Rivers: A Novel (15 page)

“Something ain’t right,” Ava said again. “I can see it but it ain’t moving. And I ain’t sure it’s the right way or not.”

“You gonna have to cut her, then,” Aggie said.

“You cut her. I don’t wanna cut her.”

“You gonna have to.”

“Or you are.”

“She’s gonna die if you don’t,” Aggie said with no notion if this was true or not but from the sound of Lorna, it sounded right.

“She might die either way,” Ava said. “If I cut her, how am I supposed to fix it up? There ain’t nothing in the bag showing me how to do that.” She no longer wore the army coat and her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows and there was blood on her hands.

“You gonna have to get that baby,” Aggie said. “He’s the start.”

“I know what he is. Or she is. Or whatever it is,” Ava said. “I been here long as you. Remember?”

“The start of what?” Cohen asked but they ignored him or didn’t hear him.

Lorna screamed out again. And then she stopped. They waited for her to start back but a quiet minute passed and Ava hurried back inside.

Aggie stepped back out and stood on the doorstep. The rain beat on the men and they hunched over and peered at each other from under their hoods.

“Got coffee over there in that one,” Aggie said and nodded toward another trailer but Cohen didn’t answer. He badly wanted some water but he didn’t want to get in the habit of asking this man for anything and before he could decide what to do the screaming started again and this time it didn’t stop. The screaming and the women calling out to her above her screams, above the storm, begging her to hold on, yelling directions to one another, chaotic directions that went around in circles and didn’t help or mean anything but only added to the hysteria of the moment. Cohen closed his eyes. Clenched his jaw. Wished to God he were somewhere else.

Aggie stood without expression.

Cohen opened his eyes and yelled to him, “You proud of this?”

Aggie yelled back, “I probably should have gone ahead and killed you last night. Or right now.”

Cohen wasn’t sure he’d made it out against the noise of the women, so he asked the man to say it again.

“You heard me,” Aggie said.

“No, I didn’t,” Cohen said defiantly. “Say it again.”

“I said I’m going to save you. You were sent here and you know it. Like the rest of us.”

“Nobody was sent here.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand enough of what I see.”

“That’s what you see now.”

“It won’t be no later.”

Aggie nodded. He grinned at Cohen from under his hood with the eyes of a man who had been set free. The eyes of a man who understood the power of conviction when there was no one around to judge.

The screaming then became something more than painful. It became torturous. Grotesque. Cohen watched Aggie and he didn’t know what he was dealing with here in this place, with this man. Didn’t know exactly who Aggie was or what he had done or what he was capable of but he knew it was some bad shit. Women behind locked doors and one man with the keys. The Holy Bible stuck in his back pocket. Wearing the coat he’d taken off a dead man. The power to send out others to ambush and steal. The drop-dead glare of the unrepentant.

The woman’s scream was shrill and pleading and there appeared to be no mercy in this land. Cohen stood still, listening to her, watching the man with his brow unchanged while the screaming of the woman splintered the storm around them and he thought of Elisa and what it would have been like with her belly round and the name chosen and the room built and painted yellow or pink or blue. He thought of the tiny nameless thing that died with her and he thought of the small thing fighting for its life inside that trailer where the women stood helplessly
around the mother as if they had been ushered back to a time when there was no other choice than to wring your hands and pray. There were the screams and the pleas but there were no answers and the sun was creeping on the edge of the horizon and somewhere people were sleeping in warm beds and somewhere it was going to be a beautiful day.

It was then that Cohen lifted his coat and shirts and he unsnapped the sheath and took out the knife. He held it in his right hand and waved it like a badge. Aggie’s eyes widened and he stepped back but Cohen wasn’t going for him. He was going for the trailer where the screaming came from and when he got there, he opened up the door and he walked right in and he saw the blood and he saw the anguish and Ava, kneeling between the woman’s legs, turned and looked at him and he pushed her out of the way.

ON THE MORNING OF THE
fourth day in venice, they awoke to a faint sunshine. Elisa rolled over onto Cohen, kissed him, and said I’m going for a run.

