Michael Smith - Rivers

He searched most freely away from the city limits and in the miles surrounding his place, and in the miles surrounding the stretch of flooding where they had abandoned him. He followed dirt roads and jagged highways that he had known all his life but they all led to nothing and there was too much space to search it all. His fever came and went and he was sore all over. More sore in his shoulder than anywhere else and he always slept on the other one.

For a time he had taken refuge in a mostly standing gas station and garage on the outskirts of Gulfport. The doors to the bays remained locked down and he built a fire in the garage at nights and the smoke sneaked away through the gaps in the metal roof. The roof dripped from everywhere, smacking at the concrete. At night he slept under the counter in the station and Habana and the dog stayed in the garage. The wind blew and the sounds of the metal roof bending kept him anxious, so on the second night he put the dog outside in order to differentiate between the real and the imagined. During his searching, he had been able to gather a few items of need—clothes, canned foods, a lighter, a hatchet, and a length of rope. He’d held on to some things, not from necessity but because they interested him—a personalized coffee mug with a picture of twin girls, a Saints football jersey with a faded autograph, a pair of roller skates, and a Merle Haggard CD. He sat around the fire in the garage and held these things and imagined the lives they had belonged to. The names of the twins and which one had been born first. What kind of kid still knew how to roller-skate. The boy standing against the railing with his football under his arm and a hopeful look on his face as the players stopped and began to sign autographs. The roughneck or maybe the old man sitting on the back porch in a still, starry night, with a strong drink in his hand, while Merle played over the stereo. The woman who came out and sat with him and their hands together and no words. Only the song in the air and the quiet that belonged to two people who loved each other. He kept these things on a shelf in the garage next to empty oil drums and forgotten socket wrenches.

As he lay down to sleep at the end of the fifth day, he decided they were gone. Didn’t matter where to. Just that they were gone and the Jeep was gone and he could not believe that he had been separated so easily from the Jeep. On the morning of the sixth day, as he sat eating from a can of peaches, the rain stalled, and then another one blew in.

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.