Rivers

by Michael Farris Smith

  “What is it?” Evan whispered.

  “Why are you whispering? It ain’t more rats, is it?” Nadine asked.

  “Hold on,” Cohen said. He held the light on the tub and walked over to it. When he got there, he reached down and touched his fingertips to the end of the faucet and it was wet. Then he shined the light down to the drain and he touched it and it was also wet. He then turned the handle for the cold water and there was a delay, and a groan, and then water sputtered out of the faucet, copper-colored and filled with little specks of something. It kept on sputtering and spitting but Cohen left it running and soon the line had cleared and a stream of water ran from the faucet.

  Cohen stood back and smiled and said, “I’ll be damned.”

  “I got it. I got it first,” Nadine was yelling as she turned and gave the baby to Kris. She ran out of the room and back down the stairs and then they heard her running through the house, yelling, “We got a tub and water. We got a tub and water, a tub and water.” Kris and the baby and Mariposa and Brisco followed her back down the stairs.

  “Hadn’t seen one of those in a while,” Evan said. “Gotta say I wouldn’t mind a bath myself.”

  “Gonna be a cold one,” Cohen said.

  “No colder than these birdbaths we been taking since forever.”

  “That’s true.”

  Evan walked around the tub, moved around the dark room. “Sorry about that back there,” he said.

  Cohen shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I was curious.”

  “No shit.”

  “I didn’t think it’d be a thousand rats.”

  Cohen moved across the room and shined the flashlight out of the window. He thought about the look on the boy’s face after they had gotten away from the men in the parking lot. He turned back to Evan and said, “I hate I had to ask you to shoot.”

  Evan didn’t answer.

  “You all right?”

  He nodded. “I’m all right.”

  “Just so you know, Evan, there is one thing in this world I won’t worry about,” Cohen said. “And that one thing is you.”

  Evan was about to speak again but the footsteps of the others were on the stairs and into the upstairs hallway and they came in the bathroom with lanterns and bars of soap and towels and clothes. Mariposa came in behind them, holding the baby.

  “Get out, get on out,” Nadine said and she and Kris ushered the men out of the room.

  “Come on, Mariposa,” Kris said. “Let’s get the baby first.”

  “Where’s Brisco?” Evan asked.

  “He said he didn’t want a bath,” Mariposa said.

  Cohen said, “Go ahead and run the water but don’t get undressed. I got an idea.”

  He and Evan headed downstairs and outside to the trucks. Evan held the flashlight while Cohen raised the tarp covering the truck bed and stuck his head under. He found the propane burner for the stove and he went back into the house and up to the bathroom. He took the legs off the stove and the tub sat just high enough to slide the stovetop underneath. Cohen took a lighter from his pocket and lit the stove and the blue flames wrapped the bottom of the tub. “That’ll help knock off the chill,” he said.

  “That’s plumb genius,” Nadine said. “Now get on.”

  Cohen and Evan went back to the trucks and worked against the storm but were able to get out what they needed for the night. Food and drink and some blankets. They took it all into the kitchen. Then Cohen went out one more time and he came back with a shotgun and shells.

  COHEN AND EVAN AND BRISCO had taken off their coats and they sat on the floor in the kitchen. Cohen drinking a beer. Evan and Brisco sharing a bottle of water and eating from a can of green beans. The voices of the women upstairs and the rain coming down and the wind shoving at the house and Brisco trying to explain why he did not need to take a bath and Evan trying to explain why he did.

  And then Evan said, “You know that girl likes you.”

  Cohen didn’t answer.

  “I said you know that girl likes you.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Don’t you know it?”

  Cohen shook his head. He started to make some crack about he-said-she-said up and down the high school hallway, but then he realized Evan wouldn’t know anything about that. That he had never been up and down a high school hallway, had never passed notes, been to ball practice, skipped out on class in the afternoon, climbed into the backseat with the girl from history class and felt around for things. Never been to a movie with a girl or gone riding with the windows down and the music loud on a spring afternoon. That he was the perfect age for such things but he would not know them and he seemed to be so far beyond them anyway. And it was then that Cohen began to feel the weight of the others in this house on this dot on the map below the Line. He had always been aware that he wasn’t the only one who had lost, but the losses for others seemed different to him, more true and exact, now that the losses of others had eyes and faces and arms and legs.

  “I think she’s just lonely. Like everybody else,” Cohen said.

  “Nah. I think it’s more than that.”

  “You remember she wanted to kill me. You remember that?”

  Evan laughed. “I remember. She didn’t mean it, though. I told you we didn’t mean nothing. We had to.”

  “You told me you didn’t mean nothing. You didn’t say we.”

  “Yeah, but you know it. Anyway, you’re probably twice as old as her.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You might be.”

  “How old is she?”

  Evan shrugged. “Eighteen? Nineteen?”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “I never asked.”

  “How old you think I am?”

  “About twice whatever she is.”

  Cohen shook his head. “Got me there.”

  Brisco got up from the floor and started playing with his shadow on the wall, his arms out and gliding like a hawk.

