Michael Smith - Rivers

The shivering now at its height, he walked back into the front room and took off his clothes while the dog watched him and then he walked naked to the hall closet where he found that some but not all of his clothes were gone. He took out a pair of jeans and socks and two long-sleeve shirts and he put it all on and then he looked down the hallway. The drywall that he had used to cover up the entrances to the bedrooms had been busted and pulled away from the frame. He cussed himself for putting up and puttying the drywall but then not finishing it. What the hell good did it do to make a wall to hide a room if you’re not gonna finish the damn wall. No good, that’s what. He went back into the front room and put on the wet boots and then he walked down the hallway, stepping across and kicking at the broken drywall, and he stopped in the dark doorway of the bedroom that he and Elisa had shared.

There was a musty smell as the room had been closed up for over two years. He walked in and the drawers to the dresser had been pulled out and her clothes that remained lay scattered across the floor. He knelt in the midst of the clothes, the gray light coming through the sheer curtains and around him like a cloud and holding him like some nameless black-and-white character from an old movie. He picked up one of her gowns, silk and silver, and he felt its softness in his rough fingertips. Touched it against his damp, hot forehead as if it had the power of remedy.

He set the gown on the floor and picked up and put down her other things—a bra and her T-shirts and black stockings and red panties. He picked them up slowly and held each garment and set it down just as slowly, as if they were dead, dry leaves that could crumble with the slightest force. He got up from his knees and saw their fingerprints and handprints across the top of the dresser in the filthy, almost slick film that had settled over the room during its closure, and then he noticed the cobwebs stretched across the blades of the ceiling fan. He moved across the room, stepping around the bed that had been stripped of its comforter and sheets, and he sat down on the bare mattress and saw on the top of the nightstand more traces of their hands. Her wooden jewelry box had been opened and turned over and there was nothing left. The engagement ring and the wedding band and earrings and necklaces were gone and he pictured them in the hands of strangers. People who thought no more of what belonged to her than they thought about rocks in a gravel road. He picked up the empty jewelry box and closed the lid and held it on his lap and tried to force himself into a good memory but all he could think of were those strangers who had taken what he had left of her and who had taken everything else they could take and who were probably unloading and planning to come back and take the rest.

He held the jewelry box on his lap and he swung his legs up onto the mattress and he leaned back and stretched out. He wanted to sleep. Needed to sleep. Needed to lie still and let the aspirin help chase the fever. Needed to drink water and eat something and rest until he was strong again but he knew that he didn’t have that option. They would be back and there might be more of them and they had his guns and his Jeep and he didn’t have anything. The dog wandered into the bedroom and sniffed at the clothes on the floor and then looked around as if to say, I didn’t think this woman lived here anymore.

He closed his eyes. Wanted to sleep and one day wake up and this life would be a different life. The dog walked around to his side of the bed and lay down beneath him. They both lay still for several moments as if the day belonged to them. At the edge of sleep, Cohen made himself sit up, and he put the jewelry box back onto the nightstand next to the picture of them waist-deep in a blue ocean. He picked up the frame and opened the back and he took out the picture and held it close to his eyes. Touched his fingertips to the faces of another time. He folded the picture in half and he stood and put it in his back pocket and then he got down on his knees and said, “Be there.”

He bent over and looked under the bed and the shoe box was gone and he yelled goddamm it and pounded his fist on the floor. Bent over and pressed his head against the floor and pounded at it and yelled out over and over again. Goddamm it, goddamm it, goddamm it.

He sat doubled over for a minute and then one more pound at the floor and he got up and walked over to the closet. The sliding doors were open and they had taken the things that held warmth. Her coats and her sweatshirts and her jeans. The dresses remained. The summer dresses that once hung delicately on her tanned body. The black thing that she wore with grace when they buried someone they had known. The other thing that she wore that gave away the freckles between her breasts. He looked away from her clothes to his side of the closet and he looked down and noticed an old pair of work boots that he had forgotten. He picked them up. Black and dusty and steel-toed and dry. He tucked them under his arm and he ran his hand along the length of one of her dresses and then he walked out of the room and down the hallway and stepped inside the other room.

It had been an office until the news of the baby and then it had become a shared room for all, a place to keep things until her room was finished. The dresser had been opened up and some of the tiny clothes had spilled out onto the floor. He walked over and put down his boots. He knelt and picked up each small sock or nightshirt and folded it neatly and put it back in the dresser. Two drawers had been filled in anticipation, Elisa unable to go anywhere without picking up some little hat or pair of tiny slippers. Unable to stop thinking about it, smiling as she’d come home with something else, him smiling back and making fun. He closed the dresser drawers and stood. Empty picture frames on top of the dresser. A lamp with a giraffe lampshade. A piggy bank that he raised and shook and the coins rattled. He set it back down and walked over to the closet. The door open and his two suits hanging there, next to them a gathering of tiny pink hangers. Toys in boxes on the floor. A stack of colorful books on the top shelf.

He stepped back. Stood in the middle of the room. It felt as though a great hole might open up beneath him and swallow him into the earth and he wished that such a thing were possible.

He stood there, still and insignificant, with unfocused eyes.

Minutes later, he walked back to the dresser and opened the drawer and took out a pair of the tiny socks and stuck them in the front pocket of his jeans. Then he picked up his boots and left the room.

He sat down on the floor in the front room and took off the wet boots and put on the dry ones and tied double knots. Then he walked outside to look for Habana and the dog followed him.

At the back of the house he expected to find her door open and he was right. He looked inside the converted family room and was surprised to see her saddle and bridle there. He called out and whistled for her as he looked across the back fields. He asked the dog where she was but the dog didn’t answer. He walked out into the backyard and stepped across the mangled barbed-wire fence and he stood out in the field with his hands on his hips and turned in a circle, calling for her and looking for her and hoping she would appear from somewhere along the tree line once she knew it was him. “Go look for her,” he said to the dog, but the dog stayed at his side. He called for her three times more and then he walked back to the house shaking his head as he looked for what might have been left outside. Below the kitchen window he found the generator and he was certain now that they would be back. That they had put everything they could into the Jeep and were unloading and coming back for the rest. Nobody left a generator.