Michael Smith - Rivers

“You shoulda got up,” Kris said.

“Nah. I shouldn’t have. That was her thing. I liked it being her thing. Said it kept her sane and I woulda screwed that up huffing and puffing trying to keep up.”

“That was probably smart.”

“Yeah. One of the smart things I’ve done, I guess.”

Cohen drank some more. Knelt next to the ashen fire. “Not that long until light,” he said. “You know it’s gonna rain hard again soon. You should probably go lay back down.”

“Probably,” Kris said. “Lemme have one more sip.”

“It ain’t no good, you said.”

She held out her hand. “I know it ain’t. But it’s a sleeping pill.”

He handed her the bottle. She took a sip, shook her head, then took another. She gave it back and said ugh. Then Mariposa helped her out of the chair and walked with her as Kris moved gingerly toward the trailer. Cohen asked if they needed any help but Kris said no. “Save all your help for getting me to the Line, ’cause I told you I decided I want to hold on to it. If God’ll let me.”

Mariposa closed the door behind Kris and she walked back. Cohen drank again. She wiped at her face and said, “I don’t wanna sit in the rain. Do you?”

He looked up at the night sky. “It’s not raining much.”

“It will be. You said.”

He nodded.

She stepped over to him and held out her hand. He looked at it. It was wet and frail-looking. She seemed the same way. He looked around the compound, out into the dark acreage, out toward the place where Aggie and Ava lay. Then he looked back to her and down at her extended hand and it seemed to shake from cold or fear or something.

He reached out and took it and she led them to her trailer.

IT SEEMED AS THOUGH HER entire life had been driven by her imagination. From an early age, her head filled with ghost stories and listening from behind the curtain to the spiritual confessions of those who paid for her grandmother’s otherworld connections and the French Quarter spirits that gathered in the glow of the lampposts and her own childlike manifestations of the space between the imagined and the real. The tarot card readers in Jackson Square who let her sit and listen and the friendly vampire who stood outside Lafitte’s in the winter and led the cemetery tours and the Mardi Gras masks and the fabulous costumes of the parades. The stories she created for the Quarter regulars who came in and out of her father’s store and the stories she spun while she looked into the windows of empty buildings as she and her mother walked back and forth from home to school and the boats up and down the river and the beautiful women and handsome men she imagined sitting on the decks and drifting in and out of her city.

And then the storms. From bad to worse and more frequent and sometimes evacuations and then regular evacuations and then bold predictions of a weather pattern that would go on for years and years and continue to destroy and many scoffed and many refused to believe but her mind processed it easily. She would lie awake nights, on the eve of another storm, and dream of the catastrophe in vivid colors, see the shingles ripping from rooftops and hear the cracking of tree limbs and feel the flooding waters around her neck. She saw the skeletons of buildings and wrecked ships and heard the crashing of waves and heard the great roar of thunder before it ever arrived. And when the storm did arrive and perhaps it hadn’t been quite what she had imagined, melancholy came over her that lasted until the next warning and then her mind would create havoc all over again and eventually the reality of the storms caught up with the projections of her imagined landscape. Even as the storms worsened and morphed into one long stream of destruction, even after the insanity arrived with the proclamation of the Line, it all seemed to be something that she had seen before, as if when she closed her eyes she had always been off in some other world where Mother Nature was a vengeful authority. There was not a sky darker than the skies behind her eyes, there was not a wind more powerful than the winds of her mind.

Then she had found herself alone and she had discovered that there were plenty of things in this world that were unimaginable. She had never been able to understand this place with these men and their roped-down trailers. Never been able to conjure anything more horrific than this as she lay down at night. Instead of creating new worlds, her dreams were filled with fascinations of escape. Filled with fascinations of revenge. Filled with the faces of those she had loved and now missed. And in the waking hours, she could only wonder where they were. Wonder if someone was looking for her. Wonder if anyone was still alive who cared. She was certain she had family. Somewhere. But this new world was so vast and shifting and unanswerable that she hadn’t been able to create anything but an unhappy ending for herself and the others. The little girl whose mind once was a carnival of ghost tales and spirit worlds and the romance of hurricanes was now a young woman whose insatiable imagination had been replaced with the sharp edges of the real thing.

Then she and Evan had gone out, and she had choked the man in the Jeep, and she had gone to his house and she had seen where he slept and whom he slept with and what his life had been like and what he was holding on to. And she had taken his shoe box that held the contents of his life and she had held the letters and worn the jewelry and her mind had come alive again. It was as if she had walked through a secret door and taken the hand of someone she once created and had led him out of the dream into reality. It was as if she had become again that little girl. Since she had been alone, since she had been brought to this place, since she had been forced to endure what all the women there had been forced to endure, she had in some ways forgotten that she was alive, that her life belonged to her.

She held Cohen’s hand and led him into the trailer and on a shelf on the wall she lit the candles. He stood holding the whiskey bottle and she took it from him and set it on the shelf. She stepped back from him and removed her coat. He reached out and took a strand of her black hair and let it trail through his fingers.

She whispered to him, “I can be who you want me to be.”

She wore a flannel shirt and she began to unbutton it as he held her hair, rubbed it between his fingers as if it were a fabric that he had never touched before. She unbuttoned the shirt to the end and she pushed it back from her chest, and then her shoulders, and it fell and the wind pushed the trailer and the candlelight waved.

He let go of her hair and looked at her.

Her hair was around her neck and down her chest and he moved it back and exposed her neckline. The V of the dress reached between her breasts.

Cohen stepped back. The long black sleeves. The tie around the waist that he had tied for her each time she wore it. Mariposa tugged at her waist and lifted the rest of the dress, which she was wearing tucked into her pants, and it fell over her hips and reached her knees.

He began to shake his head. She took a step toward him and he took another step back. “Stop,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said and she reached out for him, but he grabbed her by the wrist and lowered her hand.

“I said stop,” he said and his voice had changed. “That’s not yours.”

“I know. I didn’t mean it to be. I meant it to be hers.”

He reached to the shelf and grabbed the bottle. He turned it up and drank hard. Then he looked at her again. “I don’t wanna pretend,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d think I would. I don’t know why the hell anybody would want to do something like that.”