Rivers: A Novel by Michael Farris Smith Read Free Book Online

not a street that didn’t have a story. Not an alley without a ghost. Not a burning candle without a spirit hovering close by. A carnival of imagination.
    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 itwas 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