Rivers: A Novel (12 page)

Cohen moved closer and looked down. Half the man’s face was red and torn and there were gashes across his throat and on his head and down his chest and arms. A bad tear in his rib cage. He was breathing in a terrified, irregular rhythm and his eyes were wide and sharp against the red surrounding them. He held his arm up to Cohen and tried to say something but only a shaky grunt came out. Cohen didn’t reach for him but he knelt a few feet away. The rain washed the blood as quickly as it came out of him.

The man’s grunting kept on and Cohen watched him for a minute and then he held the shotgun out toward him. “Where’d you get this?” he asked. Then he turned and pointed at the Jeep and asked the same thing. “All of it’s mine. Mine. Where’s them two that jumped me out there on the road?”

The man turned on his side and coughed out blood and he acted as if he were trying to get up. Cohen moved back. The man seemed to be trying to say something but Cohen didn’t know what, so he asked again. “Where are they? If you want anything else from me, you better speak up.”

The man got over on his belly and began to crawl toward him. Bleeding from everywhere and his face like some horror film and he moved himself forward on the ground inches at a time, reaching for Cohen. He kept coughing and spitting and coughing and spitting, the bloody mess like the trail of a slug across the ground as he inched forward and Cohen kept moving back.

Cohen then lay down on his stomach, eye to eye with the man, and said again, “Where the hell are them little shits? I ain’t asking you again. You want help, speak up.”

The man dropped his head and cleared his throat, then spit up again like a sick baby. Then he tried to say something. “Umrow,” he said.

Cohen leaned in and said, “Huh?”

“Umrow.”

“Calm down. Speak up.”

The man extended his arm and pointed awkwardly as if trying to give directions. Then he said, “Him. Himmel.”

“Himmel?”

He nodded his red head. “Row,” he said.

“Road?”

He nodded again.

“Himmel Road,” Cohen said. “Himmel Road out there past Crawfield. That old plantation?”

The man nodded and grunted and he began to push himself up from the ground. Cohen stayed back. “You sure?” he asked.

But the man didn’t answer and he managed to get himself to his knees. Moaning and crying out but his voice feeble. Cohen got to his feet and stood back and he saw that the man was reaching behind him for something. Cohen raised the gun on him but the man only went into his back pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. He dropped it on
the ground in front of him and then fell on his side. Cohen stepped over and picked it up and he looked at it. He read his own note. And then he said, “I told you.”

The man was on his back now and he reached his arm up. Tried to talk again but couldn’t, but he formed an imaginary pistol with his thumb and index finger and he held it to his head and pulled the trigger. When Cohen only looked at him, he slapped his hand on the ground and grunted and did it again. Still Cohen only looked at him.

“If you wanted something from me, you should have thought about it before,” he said and he tossed the note aside. Then he walked on away from the dying man and the dead panther, toward the back of the church, out of the rain, where he found his food and his water and he sat down and tried to make himself better.

AFTER HE ATE, HE CHANGED
into the dry clothes he had left behind and then he fell into an exhausted sleep, lying in the middle of the purple choir robes. He dreamed of a backyard with thick green grass and pinks and whites in the flower boxes and a clothesline. A wooden picnic table in the middle of the yard, surrounded by people he had known. Uncles and high school friends and Mom and strange faces from random moments in his life. On the table were plates of food. Fried chicken and hamburger steaks and mashed potatoes and biscuits and sliced watermelon. Everyone ate and ate but the food from the plates never seemed to diminish, yet every time he tried to fill his own plate, someone pushed him aside to talk or took him out front to show him a new car or something. He kept trying to eat and they kept distracting him and when he had the grease of the fried chicken on his fingertips, he woke with his fingers in his mouth.

