Rivers: A Novel (11 page)

The dog started out with him but would get ahead and turn back and look at Cohen, impatient with the lack of pace. Now and again the dog would wander off, out into a pasture or off into a stretch of woods, and then come back and walk with him again. He found freshly flooded roads and bridges that caused him to detour several times, but he kept going in the right direction and could feel the church road getting closer. He fought on, burning and chilled but encouraged by the familiar landscape. Not fifty yards away from the gravel road that would take him to the church, he sat down in the middle of the road. Then he lay down in the middle of the road. He draped his wet arm across his wet head and closed his eyes and there was only the constant drumming of the rain but as he lay there it seemed quiet to him. The quiet of the forgotten.

And then he heard it coming.

He sat up. Listened. Wasn’t sure if he was imagining it.

But the sound remained. Coming from the other direction. Getting a little bit louder. He looked down the road and there was a curve and coming from the direction of the curve was the sound of a vehicle that he knew. A deep, chugging sound that rose with the push of the gas pedal and fell with the ride of the clutch.

He got up and slid off the road and splashed into the ditch, his head just high enough so that he could see it coming from around the curve. He waited, anxious, like some hungry animal. And then there it was.

“Please God, be real,” he whispered.

And it was real. The Jeep was coming in his direction and he could see that there was only the driver.

Then it slowed. And then it stopped.

The driver stood in his seat and looked around. It wasn’t the boy and it wasn’t the girl. Cohen wanted him to come on his way but didn’t know what he could do if he did. He looked around for a stick or a big rock or anything but there was nothing except wet, limp grass and weeds. He thought to simply get up and flag the man down. Try to get the Jeep back the way it was taken from him. But he wasn’t strong enough to fight. Wasn’t strong enough for anything. So he lay there and watched.

The Jeep came on forward a little, and then it turned down the church road.

Cohen hurried out of the ditch and onto the road and he was running. The frail, broken run of a sick and hungry man and he kept it up until he reached the church road and he saw the tracks in the mud. He bent over with his elbows on his knees. Gasping for breath and his head light.

He stayed bent over until he caught his breath and then he began again, the sound of the engine fading away.

HE WAS GOING TO SHAKE
this free and then that would be that. The Note that was driving him crazy. The note that had stirred the past with the
images of the burgundy dress of his mother and the backwoods church. It would all be gone after this. For reasons that he didn’t understand, he was drawn back to this road. Back to this place. Back to years long before the barrage and the lawlessness.

He drove and thought about Aggie. How he first saw him standing outside of the liquor store, drinking out of a pint of whiskey and smoking a cigarette. Wearing a heavy jacket with his hood pulled over his head but his eyes sharp even from a distance. Joe had walked past him, exchanged a glare. It seemed like that was all anyone did at that time, glare at each other, the coast quickly becoming the land of desertion, a smattering of liquor stores and strip clubs turned whorehouses and the random gas station all that remained with lights on and doors open. The Line only a few months from being official. The coast rats sleeping in what was left of abandoned houses and businesses. Nobody trusting anybody. Destruction all around.

Joe had gone inside and gotten his own bottle and when he came back out Aggie was still there. Watching him. Joe walked toward his truck with his eyes on the man with the hood.

Aggie tossed his cigarette and said, “You got a hitch on that thing?”

Joe said, “What’d you say?”

“A hitch. You got a hitch on your truck there?”

“Yeah, I got a hitch. So what?”

Aggie drank from his bottle and took a few steps toward Joe. “You wanna make some money?”

Joe laughed. “You ain’t got no damn money.”

“I got it if you want to make it,” Aggie said. He pushed his hood back from his head, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a folded stack of bills.

“I ain’t queer,” Joe said.

“Me neither. Damn.”

“Then what you want?”

“I need a truck with a hitch. I got some things I gotta get towed.”

“To where?”

“Not far. I got two trucks already but the hitch is busted on both.”

“If you got two trucks, why you standing here without one?”

“Walking don’t kill people.”

“It might down here.”

