Rivers

by Michael Farris Smith

  He nodded.

  Then they heard Nadine and Kris screaming at Aggie’s dead body. And then at Ava’s dead body. You fucking liar, Nadine yelled at the dead woman, her voice savage and vehement. Cohen got up and went over to them and Kris and Nadine were kicking the limp bodies and screaming son of a bitch and go to hell. The bodies absorbed the kicks like old mattresses and lay heavy on the wet ground. The women’s voices were filled with hate and celebration and seemed to carry out across the land on the wind. Evan only stood there. Kris kicked little kicks with her round belly and short legs but Nadine reared back and crushed ribs and cheekbones with her heavy boots and winding, skinny legs. Cohen stood back from them in the dark with his arms folded. Mariposa sneaked up behind Cohen and she wrapped her arm around his and when he turned to her she pulled closer to him and kissed him on the mouth. She held her hand against his wet beard and he let himself go and leaned in to her and felt her wet mouth and wet nose against his own. The women kicked and danced and screamed and cussed and Cohen let himself fall.

  Only for a moment. He pulled back from her as quickly as he had gone to her. He stared at her but it was too dark for expressions and she let go of his arm. Wiped at her face. Then she turned around and walked over to the bodies and started kicking with Kris and Nadine.

  “Come on, Evan. What you waiting on?” Nadine said. She was bent over with her hands on her knees, getting her second wind.

  “He’s already dead,” Evan said.

  “And he deserves a lot worse,” Nadine answered. Then she went back to it.

  Cohen said, “She was working to get him loose if anybody wants to know.”

  Kris held her hands on her sides and was out of breath. She backed away and let Nadine and Mariposa have it and Evan took her by the arm and said, “You better calm down before you pop.”

  She raised up and said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with me.”

  “Hell yeah,” Nadine yelled at her. “Get back on it.”

  Kris moved back to the body and kicked and kicked. Nadine stomped on Aggie’s head with the heel of her boot and Mariposa had run out of steam and stood back.

  Evan walked quietly to the fire.

  Something cracked under Nadine’s heel and she screamed I fucking hate you and she stomped and stomped and there was another crack and now Mariposa and Kris kicked at Ava, her body so layered in clothes that it sounded like they were kicking a mattress.

  Cohen watched with his arms crossed. He wondered what it would feel like to join them, to let it out, whatever he would be letting out. But he wasn’t going to invade and knew he couldn’t understand what they had been through or what they owed the two dead bodies.

  Kris paused again and bent over. “I can’t do no more,” she said, huffing.

  Nadine and Mariposa stopped and looked at her.

  “You all right?” Cohen asked.

  “She’s all right,” Nadine said. “Why don’t you let us be for a bit? Go sit down.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” Cohen asked Kris again.

  “Cohen,” Mariposa said.

  Kris dropped down on a knee and Nadine and Mariposa moved to her.

  “If you need me I’m over there,” Cohen said, but they didn’t hear him, and he left them and went and sat down with Evan. A few minutes later, they were at it again.

  EVAN HAD GONE INSIDE WITH Brisco and Cohen was alone when the women walked back into the compound, hands on hips. The rain had lightened and they all sat down. Cohen found bottles of water and passed them out and he stood next to the dying fire.

  “I knew it,” Kris said. “I knew she was gonna do some shit no matter what she said.”

  “Yep,” Nadine said. “I damn well knew it, too. And we ain’t burying nobody just so you know.”

  Cohen lit a cigarette and blew warm air on his hands. He looked at Mariposa and she was looking at him. When their eyes caught, he stared at her a moment. Then he blew on his hands again. Nadine turned up her bottle and finished it and tossed it onto the red coals. The bottle twisted and melted.

