Rivers: A Novel (17 page)

The boy looked back over his shoulder and Aggie was watching them. He lowered his voice as if the old man had a magical ability to hear all. “Nothing.”

Cohen looked down at the small boy and hobbled closer to them. “Who are you?” he asked.

“This here is my little brother. He’s why I did what I did out there.” The small boy wore a denim coat buttoned to the top, and a scarf was coiled around his neck and up above his mouth. He held a half-deflated football tucked under his arm.

“You got a name?”

“Which one of us?”

“Either. Both.”

“I’m Evan and he’s Brisco.”

“What’s he got to do with you and that girl back there trying to kill me?”

Evan shook his head and said, “I wasn’t trying to kill nobody.”

“You shot at me.”

“Didn’t nothing come out.”

“That ain’t the point.”

“The point is I didn’t want to. I told you, Aggie keeps Brisco when he sends me and Mariposa out looking around. So he knows I’ll come back. And it’s best to come back with something.”

Cohen looked past the boys. Aggie was smoking a cigarette. His
eyes on them. The women passing the baby around behind him. The smoke from the young fire rising and mingling with Aggie’s cigarette smoke like a team of serpents stretching up into a watchful perch. Mariposa stood alone, leaning against a trailer, and watched them.

“Cover your ears up, Brisco,” Evan said and the boy put his pale hands over his ears. Then Evan said softly, “You kill Joe?”

Cohen paused and tried to figure how to answer. He didn’t know if he wanted them to know that he’d never killed a man. Never shot at a man. Never shot at all except to shoot back in the direction of gunfire to let them know to go the other way. He knew they would talk about him and wonder about him, so he said, “Yeah.”

Evan reached down and picked the top off a blade of tall grass. “Good,” he said. Then he moved Brisco’s hands off his ears.

Cohen blew on his hands and rubbed at his face. The small boy moved the football from one arm to the other and then he tossed it to Evan.

“Go long,” Evan said and Brisco took off, not looking back and quickly out of range of a deflated football. “Hold up,” Evan called and Brisco hit the brakes. Evan let fly of the wobbly, saggy ball and it short-hopped Brisco.

“Practice kicking,” Evan told him. Brisco tucked the ball and ran a quick circle. Then he tried to drop it and kick it but it didn’t work out and he lost his balance and fell to the ground. But he laughed at himself and got up and started trying again.

With the small boy out of earshot, Cohen asked Evan what the hell was going on out here.

Evan moved his eyes back and forth. Said, “Maybe I shouldn’t.”

“Go on,” Cohen said. “Talk low. It’s all right.”

Evan’s eyes moved across the landscape again, but then he started talking. Said it began with Aggie and Joe and that woman over there named Ava. Said that from what he could tell, them three had gone around like Good Samaritans, picking up stragglers here and there. Finding people along the road or hid back up in houses or wherever and told them they had food and a safe place if they’d come on. Sometimes
it’d be two or three people and they’d bring them out here and give them a trailer to sleep in and feed them a couple of days. Pray with them. Preach to them. All that shit. But they’d only pick up women or women with a man and then when they’d get out here, they’d tell the man they was going hunting and they’d walk out in the woods and shoot him dead. Next thing there’d be a lock on the door and that woman wasn’t going nowhere. They got some plan for mankind or something like that. Aggie thinks he’s got something to do with Jesus or God or at least that’s what he’ll tell you. Evan looked out at Brisco as he talked and he had the stare of someone who had seen a lot in a short amount of time, but in his voice remained the charming tone of youth.

Cohen stared at him. Evan’s cheeks and eyes thin and hard. “And you. Where’d he find you?” Cohen asked.

“Found me and him the same as the others. We were with my uncle but my uncle disappeared on us and we was walking up Highway 49 when him and Joe pulled up beside us. We didn’t know what else to do but to go with them. I couldn’t let Brisco starve. They was real nice at first. Then they locked us up like everybody else.”

“But he didn’t take you hunting?”

Evan shook his head. “No. Not yet.”

“And what about the girl?”

“She was here when we got here. She won’t tell me nothing else.”

Cohen looked across toward the camp. Aggie was drinking coffee now, not looking at them.

“Why ain’t I dead?” Cohen asked.

“Guess for the same reason I ain’t and Brisco ain’t. He’s a old man and he can’t make all these women have babies by himself. Joe did that. So he don’t want to kill us. He wants to convert us.”

