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Authors: Michael Farris Smith

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BOOK: Rivers: A Novel
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Evan and Brisco both rose up, startled.

“What the hell,” Evan said. His blond hair was wild and his young brother, Brisco, squeezed a deflated football.

“Nothing. Just don’t want Aggie to see me out.”

The boys sat up on the mattress. Clothes and empty water bottles strewn about. An overturned chair and a busted Styrofoam cooler across the floor. Brisco lay back down and Evan got up, rubbing at his head and face.

“Where you think he put the keys?” Mariposa whispered.

Evan moved past her. Picked up an empty cup and looked in it as if expecting something to be there. He tossed it aside. “Why you whispering?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Then stop.”

Mariposa moved around the small space, her arms folded. “I wish we wouldn’t have told Aggie about that house,” she whispered again.

“Me, too,” he answered. “Stop whispering. You’re making me nervous.”

“The keys,” she said at a normal volume. “Where you think he put them?”

“Keys to what?”

“To the Jeep.”

“I don’t know. Same place he keeps the rest of them, I guess.”

Mariposa exhaled. She dropped her head in disgust. Brisco picked up two empty water bottles and started playing drums on the wall.

Evan moved to the door, opened it, and sucked in the rainy, cool air, and closed it again.

“I can’t take it anymore,” she said.

“I know it.”

“I ain’t joking around. I mean it.”

“Just don’t do nothing dumb.”

“I already did something dumb when we came back here with the Jeep. I told you we shoulda run on.”

“Jesus, I can’t leave Brisco. What the hell are you talking about? Haul ass if you want to, but I’m with Brisco, don’t matter what shit I gotta put up with.”

Brisco stopped the drumming and said, “Leave me where.”

“Nowhere,” said Evan.

She shook her head. “I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I hope like hell you didn’t.”

He paused. Eased up. “You could if you want, though.”

“I can’t do it by myself. Neither can you and him.”

They squared off. One waited on the other with an answer. Like they did together most every day. And still neither had one. Brisco tossed aside the water bottles and sat down and crossed his legs. His shoe was untied and he played with the lace.

“We could walk together,” she said.

“It’s too far. We done decided that.”

“Well, maybe we need to decide again.”

“We’d starve before we got there. Or get found and end up worse off than this. You heard all the same stories I heard.”

“We could walk at night.”

The boy shook his head. “Night’s worse. And now it’s raining all the time. We can’t walk in the dark and the rain. And Brisco can’t do it anyway. He’s too little.”

Brisco turned on the mattress and said, “I ain’t too little.”

“Yes, you are,” Evan told him.

“I’m seven, you know.”

“Not yet, you ain’t.”

Brisco flopped back over and Evan turned to Mariposa and said, “We got to hold on. We got to keep doing what he tells us and he’ll keep our doors unlocked and we’ll find a way, I swear it.”

But it didn’t matter what he said because she was already gone, already turned from him, already done with the same conversation they’d
had a hundred times. She moved over to the corner of the trailer and sat down on the floor and put her face against her knees. She had come to know desperation but it seemed as if her desperate feelings were beginning to develop into something else. She didn’t know what that was but she felt herself moving degrees past desperation. She didn’t like the thoughts in her head and in her heart when she promised herself that she would do anything to get out of this place. It scared her to imagine what those things might be.

ACROSS THE WAY A TRAILER
door opened and out came Joe. He wore a flannel coat and muddy boots and his hair was long and brushed straight back. He walked over to the fire pit and looked down at the floating ashes, his eyes puffy and red. The smell of whiskey and cigarettes in his breath and on his clothes as he drank all night, through the duration of the storm, sitting on a crate inside his trailer with one hand on a bottle and the other clutching at his knee until it was over. He rubbed his hands together then tugged at his coat and coughed a hacking cough and he leaned over and spit. Around the compound the locks were on all the doors but for the two belonging to the boy and the girl and he had told Aggie it was a bad idea to leave them open, no matter what they’d earned, but Aggie hadn’t listened. A dull pain filled his head and he stretched his arms and twisted and when he did he saw Aggie standing out in the field, looking out across the low, flooded countryside. Out above Aggie was a cluster of white birds, circling and diving and circling and diving. A grace in their rise and fall, as if they were high-class performers trained to illustrate beauty in the arc of flight. But Joe paid more attention to Aggie than the birds. His fixation on the landscape, his concrete stature, his apparent adoration for the new morning.

