Michael Smith - Rivers

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.

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?”