  “I been thinking I’m gonna give it away,” Kris said. “That’s the first thing I thought today when I realized we were getting out of here. Don’t even wanna see it. Just take, I’m gonna tell them. Don’t show it to me only take it on. But when it started hurting before I started changing my mind. Right in the middle of them cramps, I started wanting it to be all right and wanting to see it. Even when I was hollering it hurt so bad I was wanting to be able to hold on to it and hoping I get to. Now I’m hoping I get to.”

  Cohen said, “You’ll get to.”

  “If we make it,” Nadine said.

  Now he was tired of smoking and he wanted to drink again. He went over to his trailer and came back with a whiskey pint. He handed it to Kris and she shook her head.

  “One sip ain’t gonna hurt,” Nadine said.

  She took the bottle and a sip and her shoulders raised and fell. “I never did like that shit,” she said as she passed it to Nadine.

  Cohen said, “You’ll be fine.”

  “Maybe.”

  Nadine drank and then she said she was sick of being wet and Aggie was dead and gone and no offense but there was nothing else worth sitting out there for. She took another drink and passed the bottle to Mariposa and went inside.

  Mariposa held the bottle to her nose and sniffed. Then she took a little drink and winced. Cohen shook his head and took the bottle from her.

  “What’d she look like?” Kris asked.

  Cohen switched the bottle from hand to hand. He thought of the picture in his back pocket and started to pull it out. But instead he said, “She looked like a runner ’cause that’s what she was. Kinda tall. Ate whatever cause she burnt it all up. Ran cross-country in high school. Ran whatever after that. Used to run on the beach. I’d lay there and drink beer and she’d run up and back a few miles. Then she’d go out into the water and cool off and call me names for being so damn lazy.”

  “You shoulda got up,” Kris said.

  “Nah. I shouldn’t have. That was her thing. I liked it being her thing. Said it kept her sane and I woulda screwed that up huffing and puffing trying to keep up.”

  “That was probably smart.”

  “Yeah. One of the smart things I’ve done, I guess.”

  Cohen drank some more. Knelt next to the ashen fire. “Not that long until light,” he said. “You know it’s gonna rain hard again soon. You should probably go lay back down.”

  “Probably,” Kris said. “Lemme have one more sip.”

  “It ain’t no good, you said.”

  She held out her hand. “I know it ain’t. But it’s a sleeping pill.”

  He handed her the bottle. She took a sip, shook her head, then took another. She gave it back and said ugh. Then Mariposa helped her out of the chair and walked with her as Kris moved gingerly toward the trailer. Cohen asked if they needed any help but Kris said no. “Save all your help for getting me to the Line, ’cause I told you I decided I want to hold on to it. If God’ll let me.”

  Mariposa closed the door behind Kris and she walked back. Cohen drank again. She wiped at her face and said, “I don’t wanna sit in the rain. Do you?”

  He looked up at the night sky. “It’s not raining much.”

  “It will be. You said.”

  He nodded.

  She stepped over to him and held out her hand. He looked at it. It was wet and frail-looking. She seemed the same way. He looked around the compound, out into the dark acreage, out toward the place where Aggie and Ava lay. Then he looked back to her and down at her extended hand and it seemed to shake from cold or fear or something.

  He reached out and took it and she led them to her trailer.

  25

  IT SEEMED AS THOUGH HER entire life had been driven by her imagination. From an early age, her head filled with ghost stories and listening from behind the curtain to the spiritual confessions of those who paid for her grandmother’s otherworld connections and the French
Quarter spirits that gathered in the glow of the lampposts and her own childlike manifestations of the space between the imagined and the real. The tarot card readers in Jackson Square who let her sit and listen and the friendly vampire who stood outside Lafitte’s in the winter and led the cemetery tours and the Mardi Gras masks and the fabulous costumes of the parades. The stories she created for the Quarter regulars who came in and out of her father’s store and the stories she spun while she looked into the windows of empty buildings as she and her mother walked back and forth from home to school and the boats up and down the river and the beautiful women and handsome men she imagined sitting on the decks and drifting in and out of her city.

