Michael Smith - Rivers

I will bring you back one day, he told her and he reached for her hand.

“Stay here,” Mariposa screamed and she had his face in her hands and was shaking his head back and forth. He looked at her but didn’t look at her. “Stay here, Cohen. Stay here, come on and stay here. Come on!”

“What is it?” Evan yelled. “What’s happening?”

“Look at me. Look at us. We’re getting there. It’s all behind now, Cohen. It’s all behind,” Mariposa said, her voice wavering and his face in her hands and the rain and sweat and blood in tiny rivers down her fingers and wrists and she could see that he was somewhere else. “Cohen. Look at me. Please come on. It’s all behind I swear it.”

Maybe next time we’ll have a stroller with us for you-know-who, Elisa said and he smiled and asked her who she was talking about. It’s coming and you know it’s coming. We can wait a little while longer but you know that, right? And you might as well get ready but you’ll be good at it. Her eyes changed again, from peaceful to confident and excited for the years before them. She grinned and said don’t be scared.

I’m not scared. Those things are little and I’m pretty sure I could win in a fight.

A young girl in sandals and a long white skirt came along the street holding an armful of roses. She stopped and held them toward Cohen, said something, nodded at Elisa. He held up two fingers and the girl pulled two from the bundle and gave them to Cohen. He paid her and she nodded and moved on and Cohen held the two roses out to Elisa.

One for the Venice water, he said. And one for the Mississippi water.

She took them, smelled them. Touched her fingertips to the petals.

From a distance, he heard someone calling him but he wasn’t sure who it was or where it was coming from and he didn’t try to answer.

The sun moved and their shadow had disappeared. The Venetian sunlight brushed the side of Elisa’s face, her arm, her leg. She seemed to him like something made of marble, her beauty perfectly sculpted and preserved.

MARIPOSA SAT IN A BUS station in Asheville, North Carolina. The bus station was a twenty-minute walk from the shelter that they had called home for months and she sat in the same spot where she sat each time she waited. Her legs were folded and her bag was next to her on the wooden bench and the ceiling fans clicked as they circled overhead. She thumbed through the pages of a newsmagazine, fanning the pages, enjoying the fluttering sound that they made. A woman with glasses sat behind the ticket counter and talked on the telephone and two men who looked like brothers sat on the other side of the small waiting room. One of them flipped a coin until the other guessed heads or tails correctly and then they swapped and the record was four misses in a row. Outside Evan and Brisco picked up rocks and tried to hit a garbage can they had moved out into the empty parking lot.

A denim jacket lay across the bag and Mariposa wore a sleeveless shirt with ruffles around the neck. The late spring was muggy and windy and there was little need for a jacket during the day but the nights remained cool. She uncrossed her legs and set the magazine on the bench. The magazine cover was a photograph of a man in a suit standing on a sun-soaked podium, red, white, and blue flags flapping in the wind behind him. He made a fist with his right hand, seemed to speak with indignation. She picked up the magazine and turned it over and slid it to the end of the bench.

She looked at the round clock on the wall behind the counter and there was another ten minutes to wait if the bus was on time but no one was certain of the chances of that happening.

She moved her jacket from the bag and opened it. She took out a folded sheet of paper and counted the places she had been. Huntsville, Birmingham, Roswell, Augusta, Athens. The names of thirteen more towns and the addresses of thirteen more shelters remained on the list and she was making her way east for the first time, heading for Winston-Salem. The shelters on her list held thousands of people and stretched from Alabama across to North Carolina, up into Kentucky and Virginia. There were more across on the other side of the Floodlands, over into Texas and Arkansas, but that would have to wait and hopefully she wouldn’t need to get across. The shelters functioned out of high school gymnasiums or National Guard armories and served as a way of living for most. Children went to school at these shelters, job training was provided at these shelters, mail was delivered to these shelters. And she was going to go to each one on her list until she found someone that she knew. Somewhere she had a mother and cousins and aunts and she was ready to find them.

She looked out of the glass doors at Evan and Brisco. Thought of the place where they had buried Cohen, somewhere off the road in northeast Mississippi, after they had driven almost three hours with him dead against the door, nobody in the truck wanting to let him go. The rain had eased the farther north they had gone, and they turned off the highway and drove along a side road where there were no lights and they went out into a field.

In the truck bed, Evan found a shovel and he used it to dig a grave while Mariposa sat on the ground with Cohen lying across her lap. Brisco stood strangely quiet and watched his brother dig. When Evan was done, with the truck lights shining on them, they lifted and carried Cohen to the grave and set him down gently. Then they stood there in silence until Mariposa turned and walked away and Evan and Brisco covered him with the dirt. After Cohen was buried, Evan turned to look for Mariposa but she had walked out into the dark and he let her be. He sat with Brisco on the tailgate and they were chilled by the wind but it felt different than the chilled wind of down below. He and Brisco talked and Evan heard her crying out there in the dark but when Brisco asked is that Mariposa, Evan said no. It’s only the wind.

After an hour she returned from the dark and they began again.

They had driven east until noon and wound up in Asheville at a shelter that occupied an old department store. A group of women were standing outside the front doors smoking when the three of them got out of the truck. Filthy, exhausted, hungry, skinny. Bullet holes and dents in the truck. Bloodstained clothes. The fragile gait of the weary. One woman had dropped her cigarette at the sight of them. Another said what in God’s name is this.

Mariposa folded the paper with the list of towns and stuck it back in her bag.

She rested her hands on her stomach and hoped for a kick. The little kicks helped the day go by and kept her spirit alive and she pushed some to see if that would get them going and it did. A handful of kicks and she talked to him as they came and went, and then he settled again.

The woman at the counter hung up the telephone and she announced to Mariposa and the two men that, believe it or not, the bus would arrive any second.

Mariposa got up from the wooden bench and as she rose the baby kicked again and made her oooh. Her eyes got big and she put her hands on the sides of her stomach and said, “Easy, little man.” She took a deep breath and walked to the glass doors and went outside. Brisco and Evan were arguing over the score of whatever game it was they were playing.

There was another kick and she thought of Cohen and the dream that she had in Ellisville about him leaving and not coming back. Thought of the way that he assured her that it wasn’t going to happen. I’m not going to leave you, and you have to promise not to leave me.

It was the only dream left to focus on as she had stopped having them altogether, her subconscious nights replaced by sleeplessness, lying on her back, staring at the exposed metal beams of the shelter ceiling, trying to figure out what had been real. She had conjured up his life based on the remnants of it—the trinkets and tokens and letters and his expressions when he was forced to talk about it. But then the illusion she had created succumbed to the intensity of the real man. She had talked with the real man and slept with him and bled with him and she wondered how far he had come toward her. All the way?