Rivers: A Novel (30 page)

“That’s a good point,” Cohen said.

“I’m with them,” Mariposa said. “We could sit here for days but I don’t think the baby would make it. Nobody thinks it.”

“Let’s go then,” Nadine said.

“All right,” Cohen said. “Come on, Evan. Let’s try and load what we can.”

“And hurry up,” Nadine ordered and then she walked around in circles with the child.

Cohen and Evan began to gather canned food and lamps and plastic bags of blankets and clothes. Mariposa helped them get it all to the door and Cohen and Evan ran in and out of the storm, loading the truck. When they were done, Mariposa went out and helped them get the tarp tied.

They ran back inside and the wind slammed the door behind them. The baby screamed and Nadine danced around with him and tried to get him to take the bottle but he wouldn’t.

Cohen picked up the shotgun and the box of shells and handed them to Evan. “Let Nadine drive and put Kris in the middle with the baby and Brisco,” he said to Evan. “You ride against the window. We see anybody, you make sure they see what you’re holding.”

IT RAINED SO HARD AND
the wind was so stiff that they had to pull over on the side of the road and wait. In lulls, they had gone east and then been able to maneuver north on Highway 29. But they moved at a walker’s pace, through decimated communities, houses and stores huddled around four-way stops and town squares. It took nearly an hour to manipulate several miles. They finally came to Highway 98, a four-lane running east and west. Fifteen miles to the east was Hattiesburg, a once slick university town that had sprawled with subdivisions and shopping malls and movie theaters. The interstate ran through Hattiesburg, which would get them to the Line most efficiently, but it was also likely that with the abundance of places to hide there would be more risks. This was the debate that they were having through rolled-down windows as they sat at a stop sign.

“I say we keep on this way,” Evan said.

“Which way?” asked Nadine. Evan pointed straight ahead, continuing north on 29.

“Might run out of road that way,” Cohen said.

“Better than getting shot.”

“I agree with that,” Nadine said.

“How’s he feeling?” Cohen asked.

“You hear him, don’t you?” Kris said about the wailing baby in her arms. “And hot. Don’t seem like that’s gonna change.”

“I ain’t interested in the interstate and what might be on it,” Evan said.

“I bet Charlie came that way,” Cohen said.

“Charlie had some help,” Evan said.

“Yep.”

“Let’s just keep on,” Nadine said and she pointed forward.

Cohen looked ahead. “All right,” he said.

But before they went any farther, he got out of the truck and took a gas can and put a couple of gallons in each truck, the wind pushing him off balance, his clothes stuck to him and his eyes fighting to stay focused on the job. He spilled a little but most went into the tanks and when he got back in the truck cab he was out of breath. Mariposa gave him a towel from the floorboard and he wiped his face and head. Then they crossed over Highway 98 and continued on north.

AFTER ANOTHER HOUR AND TWENTY
careful miles, the rain constant and the roads flooded in some places but able to be crossed, they came upon a sign as big as a billboard, sitting solitary in the countryside, that read:
U.S. GOVERNMENT–LEGISLATED TERRITORY 10 MILES
.

“That’s it,” Mariposa said and she sat up straight.

The next ten miles were a drowning landscape that, as they drove closer to the Line, became littered with the waste of man—shells of vehicles, abandoned government trailers, burned houses, beer bottles and shredded tires and trash like the remains from a crowd that had made a run for it. All of it soggy and stuck to the earth. It was difficult to see that far ahead and they came upon another sign, as large as the first, that said the Line was two miles away. Two more filthy miles along the desolate highway and then they came upon a station, a square brick thing with a metal roof, the illumination of the electric light from inside a patch of yellow in a portrait of gray. A ten-foot-high fence stretched
out from either side of the station and reached out of sight, with three black Hummers parked on the other side. A group of men in black coats, the same black coats they had encountered before in the parking lot, looked out at them from behind the thick glass of the station, like some powerful assembly of storm gods who had taken refuge from the work of their own hands.

Cohen stopped the truck. The other truck stopped behind him.

“What?” Mariposa said.

“I don’t know. What does it look like to you?”

They sat and stared ahead at the station. The rain beating and the windshield wipers thumping and the irritation of it all.

“They’d be coming this way if it was bad. Right?” she asked.

Cohen wasn’t sure. But it was time to decide. He put the truck in drive and they moved on toward the station.

There were five men inside behind bulletproof windows, and two of them put up the hoods on their black coats and walked outside. They both had rifles hanging from their shoulders and across the back of their coats in white were the letters
USLP
. One of them slid back the gate that crossed the road and the other stood at the entrance and motioned for Cohen to drive forward. Cohen moved ahead and the man held up his hand and Cohen stopped. He motioned for Cohen to roll down the window. He held his rifle like he was ready and he moved toward the window while the other guard moved to the passenger side of the truck. The three on the inside watched closely.

The man stayed two steps back and held his head tucked back in his hood as the rain slapped on the bulky black coat. Cohen leaned toward him to hear through the storm.

“You American?” the man called out.

Cohen nodded.

“I said you American?”

“Yeah. American.”

“What business you got up here?”

“Business?”

“Yeah,” the man said and he pointed his rifle at the ragged tarp and rain-soaked supplies in the back of the truck. “Business. Looks like you got business. Who you got up under there?”

“Nobody. Look for yourself.”

“Then what business you got?”

“I ain’t got no business. We’re trying to get the hell outta this mess.”

The guard moved closer and looked in at Mariposa. “She American?”

“Yeah. American.”

“She don’t look it.”

