Rivers: A Novel (22 page)

And then the storms. From bad to worse and more frequent and sometimes evacuations and then regular evacuations and then bold predictions of a weather pattern that would go on for years and years and continue to destroy and many scoffed and many refused to believe but her mind processed it easily. She would lie awake nights, on the eve of another storm, and dream of the catastrophe in vivid colors, see the shingles ripping from rooftops and hear the cracking of tree limbs and feel the flooding waters around her neck. She saw the skeletons of buildings and wrecked ships and heard the crashing of waves and
heard the great roar of thunder before it ever arrived. And when the storm did arrive and perhaps it hadn’t been quite what she had imagined, melancholy came over her that lasted until the next warning and then her mind would create havoc all over again and eventually the reality of the storms caught up with the projections of her imagined landscape. Even as the storms worsened and morphed into one long stream of destruction, even after the insanity arrived with the proclamation of the Line, it all seemed to be something that she had seen before, as if when she closed her eyes she had always been off in some other world where Mother Nature was a vengeful authority. There was not a sky darker than the skies behind her eyes, there was not a wind more powerful than the winds of her mind.

Then she had found herself alone and she had discovered that there were plenty of things in this world that were unimaginable. She had never been able to understand this place with these men and their roped-down trailers. Never been able to conjure anything more horrific than this as she lay down at night. Instead of creating new worlds, her dreams were filled with fascinations of escape. Filled with fascinations of revenge. Filled with the faces of those she had loved and now missed. And in the waking hours, she could only wonder where they were. Wonder if someone was looking for her. Wonder if anyone was still alive who cared. She was certain she had family. Somewhere. But this new world was so vast and shifting and unanswerable that she hadn’t been able to create anything but an unhappy ending for herself and the others. The little girl whose mind once was a carnival of ghost tales and spirit worlds and the romance of hurricanes was now a young woman whose insatiable imagination had been replaced with the sharp edges of the real thing.

Then she and Evan had gone out, and she had choked the man in the Jeep, and she had gone to his house and she had seen where he slept and whom he slept with and what his life had been like and what he was holding on to. And she had taken his shoe box that held the contents of his life and she had held the letters and worn the jewelry and her mind had come alive again. It was as if she had walked through a secret door and taken the hand of someone she once created and had
led him out of the dream into reality. It was as if she had become again that little girl. Since she had been alone, since she had been brought to this place, since she had been forced to endure what all the women there had been forced to endure, she had in some ways forgotten that she was alive, that her life belonged to her.

She held Cohen’s hand and led him into the trailer and on a shelf on the wall she lit the candles. He stood holding the whiskey bottle and she took it from him and set it on the shelf. She stepped back from him and removed her coat. He reached out and took a strand of her black hair and let it trail through his fingers.

She whispered to him, “I can be who you want me to be.”

She wore a flannel shirt and she began to unbutton it as he held her hair, rubbed it between his fingers as if it were a fabric that he had never touched before. She unbuttoned the shirt to the end and she pushed it back from her chest, and then her shoulders, and it fell and the wind pushed the trailer and the candlelight waved.

He let go of her hair and looked at her.

Her hair was around her neck and down her chest and he moved it back and exposed her neckline. The V of the dress reached between her breasts.

Cohen stepped back. The long black sleeves. The tie around the waist that he had tied for her each time she wore it. Mariposa tugged at her waist and lifted the rest of the dress, which she was wearing tucked into her pants, and it fell over her hips and reached her knees.

He began to shake his head. She took a step toward him and he took another step back. “Stop,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said and she reached out for him, but he grabbed her by the wrist and lowered her hand.

“I said stop,” he said and his voice had changed. “That’s not yours.”

“I know. I didn’t mean it to be. I meant it to be hers.”

He reached to the shelf and grabbed the bottle. He turned it up and drank hard. Then he looked at her again. “I don’t wanna pretend,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d think I would. I don’t know why the hell anybody would want to do something like that.”

The expectation left her face. Her shoulders slumped and she seemed to shrink.

“Whatever else you got, don’t let me see it,” he said and he turned and walked out the door.

Mariposa stood still. Watched her shadows. She realized now that this would be her last night here. That tomorrow night, they would be somewhere else. She lifted the dress over her head and dropped it on the floor. Put the flannel shirt on again. Put on her coat. He is not a dream, she thought. He is not a story. No matter how hard you try. She stood still and wondered if maybe he was just outside the door. Maybe he was coming back. Maybe there would be a long pause and then a knock.

She waited but there was nothing. You can’t put a spell on him, she thought. Not down here. You can’t put a spell on nobody and you can’t make the dead come to life.

COHEN CHANGED HIS BANDAGE, PUT
on his coat and put the pistols in the coat pockets, tucked the shoe box under his arm and came outside and found them ready to go. Evan was holding the shotgun and he handed it to him. They gathered in the early morning in the middle of the compound, around the smoldering, wasted fire. It rained and the wind had become steady and out across the Gulf the sky was a deep, threatening gray.

Cohen walked over and they told him that these were the rules that had been agreed upon—whatever vehicle you get into belongs to you and the others in it. At the Line, the baby and Kris go to a doctor immediately. After that, no one owes anybody anything. Cohen nodded.

“Yeah, but what about when we get up there?” Kris asked.

“That’s what we’re talking about,” Cohen said.

“Not all that. I mean like, are we still alive or wrote off?”

Nadine said, “Guess we’ll find out. Might be some resurrections.”

