Michael Smith - Rivers

She sat Indian-style on the mattress in the trailer, the sleeping bag covering her, and leaned forward with the shoe box she had taken from the house they found—it had to be the house of the man they’d ambushed—and she rummaged through their lives, him and his wife. She plucked the champagne cork, smelled it, held it out in front of her. Heard the piano playing at the reception, saw the women in their long shiny dresses, wearing their long shiny earrings. She put down the cork and picked out a small stuffed frog. Won at a fair or bought at a gas station on a spur-of-the-moment excursion along the panhandle. She took a hard candy bracelet from the box and put it around her wrist and noticed that some of it had been eaten away. She opened up the cards and letters and read the words he had written to her, read the words she had written to him. A whole year? she wrote on a first-anniversary card. One down and how many more to go? And then an I love you and her name with a fancy E and a looping A at the end. I can’t tell if you’re getting better or I’m getting worse, he wrote on a birthday card. There is the water and the sky and there is you above it all, he wrote on a Valentine. Their lives seemed to appear before her in the sultry light of the candles, two people loving and laughing and living with ease. She read and paused and watched them.

She went through the cards and letters and then there were more things. A red bow, a shiny rock, half of a shoestring, a pacifier. Two dried roses tied together with a white ribbon, and on the ribbon was written Sono ubriaco. She said it aloud, wondered what it meant. She knew it wasn’t French and didn’t think it was Spanish and guessed it was Italian. Sono, she said aloud again, trying to figure out one word in hopes of putting it together with the second. Sono. She tried and tried but couldn’t place it.

She looked up from the box and stared at the three flames swaying back and forth. She thought of her grandmother and she thought of standing at the river, watching the people get on and off the riverboat. She thought of the stories of the lovers separated by what they could not control and she felt the same rise and fall that she had felt as she walked away from the river, holding her grandmother’s hand, filled with sympathy and envy by whatever story she had been told.

At the bottom of the box was a large envelope, sealed, folded in half, with nothing written on the outside. But she didn’t open it, wanted to save something for later. She returned everything to the box and put the top on and for a little while she had forgotten about the storm. Forgotten about this place.

Then a massive gust came and the trailer seemed to rise and drop and the bottles fell over and the candles went out and she let go a yelp. She pulled the sleeping bag tight around her. Dark all around her, the storm beating like a thousand hands against the trailer roof and sides. She tried to sing a little song she remembered her grandmother singing to her but the words were gone and only fragments of melody came out of her nervous mouth and all she wanted was for the night to end but that was a long ways away. She wondered if Evan and Brisco were awake, if any of the others were awake, and knew they had to be, it’d be impossible not to have your eyes open, and she wondered if they were holding on to the floor like she was, or if they were praying that the ropes would hold, or maybe praying that the ropes wouldn’t hold and that the storm would grant mercy and break them free and lift and carry the trailers away and set them down gently in the thick, twisted arms of the kudzu. She stared into the dark and she listened to it all and she held on and she hated most that during nights like these there was no way to hear Aggie coming in your direction.

IT WAS MIDDAY BEFORE THERE was a moment of relief. The wind finally gave, and the rocking stopped, and the rain slacked. Mariposa unwrapped herself from the sleeping bag, put on her jeans and sweatshirt, socks and boots, stood, and moved to the window. She wiped the fog from the glass with her shirtsleeve and looked around.

It had the look of a makeshift military compound that you might find in the middle of some forgotten war on the edge of a faraway jungle. A corral of sorts of the trailers that the government had once provided for those who had lost their homes. Short rectangular white things on wheels that symbolized the inadequacy of the effort to provide for the suffering. There were a dozen of them in a loose circle on the high ground of an old plantation where only the chimneys remained from the three-story antebellum. Stretching across the top and down the sides of each trailer were the same wild webs of rope that held her trailer to the ground. All but two of the trailers locked from the outside with deadbolts.

Around the trailers the grass was high but in the circle there was slick red clay and a square fire pit built from cinder blocks taken from the rubble of broken-down country stores. Scattered behind the trailers were old pickups, some that would crank and some that wouldn’t, a couple of cattle trailers, refrigerators and freezers, odd pieces of furniture and mattress frames.

She saw Cohen’s Jeep behind the old man’s trailer. Then she took a step over to her trailer door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. Which she figured was a reward for what she and Evan had done. She walked over and took the shoe box from the floor and set it on the mattress and laid the sleeping bag over it. She then opened the door and hurried next door to Evan’s trailer and it was also unlocked so she went in.

Evan and Brisco both rose up, startled.

“What the hell,” Evan said. His blond hair was wild and his young brother, Brisco, squeezed a deflated football.

“Nothing. Just don’t want Aggie to see me out.”

The boys sat up on the mattress. Clothes and empty water bottles strewn about. An overturned chair and a busted Styrofoam cooler across the floor. Brisco lay back down and Evan got up, rubbing at his head and face.

“Where you think he put the keys?” Mariposa whispered.

Evan moved past her. Picked up an empty cup and looked in it as if expecting something to be there. He tossed it aside. “Why you whispering?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Then stop.”

Mariposa moved around the small space, her arms folded. “I wish we wouldn’t have told Aggie about that house,” she whispered again.

“Me, too,” he answered. “Stop whispering. You’re making me nervous.”

“The keys,” she said at a normal volume. “Where you think he put them?”

“Keys to what?”

“To the Jeep.”

“I don’t know. Same place he keeps the rest of them, I guess.”

Mariposa exhaled. She dropped her head in disgust. Brisco picked up two empty water bottles and started playing drums on the wall.

Evan moved to the door, opened it, and sucked in the rainy, cool air, and closed it again.

“I can’t take it anymore,” she said.

“I know it.”

“I ain’t joking around. I mean it.”

“Just don’t do nothing dumb.”

“I already did something dumb when we came back here with the Jeep. I told you we shoulda run on.”

“Jesus, I can’t leave Brisco. What the hell are you talking about? Haul ass if you want to, but I’m with Brisco, don’t matter what shit I gotta put up with.”

Brisco stopped the drumming and said, “Leave me where.”

“Nowhere,” said Evan.

She shook her head. “I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I hope like hell you didn’t.”

He paused. Eased up. “You could if you want, though.”

“I can’t do it by myself. Neither can you and him.”