Rivers: A Novel

by Michael Farris Smith

  The hurricane rains came violently and he recognized the menacing tone of gray that had moved in from the south and he knew he wouldn’t be going anywhere. It rained relentlessly for two days, and then the winds picked up, shooting the rain diagonally and then horizontally, an infinite array of tiny stinging pellets. Cohen tried to figure out the best way to ride it out but there was only the small office of the gas station and the garage, so he left Habana in the garage and he hid under the counter in the purple robe with her saddle across him and the dog at his feet. With him he kept the flashlight and some water. As he lay hidden several miles inland, at the waterfront the water began to rise and surge and it reached across the beach and slapped against the highways and the ruins of the coastline.

  And then the worst came on. The sky turned dark, almost night, and he had no idea of time. A constant roar as if he were trapped inside an engine. He shined the flashlight on the dog and it was wide-eyed and trembling. The rains fell and the wind blew as the storm began to exert her strength. In the next hour, the already strong wind became a force and he heard groans in the steel frame of the gas station and the snaps and crashes of trees falling to the ground. Water began to drip onto the counter and sheets of metal were torn from the roof and once or twice there was an extended moan of metal and he sat up and so did the dog. Habana reared and wailed. Moments later the groan came again and there was a cracking above him. The next thing he heard was glass shattering and the wind and rain invaded the station. On the other side of the wall, Habana reared and whinnied and snorted and bumped into the wall in her frantic pacing. He called out to her but it was no good and the dog stood with its ears perked. Then there was the metal groan again and he realized that the garage was about to go.

  The winds bore down and the rain bore down and underneath the door a stream of water ran across the concrete floor and all he could do was lie and wait until the garage gave and as soon as the last piece of roof was twisted off into the storm, the bay doors bent and snapped away like buttons and the aluminum walls were ripped free and that was the last he heard of Habana. There was nothing but a metal frame bending and moaning as if it felt the pain.

  The dog jumped up on his chest and he hugged the dog as the roof of the station came off and everything not hammered down and even some things that were began to fly away and the rain whipped. He curled himself up as tightly as a skeleton could curl and he held the saddle on top of his head as the wind tried to take them away and he and the dog held on to each other and Cohen called out to Elisa and he called out to God though there was nothing to do but take it.

  COHEN STAYED CURLED WITH THE saddle pulled over him to protect himself from any flying or falling debris. The hurricane sat on top of the coast and punished through the night. By morning, the rain fell straight and the damage had been done. He had been sitting in several inches of water for hours and he was beyond cold. His lips had turned purple and his body cramped with the shivering and the jerkiness of his breath. Around him, everything seemed blurred. He stood and the water was over his ankles and he looked up to where there once was a ceiling and the rain fell on him. He walked out of the station and into the parking lot. His hands and fingers were wrinkled and waterlogged. His entire body soaked and shivering.

  He knelt down and cupped his hands and lapped the rainwater. The dog stood beside him and whined. Cohen raised and looked up and down the road. He called for Habana, but his voice was muffled by the rain and she didn’t come.

  They got back to the station and crawled back underneath the counter. The rain played a song in the water and he stared out and was overcome with the notion that before night, he was going to die. He wasn’t sure how it would happen, only that it would. Something hungry and savage would find its way to him and sniff him out and tear him apart with its claws and jaws. Or his fever would explode something in his head and he would fall face-forward into the standing water. Or he would nod off and never wake again because his body and his mind and his heart didn’t want to go through the trouble. Or this goddamn rain would finally erode his brain to the point to where he would simply find a deep hole and stick his head in it and never raise it out. He felt as if he were sitting at the end of the world, in a place that the light had long ago abandoned and undiscovered creatures moved about in the black using their instincts to feed off one another. Somewhere unknown to man and unsafe for man and forgotten by the one who had created it. He was going to die in this place and it wrecked his spirit at first but then this became an apathetic notion. He didn’t know what there was to live for. And he didn’t know what there was to die for. Only that he would die in this forgotten place and be a part of its unaccounted history.

  The water ran down his head and face and arms and legs. Under his skin. In his bones.

  He looked at the dog and said, “I don’t understand.” He fell over on his side with his arms over his head. Rubbed at the red streak around his neck while the rain fell on him. He was too tired to think. He just lay there, cold and wet, and he fell asleep.

  Hours later Cohen woke and sat up. Massaged his shoulder. Wiped at his face with his hands and decided that he was going to get up and walk to that church and get his food. He was going to sit down and eat and drink the bottles of water and maybe the roof was still on the place and he would be able to put on dry clothes. “And when I’m done with all that,” he said to the dog, “we are getting the hell out of here.”

  12

  MARIPOSA HADN’T SLEPT AND HER jaw was sore from holding it clenched through the worst of the storm during the night. She stood and looked out but there was nothing new to see. There was enough light now, at least, and that was what she had been waiting on.

  She had been sleeping with the large envelope she’d found in the bottom of the shoe box. Holding it, dreaming about it, imagining what was inside, not wanting to open it because she knew the reality of its contents would be a letdown. But her curiosity had won out and she had only been waiting for enough light so she could open it and see what it held and she discovered that she wasn’t disappointed.