Cohen reached for her as she tried to get up from the bed but she playfully pushed him away and stood at the window.

“I can’t believe you brought your running shoes,” he said. “Me and you need to discuss what the word ‘vacation’ means.”

She took off the T-shirt that she slept in and she pushed back the white drapes and stood in the open window in only the panties she had bought the day before that had
CIAO
written across the bottom.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She stretched her arms and she was beautiful in the morning light. “It’s Italy. Nobody cares,” she said. “It feels good.”

He stared at her freckled back and shoulders and all he wanted to do was snatch her back into the bed and do wild things to her. He was about to go for her when she moved from the window and opened the armoire next to it. She found shorts and a tank top and her running shoes and she began to dress.

“Only a short one,” she said. “I gotta sweat out some of this wine we’ve been putting away.” On the nightstand was an empty wine bottle and on the floor by the bed was another.

“You’re gonna get lost,” he said.

“Probably. But I’ll figure it out.”

“Well,” he said and he rolled over. “I’ll be right here when you get back.”

She tied her shoes and found her running watch in the suitcase. Then she kissed him again and went out the door and he listened to the sound of her footsteps on the stairway.

HE AWOKE TWO HOURS LATER
and heard the tenor voice outside. Elisa hadn’t returned. He checked his watch twice to make sure she had been gone that long and he believed she should have been back by now. A short run for Elisa usually meant forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour.

He took a long shower and then shaved and brushed his teeth. When he was done he thought of standing naked in the window like Elisa but realized her curves provided a much more desirable picture. He put on some jeans and a white T-shirt and then he stood in the window and looked out at the courtyard. Healthy vines grew out of terra-cotta pots and up a trellis and red blossoms stuck out from window boxes on the building across the courtyard. The handful of wrought-iron tables were filled this morning with the absence of rain and a young waitress moved between them delivering coffee and plates of bread.

What she has done, he thought, is run until she got lost, then found herself a young Italian stud. They are now on a little boat that will take them to his bigger boat and by this time next year she will be speaking Italian and standing naked in her own bedroom window with her hunky young Italian traded in for a new hunky young Italian.

He smiled but didn’t laugh because it didn’t seem an impossible scenario with the fairy-tale look that had been in Elisa’s eyes since they had arrived.

He sat down on the bed and turned on the television and watched the replay of a soccer match from last night. Milan and Barcelona. He couldn’t tell which was which but he listened to the constant chantlike choruses from the crowd and felt almost hypnotized. He watched for half an hour and then he began to worry some, so he turned off the television
and put on shoes, socks, and a shirt, and went out to walk around and look for her.

He turned right when he came out of the hotel. A short walk and he arrived at a busy plaza. Tucked in the corners of the plaza were kiosks for newspapers and magazines, cigarettes and postcards, tourist maps and T-shirts. Restaurants and cafés lined the streets and waiters in white shirts and black ties moved from table to table and tourists walked slowly from café to café considering the best place to sit. In the center of the plaza was a small fountain where angels arched their backs and reached toward the heavens and at their feet children tossed in coins and splashed one another playfully. Branching out from the plaza were numerous streets and alleys and Cohen looked around and tried to imagine which one Elisa might have taken, but he realized it didn’t matter, as in this labyrinthine city your first turn had little bearing on where you eventually wound up.

He crossed to the other side and bought a pack of Lucky Strikes at a kiosk. He unwrapped the pack, lit a cigarette, and watched the plaza scene for another moment before picking a random alley to follow and try to find his wife.

Cohen moved along the street and crossed a canal and then he crossed another canal and he seemed to have merged into more of a local neighborhood. He passed a grocery store, a Laundromat, an appliance store, and a flower shop. A woman came out of a doorway with a dog on a leash and in another doorway a bicycle leaned against the wall. Cohen walked until he was out of the neighborhood and into a retail shopping district, a series of store-lined streets with sleek, scantily dressed mannequins and shiny jewelry and Venetian-made glass vases in the different windows.

