Rivers: A Novel (18 page)

He went on and on, his words filled with conviction and his neck muscles taut and he began to twist his hands and arms, wringing the snake like a wet towel, the feeling that he needed something to kill rising up through him and as he prayed for strength and prayed for vengeance against those who would question the way, my way and Your way, dear God, he became so lost in his own power and might that he never saw the women rush on him and before he could rid himself of the fury of his prayer, he was on his back with his arms pinned and his legs pinned and his own revolver pressed against his lips like the biting kiss of a fierce lover and the snake had crawled away.

NONE OF THEM WAS SURE
what to do with him. They hadn’t thought that far ahead. Several wanted to kill him with his own gun. Several others wanted to lock him up and let him starve. Still another wanted to cut off his manhood and throw it out in the field for the buzzards and as soon as he bled to death, do the same with the rest of him.

With the help of Cohen and Evan they had tied him to the back end of a cattle trailer in the field. His arms were stretched out wide, and he was sitting on the ground, and he was bound at the wrists, elbows, around his neck, and around his chest. The baby was taken out of Ava’s arms and they made clear to her that she had a choice, die with Aggie or live with us. She decided she’d rather keep on living. No sooner had her decision been made than two of the women who weren’t pregnant began to dig through the pile of keys they had taken from Aggie. They found the keys to one of the trucks that they knew would run and without another word, without packing a change of clothes or any food or water, they went for the truck and the engine dragged a few times but then it cranked. Before they could get turned around and headed toward the road, three more women had run and gotten into the back of the truck and they were gone.

That left the pregnant woman and two not pregnant and Evan and Mariposa and Brisco. And the less-than-a-day-old child. Cohen rubbed at his beard and looked around and then he knelt on the ground and began looking through the keys for the Jeep key. He picked it out and stood and put it in his pocket and then he walked out to where Aggie
was tied and he reached into Aggie’s shirt pocket and took his cigarettes and lighter. The rain beat against the rusted iron trailer like some random back-alley drumbeat outside a late-night Royal Street blues bar.

“You could be my brother,” Aggie said to him in a humbled voice.

Cohen looked at him and shook his head and covered and lit a cigarette. When he walked back to them, they were standing in a circle, holding hands, and the pregnant woman was crying. They were wet and worn but it didn’t seem to matter. Seemed like they had accepted that they were part of what came from the sky. He looked around for Mariposa but didn’t see her. Cohen let them be, not wanting to intrude on the things that they had suffered together, and he went into the trailer that had belonged to Joe. Clothes were scattered about and there were empty plastic bottles and empty beer and whiskey bottles on the counter and a bowl filled with cigarette butts on the floor next to the bed. Cohen found a pair of jeans that looked about right and he tossed them over his shoulder and walked out of Joe’s trailer and over to the trailer where the woman had given birth to the child.

He opened the door and was greeted with the smell of the sick and the dead and he stepped back. There wasn’t much light now but he leaned his head inside and he looked at the woman, covered in crimson, her legs spread and her arms at her side and her head fallen over with an open mouth. He looked at her and then he stepped in and stood at the foot of the bed.

There was dried blood underneath his feet. The sheet across her legs had stuck to her and her naked breasts were smeared dark red. Her bare feet were sticking out of the end of the sheet. Her hands so still against her, never having held her own. The moment replayed in his mind like some memory of a horrific dream and he shook his head to rid himself of it and then he looked around and found the black bag. It was open on a short table next to the bed along with a stack of towels and a gallon of water. He looked inside and found the spray and gauze that Aggie had used on him. He took off his pants, unwrapped the bandage from his leg and washed it with the water. Then he sprayed the wound, front and back, and he wrapped a fresh bandage around his thigh. When he
was satisfied with his work, he put on the jeans he had taken from Joe’s trailer, then he looked at the woman again. She seemed almost otherworldly, an apparition from the underworld sent to warn them.

He bowed his head and whispered an unfinished sentence. He listened to the rain. And then there came a great boom of thunder that echoed across the night. He wondered if something of his had been lost. Or maybe something had been found.