  “You like her?” Evan asked.

  “No. Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “That ain’t no answer.” Evan huffed. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve and set the can of green beans on the floor. “Just seems like—” he started, then stopped.

  “Seems like what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Seems like a miracle that anybody down here would find anybody else. Especially you.”

  Cohen drank his beer. Tried to figure out how to answer. “Nobody’s found nobody. Nobody’s looking for nobody. I’m guessing about forty more miles and the road splits us all.”

  “You think?” Evan asked.

  “Which part?”

  “That we’ll all split up.”

  On the floor next to Cohen were two more beers and he took one and handed it to Evan. “Here,” he said.

  Evan took it. Nodded. “What’d you used to do?”

  “Do?”

  “Yeah. Like work or whatever.”

  “I framed houses. Built a bunch of these houses that are nothing but litter now.”

  “How’d you learn all that?”

  “My dad did the same. Started working with him in the summers when I was, I guess about your age. Kept on from there.”

  Evan thought a minute. Sipped from the beer. “I think I’d like that. Be outside and stuff. See something happening every day. You like it?”

  “Yeah,” Cohen said. “I liked it. Even kept on for a while after all this mess started.”

  “You mean that thing on the back of your house.”

  Cohen nodded. “That thing.” He felt so stupid now, thinking he could finish that room. “Let’s talk about the weather instead.”

  “Okay. I think it’s gonna rain.”

  “It’s already raining,” Brisco said, making an alligator chomp with his shadow.

  “Then it’s a good thing we own a farmhouse,” Cohen s
aid. “Complete with a tub and running water and a kitchen.”

  “Too bad it didn’t come with firewood,” Evan said.

  “That’s true,” Cohen said. Then he thought a minute and he set down his beer and said maybe it did, to come on and bring the lantern. They walked into one of the other rooms where the floor was warped and bowed. Evan held the light and Cohen set down his beer and got his fingers up under one of the boards and he pulled. It came right up. And when one was up, it was easier to get the others, and in minutes they had the floorboards of half the room pulled up and in a pile. Evan gave Brisco the lantern and he and Cohen gathered the boards in their arms and they walked into the front room of the house where there was the fireplace. They dropped the boards on the floor next to the fireplace.

  “Think it’ll burn down the house if we light it up?” Evan asked.

  Cohen knelt and said come here with that light, Brisco. Brisco stood over him and shined and Cohen ran his hand across the brick bottom of the fireplace, feeling for bits of crumbling mortar. When he didn’t find any, he said we might as well give it a try. And they did, and the floorboards were made of oak and they burned easily, and by the time the women came downstairs with their wet hair and shiny faces, the room was aglow and warm, and no one cared that the house that protected them was also the house they were burning up.

  32

  MARIPOSA SLIPPED AWAY. SHE FOUND a candle on the kitchen counter and lit it and she went upstairs to look into the other rooms. More warped wooden floors. More crumbling plaster and peeling wallpaper. Shredded bird nests and molded fireplaces. The rooms were great and wide and she imagined a large family living there, the children upstairs and the steady rumble of their running and playing while the mother and father sat downstairs and read the newspaper and drank coffee and felt the cool autumn breeze through the open windows.

  She stayed away from the windows as the rain and wind bullied the house and she held her hand across the flame to protect it. She came into a room where the wallpaper flapped in the wind and the closet door hung by its top hinge. The candlelight led her to the fireplace mantel and it was decorated with hand-carved rose vines. She touched the vine and then the rose petals, running her fingers along the grooves that were still smooth. She set the candle down on the mantel and listened to the storm, listened to the voices and movement of the others about the house. The flame danced and Mariposa put her hands on the mantel, stretching them wide, letting her head drop as her hair fell around her neck and head and nearly reached her knees.

  “There’s no such thing,” she whispered. She waited for her grandmother to answer. “There’s just no such thing,” she said again and she raised her head. Looked at the twisting, delicately carved vine.

  It was all disappearing. The French Quarter ghosts that she had chased as a child, hiding with her friends as they trailed the horse and buggy and listened to the man in the overcoat and floppy black hat regale his passengers with the wraithlike tales of the pirates and the hanged criminals and the brokenhearted debutantes who still roamed the dark and murky streets. The smell of incense wafting from her grandmother’s reading room as she delivered the messages from the grave beyond to the hopeful soul sitting across from her at the table. The notions of spirits and gods and angels that hovered in the realm between life and death and helped us along, or drove us into a corner, or waited and watched until it was necessary to intervene and save us from catastrophe. It was all disappearing as the very real world beat at her, beat at them, beat at all things from every direction.

  She waited for the voice of her grandmother to come in through the window or exude in a slow smoke from the flue of the fireplace. That voice that had created that childlike hopefulness in wondrous things. She waited for that voice to appear gently, like the candle flame, and assure her that such things would always exist. No matter how hard the world strikes, no matter what men do to one another, no matter what men do to you, no matter what is lost, and no matter how badly you may want something that you cannot have, there are such things that stand in the shadows and drift with the clouds and rise with the sunshine and wait for you. Watch for you.