Cohen looked at Mariposa and back at the guard. “How so?”

“How about them back there? They with you?”

“Yeah, with me and her. All Americans. God bless America.”

The guard looked at the truck behind Cohen. He motioned the other guard to walk back to it. “You sit still,” he told Cohen.

Cohen rolled up the window and he turned and watched the guards as they walked to the other truck. It seemed like he was having the same conversation with Nadine as she was nodding and pointing at the others and then they stepped to the back of the truck and untied the tarp and looked underneath. They moved to Cohen’s truck and did the same thing. The guard tapped on Cohen’s window and he cracked it and the guard told him to cross through and pull over on the side of the road. He did and Nadine did the same.

Two more guards came out of the station. The four of them stood together and talked for a minute.

“What’s wrong?” Mariposa asked.

“Take a look. Just about all this,” Cohen said.

The guards split up. One went back inside the station and picked up a telephone. Another went to one of the black SUVs parked next to the station and he cranked it and pulled around alongside the vehicles. One guard walked to Cohen’s truck and the other to Nadine’s. Cohen let the window down again.

“Women back there say they got to get to a hospital. That right?”

“That’s right.”

“How long y’all been down there?”

Cohen shook his head. “Some longer than others.”

“Who the hell had the bright idea to get knocked up and have a baby down there?”

“I know it. Don’t make sense. But it’s a long story, I can promise that.”

“You got relations with them back there?”

Cohen said no.

“Then we’re gonna take that woman and that baby ourselves. Make sure they get where they need to go. You got anything up here that belongs to them?”

Cohen thought a minute. Looked over his shoulder and Kris and the baby were being helped into the SUV and Nadine was taking Kris’s plastic bag of clothes and whatever else out of the back of the truck. She handed it to the guard, who put it into the back of the SUV, then she hurried up to Cohen and said, “I got to follow them seeing as how that truck belongs to both me and Kris. We got to go.” She reached in the window and hugged Cohen around the neck and he said to hold on. He leaned back and took some money out of his front pocket and he gave it to her. “Be a good momma,” he said.

She took the money and smiled and she was getting soaked so she ran back to the truck. Evan and Brisco got out and came and got in next to Mariposa and they all watched the SUV and the truck drive away.

“Where they going?” Cohen asked.

“Depends,” said the guard. “About a hundred miles northeast to a decent spot for that baby and pregnant woman.”

“A hundred miles?”

“At least.”

“But ain’t this the Line?”

The guard laughed. “Officially, hell yeah. Unofficially, hell no. The Line ain’t nothing more than a line in the sand these days. Where you going, anyhow?”

Cohen shook his head. “I don’t guess we know. I can’t make it another hundred miles or whatever. Not in this thing.”

“Ellisville is straight on up this highway.”

“What’s there?”

“Mostly nothing. But maybe gas and food if you’re lucky.”

“Lucky? They got that stuff or not?”

“You’ll see when you get there.”

“All right,” Cohen said.

“And you got quite the arsenal in the back of that truck. You got plans?”

“Only plans we got is to get somewhere dry and warm and eat something cooked.”

“You can’t go riding around with all those guns in the back. Wrong people get back there, it’d be ugly.”

“What’s the gun law?”

“Gun law? I guess it’s if you got one, you’d better not let nobody take it from you. You’re still a long ways from law.”

“I got it.”

“Then go on. Ellisville is another dozen miles. Better find somewhere soon, ’cause there’s another storm right behind this one and it looks like a monster.”

“I haven’t seen one that isn’t.”

The guard shook his head.

“Ask him about Charlie,” one of the other guards called out.

“Yeah. Any chance you might’ve seen this old guy named Charlie down there somewhere? He runs a truck back and forth. Left out a while back but didn’t come back through this way.”

Cohen nodded. “We saw a couple of his boys. And about twenty others laid out.”

“Damn. Where at?”

“Down at the water. Casino parking lot.”

The guard shook his head again.

“You know,” Cohen said, “there’s some of you running roughshod down there. Even wearing the same coats.”

“I know it. They drive by here about once a week and fire over our heads just to see if we’ll do anything.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not getting paid to do anything. Don’t nobody sent down here know what the hell is going on, but some of us took it different than others.”

Cohen rolled up the window. The guard backed off and walked over to the others. Cohen put the truck in drive, but then he stopped and said wait a second and he got out of the truck and called out to the guards who were walking back into the station. They stopped and Cohen hurried over and asked if there was anything in particular they needed to be looking out for.

The guards smiled. Looked at each other. “Yeah,” one of them said. “If I was you I’d be on the lookout for whatever’s got two arms and two legs and sense enough to make them work.”

THE GAS GAUGE WAS RIGHT
at the e as they drove into ellisville. The high-way led them into downtown, a decrepit town square with a fractured awning running the length of the buildings, and underneath the awning stood groups of men sheltering from the rain, watching the truck as Cohen drove around the square looking for a place to park.

“What they all waiting for?” Evan asked.

“Nothing, it looks like,” Cohen answered.

Lights shined from the square buildings. A café stood in one corner and its door was open and a big man with an apron loomed in the doorway. Cohen lapped the square twice, watching them, some with the look of menace, others with the look of the defeated, but all seemingly interested in the unfamiliar truck and the unfamiliar refugees.

Cohen turned off the square and drove around to the backside of a row of buildings. He parked in between two dumpsters. A metal staircase rose up the back of one building, and at the top of the staircase, standing with an umbrella, was a square-shaped woman in only her panties and bra and she was waving at them to come on up, calling out in a singsong voice muted by the rain.