Joe rubbed at his eyes. To him, it was just another morning after another night of big wind and big rain and all he wanted was a cigarette to deliver him to Aggie’s level of tranquillity. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an empty pack.

He sighed and walked out toward Aggie.

AGGIE SMOKED AND GAZED ACROSS
the flooding. He had never been anything but grateful for the calamity of the storms and the subsequent drawing of the Line, this perfect godforsaken land where a man like him could create his own world, with his own people, with his own rules. The rage of God Almighty. The fractured and forgotten order. In his most selfish moments, he believed that this had all somehow come about explicitly for him.

In his back pocket was a worn, floppy Bible, the size of a small notebook. The books and chapters he didn’t like had been ripped out and there was a cigarette marking chapter six in Genesis, where the story of Noah began. On his belt loop was a ring of keys. He turned his head from side to side, as if being careful to record and save this image for some later time when he would need it. His hair was thin and slick and age spots spread across his forehead and over his hands. A revolver that he made sure everyone could see was tucked inside the front of his pants and he wore an army coat that he’d pulled off a dead man floating in the water in a long-gone cul-de-sac down the shoreline.

Aggie didn’t turn when he heard the footsteps. Eyes out across the land. Joe stopped next to him. They stood in silence for several minutes and the rain bothered neither man.

Finally, Joe took a light out of his back pocket and flicked it a couple of times.

Aggie didn’t move at first, but then he eased his hand into the front pocket of the army coat and he held out a pack of cigarettes. Joe took one and nodded and then he lit it. The two men stood there with their cigarettes held inside their coats. The rain on them and the waters out before them. Their kingdom behind.

“I don’t guess we lost nothing last night,” Joe said.

Aggie lifted his hand to his mouth and smoked. Then he shook his head.

“If it didn’t get us last night, won’t get us,” Joe said.

“You say that every time.”

“Damn ropes must be tight as hell.”

Aggie turned to him. A bend in his eyebrows as he said, “Don’t doubt God’s muscle. If He wants them trailers, He’ll have em.”

Joe smoked and let out a frustrated exhale. Some mornings there was no talking to Aggie and this seemed like one of them already. He rubbed at the back of his neck to try and ease the throbbing. He squatted down and picked at the weeds. “You letting them out today?” he asked, his eyes on the ground.

“Later on,” Aggie said.

Joe pulled his cigarette out of his coat and smoked. “We going out to work?”

“After we let them two take us to where that house is.”

“We ain’t spinning wheels, are we?” Joe asked. “Seems like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Aggie shook his head. “No. We ain’t spinning wheels. And if we are, it’s better than not.”

“Yeah. I reckon.”

Aggie looked away from the birds and the lowlands and looked at Joe. He grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t doubt me, Joe.”

Joe nodded.

“Then come on. Go get them two and then come and help me hook up the trailer. That little one stays here. Sooner we get back, sooner we can go out and have a look. I’ll go ahead and throw the shovels and pickax in the other truck over there,” Aggie said. He looked once more across the flooded fields and then he walked on toward the trailers.

6

COHEN HAD NEVER KNOWN ANYONE
who had gone to Venice. Or Italy. Or Europe. When he asked Elisa what she wanted for their first anniversary, he expected her to say she wanted a necklace. Or a day at the spa. Or a swanky dinner at one of the upscale casino restaurants. Or anything but what she said.

“I wanna go to Venice.” They were sitting on the front porch, late in the day, in the falling purple light. He kicked off his work boots and leaned back in the wicker chair and drank from the cold beer. She was barefoot and had her legs crossed in the chair, her legs and arms and everything brown from the summer sun.

“Venice where?” he asked.

“Venice, Texas,” she answered and kept her eyes ahead and waited for him to give up.

“Never heard of it,” he said and she reached over and slapped his arm.