When he came out they had broken from their circle and begun to plunder through the trailers that Aggie always kept them from. All of them but Mariposa, who stood alone, staring at Cohen, as if waiting for him.

Cohen limped over to her. He held out a cigarette but she shook her head. “You don’t look like you’d be much in a fight,” he said. “But my neck still hurts some.”

Mariposa folded her arms. “You gonna lead us out of here?” she asked.

Cohen smoked. Thought about it. “That sounds kinda biblical. I’m guessing y’all have had enough of that.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“I’m about like everybody else here.”

She let her arms fall to her sides. “Not really,” she said. She looked away from him, at the others plundering through the stockpile of food, water, clothes. Cohen watched her and what he noticed now was her youth. Half my age, he thought. At least.

Aggie hollered out something that Cohen didn’t make out. He then called out very clearly for Ava. She was crossing the compound and she stopped and looked in his direction. He called her again. Ava looked around and saw Cohen and Mariposa and she shook her head and moved on to her trailer.

Mariposa said, “Somewhere I got somebody.” She looked at Cohen again. What he noticed now wasn’t her youth but in her expression, in her deep-set eyes and the bend of her thin lips, he saw something contradicting that youth, far removed from innocence by no fault of her own.

“I got family,” she continued. “Somewhere.”

Cohen nodded.

“Like you,” she said.

He felt like there was something he wanted to say, but he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know who she was. Didn’t know if he wanted to find out. Didn’t want to care. Didn’t want to talk to her about her life or his life or anything that mattered. He thought of simply walking away but didn’t have to when Brisco came bounding out of a trailer with an armful of Coke cans. He dropped one and kicked it over toward Cohen and Mariposa and then he walked to them and handed them each a can. “There’s a whole bunch,” he said.

Cohen looked down at Brisco and said, “How old are you?”

The boy set the other cans on the ground, lifted his arm, and slid his jacket sleeve under his nose, and then he only shrugged.

“You don’t know how old you are?”

“I know.”

“Okay.” He waited on the child to continue but he didn’t and then Cohen didn’t have to worry about walking away from Mariposa because she turned and walked away from him. Brisco headed back toward the trailer. The women had finished their plunder and gone in from the rain.

There was a murmur of thunder and a flash off to the west. Cohen looked down at the ground and watched the rain splatter in the red mud.

Then he walked over to Mariposa’s trailer. A low glow of light leaked behind a shirt or sheet or something hung across the window. A concrete block below the door. He stepped up onto the block and stood close to the door, so close that if he leaned forward, his nose would bump it. He heard her moving inside. He lifted his hand and touched his wet fingertips to the wet door and he wondered what she was doing. He wondered why she had come to him like she had, in the middle of the night, no words, no want, only coming to him quietly and almost reverently and lying there with him. He wondered how he had known it was her, how when he woke in the dark and felt the body that he had
known it was the girl with the black hair. He wondered why it hadn’t startled him and he wondered why he hadn’t moved away from her. He wondered why it felt like it had and he wondered what it might feel like again, if it would be the same, tranquil and assuring, or if it would cause disgust and guilt and cause him to run. Inside the trailer, her movement stopped and he wondered what she was doing. He wondered what he was doing. His head tilted forward and he rested his forehead on the door.

“You can come in,” he heard her say.

He lifted his head.

“It’s okay,” she said.

He slid his hand from the door and slowly moved it to the door handle and there was more lightning and for a split second he saw his shadow on the door.

He let go of the handle, stepped down off the block, and backed away.

He turned from her door and walked over to Aggie’s truck and took a shovel out of the truck bed. Then he walked down the driveway toward the dog. The rain was coming on and the thunder more frequent. He couldn’t see and he tripped over the dog when he came to it. He knelt and scratched its soggy head and its body was cold and stiff. He moved off the gravel and started digging. The earth was soaked and gave easily and when he had a hole big enough, he set the dog’s body down into it and he covered it with mud and rocks. He said I’m sorry I got you into this and then he bowed his head and said amen.

