat beside her and Mariposa glared at the two men. Aggie got behind the wheel and Joe said he was gonna walk through one more time. Inside, he passed through each room, checking for anything they had missed that might be of use or value, but the place had been stripped of its offering. In the kitchen he found a note on the counter that none of them had noticed. He picked it up and read. Didn’t laugh but smiled an uncomfortable smile. He folded the note and walked out and got in the passenger side of the Jeep.

  “This is a good old place,” Aggie said as he settled behind the steering wheel. He cranked the Jeep and then Joe handed the note over to him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Looks like their friend
left us a little note.”

  The older man unfolded it, read it, then huffed and gave it back.

  “What you think?”

  Aggie paused. Pursed his lips and put the Jeep into first gear. “Don’t think nothing,” he said. “Too much of that’ll get you killed down here. You should know that by now.”

  The gray of day was beginning to fade and thunder that had been far off now rumbled more closely and Aggie said the digging would have to wait until tomorrow. The Jeep moved off the concrete slab and out into the backyard and circled the house, the tires spinning some and the trailer tires sinking some but they made it around to the gravel and moved on, the girl and the boy vibrating with the furniture and generator like mindless wind-up toys. Aggie had shrugged off the note but Joe thought about it as he tucked it into his pocket. They moved along the skinny road and he looked out at the crippled trees and the twisted countryside and thought for the first time in a long time about his mother in her burgundy dress, his hand in hers as they walked through the front door of the little brick church on the dusty road. It seemed like the memory of some other woman and some other child and his thoughts drifted away from what he had become as he considered the mother and child and the tranquillity of the sanctuary. The cream-colored walls and cherrywood pews and slightly out-of-tune piano that played for the slightly out-of-tune choir composed of workingmen in short ties and old ladies with their glasses held around their necks by beaded silver chains. The rough voice of the preacher and the stories that he told about the man who walked from place to place. Touching them and healing them. Speaking to them of forgiveness and tolerance. Feeding them with crumbs and giving them all the chance to live in golden castles on golden streets in golden clouds.