  And then the storms. From bad to worse and more frequent and sometimes evacuations and then regular evacuations and then bold predictions of a weather pattern that would go on for years and years and continue to destroy and many scoffed and many refused to believe but her mind processed it easily. She would lie awake nights, on the eve of another storm, and dream of the catastrophe in vivid colors, see the shingles ripping from rooftops and hear the cracking of tree limbs and feel the flooding waters around her neck. She saw the skeletons of buildings and wrecked ships and heard the crashing of waves and heard the great roar of thunder before it ever arrived. And when the storm did arrive and perhaps it hadn’t been quite what she had imagined, melancholy came over her that lasted until the next warning and then her mind would create havoc all over again and eventually the reality of the storms caught up with the projections of her imagined landscape. Even as the storms worsened and morphed into one long stream of destruction, even after the insanity arrived with the proclamation of the Line, it all seemed to be something that she had seen before, as if when she closed her eyes she had always been off in some other world where Mother Nature was a vengeful authority. There was not a sky darker than the skies behind her eyes, there was not a wind more powerful than the winds of her mind.

  Then she had found herself alone and she had discovered that there were plenty of things in this world that were unimaginable. She had never been able to understand this place with these men and their roped-down trailers. Never been able to conjure anything more horrific than this as she lay down at night. Instead of creating new worlds, her dreams were filled with fascinations of escape. Filled with fascinations of revenge. Filled with the faces of those she had loved and now missed. And in the waking hours, she could only wonder where they were. Wonder if someone was looking for her. Wonder if anyone was still alive who cared. She was certain she had family. Somewhere. But this new world was so vast and shifting and unanswerable that she hadn’t been able to create anything but an unhappy ending for herself and the others. The little girl whose mind once was a carnival of ghost tales and spirit worlds and the romance of hurricanes was now a young woman whose insatiable imagination had been replaced with the sharp edges of the real thing.

  Then she and Evan had gone out, and she had choked the man in the Jeep, and she had gone to his house and she had seen where he slept and whom he slept with and what his life had been like and what he was holding on to. And she had taken his shoe box that held the contents of his life and she had held the letters and worn the jewelry and her mind had come alive again. It was as if she had walked through a secret door and taken the hand of someone she once created and had led him out of the dream into reality. It was as if she had become again that little girl. Since she had been alone, since she had been brought to this place, since she had been forced to endure what all the women there had been forced to endure, she had in some ways forgotten that she was alive, that her life belonged to her.

  She held Cohen’s hand and led him into the trailer and on a shelf on the wall she lit the candles. He stood holding the whiskey bottle and she took it from him and set it on the shelf. She stepped back from him and removed her coat. He reached out and took a strand of her black hair and let it trail through his fingers.

  She whispered to him, “I can be who you want me to be.”

  She wore a flannel shirt and she began to unbutton it as he held her hair, rubbed it between his fingers as if it were a fabric that he had never touched before. She unbuttoned the shirt to the end and she pushed it back from her chest, and then her shoulders, and it fell and the wind pushed the trailer and the candlelight waved.

  He let go of her hair and looked at her.

  Her hair was around her neck and down her chest and he moved it back and exposed her neckline. The V of the dress reached between her breasts.

  Cohen stepped back. The long black sleeves. The tie around the waist that he had tied for her each time she wore it. Mariposa tugged at her waist and lifted the rest of the dress, which she was wearing tucked into her pants, and it fell over her hips and reached her knees.

  He began to shake his head. She took a step toward him and he took another step back. “Stop,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” she said and she reached out for him, but he grabbed her by the wrist and lowered her hand.

  “I said stop,” he said and his voice had changed. “That’s not yours.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean it to be. I meant it to be hers.”

  He reached to the shelf and grabbed the bottle. He turned it up and drank hard. Then he looked at her again. “I don’t wanna pretend,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d think I would. I don’t know why the hell anybody would want to do something like that.”

  The expectation left her face. Her shoulders slumped and she seemed to shrink.

