Michael Smith - Rivers

“I’ll do all that twice for fifteen,” another one said and they all laughed and called out after Cohen as he crossed the street and made a left and continued along the square. Cohen saw the big man with the apron protecting the doorway of the café and they walked a little faster and halfway there, a man threw his shoulder into Cohen as they passed, knocking him off balance. He staggered against Mariposa but kept his feet. Several of them stood together, all of them with beards and wild red eyes and they each held a bottle and together they smelled like hell. Cohen stood up straight and looked at the one who had shoved him. Tattoos circled his neck and his nose was a little crooked.

“Good day, sir,” the man sang out and a couple of them laughed. Up and down the sidewalk, everybody stopped and watched and waited.

Cohen nodded and he took Mariposa by the arm and started to walk again but the man moved in front of him.

“I said good day. You got manners, you say the same.” He stood close to Cohen and glared, then he looked at Mariposa, up and down. A couple of his buddies moved in behind him.

“Go on, Evan,” Cohen said. “Take Brisco and go get something to eat.”

Evan and Brisco started to move and Cohen was surprised the men let them but they did and the boys walked on toward the café, Evan watching over his shoulder.

“What you want here?” the man asked.

Cohen nodded at the café. “Something to eat.”

“Who you got with you? Sister? Cousin? Daughter, maybe.”

“We’re just walking over there.”

“You might have to hold on. We here are the welcome-to-town committee. I’m president and them behind me is vice presidents.”

Cohen looked past him and counted. “You got four vice presidents.”

“That’s right.”

“What for?”

“It don’t matter. Does it?”

“Not to me. But I wouldn’t split the vice presidency with three others.”

The man reached out to touch a strand of Mariposa’s hair and Cohen swatted his hand away.

“You better be careful,” Cohen said.

“I was thinking the same thing about you,” the man answered, loudly, over the rattle of the rain. The others moved in closer.

“We just want food and gas,” Cohen said.

“I done heard that one. Seems like it unites us all.”

“We’re not looking to be united.”

“That right?”

“That’s right.”

“You might get a whole lot more than that. Might get united and anointed and invited and provided and God knows what else. ’Specially her.”

“Got that right,” one of the others said.

“How old are you, darling?”

“Don’t talk to her,” Cohen said.

She squeezed his arm.

“Well, then,” the man said and he grinned. He stepped back and waved his arm as if showing them to their table. “Cowboy gets to get on his way. Pardon the interruption. Y’all go and enjoy yourselves and we’ll be right here watching. Right across there we’ll have us a drink or two tonight, maybe.” He pointed at a storefront on the other side of the square where JOINT was spray-painted across the glass in a childlike script.

“Come on,” Cohen said to Mariposa and they moved ahead. Cohen watched the men as he walked past, uncertain.

“We gonna make you feel right at home,” the man called out. “Know why? ’Cause there ain’t nothing else to do. Ain’t nothing else to do but take care of the visitors to this fair city. God knows we about to be wiped away anyhow. Might as well enjoy it.”

IT WAS AS IF THEY were a quartet of unrehearsed actors who had been cast into an ongoing production and directed to play the role of silent, exhausted, and bewildered. They sat in a booth at the front of the café next to the window. Brisco and Evan on one side, Cohen and Mariposa on the other. Along one wall were more booths and nearly every seat was filled. Women with children, old people sitting six in a booth, a table of Mexican boys talking quickly with nervous looks. More people and more normalcy than any of them had seen in years. More normalcy than Brisco had seen in his life.

Opposite the booths there was a long counter with ten stools occupied by men with coffee mugs and cigarettes. Behind the counter stood a black woman wearing a sweatshirt and a red bandana tied around her neck that she used to wipe the sweat from her upper lip as she worked the grill. A black girl hurried from table to table with a small notebook in one hand and a towel tossed over her shoulder.

“What’s she doing?” Brisco asked.

Evan leaned down to him. “She goes around and asks people what they want, then she writes it down and takes it over there to the cook. The cook fixes it, then when it’s done, she goes back and gets it and takes it to the person who asked for it.”

Brisco’s eyes followed her as she moved between tables, pausing to write down an order or lift plates from a table. “Oh,” he said.

The girl stepped carefully across the slick linoleum floor. Crooked cracks ran from the ceiling to the floor in the plaster walls and in some places the plaster had fallen away, exposing the original brick walls. The big man with the apron stood in the doorway like a roadhouse bouncer and in his right hand he held the heavy end of a pool stick, a foot long, and he tapped it on his leg to the rhythm of the song that he was humming.

Mariposa put her head down on the table and Cohen watched the square through the window. The rain still falling and the people lining the sidewalks and the water rising and spilling over the curb about halfway around. The men drank. They smoked. Some whispered to one another. Every now and then a push and a shove. A ragged blend of the young and the old. Across the square, Cohen noticed two police cars parked in an alley and he figured that was why things hadn’t escalated before when the men confronted them.

The big man, tall and barrel-chested with his hair in buzz cut, walked over and tapped the end of the pool stick on the table and they turned their attention to him. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows and a scar ran the length of one forearm as if it were an extension of the pool stick.

“Y’all hungry?” he asked.

“I am,” Brisco said.

“I bet you’re always hungry.”

“Mostly,” Evan said.

“We got burgers and breakfast, and that’s about it as far as eating,” he said. “Coffee, Coke. Milk, juice.”

They all looked at one another. Seemingly unsure how to answer being asked what they wanted to eat or even how to think about it.

“We don’t have anything else so don’t try and dream something up.”

“Gimme some scrambled eggs. Bacon. Sausage. Toast. Better yet, everything you got with breakfast on it,” Cohen said.

“Me, too,” said Mariposa.

“Me, too,” said Brisco.

“You don’t even know what half that stuff is,” Evan said to his small brother.

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t,” Evan said. “Maybe we’ll just get some toast or something.”

“Hell you will,” Cohen said. “Bring it all for everybody.”

The man turned and shouted to the black woman behind the grill. “Four breakfasts. All of it on all of them.” Then he asked what they were drinking and he shouted that out too and then resumed his place in the doorway along with the humming and the tapping.

“God knows you’ve earned a breakfast,” Cohen said to Evan and the boy nodded.

Cohen stood up, took off his coat, and set it on the seat next to Mariposa. Then he reached into his pocket and took out the folded money. “Might as well see what we got.” He unfolded the money and began to count the hundred-dollar bills. When he was done, he said, “Thirteen hundred.”