Michael Smith - Rivers

“Too bad it didn’t come with firewood,” Evan said.

“That’s true,” Cohen said. Then he thought a minute and he set down his beer and said maybe it did, to come on and bring the lantern. They walked into one of the other rooms where the floor was warped and bowed. Evan held the light and Cohen set down his beer and got his fingers up under one of the boards and he pulled. It came right up. And when one was up, it was easier to get the others, and in minutes they had the floorboards of half the room pulled up and in a pile. Evan gave Brisco the lantern and he and Cohen gathered the boards in their arms and they walked into the front room of the house where there was the fireplace. They dropped the boards on the floor next to the fireplace.

“Think it’ll burn down the house if we light it up?” Evan asked.

Cohen knelt and said come here with that light, Brisco. Brisco stood over him and shined and Cohen ran his hand across the brick bottom of the fireplace, feeling for bits of crumbling mortar. When he didn’t find any, he said we might as well give it a try. And they did, and the floorboards were made of oak and they burned easily, and by the time the women came downstairs with their wet hair and shiny faces, the room was aglow and warm, and no one cared that the house that protected them was also the house they were burning up.

MARIPOSA SLIPPED AWAY. SHE FOUND a candle on the kitchen counter and lit it and she went upstairs to look into the other rooms. More warped wooden floors. More crumbling plaster and peeling wallpaper. Shredded bird nests and molded fireplaces. The rooms were great and wide and she imagined a large family living there, the children upstairs and the steady rumble of their running and playing while the mother and father sat downstairs and read the newspaper and drank coffee and felt the cool autumn breeze through the open windows.

She stayed away from the windows as the rain and wind bullied the house and she held her hand across the flame to protect it. She came into a room where the wallpaper flapped in the wind and the closet door hung by its top hinge. The candlelight led her to the fireplace mantel and it was decorated with hand-carved rose vines. She touched the vine and then the rose petals, running her fingers along the grooves that were still smooth. She set the candle down on the mantel and listened to the storm, listened to the voices and movement of the others about the house. The flame danced and Mariposa put her hands on the mantel, stretching them wide, letting her head drop as her hair fell around her neck and head and nearly reached her knees.

“There’s no such thing,” she whispered. She waited for her grandmother to answer. “There’s just no such thing,” she said again and she raised her head. Looked at the twisting, delicately carved vine.

It was all disappearing. The French Quarter ghosts that she had chased as a child, hiding with her friends as they trailed the horse and buggy and listened to the man in the overcoat and floppy black hat regale his passengers with the wraithlike tales of the pirates and the hanged criminals and the brokenhearted debutantes who still roamed the dark and murky streets. The smell of incense wafting from her grandmother’s reading room as she delivered the messages from the grave beyond to the hopeful soul sitting across from her at the table. The notions of spirits and gods and angels that hovered in the realm between life and death and helped us along, or drove us into a corner, or waited and watched until it was necessary to intervene and save us from catastrophe. It was all disappearing as the very real world beat at her, beat at them, beat at all things from every direction.

She waited for the voice of her grandmother to come in through the window or exude in a slow smoke from the flue of the fireplace. That voice that had created that childlike hopefulness in wondrous things. She waited for that voice to appear gently, like the candle flame, and assure her that such things would always exist. No matter how hard the world strikes, no matter what men do to one another, no matter what men do to you, no matter what is lost, and no matter how badly you may want something that you cannot have, there are such things that stand in the shadows and drift with the clouds and rise with the sunshine and wait for you. Watch for you.

Mariposa waited but couldn’t hear her grandmother’s voice. She looked at her wrinkled, wet fingertips. Touched them to her mouth.

The ghosts will kill you, she thought, and then there was the image of Cohen living alone in that house, with his memories overwhelming him when he thought they were protecting him. The power of what he had loved and what he had lost so incompetent against the careless strength of the living.

She picked up the candle and crossed the room. The rain blew against her as she passed the window and she walked into the corner and stopped. She nudged her back into the crevice of the walls and slid down and sat with her knees up against her chest. With both hands she held the candle. She let her faith in other things, in other worlds, fall way down inside her.

Right now, she thought. And she waited for Cohen.

EVAN AND BRISCO WENT UP next and got clean despite Brisco’s pleas against it. The women sat with the baby next to the fire. Cohen had laid the blankets across the floor, where they could all sleep in the same room with the fire and now he sat with his back against the wall. No one knew where Mariposa had gone.

“She didn’t take no bath,” Nadine said.

“Can’t understand that,” said Kris. “I coulda sat in that thing for a month.”

“You know some people have babies like that. Sitting in a big ol’ tub. Baby and everything else comes out floating.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kris said. “That makes me want to vomit. I want the drugs and tell me when it’s over.”

“Amen to that. Why the hell would anybody want to be in the same tub with all that mess.”

Kris held the baby but he began to cry and she handed him to Nadine. Nadine rocked him in her arms and got up and walked around the room with him but he kept on.

“Gotta be hungry,” she said.

“I tried already. Didn’t want nothing.”

“Give it here,” Nadine said and held out her hand and Kris held the full bottle up to her. Nadine tried to give it to him but he fought it and kept on crying. “You think getting his ass clean would make him happy. Not the other way around,” she said. “He’s still hot.”

Cohen stood and looked out of the window. Outside was as black as a hole. He thought about the Jeep again. Thought about the shoe box that had gotten him into all this, sitting on the backseat of the Jeep, being pelted by the rain. Being ruined by the rain. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the key to the Jeep. Mumbled to himself and shook his head.

“What?” Kris asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

Another half hour passed and the baby kept crying. Evan and Brisco came down from the tub and told Cohen it was his turn.

“I left you a shirt of mine up there if you want it,” Evan said. Cohen nodded to him and took the lantern and he headed upstairs. Evan and Brisco went into the kitchen to look for something to drink.

Nadine paced with the child. Bouncing and singing and talking to him and trying the pacifier and trying the bottle and nothing. But she kept on. She told him about the smell of a chicken farm and told him about the time her stupid brother pushed her in the creek before she knew how to swim and she told him about the time her other stupid brother took their daddy’s truck before he had a license and drank a quart of beer and ran the truck into the back end of a parked cattle trailer. During the stories the baby paused, but when she had finished he’d start crying again. So she’d walk and bounce and sing and talk some more and he finally slowed down enough to take a bottle. Nadine sat down with him in front of the fire.