“You know damn well what I’m talking about.”

“I know, I know. What makes you want to go all the way over there?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Saw it on TV the other day. Looks nice. All the canals and the old buildings and churches and stuff. No cars or nothing. Don’t you think it’d be kinda cool?”

He wrinkled his brow. Thought about it. “How much?” he asked, knowing she had already looked.

“A lot.”

“A lot a lot, or just a lot?”

“Just a lot.”

He drank from the beer. The crickets and tree frogs sang their song and it echoed through the twilight and across the land.

“Well,” he said.

“We probably can’t save it before our anniversary.”

“Probably not.”

“But we could probably save it by the spring. That’s six months. You think?”

He liked how she sounded. Excited and hopeful and a little nervous. He had never once thought about Venice but the thought of it now, with this woman, made him feel as if he were about to commit to a romantic adventure that you only read about in paperback.

“I think we can. If that’s what you want,” he said.

She uncrossed her legs and got up from her chair. She pushed his arms back and sat down in his lap and squeezed him around the neck until he coughed.

THEY ARRIVED IN AN OVERCAST
city and for the first three days of the ten-day trip it rained off and on, but they didn’t care. Their hotel room was on the top floor and the window looked out across a courtyard and a canal. In the mornings the man who arranged the small tables in the courtyard sang beneath the light rain in a gentle tenor voice. They crawled all over one another as it rained, then fell back asleep and woke again and listened again and felt as though they had been removed from reality and set free in some other place that existed only to please them.

The hotel was three floors and the rooms were small. The staircase was wide enough for one and its turns were tight. The walls were brick with clumps of mortar hanging from between the bricks and Cohen couldn’t go up or down the stairs without commenting on the sloppy job someone did a long time ago. The hotel was run by two sisters and their cluster of indistinguishable teenage children who vacuumed the rugs, watered the plants, attended the small bar and two tables, went
out for morning croissants, swept the foyer, changed the towels and the sheets, delivered the morning newspaper, and whatever else. The sisters wore their black hair pinned up and only one showed streaks of gray. They were frumpy and sat with folded arms and talked incessantly and moved only if someone came along and needed something and sometimes not even then, only shouted out a quick instruction to whatever child happened to be in earshot and that child would hurry to it but not without mumbling something in the tone of teenage angst that was discernible in any language.

When it wasn’t raining, they walked and walked. Though Elisa had two guidebooks and a detailed list of what she wanted to see and when she wanted to see it, she was taken by the city and its ancient streets and the heartbeat of the language and the quaint bridges and the architecture and all she wanted to do was walk. They avoided the museums and cathedrals except to admire the exteriors—the Gothic arches and the details of the statues of the saints and the complexities of the stained-glass windows. All of which fascinated Cohen, as in the world of efficiency and symmetry that he had learned from his father, he had forgotten or perhaps never realized that buildings could be constructed with such imagination. Instead of following the lines of tourists in and out of the starred spots on the map, they moved across the canal bridges and walked down narrow streets that led to other canal bridges and other narrow streets. They were frequently lost, having to double back, spending an hour or more trying to figure out exactly where they were but finding local cafés and bars along the way and not caring a bit, reveling in the notion that they had discovered some secret part of the city that the sightseers would never know. For three days they clung to one another in the hotel room and then walked with locked arms through the floating city.

7

COHEN GOT UP FROM THE
wooden pew and looked at the place where he had found refuge. A tree covered in Spanish moss had fallen through the roof and lay across the pulpit and mold had spread across the choir loft and the baptismal. The stained-glass windows remained only in fragments. A lamb at the feet of someone in a white robe. The bodiless head of Christ bleeding from the crown of thorns. Half of an angel looking over the headless Mary holding the baby. The Bibles and hymnals remained in the slots in the backs of the pews, but their pages were yellowed and wavy. The hardwood floor of the aisle was covered in water and scratched from the nails of the animals that came and went. He rubbed his forehead and it was damp and he ached all over and he walked to the open doors of the sanctuary and looked out. He figured this was about as good as it was going to get. He was weak but knew that he had to begin.

BOOK: Rivers: A Novel
4.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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