  There was a deed to a house and to land. A marriage license. His and her passport, each with a single stamp from Italy. There was a letter from the state of Mississippi, making an offer for his house and land. There was another letter, dated three months later, from the U.S. government, making a slightly larger offer for his house and land. There was another letter warning him to take the offer or risk losing full rights to the properties. And there was a final letter explaining that the time to accept an offer had passed but he could retain the rights to his house and land but that those rights would disappear once the Line became official, and in the event that the region ever regained its original status, rights would revert to him.

  There was a death certificate. There were bank statements from closed accounts. There were letters from insurance companies claiming that, according to recent legislation, they were no longer responsible. There was a letter from a bank in Gulfport that confirmed a certificate of deposit in the name of the child. She noticed the dates on each of the letters or statements and everything went back three to five years.

  She spent time with each document that came from the envelope. She read again and again, trying to put it together, their lives becoming more vivid now, the truth blending with the illusion of the memories in the shoe box. These people had been real, not simply whispers of romance that swirled away and landed safely somewhere else. Outside the rain fell and the wind pushed, but inside she was in another world, lost in Cohen’s creation.

  13

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN—he is not dead he is risen.

  Joe read it once. Twice. Three times. He sat up on the mattress, naked with a blanket across his legs. The white paper once clean and pure against the filth of his hands and fingernails but now smudged with the same filth. He had read it a hundred times over during the night as the rain and wind beat against the trailer. As the storm had dragged on and the winds became stronger, he drank har
der and clenched his jaw tighter and by the light of the lantern he read that note over and over and over. By the end of the worst, he was no longer reading it but reciting it aloud, pacing across the short, narrow floor and rearing back his head and screaming it upward as if to join with the forces of nature. He is not dead he is risen! He is not dead he is risen! Turning up the bottle and reciting it louder and stripping off his clothes and falling drunkenly against the walls of the trailer as it rocked with the weather. Howling all night until the storm let go a little and the bottle was empty and then he fell face-first on the bed with the note clutched in his hand.

  Joe sat on the bed with it now and thought of tearing it into a thousand pieces. But instead he held on to it as he got to his feet, put on his clothes, searched around and found a half bottle of water. He drank the water in one take and wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve and then he walked outside.

  Aggie stood under a tarp, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. A coffeepot sat on top of a small gas burner and Aggie poured Joe a cup as he walked over. Joe took it and cast his bloodshot gaze out at the rain. He coughed some and spit and rubbed at his forehead. “I want to go off and look around some.”

  Aggie leaned over and took the Bible from his back pocket and turned it back and forth in his hands, its cover worn and soft like sheepskin. “Might wait until it lets up some.”

  “I can’t. I can’t wait.”

  Aggie drank the coffee. “You all right?”

  “I’m all right. Just a rough night, you know.”

  “Seemed like it.”

  “I guess you slept through it.”

  Aggie shrugged.

  “I’m getting out for a while. You might let them out, too,” Joe said and he motioned his coffee cup at the locked doors of the trailers.

  Aggie nodded. “Go on, then. Keep your eyes out for stragglers and whatever else. God knows who’s running around down here now. Take that Jeep.”

  “All right,” Joe answered. He drank his coffee. Waited for any more instruction from Aggie but it didn’t come. Aggie stuck the Bible back in his pocket and he took the key ring from his belt loop. He picked out the key to the Jeep and he took it off and gave it to Joe. As Joe took it, one of the women began to beat on her trailer door and call out.

  “That was a bad one last night. Let em breathe,” Joe said.

  “I’ll worry about that.”

  Joe shoved his hands down in his pockets. Pushed his boot heel into the ground. “It was a bad one last night and it’s been like one long bad one here lately.” He waited for Aggie to say something, but he didn’t. “Seems like it’s badder all the time. Don’t it?”

  “Don’t feel much different to me.”

  “I didn’t say it feels different. I said it is different.”

  Aggie turned to him. “So?”

  “So, all I’m saying is, we got a plan for if it gets too bad?”

  “It ain’t gonna get too bad.”

  “You don’t know that. I damn near shit the bed last night.”

  “Then you need to get your shit together,” Aggie said. “This is where we are.”

  Joe took a couple of steps back and forth, then said, “Fine.”

  “You look stir-crazy. Go on out of here.”

  Joe nodded, then said, “You got Mariposa and that boy locked?”

  “Yep.”

  “You better keep them that way.”

  “How come?” Aggie asked, his tone gently patronizing.

  “They both got that look here lately. They’ll get brave.”

  “That boy is plenty smart enough to weigh the consequences. He listens when we read.”

  “He listens but he’s got that look. And so does she.”

  “She,” Aggie said and he stopped. Thought about her and her amber skin and her wavy black hair and the look in her eyes. “She is just right.” He tossed the cigarette. “See what you can see,” he said.