He looked for a running woman. The day was warming and he was sweating some on his face and neck and now he was really worried. He noticed the dead ends where the water was stagnant and the alleys covered in shadows and he realized there were a thousand places to drop and disappear. He kept walking and smoking and looking and he came to a plaza that he recognized from the day before and it seemed he was
making some sort of circle back toward the hotel. Maybe she’s back, he thought, but the thought only lasted an instant and he decided to call out. He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Elisa!”

Movement in the plaza paused and people looked at him.

He took advantage of the quiet and again yelled, “Elisa!”

From a window somewhere an unfriendly voice yelled back so he kept walking. As he walked he continued to call out, the echo of his voice sometimes shooting along a passageway and sometimes falling dead in a dead end. He called out and walked more briskly and even looked into the canals as his imagination pictured a floating running shoe or running watch or her beautiful bare back afloat in the still tepid water.

He came to the intersection of five streets and in the middle of the intersection was a statue of a conquered winged lion with a woman in a long, flowing gown, wielding a spear, sitting on top of the lion. Cohen climbed up on the lion, stepped from the lion’s head into the woman’s lap, and managed to get on her shoulders so he could have a better view. A store owner came out of a gift shop and yelled at Cohen, pointing and waving and clapping his hands. Another Venetian passing by joined with the store owner. Cohen ignored them and from his perch looked down each street, screamed out her name. The store owner came closer to Cohen, waving his arms and shouting and Cohen jumped down from the statue and yelled back at the man and the man backed off. Cohen then turned in a circle, looking at all the streets, trying to decide what to do and sweating more now than before.

He realized he hadn’t left a note or word with the front desk and that if she had returned, she would be wondering what had happened to him. So he started running. He ran in what he thought was the general direction of the hotel, hoping to find a familiar street that would take him there. He called her name. Screamed her name. He paused at the ends of streets and looked both ways, he looked down into the canals when he went over a bridge. He hurried but tried not to miss anything.

He ran down a long alley and then cut across a canal and ran along another long alley and up ahead he saw people passing on the street. He believed that it was the street of his hotel and he was right. He turned
onto the street and after several minutes he recognized buildings and the hotel sign came into sight and then he saw, almost to the doorway, Elisa walking with her arm draped around a short woman in a long skirt. Elisa leaned on the woman and they inched along and Cohen raced and he caught them as they made it to the door.

“Elisa,” he said, out of breath. He saw that she held a rag on her forehead and it was dabbed in blood and he grabbed and hugged her though she still leaned on the woman.

“She okay. She okay,” the short woman said, pushing Cohen away, and then she moved Elisa’s arm from around her neck as if to say, Here you go, she’s yours. The woman’s glasses were held by a silver chain around her neck and she had kind, wrinkled eyes.

“I’m all right,” Elisa said, laughing a little and reaching for Cohen. “You look freaked out.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Got lost. Like we said I would.”

The woman made a fist and bonked her own forehead. “Head hit on ceiling,” she said.

“Street,” Elisa said and she pointed at the ground. “Head hit on street.”

“Okay. Good.”

“Head what?” Cohen asked. Her arm was around his neck and she held her hand out to the woman. The woman took her hand and Elisa said, “Thank you so much.
Grazie
so much.”

“You okay?” the woman asked, nodding.

Cohen stuck his hand in his pocket and took out some money and tried to give it to her but she wouldn’t take it and she backed away, nodding and saying, “Okay, good. Okay, good.”

“
Grazie,
” Elisa said again and the woman waved and turned and went back her way.

Cohen and Elisa moved inside the hotel and sat down at a table by the bar. She fell into a chair and moved the rag from her head and she was cut and swollen above her eyebrow.

“Goshdammit,” Cohen said.

One of the teenagers passing by saw Elisa’s eye and Cohen stepped behind the bar. He took a clean rag and wet it with cold water and gave it to her. “Something else?” he asked and she said no and told him thanks.