He shook free from the dream and sat up. He was sweating and this seemed a good sign. The day was nearly gone and the rain had let up. He got up and walked outside and he dragged the dead man and the dead panther out into the woods, laying them next to each other like ill-fated lovers. He then went to the Jeep and looked under the seats
and in the glove box. Under the seat he found a hatchet and a half box of shotgun shells and in the glove box there was a flashlight and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

Over the next few days he went through the rest of the food and water, and the empty tin cans and water bottles were scattered across the floor of the back room of the church. He ate and slept, ate and slept. Between sleeping he would walk up and down the road looking for the dog but he stayed off his feet mostly, knew that he needed to get his strength back as soon as possible because there was a journey ahead.

The rain and wind came and went. At night the wind howled as it whipped through the church roof and windows and the water dripped from everywhere. In the day he sat out by the road and imagined a sun sitting in the sky, the sky open and pale and the chill gone from the air for a little while. In the field across the road, a quarter mile away, he saw two black cows meandering about, seemingly unaffected. Heavy, rippled clouds covered it all. Sometimes when the rain and wind eased, there were birds and armadillos and deer.

His fever remained but he felt it beginning to break. At night he listened to the symphony of Mother Nature and smoked the cigarettes. Possums and raccoons visited the church in the darkness and he wondered if they knew about the panther so he told them about it. Pointed out toward the woods where its body lay if they wanted to see for themselves. Each night they came and went as he sat on the front porch next to a small fire reading one of the left-behind paperbacks and each night he spoke to them about the panther or the weather or the advantages of being nocturnal.

When he slept his dreams were less the nightmare and more the comfort of a life that used to be, but when he woke he never hurt any less from having seen the faces of those he missed.

He had options. He could drive to Gulfport, to the casino parking lot, and hope for Charlie. He could get enough gas and supplies to make it to the Line and go from there. But he couldn’t be sure that Charlie would appear, or if he had already come and gone. The last hurricane had seemed stronger and more bitter than the recent ones and there
could have been roads and bridges washed away, keeping Charlie from making it to the coastline.

Or he could go out on Himmel Road, find the Crawfield Plantation, and find those two who had jumped him. He believed that where he found them, he would find his gas cans, his .22, probably some food and other supplies. Didn’t know what else or who else he’d find. But it seemed worth pursuing because he also knew he’d find the things that belonged to Elisa, that belonged to their life together, that belonged to him.

And then after that, he would go for the Line.

He tried for days to talk himself out of caring about those things and that shoe box. It was only tiny bands of silver or gold, only a small diamond, only dainty things that went in your earlobe or hung around your neck, rhinestones and rubies, and all of it together didn’t add up to much. Only pieces of paper that didn’t prove anything. Only silly little mementos of years long gone. They’re not worth anything, he’d think. They won’t do no good. Let it go like you should have already. Let it go.

Even in the moments when he had convinced himself that finding Charlie and getting out was the safest, easiest plan, somewhere beneath it all where there was the truth he knew that he was going to find that girl and that boy and get back those small, precious things. Because it was her and because she didn’t belong with them and if he was leaving, he was going to leave the way he wanted to leave. He had his Jeep. He had his shotgun. He was finding his strength, invigorated by hope. On the morning of the fourth day, as a steady, drifting rain crossed the land, he loaded the shotgun, draped a robe across his shoulders and head, lit a cigarette, and sat down in the Jeep. He sat and smoked, talking to himself. Telling himself that he was ready for anything. When he finished the cigarette he flicked it out and then adjusted the rearview mirror and looked at himself. It was the first time he had looked at himself in weeks. He noticed his cheekbones and he put his fingers to them, more round and pronounced than they had been. Then he touched the healing line around his neck. He leaned closer to the mirror and looked at his eyes. Thought they had changed color. Or maybe it was the skin
and face around them that was so different and made them strange. He leaned back. Huffed.

Then he cranked the Jeep and turned out of the parking lot.

At the end of the gravel road, the dog was standing there. Wet and ragged. He whistled and the dog jumped up into the passenger seat, and they started down the highway in the direction of Himmel Road.