  “Whatever else you got, don’t let me see it,” he said and he turned and walked out the door.

  Mariposa stood still. Watched her shadows. She realized now that this would be her last night here. That tomorrow night, they would be somewhere else. She lifted the dress over her head and dropped it on the floor. Put the flannel shirt on again. Put on her coat. He is not a dream, she thought. He is not a story. No matter how hard you try. She stood still and wondered if maybe he was just outside the door. Maybe he was coming back. Maybe there would be a long pause and then a knock.

  She waited but there was nothing. You can’t put a spell on him, she thought. Not down here. You can’t put a spell on nobody and you can’t make the dead come to life.

  26

  COHEN CHANGED HIS BANDAGE, PUT on his coat and put the pistols in the coat pockets, tucked the shoe box under his arm and came outside and found them ready to go. Evan was holding the shotgun and he handed it to him. They gathered in the early morning in the middle of the compound, around the smoldering, wasted fire. It rained and the wind had become steady and out across the Gulf the sky was a deep, threatening gray.

  Cohen walked over and they told him that these were the rules that had been agreed upon—whatever vehicle you get into belongs to you and the others in it. At the Line, the baby and Kris go to a doctor immediately. After that, no one owes anybody anything. Cohen nodded.

  “Yeah, but what about when we get up there?” Kris asked.

  “That’s what we’re talking about,” Cohen said.

  “Not all that. I mean like, are we still alive or wrote off?”

  Nadine said, “Guess we’ll find out. Might be some resurrections.”

  They looked around for the last time at this place where some of them had spent weeks, some of them months, some of them almost two years. The rain fell on the drab, lifeless compound. The bodies of Aggie and Ava lay off to the side at the back end of the trailer. It was now a place for restless spirits, a grave site.

  They loaded garbage bags filled with clothes and other possessions into the beds of the pickups. Kris held the baby and he was sucking on a bottle and the rare air of optimism appeared on their faces as they prepared for what was next. Cohen stood at the back of the truck they had filled with supplies and checked to see if there was anything that he had missed. In the last act of preparation, Evan began to put the gas cans into the truck bed. Kris and Nadine walked over together to the trucks. Mariposa went with them. Kris handed
the baby to Cohen and they began to take the gas cans and he asked them what the hell they were doing.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nadine said.

  The three of them went from trailer to trailer, opening the doors and stepping inside and pouring gasoline onto the beds and floors and then out again and along the ropes that held the trailers strapped into the ground. Cohen cradled the child and held the bottle to his mouth and shook his head as he watched them, knew that their journey was becoming more troublesome with each drop spilled into the trailers. He also knew that his voice would not be enough to stop this cleansing. He talked to the baby as the women continued their work. Be a good little man, he said. Got a pretty good trip coming up. Hope you ride well. We’ll get you somewhere if you can stick with it.

  When they were done, the women returned the gas cans to the truck bed and then without being asked, Cohen produced a cigarette lighter from his pocket. Nadine took it from him and Kris and Mariposa filled their arms with rolls of toilet paper. They splashed back and forth across the compound, ducking into a trailer, lighting a toilet paper roll and tossing it in, and moving on to the next until they were all done. Then they gathered again in the middle and within minutes there were heavy coils of smoke curling out of the open doors of the trailers, and then there were yellow flames burning through the roofs and out of the windows. Pops and hisses and low roars of the growing flames fought against the rain. They stood and watched until all of the trailers were burning like giant campfires and then they walked out of this ring of fire and they all moved over toward the trucks. Nobody said a word as Kris took the infant from Cohen.

  Evan cranked one truck. Nadine cranked the other. And then Cohen cranked the Jeep and Mariposa got in with him. He had cut a piece of tarp and roped it across the top of the Jeep and the rain slapped against it. He looked at her and said, “The last time you rode with me I almost died.”

  She held up her hands and showed him both sides, as if she were a magician proving there were no strings. “You should know that story by now.”