Michael Smith - Rivers

He went to the window and looked down. They were on the second floor and the awning was not ten feet below the window but Evan was almost certain it wouldn’t hold and if it splintered or collapsed then the fall could be much worse. He tried to open the window to get a better look but it was nailed shut. The window would have to be broken and with the sound of the storm it might be possible to get away with that. But then he would have to handle Brisco out of a jagged window onto a rickety awning in a driving storm. The entire scenario kept getting worse and worse.

He walked back into the room where Brisco slept and he looked at the small digital clock on the bedside table. An hour had passed and he didn’t believe it would be much longer before they came in. He walked gently over to the door and put his ear against it. They had stopped talking. Evan waited for them to start again.

Nothing. Only the beating of the rain and force of the wind.

He moved his ear from the door and looked down at the doorknob. Above the doorknob he noticed that the latch on the door was unlocked. He turned the lock and it clicked shut.

And then from the other side of the door, a voice said, “That ain’t gonna do you no good.”

Evan eased back from the door and over to the bed. He took out his pistol and then he sat on the bed, his back against the wooden headboard. Brisco turned in his sleep and grunted some but didn’t wake. Evan held the pistol in his lap and watched the door.

COHEN COULDN’T STAND BEING ALONE. After burying himself, after becoming what he wanted to be—alone with his memories and ghosts of a life—after everything he had done to be alone and remain alone, he couldn’t stand being alone now as he drove the truck behind the U-Haul. For two hours they had been moving back toward the coast, the hurricane forceful and gathering strength and the endless black night and the pounding of the rain and the wind and the twisting and turning across the beaten land and all he could think about was how alone he felt and it hurt like a broken bone.

During this solitary time he thought of everything. His life with Elisa and the early days when they were new and how he would quit work early and pick her up and they would drive up and down the coast, drinking beer and talking about all the things they were going to do, and at twilight they would find a pier to sit on where they could eat and drink some more beer and then at dark, before taking her back home, find a quiet strip of beach and lay out towels and lie naked under the empty sky, and when it was all done, kiss good night, anxious for tomorrow and the chance to do it all again.

He thought of the positive pregnancy test he danced around the living room with, holding high like a trophy, and her laughing and saying I peed on that, I peed on that, but him only dancing and twisting and turning like a madman. He thought of the many times he should have cut loose and taken her and gotten out of there, sold the house, sold the land, started over somewhere else and if he would have done that, how she would be alive now and he would be lying in bed with his daughter reading a bedtime story instead of caught in the middle of this impossible night in this impossible land.

He thought of the man he had left to bleed to death when the man was begging him to end his misery and he thought of slitting the stomach of the pregnant woman with the knife his grandfather had passed on to him and he thought of the two he had shot and killed back at the compound and he knew all those things made him something different now. He thought of Aggie and his twisted ideology and he thought of standing in the rain and trying to frame a child’s room and he thought of Habana and where she might be and he thought about the shoe box and how the things in it were probably scattered all across Gulfport. He thought of Mariposa and what must be going through her mind and how he hadn’t gotten to assure her of anything and did it matter anyway. Would any of it matter and would they even survive the night. He drove closely behind the U-Haul and being alone in the truck chewed at his heart and his mind and he seemed to relive his entire life in those hours and he wondered how in the hell the roads of his life could have led him to this moment. It seemed impossible.

Charlie was taking him places he had never been and if set free Cohen wondered if he could even find his way out of this hurricane. In almost every direction the ditches overflowed the road and the creeks ran the heights of bridges and there were great spaces of water everywhere but Charlie seemed to somehow find a way around. Cohen smoked without cease and the truck headlights and windshield wipers were ill-prepared for such intense combat. The winds rocked the back of the U-Haul and several times Charlie stopped and waited and then went on again but it never seemed to make sense to Cohen because there was only the fierce velocity of the wind and rain and never any ease.

He didn’t have a damn clue where they were. He wasn’t even certain whether they were driving north or south. Or east or west. In his angst he knocked his head against the steering wheel, against the door window. He pulled at his beard, at his hair. He squeezed at his chest and he smoked and he smoked and he felt so alone. Once when Charlie momentarily stopped, Cohen let his head fall down on the steering wheel and he began to cry and he wished that he had lived a better life so that he could call out for the hand of providence to guide him and half expect a response. He had expected sometime in the night for the lull to come and ease their journey but there wasn’t going to be a lull. There was no such thing anymore.

Mariposa had told him that in her dreams he left and didn’t come back. He had scoffed at the notion in the dry room but now he felt the possibility of not being there. And he thought of Evan and Brisco and the predicament he had left them in and he wondered how soon it would be before the boys were doing things out of desperation or if they were already. He thought that he should have sent them off with the black Hummer and the women and the baby. But hell no, he couldn’t have thought of that then.

He wanted to know anything. What time it was. Where they were. How much strength was left in the storm. Would the Jeep still be there or had someone found it and for some reason found the latches underneath the backseat and opened them and lifted the seat and hit jackpot. Would the night ever end. Would they be blown away. Would they drown. Would they be shot. All he had were questions.

He smoked his last cigarette. The night raged on. They continued like patient water beasts migrating toward their violent ocean home. Another hour of Charlie making turn after turn. Another hour of going nowhere. All around was black and floating countryside and they were on a road that was not much wider than the U-Haul. The brake lights of the U-Haul shined and it came to a stop and Cohen knew it was another dead end. The hazard lights began to blink and this was the sign for Cohen to come get in the U-Haul so they could figure out what to do next.

Cohen fought his way to the U-Haul cab, fought the door open, and Mariposa grabbed and pulled him in and he fell across her lap. He sat up and she slid into the middle of the bench seat between the men.

“Told you we’d make it,” Charlie said.

“You okay?” Mariposa asked and she held on to his arm.

“There’s no way in hell to do this, Charlie,” Cohen said, catching his breath and sitting up straight. “You can’t hardly stand out there.”

“It’ll be all right,” Charlie said. He held the pistol in one hand and the flask with the other.

“Shit. You been drinking all this time?”

“All this time,” Mariposa said.