  Joe nodded and walked back to the compound and into his trailer. He opened up a beer and drank it fast. Let out a grunt when he was done. Then he picked up a towel off the bed and wiped his face and he put on a pair of work gloves and a black sock hat and a coat with a hood. Before he walked out, he grabbed his newly acquired sawed-off shotgun and he took a fistful of shells and stuck them in his coat pocket. He walked out and across the red mud and saw them beginning to peek out from behind the curtains, like they did every morning. Their doors locked from the outside. The pale, exasperated faces in the dirty windows. The sunken eyes. Wondering if he was making the rounds and unlocking the doors. Wondering if they would be allowed outside. Wondering if this would be one of the days when they were allowed to be human. Wondering why they couldn’t have just been blown away.

  14

  COHEN’S MIND BEGAN TO BETRAY him as he walked on. The hunger and the fever and the exhaustion. Things that weren’t there dashing in and out of ditches and out from behind trees and calling to him with hollow, singsong voices. He shook continuously now. Stopped every hundred yards and knelt or sat down. Water standing everywhere. He sometimes held the trunk of a tree to keep himself upright. He moved along with pain in his shoulder and down his back but he kept on, fighting off the tricks in his mind, trying to keep toward the church, trying to ignore the rain, thinking about the food and water he would find when he got there. He called out as he walked on, Please God be there. Please God be there. There was no knowing if the church was standing but he believed it would be. He didn’t have another choice.

  The dog started out with him but would get ahead and turn back and look at Cohen, impatient with the lack of pace. Now and again the dog would wander off, out into a pasture or off into a stretch of woods, and then come back and walk with him again. He found freshly flooded roads and bridges that caused him to detour several times, but he kept going in the right direction and could feel the church road getting closer. He fought on, burning and chilled but encouraged by the familiar landscape. Not fifty yards away from the gravel road that would take him to the church, he sat down in the middle of the road. Then he lay down in the middle of the road. He draped his wet arm across his wet head and closed his eyes and there was only the constant drumming of the rain but as he lay there it seemed quiet to him. The quiet of the forgotten.

  And then he heard it coming.

  He sat up. Listened. Wasn’t sure if he was imagining it.

  But the sound remained. Coming from the other direction. Getting a little bit louder. He looked down the road and there was a curve and coming from the direction of the curve was the sound of a vehicle that he knew. A deep, chugging sound that rose with the push of the gas pedal and fell with the ride of the clutch.

  He got up and slid off the road and splashed into the ditch, his head just high enough so that he could see it coming from around the curve. He waited, anxious, like some hungry animal. And then there it was.

  “Please God, be real,” he whispered.

  And it was real. The Jeep was coming in his direction and he could see that there was only the driver.

  Then it slowed. And then it stopped.

  The driver stood in his seat and looked around. It wasn’t the boy and it wasn’t the girl. Cohen wanted him to come on his way but didn’t know what he could do if he did. He looked around for a stick or a big rock or anything but there was nothing except wet, limp grass and weeds. He thought to simply get up and flag the man down. Try to get the Jeep back the way it was taken from him. But he wasn’t strong enough to fight. Wasn’t strong enough for anything. So he lay there and watched.

  The Jeep came on forward a little, and then it turned down the church road.

  Cohen hurried out of the ditch and onto the road and he was running. The frail, broken run of a sick and hungry man and he kept it up until he reached the church road and he saw the tracks in the mud. He bent over with his elbows on his knees. Gasping for breath and his head light.

  He stayed bent over until he caught his breath and then he began again, the sound of the e
ngine fading away.

  HE WAS GOING TO SHAKE this free and then that would be that. The Note that was driving him crazy. The note that had stirred the past with the images of the burgundy dress of his mother and the backwoods church. It would all be gone after this. For reasons that he didn’t understand, he was drawn back to this road. Back to this place. Back to years long before the barrage and the lawlessness.

  He drove and thought about Aggie. How he first saw him standing outside of the liquor store, drinking out of a pint of whiskey and smoking a cigarette. Wearing a heavy jacket with his hood pulled over his head but his eyes sharp even from a distance. Joe had walked past him, exchanged a glare. It seemed like that was all anyone did at that time, glare at each other, the coast quickly becoming the land of desertion, a smattering of liquor stores and strip clubs turned whorehouses and the random gas station all that remained with lights on and doors open. The Line only a few months from being official. The coast rats sleeping in what was left of abandoned houses and businesses. Nobody trusting anybody. Destruction all around.

  Joe had gone inside and gotten his own bottle and when he came back out Aggie was still there. Watching him. Joe walked toward his truck with his eyes on the man with the hood.

  Aggie tossed his cigarette and said, “You got a hitch on that thing?”

  Joe said, “What’d you say?”

  “A hitch. You got a hitch on your truck there?”

  “Yeah, I got a hitch. So what?”

  Aggie drank from his bottle and took a few steps toward Joe. “You wanna make some money?”

  Joe laughed. “You ain’t got no damn money.”

  “I got it if you want to make it,” Aggie said. He pushed his hood back from his head, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a folded stack of bills.