Michael Smith - Rivers

“You can come in,” he heard her say.

He lifted his head.

“It’s okay,” she said.

He slid his hand from the door and slowly moved it to the door handle and there was more lightning and for a split second he saw his shadow on the door.

He let go of the handle, stepped down off the block, and backed away.

He turned from her door and walked over to Aggie’s truck and took a shovel out of the truck bed. Then he walked down the driveway toward the dog. The rain was coming on and the thunder more frequent. He couldn’t see and he tripped over the dog when he came to it. He knelt and scratched its soggy head and its body was cold and stiff. He moved off the gravel and started digging. The earth was soaked and gave easily and when he had a hole big enough, he set the dog’s body down into it and he covered it with mud and rocks. He said I’m sorry I got you into this and then he bowed his head and said amen.

He picked up the shovel again and he took ten steps away from the dog’s grave and sank the shovel into the ground. He dug and dug, fighting the water running down into the hole, but finally managing to get farther down to where it was easier to dig. He worked for nearly an hour until he was standing down in the hole, almost waist-deep, and he thought it was both deep enough and long enough. He tossed the shovel and climbed out of the big hole and he walked back up the driveway and to the trailers. Lights were off inside all the trailers but hers. His hands were aching and blistered and he wiped them on his wet pants and then he walked over to the trailer where Lorna lay. He opened the door and felt around on the floor and found a blanket and he was glad that it was dark so he didn’t have to see her. He spread the blanket beside her and rolled her body over and he wrapped her in it, careful to cover her head and her feet as if to salvage some bit of dignity. She was heavier than he thought she would be but he lifted her underneath her knees and shoulders and they moved out of the trailer and into the rain. He looked across and Mariposa’s light was off.

But from the corner of her window, she watched him.

When he had moved back out into the dark, she lit a candle and turned to a plastic bag next to her mattress. In the bag were the dresses she had taken from Elisa’s closet. She laid them across the mattress, three of them. A white sundress. A black long-sleeve with a low neckline. Another with pastel blue and pink flowers that looked like it could’ve been worn with a bonnet on Easter Sunday. She stood back and admired them. Imagined the places they had been. For what occasion each had been worn. Imagined Cohen’s hands helping to remove them from her body. Mariposa put her hand to her chin, the pose of decision. After a thoughtful moment, she began to undress, and soon she stood in the candlelight, chill bumps up and down her legs and arms. She picked up the black dress and put it on.

IN HIS PREDICAMENT, THE ONLY thing Aggie could do was think. And he did. He thought of the sweaty nights in the sweaty room with the sweaty snakes slithering through his arms and around his neck and waist as the organ played and the people sang and shouted. Thought of how it moved them and how the men wanted to shake his hand and the women wanted to be led by him and how he did lead them all the way and how good it felt when they were only nodding, no matter what he asked them to do. He thought of fists against his face in barrooms and the thrill ride of whiskey and the summer dark and he thought of nights in jail staring out of a square window at a black dotted sky when he felt like he was at the bottom of a well.

He thought of the anarchy of the evacuations and how it filled him to be alive in the midst of the panic and he thought of once when he was a boy and a man who was living with him and his mother had slammed her against the wall and he thought of the knife he had stuck in the back of the man’s leg later as he slept on their couch and the sound the man had made as the blade sank in. He thought of the work he had done to gather a community and he thought of the crying of the newborn child and he thought of the purity of the rising sun across the horizon in the morning after a storm. He sat there, tied to the trailer, the rain on him as if he were nothing more than a tree stump, and he imagined that the thunder was calling out to him, a voice from somewhere out there speaking to him in a language that only he could understand. He soaked in the rain and listened to the thunder and his arms ached from being stretched and tied. What more can you give to them? What more can they want? It has always been like this, they did the same thing to Him. He gave them all they could want and all they could need. He showed them the path to glory and they tortured Him, spit on Him, watched Him bleed and bleed and bleed. And now here I am and all I did was protect them, shelter them, feed them. All I did was lead them through the storms, a watchful shepherd and his flock, and now I can scream out in the night and they will hear me and no one will come. Not a one. It has always been like this. And it always will be.

He thought of how this was going to end, realizing the things he had gained and the things he had lost, and it almost seemed to him like these thoughts were the thoughts of another man’s life.

SINCE THE MOMENT THAT CHARLIE first heard the rumors of the buried money, he had begun to lose interest in his truck and his deliveries below the Line and the small bills he got in exchange for his assortment of small goods. Initially he had figured it was like the other ridiculous news that had been delivered to the Gulf Coast over the years. The prediction that the storms would not stop and would become more harrowing. The prediction that they could go on for years. The prediction that the government was thinking of drawing some bullshit line that you weren’t supposed to cross over. All of it had seemed so far-fetched at one time. Yet all of it had been true. And the rumor of this buried money seemed to Charlie exactly like these other bits of fairy-tale information that had come to fruition. So strange that it had to be right. And he wasn’t going to be outhustled for it by a bunch of yokels in pickup trucks packed with shovels and picks and coolers of beer.

For two years he had called everyone he knew to call trying to figure out exactly what had been said and who had said it. Most recently, some ex–casino man admitted on television that he had ordered trunks of cash to be buried. And he hadn’t thought any further ahead than that because nobody truly believed the storms would last this long or that the Line would last this long. But in the interview, the ex–casino man had his face blacked out, his voice altered, and he didn’t identify what casino he had worked for or if that casino was in Bay St. Louis, or Biloxi, or Gulfport, or wherever. Only that it was down there somewhere, buried on casino grounds. Unsure how much but that it was millions, at least ten or fifteen. He had lost count when they were stacking it into the trunks.

Those were the bits and pieces Charlie had put together from his phone calls, the he-saids and she-saids that had spread across the Southeast with jetlike propulsion. The images of buried treasure dancing in the heads of anyone who thought they had the means and ability to get down and search, nearly all of the dreamers unequipped and unprepared for the risks they would encounter below.

But Charlie was not unprepared. He had the means. Knew the roads. Had the muscle. Had the firepower. Had the guts.

He was unlike others who had lost so much. He had been without a wife, without children, and his friends had either passed on or evacuated, and he had taken the government’s first pathetic offer for his land to get as much cash in hand as possible to prepare for his role in the new world. The gradual breakdown in order had fed his talents as a hustler, as a trader, and he had found satisfaction in a return to the natural world, where there was no credit. There was no payment plan. There was what do I have that somebody wants and how much are they willing to pay for it. It was a system that he thrived in. A system that gave him a purpose.