“My trucks are where I need them to be. You wanna see, take the money. You wanna help, take the money. If you don’t, don’t take it.”

Joe thought about it. He needed the money. Everybody needed the money. “How much?”

Aggie held the folded bills out to him. “All of it.”

“Shit,” Joe said, shaking his head. “You must think I’m damn crazy.”

Aggie had kept moving toward him, was close now, could reach out and touch him if he wanted. “I don’t think you’re crazy. I need something. You probably need something, just like everybody else down here. Or why else would you still be here?” Aggie held out the money again. “Take it,” he said. “Take it and let’s ride and talk a little while. We got drinks. I got a pack of smokes. You smoke?”

“Yeah, I smoke,” Joe said and he reached his hand out for the money. He then took a long, cautious look at the man. “Open up that coat.”

Aggie opened his coat and he had a pistol tucked in his pants. “I know you got one, too,” he said. “So we can call it even.”

“You’re gonna have to let me hold it while we ride.”

“No, I ain’t. You got every nickel I have in your hand right there. You won’t hold my gun. I won’t be dead and broke.”

Joe thought about it. The man seemed to stare straight through him and there was something about him that told Joe his side would be a good one to be on in a place like this.

So he had told Aggie to get on in. That was three years ago.

It had been easy to go along with Aggie. He was a man who spoke with conviction, with a straight-ahead honesty. A man who had a plan and a way of making Joe feel like there were only benefits. At times he had felt like Aggie was a brother and at other times he had felt like Aggie might cut his throat before daylight. And Aggie had a way of talking to people, a way of getting them to believe. He had heard the way Aggie spoke to the stragglers, to the people they had found at the rope’s end. Come on, we’ll get you something to eat, he’d say with
the compassion of a grandfather. We got a warm, safe place to sleep. People down here gotta help each other, he’d say. Like the Father takes care of the birds of the sky, He takes care of us. And I’m helping Him. Come on and let’s get something to eat and then you can decide what you wanna do. We can even drive you up if you want, he’d tell them. And they would climb in the back of the truck, maybe because they trusted him, maybe because they had no other choice, but they climbed in. And they were grateful for something to eat and for the dry place to sleep and they thought they had come upon a savior. Joe believed Aggie when he said this was for their own good. They would die without this place. And you know that the men are a danger and if you don’t want to walk them out in the woods, then I will do that. I will do what we need to be done and you stand up straight. This is yours as much as mine. This is your land. It is ours.

Joe had watched. He had learned. Had participated. And he had finally walked a man out into the woods and returned him to the earth and everything else seemed easier after that. But last night was on him. Or maybe it was the culmination of many nights like that one and their growing consistency. The wind never seemed to cease. The rain never seemed to stop. It was bad and getting worse and sitting in the trailer in the dark with his knees tucked under him while the storm pushed and pulled was a too common event. He had to get drunk to get through the nights and then getting drunk spun him around inside and it was a vicious loop. And now he had this note and he had these memories of his mother and this church and what this world looked like before and he felt a pressure welling up inside.

He drove slowly as he moved along the muddy gravel road, the Jeep sliding some and him uncertain if this were the right place. It was difficult to remember anywhere in this land the way it had been because of the way it was now. It was so much worse and there appeared to be no end in sight. The tree line tight against the road seemed familiar, but there were gaps in it that hadn’t been before. Houses that might have reminded him were no longer there. It was only his hunch that led him to where he thought the small church would be.

A careful mile or two and he saw it. Sitting up ahead, to the right, back off the road. He drove on up and stopped and looked. He could see the men standing outside in the Sunday sunshine, in their short-sleeved shirts and ties, smoking their cigarettes with their calloused hands. The kids running between the cars playing chase, their shrieks and laughter breaking into the peaceful Sunday morning. The women and their clean dresses with their Bibles tucked under their arms and their faces a soft pink.

