Rivers: A Novel (16 page)

“I’m stupid,” she said.

“You’re not stupid, but what happened?”

“Running. Lost. Tripped like I almost had about a hundred times already trying to run on these stones and bricks and hit forehead-first. Knocked me a little loopy. Then that woman walked up and found me. Helped me sit up and I guess she lived right there ’cause she went in a building and came back out with the rag and some water.”

Cohen reached over and wiped a trail of blood and water from the side of her face. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I told you that you’re not supposed to exercise on vacation.”

“I get it now.”

He touched her hand that held the rag and moved it from her eye. It was about to stop bleeding. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

“Does it look like it hurts?”

“Yep.”

“Then it hurts.”

He moved her hand and rag back to the cut and said, “I’ll be right back.” He went upstairs to the room and found a bottle of Tylenol and went back down to the bar. No one was around so he went behind the bar and got her a bottle of water and himself a beer.

He sat down at the table and handed her three pills. She looked at them. Looked at him. Looked at his beer and her water.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

He got up again and took another beer from the cooler. He grabbed a bottle opener from the bar top and he sat down and opened the beers and slid one to her. She took the pills, stuck them in her mouth, and washed them down with the cold beer.

“Now that makes a girl feel better,” she said as she set the bottle down on the table.

Cohen reached into his pocket and took out the Lucky Strikes. He picked up his beer and let out an extended sigh. She winked at him with the eye not covered by the rag. The anxiety of separation fell from them but didn’t disappear.

“No more solo excursions,” he said.

She shrugged.

“I mean it,” he said.

“Should we leash ourselves together?”

“If we have to,” he said. He reached over and moved the rag from her face and looked at the cut, swollen and red. He then replaced the rag and said, “Just drink your beer.”

MARIPOSA HAD STOOD AT HER
window and watched. When she saw Cohen come out of the trailer and walk to where he slept, she waited to see if a light would come on. When it didn’t, she figured he must have gone to sleep so she waited. While she waited, she watched the commotion. A couple of the other women and Aggie went in and out of the trailer and when the door opened and there was some light she saw the blood on their hands and arms and shirts and then she finally saw a bloody mess wrapped in Ava’s arms and she wondered if it was dead or alive. The door closed for a while and when it opened again Ava held a bundle wrapped in white and she walked out into the rain, Aggie holding her by the arm, and across to his trailer and it seemed as if he or she had made it. For now.

She looked again to where Cohen slept. Still only black inside.

She put on her coat and when she got to the door she remembered that she was locked in. But she turned the handle anyway and found it unlocked and she figured in the madness Aggie must have forgotten the doors. She walked out and the wind slapped the rain against her face and with her head down she moved to his door. She paused, looked around, saw them bustling back and forth in the trailer where Lorna lay.

Then she put her hand on his trailer door handle, turned it slowly, opened the door, and slid inside.

She moved in the dark. Didn’t see him. Didn’t hear him at first.

Then he snored.

He was facedown on the mattress, his arms and legs spread out as if he were free-falling. He breathed big and heavy, and her eyes adjusted some and she moved over toward him and knelt next to the mattress. He was still wearing his coat and his muddy boots and they hung off the edge of the mattress.

She took a candle and a lighter out of her coat and she lit the candle and set it on the floor. She removed her coat and laid it on the floor, then put her hands on his left boot and felt for the laces and untied and loosened them. She tugged some. He didn’t move. She wiggled it and the boot gave and she pulled it off, and then she did the same to the right one. He grunted once and heaved but didn’t turn and didn’t wake.

She heard voices outside and she stood and looked out. Two others were moving across the compound, going back to where they slept. The light was off in Lorna’s trailer.

Mariposa knelt again. She listened to him breathing. Listened to the random snore. Listened to the rain and the wind. Listened to the words in her head that wanted to come out and then she let them out in whispers.

“I know what you came for,” she started. “I know you came for her. What’s left of her. What’s left of it all. I know what you came for.”

She paused. Put her hand on the back of his leg.

“Don’t let him keep you,” she whispered. “Don’t be like him. But I know you’re not that way. I already know it.”

She paused again. Removed her hand.

It was the first time in a long time that she had spoken to someone without angst, without vehemence, without fear.

Her hair was held back with a rubber band and she reached behind and pulled it out. Then she eased herself onto the mattress. Cohen snorted and raised his head for a brief moment. Then it fell and he continued on in his restless sleep. Mariposa leaned first on her elbows, waited on him to settle some, and then she let herself down and lay quietly beside him.

SOMEWHERE ELSE. NO COUNTRYSIDE. NO
beach. No pastures or barbed wire or crepe myrtles. A concrete world where he walked down a city street on a normal day with normal people up and down the sidewalks and in and out of the stores. Looking at the street signs but in a language that he didn’t understand and there was nothing distinct about this place. He walked on, looking into store windows, stepping into bars and looking around the tables, stopping at a pay phone and dialing and then ringing and ringing and no answer and hanging up and walking on. Newspaper stands and vendors selling hot dogs and a woman in a tight silver dress smoking a cigarette in front of a dress shop. A dog without a collar sniffing at a garbage can. The random honk of a car horn and he walked on, looking in the windows, looking at himself in the reflection. His hands were cold and he blew on them as he walked and then he was lost, stopping and looking back over his shoulder to see if he could recognize which direction he had come, walking on another block or two or three, stopping and spinning and trying to figure where he was or where he was going or how to get back or anything. He tried to ask but no one understood what he was asking and they hurried past or snapped back at him in annoyance or pushed him. He walked on and everything looked the same and he couldn’t figure out what or who he was looking for and with each step the anxiety grew until he was calling out for help but none of the strangers responded and then there was a sudden, heavy rush of clouds and they disappeared inside stores and apartment buildings but he had nowhere to go and he stood and watched the black clouds suffocate the daylight and then he felt the body beside him and he turned but no one was there but he felt the body again and then he opened his eyes and there was the darkness of the night and there was the thing beside him that he had felt in his dream.

