Rivers: A Novel (31 page)

“Let’s go to that café and eat. Maybe find out about a place to stay,” Cohen said.

“You sure?” Evan asked.

“Not much other choice. Just stay close. Hold on to Brisco.”

“What about all that stuff in the back?” Mariposa asked.

Cohen reached into his coat where he still held two pistols and he
took them out, made sure they were loaded. The bowie knife was still on his belt. The rifle leaned against the truck door next to Evan and Cohen told him to lay it down across the floorboard. They raised their legs and Evan set it down and pushed it under the seat.

“We won’t be long,” Cohen said. “Nobody saw us park back here.”

“Except her,” Evan said and he pointed up at the woman, who waved again.

“She ain’t going nowhere. Come on.”

They got out of the truck and hurried through an alley that took them to the square. The water rapped against the awning and it was mostly rotted and let in almost as much as it kept out. The café was on the other side so they started walking. Along the sidewalk, nobody moved to let them by and they wove carefully through and around the faces of men ready to take what didn’t belong to them. Some of them whistled at Mariposa, called out the things they’d do to her. Evan held Brisco tight and Mariposa held Cohen tighter. It smelled like cigarettes and old beer and here and there were bodies curled against building fronts, sleeping or passed out or dead. At the first corner a group of women huddled around a doorway of a building that had iron bars across the windows. The women were dressed like thrift-store mannequins with strangely matching low-cut shirts and hiked skirts that ignored the rain and cold. A woman wearing a baseball hat and a boa promised them anything they wanted for twenty dollars.

“I’ll do all that twice for fifteen,” another one said and they all laughed and called out after Cohen as he crossed the street and made a left and continued along the square. Cohen saw the big man with the apron protecting the doorway of the café and they walked a little faster and halfway there, a man threw his shoulder into Cohen as they passed, knocking him off balance. He staggered against Mariposa but kept his feet. Several of them stood together, all of them with beards and wild red eyes and they each held a bottle and together they smelled like hell. Cohen stood up straight and looked at the one who had shoved him. Tattoos circled his neck and his nose was a little crooked.

“Good day, sir,” the man sang out and a couple of them laughed. Up and down the sidewalk, everybody stopped and watched and waited.

Cohen nodded and he took Mariposa by the arm and started to walk again but the man moved in front of him.

“I said good day. You got manners, you say the same.” He stood close to Cohen and glared, then he looked at Mariposa, up and down. A couple of his buddies moved in behind him.

“Go on, Evan,” Cohen said. “Take Brisco and go get something to eat.”

Evan and Brisco started to move and Cohen was surprised the men let them but they did and the boys walked on toward the café, Evan watching over his shoulder.

“What you want here?” the man asked.

Cohen nodded at the café. “Something to eat.”

“Who you got with you? Sister? Cousin? Daughter, maybe.”

“We’re just walking over there.”

“You might have to hold on. We here are the welcome-to-town committee. I’m president and them behind me is vice presidents.”

Cohen looked past him and counted. “You got four vice presidents.”

“That’s right.”

“What for?”

“It don’t matter. Does it?”

“Not to me. But I wouldn’t split the vice presidency with three others.”

The man reached out to touch a strand of Mariposa’s hair and Cohen swatted his hand away.

“You better be careful,” Cohen said.

“I was thinking the same thing about you,” the man answered, loudly, over the rattle of the rain. The others moved in closer.

“We just want food and gas,” Cohen said.

“I done heard that one. Seems like it unites us all.”

“We’re not looking to be united.”

“That right?”

“That’s right.”

“You might get a whole lot more than that. Might get united and anointed and invited and provided and God knows what else. ’Specially her.”

“Got that right,” one of the others said.

“How old are you, darling?”

“Don’t talk to her,” Cohen said.

She squeezed his arm.

“Well, then,” the man said and he grinned. He stepped back and waved his arm as if showing them to their table. “Cowboy gets to get on his way. Pardon the interruption. Y’all go and enjoy yourselves and we’ll be right here watching. Right across there we’ll have us a drink or two tonight, maybe.” He pointed at a storefront on the other side of the square where
JOINT
was spray-painted across the glass in a childlike script.