The thought occurred to him that all he had to do was to get in the Jeep and keep going. Maybe his time with Aggie had run its course. Maybe he didn’t want to be responsible for all those women and what was to come. Maybe he had found that note for a reason, to shake him loose, to set him free. Maybe it wasn’t going to be as simple as coming to this place and clearing his head and going back to the circle of trailers and the faces that occupied them.

The shotgun and the shells sat in the passenger seat and he picked up the shotgun but then set it back down. He got out and pushed the hood from his head. He looked at the place. The beige brick stained and molded. The front doors gone. He walked up closer and saw the wet black ashes from a fire on the concrete porch. He poked at them with his foot and then he walked over and stood in the doorway. The fallen tree splitting the roof of the sanctuary and its moss hanging down across the pews. The stained glass in shards below the windows. He looked for the pew where they had sat. Listened for his mother telling him to sit still. Wondered what she would say if she knew what he had become a part of. He stood in the doorway and smoked. Thought of what he’d say in his own defense.

It’s a different world, he thought. And he could think of no more explanation.

He walked back outside and around the side of the church. Thought he’d take a look in the back. See if there was anything worth having. At one of the windows he knelt down and picked through the broken stained glass that sat at the bottom of a puddle. He fished the pieces out. The purples and blues and reds. He held several together in his palm
and admired the purity of color. Imagined the sunlight against them. The illusion of something brighter and better.

And this would be the last memory that he would have as he lay dying. The memory of kneeling there, in this place where he had been a boy with a mother, with the pieces of the holy glass in his hands. Not the realizations of what he had done, the flesh and blood that he had claimed along with Aggie, the women he had corralled and made his own, their bodies and their minds and maybe even their hearts and souls, unlocking the doors when he wanted and feeding them when he wanted and doing what he wanted when he felt the urge. For what other reason was there to keep them? He didn’t think of them or the men he had separated them from. The blood on his hands and the filth on his fingertips. He didn’t think of the man that he was and the power he had grasped and he didn’t sing for forgiveness or call out for redemption. In the next hour, as he lay dying, he thought only of that moment of serenity, kneeling next to the church where he had been a boy before he had grown into a man and realized the clarity of strength, his knees damp in the wet ground and in his palm the blue and red and purple glass. As he lay dying, his flesh ripped like fabric, his blood flowing freely like the rain that came so often, he thought only of those beautiful shards of glass and the weight that they carried, and he found it difficult to comprehend that while he held those small holy things, how something so big and so powerful and so violent could have been so silent as it crept up behind him.

COHEN DIDN’T WAIT FOR THE
dog to reappear and he went as quickly as he could along the gravel road because he thought the sound of the Jeep had quit. Not disappeared far down the road and out of distance but quit as if whoever was driving it had stopped and the only place close by to stop was the church. He hurried on, pulling at his pants pockets as if to drag himself. When the church was in sight he saw the Jeep parked in front of it and he stopped running and he moved over to the edge of the road, closer to the tree line, to keep out of sight.

He didn’t see the man who had been driving and it occurred to
him to make a run for it. The rain would muffle his steps and the keys would be in the ignition and just go, take off, don’t slow down. Go as hard as you can.

But then his thoughts were interrupted by the high-pitched howls and screams of he didn’t know what. Something awful and horrific and acute slicing through the hazy morning. He kept on, walking faster now, breaking into a light run and then he was at the church and next to the Jeep and then he saw that the terrible sound, the howling and screaming, was coming from a tangle of man and panther at the side of the church and the panther was winning.

Cohen looked over into the Jeep and saw his sawed-off shotgun and some shells on the passenger seat. He took it out and loaded it and put some shells in his pocket, keeping one eye on the panther and the man. He tugged at the backseat as if to lift it but it didn’t move. The man shrieked as the panther had him pinned and was tearing at him with its mouth and claws. Cohen walked over very carefully, staying behind them so that the panther wouldn’t perhaps turn and rush him, and ten feet away he aimed the shotgun and fired and the panther jumped and twisted and cried out. Cohen fired again and the panther jumped again but there was no more crying and it fell dead next to the ripped, screaming man.