He picked up the shovel again and he took ten steps away from the dog’s grave and sank the shovel into the ground. He dug and dug, fighting the water running down into the hole, but finally managing to get farther down to where it was easier to dig. He worked for nearly an hour until he was standing down in the hole, almost waist-deep, and he thought it was both deep enough and long enough. He tossed the shovel and climbed out of the big hole and he walked back up the driveway and to the trailers. Lights were off inside all the trailers but hers. His hands were aching and blistered and he wiped them on his wet pants
and then he walked over to the trailer where Lorna lay. He opened the door and felt around on the floor and found a blanket and he was glad that it was dark so he didn’t have to see her. He spread the blanket beside her and rolled her body over and he wrapped her in it, careful to cover her head and her feet as if to salvage some bit of dignity. She was heavier than he thought she would be but he lifted her underneath her knees and shoulders and they moved out of the trailer and into the rain. He looked across and Mariposa’s light was off.

But from the corner of her window, she watched him.

When he had moved back out into the dark, she lit a candle and turned to a plastic bag next to her mattress. In the bag were the dresses she had taken from Elisa’s closet. She laid them across the mattress, three of them. A white sundress. A black long-sleeve with a low neckline. Another with pastel blue and pink flowers that looked like it could’ve been worn with a bonnet on Easter Sunday. She stood back and admired them. Imagined the places they had been. For what occasion each had been worn. Imagined Cohen’s hands helping to remove them from her body. Mariposa put her hand to her chin, the pose of decision. After a thoughtful moment, she began to undress, and soon she stood in the candlelight, chill bumps up and down her legs and arms. She picked up the black dress and put it on.

IN HIS PREDICAMENT, THE ONLY
thing Aggie could do was think. And he did. He thought of the sweaty nights in the sweaty room with the sweaty snakes slithering through his arms and around his neck and waist as the organ played and the people sang and shouted. Thought of how it moved them and how the men wanted to shake his hand and the women wanted to be led by him and how he did lead them all the way and how good it felt when they were only nodding, no matter what he asked them to do. He thought of fists against his face in barrooms and the thrill ride of whiskey and the summer dark and he thought of nights in jail staring out of a square window at a black dotted sky when he felt like he was at the bottom of a well.

He thought of the anarchy of the evacuations and how it filled him to be alive in the midst of the panic and he thought of once when he was a boy and a man who was living with him and his mother had slammed her against the wall and he thought of the knife he had stuck in the back of the man’s leg later as he slept on their couch and the sound the man had made as the blade sank in. He thought of the work he had done to gather a community and he thought of the crying of the newborn child and he thought of the purity of the rising sun across the horizon in the morning after a storm. He sat there, tied to the trailer, the rain on him as if he were nothing more than a tree stump, and he imagined that the thunder was calling out to him, a voice from somewhere out there speaking to him in a language that only he could understand. He soaked in the rain and listened to
the thunder and his arms ached from being stretched and tied. What more can you give to them? What more can they want? It has always been like this, they did the same thing to Him. He gave them all they could want and all they could need. He showed them the path to glory and they tortured Him, spit on Him, watched Him bleed and bleed and bleed. And now here I am and all I did was protect them, shelter them, feed them. All I did was lead them through the storms, a watchful shepherd and his flock, and now I can scream out in the night and they will hear me and no one will come. Not a one. It has always been like this. And it always will be.

He thought of how this was going to end, realizing the things he had gained and the things he had lost, and it almost seemed to him like these thoughts were the thoughts of another man’s life.

SINCE THE MOMENT THAT CHARLIE
first heard the rumors of the buried money, he had begun to lose interest in his truck and his deliveries below the Line and the small bills he got in exchange for his assortment of small goods. Initially he had figured it was like the other ridiculous news that had been delivered to the Gulf Coast over the years. The prediction that the storms would not stop and would become more harrowing. The prediction that they could go on for years. The prediction that the government was thinking of drawing some bullshit line that you weren’t supposed to cross over. All of it had seemed so far-fetched at one time. Yet all of it had been true. And the rumor of this buried money seemed to Charlie exactly like these other bits of fairy-tale information that had come to fruition. So strange that it had to be right. And he wasn’t going to be outhustled for it by a bunch of yokels in pickup trucks packed with shovels and picks and coolers of beer.