“Come on,” Cohen said to Mariposa and they moved ahead. Cohen watched the men as he walked past, uncertain.

“We gonna make you feel right at home,” the man called out. “Know why? ’Cause there ain’t nothing else to do. Ain’t nothing else to do but take care of the visitors to this fair city. God knows we about to be wiped away anyhow. Might as well enjoy it.”

IT WAS AS IF THEY
were a quartet of unrehearsed actors who had been cast into an ongoing production and directed to play the role of silent, exhausted, and bewildered. They sat in a booth at the front of the café next to the window. Brisco and Evan on one side, Cohen and Mariposa on the other. Along one wall were more booths and nearly every seat was filled. Women with children, old people sitting six in a booth, a table of Mexican boys talking quickly with nervous looks. More people and more normalcy than any of them had seen in years. More normalcy than Brisco had seen in his life.

Opposite the booths there was a long counter with ten stools occupied by men with coffee mugs and cigarettes. Behind the counter stood a black woman wearing a sweatshirt and a red bandana tied around her neck that she used to wipe the sweat from her upper lip as she worked the grill. A black girl hurried from table to table with a small notebook in one hand and a towel tossed over her shoulder.

“What’s she doing?” Brisco asked.

Evan leaned down to him. “She goes around and asks people what they want, then she writes it down and takes it over there to the cook. The cook fixes it, then when it’s done, she goes back and gets it and takes it to the person who asked for it.”

Brisco’s eyes followed her as she moved between tables, pausing to write down an order or lift plates from a table. “Oh,” he said.

The girl stepped carefully across the slick linoleum floor. Crooked cracks ran from the ceiling to the floor in the plaster walls and in some
places the plaster had fallen away, exposing the original brick walls. The big man with the apron stood in the doorway like a roadhouse bouncer and in his right hand he held the heavy end of a pool stick, a foot long, and he tapped it on his leg to the rhythm of the song that he was humming.

Mariposa put her head down on the table and Cohen watched the square through the window. The rain still falling and the people lining the sidewalks and the water rising and spilling over the curb about halfway around. The men drank. They smoked. Some whispered to one another. Every now and then a push and a shove. A ragged blend of the young and the old. Across the square, Cohen noticed two police cars parked in an alley and he figured that was why things hadn’t escalated before when the men confronted them.

The big man, tall and barrel-chested with his hair in buzz cut, walked over and tapped the end of the pool stick on the table and they turned their attention to him. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows and a scar ran the length of one forearm as if it were an extension of the pool stick.

“Y’all hungry?” he asked.

“I am,” Brisco said.

“I bet you’re always hungry.”

“Mostly,” Evan said.

“We got burgers and breakfast, and that’s about it as far as eating,” he said. “Coffee, Coke. Milk, juice.”

They all looked at one another. Seemingly unsure how to answer being asked what they wanted to eat or even how to think about it.

“We don’t have anything else so don’t try and dream something up.”

“Gimme some scrambled eggs. Bacon. Sausage. Toast. Better yet, everything you got with breakfast on it,” Cohen said.

“Me, too,” said Mariposa.

“Me, too,” said Brisco.

“You don’t even know what half that stuff is,” Evan said to his small brother.

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t,” Evan said. “Maybe we’ll just get some toast or something.”

“Hell you will,” Cohen said. “Bring it all for everybody.”

The man turned and shouted to the black woman behind the grill. “Four breakfasts. All of it on all of them.” Then he asked what they were drinking and he shouted that out too and then resumed his place in the doorway along with the humming and the tapping.

“God knows you’ve earned a breakfast,” Cohen said to Evan and the boy nodded.

Cohen stood up, took off his coat, and set it on the seat next to Mariposa. Then he reached into his pocket and took out the folded money. “Might as well see what we got.” He unfolded the money and began to count the hundred-dollar bills. When he was done, he said, “Thirteen hundred.”

“Damn,” said Evan.

“Damn like good or damn like bad?” asked Cohen.

“Damn like good. Right?”

Cohen shook his head. “Damn like bad. We got this and we got the truck and everything in it, though. But we’re back in the real world now where it costs money to breathe.”