He was on his back. The low glow of the candle across the room. She was lying next to him and he turned and saw her black hair and he
knew. For a reason he didn’t understand, he wasn’t startled. He lay still and waited to see if she was awake or asleep and he felt her body move in slow breaths and she was sleeping. He picked his head up and her hair was across his arm and then he took his hand and lifted the long black hair and laid it across her back. She breathed a heavy breath and he put his arm down and was still. He was still and he was warm with this body close to him. It was an alien feeling. A natural feeling. And he didn’t understand why she had come and he didn’t understand why he didn’t get up or why he wasn’t in a rage and he was relieved that in the dark it didn’t have to make any sense. He lay still and warm and felt her breathing and he closed his eyes and let it be.

When he woke several hours later, she wasn’t there, and a strange light came in the trailer window. He sat up and felt as if he were moving about in a dream where he couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t real. He wondered if her body against his had been a part of his imagination but then the truth of her body settled against him and he rubbed his eyes and the back of his neck and felt a complacency in the thought of someone there.

On the floor next to the mattress was his shoe box. On top of the box were Elisa’s wedding rings, her earrings, her necklaces. Next to the box was the envelope, the letters and documents inside.

He sat up and leaned to the side. He felt in his back pocket for her picture and it was still there. Then he took her jewelry and he lifted the lid of the shoe box and put the photograph and jewelry with the rest and then he replaced the lid and lay back down and looked out of the window at the sunshine.

THE WOMEN CONGREGATED IN THE
middle of the circle of trailers and talked about the miracles.

“Look at it,” one of them said.

“I swear to God it almost looks fake,” another said.

The group of women stared admiringly up into the crystal-blue sky
as if today were the day of its creation. The storm had moved on and in its wake was a clarity that had been forgotten. No clouds. Only the sun in the afternoon sky. A calm wind.

The other miracle was being passed around between them. He had been cleaned and he slept wrapped in a blanket and none of the women could believe he was alive.

COHEN STOOD OUT IN THE
field. A low ribbon of pink wrapping the late-afternoon horizon. His hands stuffed in his pockets and the blade wiped clean and back in its sheath and his weight on his good leg. Aggie had not said anything to him as he limped out of the trailer and past the ashes of the fire and out into the field but he could feel the man’s eyes on him. Could sense his pleasure in discovering what Cohen was capable of doing. Could feel the strength of the unknown.

He wondered what would happen if he started walking. How far he would get before the rifle rang and a point in his body burned and he lay still like a hunted animal. He was a couple of hundred yards from the tree line and the grass was high and he thought he could drop and crawl but his leg was lame and he didn’t want to be hunted down and killed while he was crawling. He’d rather be dead standing up. Birds passed above and there was movement in the tall grass from the small things that needed the break in the weather to find food. He stared south and imagined the water of the calm morning, crawling onto the dilapidated shore quietly, as if careful not to wake it. The emptiness of the ocean and the stretch of the water and the sky, meeting on a seemingly infinite horizon, and he remembered standing on the beach as a boy. His eyes looking out into nothing. Imagining the men, hundreds of years ago, who had stared out across that vast expanse and braved its uncertainty as they loaded ships and said goodbye to their families and hoisted sails and drifted away, the love of land and man overcome by the curiosity of what might be. Drifting away, their homelands becoming
smaller and smaller and then disappearing in the distance, the questions out before them like great constellations. Their minds filled with notions of sea dragons rising from the depths, swallowing them whole or burning them with fire or wrapping and squeezing them until the blood ran out. Swirling black whirlpools that could swallow entire fleets, sucking them down into bottomless, twisting graves. Or a world that would simply end. An edge to sail to and then fall off of and fall off into what?

Cohen had played these games in his head as a boy, standing waist-deep in the ocean, and he played them now as a man, looking out toward a limitless sky, curious about those men and what was held in their imaginations and had they been disappointed, at least a little, to find that the wildest creations of their minds could not be true. That there was only rock and sand on the other side that was not much different from the rock and sand they had departed from. That the fountains of life and the mountains of rubies and pearls did not exist any more than the spear-headed, long-necked monsters. Or was the world unknown enough for them no matter what it held? No matter what they found or whom they saw when they got there but simply that it was unknown to them and that was plenty to feed their hunger. Plenty to fill their spirit to the highest plateau. Plenty to reward their risks. The unknown was enough and then some and Cohen thought now as he looked south toward the ribboned horizon that this would have been the perfect place for that kind of man.

He reached down and picked at the dried, crusted blood on his leg. Behind him the women remained, looking at the baby, talking softly to one another as if passing on sensitive information. Ava held him, his pink head poking out of the top of the blanket and his eyes half-open and his mouth stretching in a feeble cry. In between whispers they made soothing sounds to the infant, dirty fingers reaching out to the child and touching his soft head and swelled cheeks. Aggie pulled dry wood out from a storage trailer and he worked to get the fire going while they huddled and embraced the new day. Evan and his small brother gathered wet wood and put it in the storage trailer, leaving the women and
child to themselves. Cohen heard them but did not turn and look. He watched the sky and thought of the explorers.

HE WAS STILL STARING WHEN
the blond-haired boy walked up behind him and said, “I didn’t mean nothing that day.”

Cohen turned around and faced him. The boy’s hair was slick and flat against his head and he held one hand to his mouth to keep it warm and with the other he held the hand of a young boy.

“I really didn’t,” he said. “Kinda had to.”

“Kinda had to what?”