  Mariposa waited but couldn’t hear her grandmother’s voice. She looked at her wrinkled, wet fingertips. Touched them to her mouth.

  The ghosts will kill you, she thought, and then there was the image of Cohen living alone in that house, with his memories overwhelming him when he thought they were protecting him. The power of what he had loved and what he had lost so incompetent against the careless strength of the living.

  She picked up the candle and crossed the room. The rain blew against her as she passed the window and she walked into the corner and stopped. She nudged her back into the crevice of the walls and slid down and sat with her knees up against her chest. With both hands she held the candle. She let her faith in other things, in other worlds, fall way down inside her.

  Right now, she thought. And she waited for Cohen.

  33

  EVAN AND BRISCO WENT UP next and got clean despite Brisco’s pleas against it. The women sat with the baby next to the fire. Cohen had laid the blankets across the floor, where they could all sleep in the same room with the fire and now he sat with his back against the wall. No one knew where Mariposa had gone.

  “She didn’t take no bath,” Nadine said.

  “Can’t understand that,” said Kris. “I coulda sat in that thing for a month.”

  “You know some people have babies like that. Sitting in a big ol’ tub. Baby and everything else comes out floating.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kris said. “That makes me want to vomit. I want the drugs and tell me when it’s over.”

  “Amen to that. Why the hell would anybody want to be in the same tub with all that mess.”

  Kris held the baby but he began to cry and she handed him to Nadine. Nadine rocked him in her arms and got up and walked around the room with him but he kept on.

  “Gotta be hungry,” she said.

  “I tried already. Didn’t want nothing.”

  “Give it here,” Nadine said and held out her hand and Kris held the full bottle up to her. Nadine tried to give it to him but he fought it and kept on crying. “You think getting his ass clean would make him happy. Not the other way around,” she said. “He’s still hot.”

  Cohen stood and looked out of the window. Outside was as black as a hole. He thought about the Jeep again. Thought about the shoe box that had gotten him into all this, sitting on the backseat of the Jeep, being pelted by the rain. Being ruined by the rain. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the key to the Jeep. Mumbled to himself and shook his head.

  “What?” Kris asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Another half hour passed and the baby kept crying. Evan and Brisco came down from the tub and told Cohen it was his turn.

  “I left you a shirt of mine up there if you want it,” Evan said. Cohen nodded to him and took the lantern and he headed upstairs. Evan and Brisco went into the kitchen to look for something to drink.

  Nadine paced with the child. Bouncing and singing and talking to him and trying the pacifier and trying the bottle and nothing. But she kept on. She told him about the smell of a chicken farm and told him about the time her stupid brother pushed her in the creek before she knew how to swim and she told him about the time her other stupid brother took their daddy’s truck before he had a license and drank a quart of beer and ran the truck into the back end of a parked cattle trailer. During the stories the baby paused, but when she had finished he’d start crying again. So she’d walk and bounce and sing and talk some more and he finally slowed down enough to take a bottle. Nadine sat down with him in front of the fire.

  “You think they’d let me keep him?” Nadine asked.

  Kris smiled. “Who you talking about?”

  “Whoever is where we take him. Doctor, I guess. First thing they ask is who’s the momma.”

  Little sucking sounds came from the infant. She was a rough
woman who had lived a rough life, but there was something tender in the way she looked at the baby boy.

  “I think so. I think that’s a good idea. He can be a big brother,” Kris said.

  Nadine grinned, her harelip snarl disappearing some in the rise of her cheeks. “Don’t be none of my brothers,” she told the baby.

  The fire was warm and the room dry.

  “It sounds kinda weird, don’t it?” Nadine said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Making plans.”

  Kris folded her arms across her stomach. Rocked back and forth. She nodded and stared at the fire. When the baby finished with the bottle, Nadine propped him on her shoulder and patted his back and he burped and threw up down her back.

  “Aw, hell,” Nadine said and the baby began to wail.

  Kris took the baby from her and Nadine found a shirt on the floor and wiped herself. The baby screamed and Kris got up and walked with him and tried the bottle again but he wouldn’t have it.

  Nadine tossed the dirty shirt aside and got up and took the baby from Kris. “Sit down,” she said. “You don’t need to be walking around no more than you got to.” She cradled the baby and marched around the firelit room, bouncing him and half-singing, and the crying eased some.

  “He just don’t look right to me,” Nadine said.

  “Babies puke,” Kris answered.

  “I know they puke but he won’t quit hollering. He’s so damn miserable.”

  “Just keep bouncing around. At least that slows him up.”

  Nadine walked him and talked to him. He cried, paused and listened, and cried again. Kris lay down and closed her eyes. Nadine touched his red head and tried to get him to suck on her fingertip but he didn’t want it. Didn’t want anything but to scream. She paced the house, walked in and out of the dark of the other rooms, and felt the child against her. As she rocked him in her arms in rhythm with her steps, she allowed herself to imagine somewhere new, without the crying, the boy learning to walk, the babble of his voice, his tiny hands reaching out for her.