They looked around for the last time at this place where some of them had spent weeks, some of them months, some of them almost two years. The rain fell on the drab, lifeless compound. The bodies of Aggie and Ava lay off to the side at the back end of the trailer. It was now a place for restless spirits, a grave site.

They loaded garbage bags filled with clothes and other possessions
into the beds of the pickups. Kris held the baby and he was sucking on a bottle and the rare air of optimism appeared on their faces as they prepared for what was next. Cohen stood at the back of the truck they had filled with supplies and checked to see if there was anything that he had missed. In the last act of preparation, Evan began to put the gas cans into the truck bed. Kris and Nadine walked over together to the trucks. Mariposa went with them. Kris handed the baby to Cohen and they began to take the gas cans and he asked them what the hell they were doing.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nadine said.

The three of them went from trailer to trailer, opening the doors and stepping inside and pouring gasoline onto the beds and floors and then out again and along the ropes that held the trailers strapped into the ground. Cohen cradled the child and held the bottle to his mouth and shook his head as he watched them, knew that their journey was becoming more troublesome with each drop spilled into the trailers. He also knew that his voice would not be enough to stop this cleansing. He talked to the baby as the women continued their work. Be a good little man, he said. Got a pretty good trip coming up. Hope you ride well. We’ll get you somewhere if you can stick with it.

When they were done, the women returned the gas cans to the truck bed and then without being asked, Cohen produced a cigarette lighter from his pocket. Nadine took it from him and Kris and Mariposa filled their arms with rolls of toilet paper. They splashed back and forth across the compound, ducking into a trailer, lighting a toilet paper roll and tossing it in, and moving on to the next until they were all done. Then they gathered again in the middle and within minutes there were heavy coils of smoke curling out of the open doors of the trailers, and then there were yellow flames burning through the roofs and out of the windows. Pops and hisses and low roars of the growing flames fought against the rain. They stood and watched until all of the trailers were burning like giant
campfires and then they walked out of this ring of fire and they all moved over toward the trucks. Nobody said a word as Kris took the infant from Cohen.

Evan cranked one truck. Nadine cranked the other. And then Cohen cranked the Jeep and Mariposa got in with him. He had cut a piece of tarp and roped it across the top of the Jeep and the rain slapped against it. He looked at her and said, “The last time you rode with me I almost died.”

She held up her hands and showed him both sides, as if she were a magician proving there were no strings. “You should know that story by now.”

“Yeah. I know it.” He pulled off his sock hat and shook the rain from it and then put it back on.

“I see why you did it,” she said.

“See why what?”

“I see why you came looking for it.”

Cohen shook his head in disagreement. “You didn’t see nothing last night.”

She nodded. “I know, but I see now,” she said. “I can see that she really loved you. And you really loved her. I can see that in all those little things. I get it.”

Cohen stopped looking at her. He looked over his shoulder at the shoe box behind the seat as if Elisa might be there in its place and then he looked out toward the burning trailers, across the flooded lowlands. He squeezed his hands together as if they belonged to two different people who missed each other. Behind him one of the trucks blew the horn but he didn’t pay attention. Didn’t move.

She said quietly, “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

He unclenched his hands. Moved his head around in a circle as if stretching his neck. Then he opened his coat and took out a cigarette. He lit it and put the Jeep in first gear, and he told her that it didn’t matter what she said she was gonna do or not do. Nobody
really knows what they’re going to do until the moment they decide to do it.

The three vehicles moved across the field, driving slowly across the rough, weather-beaten terrain. As they turned onto Himmel Road, the fires were beginning to lose against the rain.

IT WAS A SPECTACLE AND
difficult not to watch. Out across the gulf the lightning storm snapped and delivered steady strikes against the darkening backdrop. A circus of lightning that seemed like it might be shooting straight from the fingertips of God. Those who weren’t driving watched. Those who were driving watched out of one eye and spied the road with the other.

Once they stopped to change the baby’s diaper and once more for the pregnant woman to pee and soon they arrived at the ocean. The sights were almost new for Nadine and Kris as neither had been away from the compound since their capture. The washed-away chunks of beach. The water sitting where houses used to be. The buckled storefronts and uprooted ancient trees. They had almost forgotten.

But not Mariposa. The sights and lightning strikes only triggered her memories of the old world and as she surveyed the landscape, she heard the voice of her grandmother warning anyone who would listen. Pack it up and go she had said from the start. We need to pack it up and forget all this. This is only the beginning. The crazy will go crazier and the wind will blow harder and the rain won’t stop. But none of them listened. Her father didn’t listen. Her mother didn’t listen and neither did her aunts or cousins or anyone in the neighborhood. No one listened until the men in uniforms with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders started making them get on the buses and even then it had been too much to believe. Too crazy. So much insanity with the National Guardsmen lined around Jackson Square, the last evacuation,
herding people onto buses where locals once climbed into horse-drawn carriages, women and children and the young and the old in a fury of pushing and shoving, while maniacs shot at them from alleys and from behind cars and from rooftops under a gray lightning-infested sky. A war against itself. Something beyond hysteria. The buses finally filled and they drove away, the Guardsmen shooting from the windows, the buses escorted by tanks, bodies left behind to be cleansed by the coming storm.

That had been the last time she had seen anybody from her family, the buses driving in different directions, and she had been pushed onto one, separated from anyone that she knew. The woman at the high school gym where they were delivered five hours later told her that it’d take some time but we’ll find them but Mariposa could tell by the sound of her voice that there were too many people asking the same question.