“For the sake of the human race,” Cohen said.

Evan shrugged. “I reckon.”

Brisco got the hang of it and kicked the ball a couple of times but grew tired of it. He ran back over to Evan and tossed him the ball again.

“How come y’all don’t run off?”

“It ain’t that easy,” Evan said, tossing the ball back to his little brother.

“No. I guess not.” Cohen then nodded in the direction of the women and asked if that was all of them.

Evan looked a minute, then said, “Yeah. That’s it. Minus Lorna.”

Cohen shook his head some, replayed that instant with her. The screaming and the swipe of the blade and the moment of disbelief from all of them. Then he told the boys that he wasn’t going to be staying around.

“That’s what I said, too,” Evan said. “But I ain’t got nowhere else to go. I’d rather be alive here than dead out there.” He reached down and took Brisco by the hand. “There ain’t much more of a decision than that,” he said, and then he and the boy turned and walked back toward the others.

Cohen let them go a few steps and then he said, “Hey.”

They stopped and looked back at him.

“That girl. What’s her name?”

“Mariposa.”

Evan started to walk off again but Cohen called him again and when he and Brisco stopped, Cohen walked over. He reached into his front pocket and he pulled out the pair of baby socks. He handed them to Evan and told him to take them to whoever had the baby.

THE WOMEN SPENT THE DAY
with the look of apprehension. Joe had been gone for days now and the women were savvy enough to realize that he wasn’t coming back, and even if he were, he wasn’t there now, and half of the strength that had held them was missing. They didn’t know the man with the gunshot in his leg but he didn’t seem to care about what was happening. He had the same formless look on his face that they all had as the blunt finality that awaited each of them came like a siren in Lorna’s cries. You can get used to anything. That was something that each of them had come to realize and accept but now as the sun unexpectedly spread out across the land, with Joe disappeared, with the infant fighting to live, and with Lorna dead, the sense of rebellion rose silently in them and they looked at one another as if to say, This can no longer be.

They were careful about what they said around Ava, as she had been working on Aggie’s side for as long as any of them had been there. Sometimes they walked around in groups of two or three out in the fields or around the fire and they spoke to one another in the low, serious voices of people who were plotting or gun-shy or both. There was that apprehension in their expressions but also something more. They had heard the screams in the night. They were aware of Lorna’s suffering and her fate, and while they had known there would be combat with the pain, none of them was the least bit interested in going through what Lorna had been through. They squinted and their cheeks tightened as they spoke to one another about the moment that was to come for each of them. Caution in their voices and anxiety in their hearts and agreeing with no hesitation that this first episode of deliverance in this place should also be the last. And if we’re going to do anything about it, we got to do it now. God knows when there’ll be another day like this.

The afternoon wore on and the clear sky disappeared. A soft rain fell and deep gray clouds sat across the Gulf and promised more. The women spoke less but seemed to communicate with their eyes and bends of the mouth and each of them expressed the same thing. He is one man and there can be no more of this. Throughout the day, as they began to help gather wood, stacking the branches and limbs in the storage trailer, or preparing food, or washing out clothes in silver bins, they moved with calculated, robotlike motions, cutting their eyes at one another, as if there were some countdown going on in each of their heads.

Cohen sat on an upright cinder block with his shot leg extended. Twice Mariposa had come over and sat down beside him and twice Aggie had told her to get up and go help the others.

Twilight arrived and the rain was steady and all was gray. They moved around in big coats, hoods over heads, shoulders slumped from the hours, days, weeks spent out in the rain.

Aggie called on Cohen to help him hook up a trailer to the back of a truck. Cohen got up and hobbled out into the field where the trucks and trailers sat.

It was a ten-foot-long flat trailer that wasn’t the work of two men
and Cohen basically stood there while Aggie dropped the trailer onto the hitch. When he was done, he raised up and wiped the rain from his face and said, “Just so you know, there may be an example set here before this day is done. Don’t like the looks of it all. The birth caused a tremor. A tremor when there should be rejoicing.”

“Somebody died,” Cohen said. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong.”

“Life was given for life and there should be no crying over that. There should be no crying over the beginning. And I see desperation. And desperate people need a message. They need reminding. And if one of them so much as flinches I’m gonna goddamn remind them in a way they won’t forget.”

Cohen didn’t answer. He pulled a broken cigarette and lighter from his shirt pocket.

