Michael Smith - Rivers

He was on his back. The low glow of the candle across the room. She was lying next to him and he turned and saw her black hair and he knew. For a reason he didn’t understand, he wasn’t startled. He lay still and waited to see if she was awake or asleep and he felt her body move in slow breaths and she was sleeping. He picked his head up and her hair was across his arm and then he took his hand and lifted the long black hair and laid it across her back. She breathed a heavy breath and he put his arm down and was still. He was still and he was warm with this body close to him. It was an alien feeling. A natural feeling. And he didn’t understand why she had come and he didn’t understand why he didn’t get up or why he wasn’t in a rage and he was relieved that in the dark it didn’t have to make any sense. He lay still and warm and felt her breathing and he closed his eyes and let it be.

When he woke several hours later, she wasn’t there, and a strange light came in the trailer window. He sat up and felt as if he were moving about in a dream where he couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t real. He wondered if her body against his had been a part of his imagination but then the truth of her body settled against him and he rubbed his eyes and the back of his neck and felt a complacency in the thought of someone there.

On the floor next to the mattress was his shoe box. On top of the box were Elisa’s wedding rings, her earrings, her necklaces. Next to the box was the envelope, the letters and documents inside.

He sat up and leaned to the side. He felt in his back pocket for her picture and it was still there. Then he took her jewelry and he lifted the lid of the shoe box and put the photograph and jewelry with the rest and then he replaced the lid and lay back down and looked out of the window at the sunshine.

THE WOMEN CONGREGATED IN THE middle of the circle of trailers and talked about the miracles.

“Look at it,” one of them said.

“I swear to God it almost looks fake,” another said.

The group of women stared admiringly up into the crystal-blue sky as if today were the day of its creation. The storm had moved on and in its wake was a clarity that had been forgotten. No clouds. Only the sun in the afternoon sky. A calm wind.

The other miracle was being passed around between them. He had been cleaned and he slept wrapped in a blanket and none of the women could believe he was alive.

COHEN STOOD OUT IN THE field. A low ribbon of pink wrapping the late-afternoon horizon. His hands stuffed in his pockets and the blade wiped clean and back in its sheath and his weight on his good leg. Aggie had not said anything to him as he limped out of the trailer and past the ashes of the fire and out into the field but he could feel the man’s eyes on him. Could sense his pleasure in discovering what Cohen was capable of doing. Could feel the strength of the unknown.

He wondered what would happen if he started walking. How far he would get before the rifle rang and a point in his body burned and he lay still like a hunted animal. He was a couple of hundred yards from the tree line and the grass was high and he thought he could drop and crawl but his leg was lame and he didn’t want to be hunted down and killed while he was crawling. He’d rather be dead standing up. Birds passed above and there was movement in the tall grass from the small things that needed the break in the weather to find food. He stared south and imagined the water of the calm morning, crawling onto the dilapidated shore quietly, as if careful not to wake it. The emptiness of the ocean and the stretch of the water and the sky, meeting on a seemingly infinite horizon, and he remembered standing on the beach as a boy. His eyes looking out into nothing. Imagining the men, hundreds of years ago, who had stared out across that vast expanse and braved its uncertainty as they loaded ships and said goodbye to their families and hoisted sails and drifted away, the love of land and man overcome by the curiosity of what might be. Drifting away, their homelands becoming smaller and smaller and then disappearing in the distance, the questions out before them like great constellations. Their minds filled with notions of sea dragons rising from the depths, swallowing them whole or burning them with fire or wrapping and squeezing them until the blood ran out. Swirling black whirlpools that could swallow entire fleets, sucking them down into bottomless, twisting graves. Or a world that would simply end. An edge to sail to and then fall off of and fall off into what?

Cohen had played these games in his head as a boy, standing waist-deep in the ocean, and he played them now as a man, looking out toward a limitless sky, curious about those men and what was held in their imaginations and had they been disappointed, at least a little, to find that the wildest creations of their minds could not be true. That there was only rock and sand on the other side that was not much different from the rock and sand they had departed from. That the fountains of life and the mountains of rubies and pearls did not exist any more than the spear-headed, long-necked monsters. Or was the world unknown enough for them no matter what it held? No matter what they found or whom they saw when they got there but simply that it was unknown to them and that was plenty to feed their hunger. Plenty to fill their spirit to the highest plateau. Plenty to reward their risks. The unknown was enough and then some and Cohen thought now as he looked south toward the ribboned horizon that this would have been the perfect place for that kind of man.

He reached down and picked at the dried, crusted blood on his leg. Behind him the women remained, looking at the baby, talking softly to one another as if passing on sensitive information. Ava held him, his pink head poking out of the top of the blanket and his eyes half-open and his mouth stretching in a feeble cry. In between whispers they made soothing sounds to the infant, dirty fingers reaching out to the child and touching his soft head and swelled cheeks. Aggie pulled dry wood out from a storage trailer and he worked to get the fire going while they huddled and embraced the new day. Evan and his small brother gathered wet wood and put it in the storage trailer, leaving the women and child to themselves. Cohen heard them but did not turn and look. He watched the sky and thought of the explorers.

HE WAS STILL STARING WHEN the blond-haired boy walked up behind him and said, “I didn’t mean nothing that day.”

Cohen turned around and faced him. The boy’s hair was slick and flat against his head and he held one hand to his mouth to keep it warm and with the other he held the hand of a young boy.

“I really didn’t,” he said. “Kinda had to.”

“Kinda had to what?”

The boy looked back over his shoulder and Aggie was watching them. He lowered his voice as if the old man had a magical ability to hear all. “Nothing.”

Cohen looked down at the small boy and hobbled closer to them. “Who are you?” he asked.

“This here is my little brother. He’s why I did what I did out there.” The small boy wore a denim coat buttoned to the top, and a scarf was coiled around his neck and up above his mouth. He held a half-deflated football tucked under his arm.

“You got a name?”

“Which one of us?”

“Either. Both.”

“I’m Evan and he’s Brisco.”

“What’s he got to do with you and that girl back there trying to kill me?”

Evan shook his head and said, “I wasn’t trying to kill nobody.”

“You shot at me.”

“Didn’t nothing come out.”

“That ain’t the point.”

“The point is I didn’t want to. I told you, Aggie keeps Brisco when he sends me and Mariposa out looking around. So he knows I’ll come back. And it’s best to come back with something.”