Michael Smith - Rivers

Cohen looked past the boys. Aggie was smoking a cigarette. His eyes on them. The women passing the baby around behind him. The smoke from the young fire rising and mingling with Aggie’s cigarette smoke like a team of serpents stretching up into a watchful perch. Mariposa stood alone, leaning against a trailer, and watched them.

“Cover your ears up, Brisco,” Evan said and the boy put his pale hands over his ears. Then Evan said softly, “You kill Joe?”

Cohen paused and tried to figure how to answer. He didn’t know if he wanted them to know that he’d never killed a man. Never shot at a man. Never shot at all except to shoot back in the direction of gunfire to let them know to go the other way. He knew they would talk about him and wonder about him, so he said, “Yeah.”

Evan reached down and picked the top off a blade of tall grass. “Good,” he said. Then he moved Brisco’s hands off his ears.

Cohen blew on his hands and rubbed at his face. The small boy moved the football from one arm to the other and then he tossed it to Evan.

“Go long,” Evan said and Brisco took off, not looking back and quickly out of range of a deflated football. “Hold up,” Evan called and Brisco hit the brakes. Evan let fly of the wobbly, saggy ball and it short-hopped Brisco.

“Practice kicking,” Evan told him. Brisco tucked the ball and ran a quick circle. Then he tried to drop it and kick it but it didn’t work out and he lost his balance and fell to the ground. But he laughed at himself and got up and started trying again.

With the small boy out of earshot, Cohen asked Evan what the hell was going on out here.

Evan moved his eyes back and forth. Said, “Maybe I shouldn’t.”

“Go on,” Cohen said. “Talk low. It’s all right.”

Evan’s eyes moved across the landscape again, but then he started talking. Said it began with Aggie and Joe and that woman over there named Ava. Said that from what he could tell, them three had gone around like Good Samaritans, picking up stragglers here and there. Finding people along the road or hid back up in houses or wherever and told them they had food and a safe place if they’d come on. Sometimes it’d be two or three people and they’d bring them out here and give them a trailer to sleep in and feed them a couple of days. Pray with them. Preach to them. All that shit. But they’d only pick up women or women with a man and then when they’d get out here, they’d tell the man they was going hunting and they’d walk out in the woods and shoot him dead. Next thing there’d be a lock on the door and that woman wasn’t going nowhere. They got some plan for mankind or something like that. Aggie thinks he’s got something to do with Jesus or God or at least that’s what he’ll tell you. Evan looked out at Brisco as he talked and he had the stare of someone who had seen a lot in a short amount of time, but in his voice remained the charming tone of youth.

Cohen stared at him. Evan’s cheeks and eyes thin and hard. “And you. Where’d he find you?” Cohen asked.

“Found me and him the same as the others. We were with my uncle but my uncle disappeared on us and we was walking up Highway 49 when him and Joe pulled up beside us. We didn’t know what else to do but to go with them. I couldn’t let Brisco starve. They was real nice at first. Then they locked us up like everybody else.”

“But he didn’t take you hunting?”

Evan shook his head. “No. Not yet.”

“And what about the girl?”

“She was here when we got here. She won’t tell me nothing else.”

Cohen looked across toward the camp. Aggie was drinking coffee now, not looking at them.

“Why ain’t I dead?” Cohen asked.

“Guess for the same reason I ain’t and Brisco ain’t. He’s a old man and he can’t make all these women have babies by himself. Joe did that. So he don’t want to kill us. He wants to convert us.”

“For the sake of the human race,” Cohen said.

Evan shrugged. “I reckon.”

Brisco got the hang of it and kicked the ball a couple of times but grew tired of it. He ran back over to Evan and tossed him the ball again.

“How come y’all don’t run off?”

“It ain’t that easy,” Evan said, tossing the ball back to his little brother.

“No. I guess not.” Cohen then nodded in the direction of the women and asked if that was all of them.

Evan looked a minute, then said, “Yeah. That’s it. Minus Lorna.”

Cohen shook his head some, replayed that instant with her. The screaming and the swipe of the blade and the moment of disbelief from all of them. Then he told the boys that he wasn’t going to be staying around.

“That’s what I said, too,” Evan said. “But I ain’t got nowhere else to go. I’d rather be alive here than dead out there.” He reached down and took Brisco by the hand. “There ain’t much more of a decision than that,” he said, and then he and the boy turned and walked back toward the others.

Cohen let them go a few steps and then he said, “Hey.”

They stopped and looked back at him.

“That girl. What’s her name?”

“Mariposa.”

Evan started to walk off again but Cohen called him again and when he and Brisco stopped, Cohen walked over. He reached into his front pocket and he pulled out the pair of baby socks. He handed them to Evan and told him to take them to whoever had the baby.

THE WOMEN SPENT THE DAY with the look of apprehension. Joe had been gone for days now and the women were savvy enough to realize that he wasn’t coming back, and even if he were, he wasn’t there now, and half of the strength that had held them was missing. They didn’t know the man with the gunshot in his leg but he didn’t seem to care about what was happening. He had the same formless look on his face that they all had as the blunt finality that awaited each of them came like a siren in Lorna’s cries. You can get used to anything. That was something that each of them had come to realize and accept but now as the sun unexpectedly spread out across the land, with Joe disappeared, with the infant fighting to live, and with Lorna dead, the sense of rebellion rose silently in them and they looked at one another as if to say, This can no longer be.

They were careful about what they said around Ava, as she had been working on Aggie’s side for as long as any of them had been there. Sometimes they walked around in groups of two or three out in the fields or around the fire and they spoke to one another in the low, serious voices of people who were plotting or gun-shy or both. There was that apprehension in their expressions but also something more. They had heard the screams in the night. They were aware of Lorna’s suffering and her fate, and while they had known there would be combat with the pain, none of them was the least bit interested in going through what Lorna had been through. They squinted and their cheeks tightened as they spoke to one another about the moment that was to come for each of them. Caution in their voices and anxiety in their hearts and agreeing with no hesitation that this first episode of deliverance in this place should also be the last. And if we’re going to do anything about it, we got to do it now. God knows when there’ll be another day like this.

The afternoon wore on and the clear sky disappeared. A soft rain fell and deep gray clouds sat across the Gulf and promised more. The women spoke less but seemed to communicate with their eyes and bends of the mouth and each of them expressed the same thing. He is one man and there can be no more of this. Throughout the day, as they began to help gather wood, stacking the branches and limbs in the storage trailer, or preparing food, or washing out clothes in silver bins, they moved with calculated, robotlike motions, cutting their eyes at one another, as if there were some countdown going on in each of their heads.