“Don’t you get no bright ideas either or you’ll be laying with the dog,” Aggie said. He took a step closer to Cohen. “You might start thinking about your place here. About what has been set at your feet. You look around a little more closely and you might see something different from what you think you see.”

Cohen snapped off the broken piece of the cigarette, bent over to hide it from the weather, and lit the stump. He looked away from Aggie, and he noticed two shovels in the bed of the truck. “What’s all this for?” he asked.

“We going digging. Me and you and that boy. But we gonna wait till it gets dark.”

Cohen sucked on the cigarette, then said, “I got some news before we go, you should know.”

“Yeah. What?”

“If you think I’m going off to dig my own grave, you might as well go ahead and shoot me dead in this spot.”

Aggie shook his head. Laughed. “Jesus, boy. We ain’t digging no graves. We going to dig up that money.”

Cohen shook his head. “Not you, too.”

“Trunkfuls. Ain’t no telling how much it is.”

Cohen was quickly done with the short cigarette and he tossed
it. He’d seen and heard enough about the hunt for the money. The groups of men he’d seen working around the same spot. The shots that had been fired that had caused some of them to drop and the others to scatter.

Aggie stepped back from Cohen. He bent down and yanked on the trailer hitch to make sure it was secure and then he raised up and said, “So see, you put everything together and you might end up a man with all he needs.”

“You and everybody else who thinks there’s money buried somewhere along the beach are out of your goddamn minds.”

“That right there is what the man who won’t find it will say.”

“Won’t nobody find it. ’Cause it ain’t there. It’s crazy to even be trying.”

“Crazy, huh?”

“Yeah. Crazy. Just like the rest of this shit,” Cohen said and he turned and waved his arm around the place.

Aggie propped his hands on his hips. Bent his dark eyebrows. “Crazy?” he asked again.

Cohen nodded. “Batshit.”

Aggie nodded a little. He took a few steps away from Cohen, turned and took a few steps back to him. “Crazier than living down here in a house with dead people?” he asked in a low, deliberate voice.

Cohen’s certainty disappeared. He stared back at the man but didn’t know what to say.

“I know you,” Aggie continued, speaking slowly. “I know you. I seen everything. Read everything in that envelope. I saw where you were. What you were doing. I put her rings on my pinky finger. Sniffed them little love notes in that sweet little box you kept shoved up under the bed. Saw them baby clothes and them dresses still hanging in the closet. Don’t tell me nothing about crazy. You ain’t no different from nobody else down here, including me. Crazy comes in lots of different ways. And you got as much in you as anybody else.”

He stopped. Waited for Cohen to answer. When he didn’t, Aggie walked past him and across the field toward the trailers. Cohen heard
him call to the women and he followed, wanting to see what Aggie had to say.

When Aggie was in the middle of the circle, he waved them into their line. Cohen stood back from them, leaning against a trailer.

Aggie told them to close their eyes and then he prayed in his gravelly voice, thanking God that there was a place for them to live and love and breathe and hide themselves from the thunder. Thank you God that we are on the higher ground and that there is food for our bellies and fire to warm our hands and safety in the night from the wolves who patrol these lands for the taste of helpless flesh. Thank you God that this beautiful child has come to us and our family has multiplied and in this child we can see today and tomorrow and forever and this sunshine is your answer to us that you love us and approve of what has come. And this place is our home and your winds are your might and do not let me hesitate to strike down those that rise against you and me. And I will not hesitate to strike.

It was almost dark, an ominous deep gray surrounding them. The rain fell straight and Aggie pushed the hood back from his head and welcomed it on his face and head. As he prayed, he stroked the butt of the revolver that stuck out of his pants. As he prayed, his brow grew tense and he held a fist toward the dripping sky and he reared back his head and closed his eyes and then he was taken away. The hand came off the revolver and then both hands were stretched out before him and in his mind he was back there before them, the pulsing of the chanting and the organ music as he moved his arms around in dancelike motions, the imaginary snake in his hands, its sleek, poisonous body intertwined with his own and the heat of the hot, strip-mall church and the energy of those out in front of him, praising and chanting and speaking in no discernible language, and he moved the imaginary snake from arm to arm, moved it around the back of his neck and down his chest and then back into his hands and the entire time he prayed out to God, You are the power and the glory and this land belongs to You and bring them on, bring them on and deliver us and wash away that which is unclean and may my own strength be like Your strength and we will inhabit
this land and keep it pure and we will multiply and be with the beasts and create for You the sons of thunder.