AGGIE HAD ALWAYS BEEN THE
kind of man who needed to be watched. A strong, wiry build and a sharp brow and thin lips that held tight when they weren’t sucking on a cigarette. Thick gray-black hair down tight on a low forehead and tanned skin that didn’t lose its dark shade even in the winter months. He had been fired for stealing, stabbed for sleeping with married women, jailed for taking cars that didn’t belong to him. He had seldom slept in the same place for longer than a couple of months and the women that he had known weren’t aware until he was gone that the name they called him wasn’t really his name. He’d always had a curious ability to make friends, to get people to trust him, that had allowed him to live the life of a renegade and when, on a dare, he had started handling snakes in front of a congregation in the strip-mall church on the east end of Biloxi, his calling had been found.

Energized by the reaction of the worshipers, his adrenaline pumping with the pulse of the snake in his hands, its tail rattling and tongue seething, he had become the man who could heal or cleanse or predict the future before he had hardly even acknowledged to his followers that he was capable of such things. It was as if those who sat in the metal chairs and chanted and sang as he twirled the rattlers made him what he was without his consent. Yet he knew that it was right. That the power he held over them was in the proper hands. And he had been wielding that power for almost twenty years, back and forth across the Gulf Coast, moving his serpent church in a carnival-like
caravan that waved the flag of the Holy Spirit until the room was full and then in the dark corners of the night, using his position that had been delivered by God to penetrate both bodies and souls that didn’t belong to him.

In this new world, the snakes had been exchanged for guns and the strip-mall church exchanged for a colony.

He had let the women out to go to the bathroom and to eat. They were scattered in the fields around the trailers, pants down and squatting, the high grass the only shroud of modesty. Aggie stood under the tarp next to a low fire with the revolver in his hand, dangling down against his leg. The rain blew in below the tarp and the fire hissed back at it like a threatened snake. He watched them carelessly as he tapped the revolver against his leg, humming an old gospel he remembered his grandmother playing on the living room piano.

Four days now since Joe went off, he thought. He couldn’t decide if Joe had run off or if he was dead or dying, but he didn’t believe the man would desert. They’d been in it together for too long, gotten in and out of too much, hoodwinked too many people, and Joe had been as much of this new world as he had. Helped him find the place, helped him tow and circle the trailers, helped him loot houses and stores, helped him smile at the stragglers, promise them food and shelter. Helped him keep the women and get rid of the men. And nothing Joe had done or said suggested that he would run off. Aggie had taken one of the trucks and gone where he could, looking for the Jeep. Looking for Joe. But Joe was gone. At least for now. Aggie was finding it more difficult to believe that he’d see him again. So without his enforcer, he’d been more careful with his colonists, keeping the doors locked longer during the day, showing the revolver when they were out.

He thought that without Joe, it was time to start working on Evan. He would need another man. Someone strong enough to help hold them the way they needed to be held. Someone to increase their numbers.

One by one they came back into the circle of trailers and on a table next to the fire there were paper plates and plastic forks and gallon jugs of water and Coke. Next to the plates were two loaves of sliced bread, a package of bologna, peanut butter, and jelly. A bag of apples sat on the end of the table. They moved about slowly, as if resurrecting from a lengthy, dreamless slumber, unfamiliar with this place and what might have brought them here. Odd, shapeless figures, so draped in layers that it seemed as if the bodies beneath were nothing more than knobby frames of bone and flesh. They formed a line and waited for him to speak. Their coats were too big for their hungry bodies, some with bandanas tied around their heads, some with sock hats, some with gloves. Eight of them. Eight women who did not do anything that they were not supposed to do. Two of them pregnant. One in a big way. At the end of the line stood the blond boy and the dark-haired girl and the child, Brisco. Evan held Brisco’s hand and the child pushed the man-sized sock hat up off his eyes so he could see. All of them were damp, like everything else. The smoke gathered against the tarp and made a cloud around them.

Aggie stood in front of them and he tossed away his cigarette. Then he removed the Bible from his back pocket and opened it up to the same place that he read from every day before they ate. His rough fingertips brushed the featherlike pages, then he began.