“Not me. Watch this,” Brisco said and he huffed and puffed as if trying to put out a fire.

“It’s enough,” Mariposa said.

“Not really. It’s more than nothing. But less than something,” Cohen said. I could fix that, he started to add, but he stopped.

At the doorway, two men holding bottles in brown paper bags tried to come in but the man told them to go on and he poked at them with the stick. They backed off and walked on by, looking longingly into the café as if the mere sight of food might ease their hunger.

It wasn’t long before the food arrived. Plates of eggs and grits and bacon and sausage. Toast with butter and jelly and biscuits with gravy and sliced tomatoes. There was no more talking for some time.

When Cohen was done, he stood up and walked to the doorway and lit a cigarette. He asked the man if he wanted one but he said no and then Cohen asked if there was such a thing as a hotel around here.

“Where you coming here from, anyway?” the man asked.

“Down there. Kinda expected something different at the Line.”

“The Line?” the man said and huffed. “That’s turning into an old wives’ tale.”

“That’s what I keep hearing.”

“You better keep on going then,” the man said. “That Line is bullshit. See those cop cars over there?” He pointed the pool stick. “Been sitting there for about a year. Go look at ’em. Windows busted out. Gutted. Same way with anything else that was supposed to mean something. Been more than a year since we had anything to hold on to.”

“How much farther to where it all starts?”

The man shrugged. “I got no idea. Everywhere I know about is like this. Probably as far up as Tennessee, I guess. On the east side. West side is washed out.”

“What you mean, washed out?”

“Damn, man. You need to get educated if you plan on getting anywhere with that crew. Go look over there at the end of the counter. There’s a newspaper about two months old but it’ll do.”

Cohen crossed the café and sat down on a bar stool at the end of the counter. He picked up the newspaper and unfolded it. It was a national newspaper, and the front-page articles spoke to the weather, boundary issues, relief issues, banking issues. The legend at the bottom said
WEATHER 16A
. It also said
BOUNDARIES 16A
.

Cohen found 16A to be the back page. Across the top half of the page was a map of the United States that provided regional weather information. Across the bottom half of the page was another United States map, the boundary map. “Good Lord,” he said.

A blue-shaded area split the country and covered all the states bordering the east and west sides of the Mississippi River. Across the blue-shaded area was written
THE FLOODLANDS
. Texas and the southeast region, above the Line, were red, up to Tennessee and North Carolina.
SERVICES AND SECURITY LIMITED
covered the red region. The Line was a thick black line that appeared to be in its original place ninety miles inland. Maroon covered the region below the Line and read
ACCESS FORBIDDEN
. On either side of
THE FLOODLANDS
, the northeast and the west, the map was green, and across both of these regions was written
SERVICES AND SECURITY UNLIMITED
.

Cohen laid the newspaper on the counter. His mouth was open some as he turned and looked blankly at the man in the doorway, at the riffraff milling about on the sidewalk.

He had no idea what to do.

“Don’t look too spiffy, does it,” said the black woman working the grill.

He didn’t register her.

“Hey,” she said loudly.

Cohen shook his head some and turned to her.

“I said it don’t look too spiffy,” she said again and she pointed her spatula at the newspaper.

Cohen closed his mouth. Shook his head.

Then he got up and walked back over to the big man in the doorway.

A woman with a blanket draped over her head and shoulders came along. She held out a shaking hand and said, “Got dollar? Got dollar?”

“No dollar. Go on,” the man said. “Can’t buy a damn stick of gum with a dollar.”

She went on. There was a clap of thunder and a snap of lightning and some of them out on the sidewalk applauded and cheered. The man turned and saw Cohen behind him and said, “You educated now?”

“Yeah. More than I’d like.”

The thunder roared again and again they cheered.

“They do this all day, I’m guessing,” Cohen said.

“All day and all night. Sidewalks never get still. They crawl in and out of these building like goddamn rats. Starting to grow little rats now. It’s a crying damn shame. Used to sit right here in this spot every morning
and read the paper. Drink my coffee. Say hey to whoever. By the way, I’m Big Jim.”