Rivers: A Novel (33 page)

She got up and walked to the counter. At the end of the counter, next to the coffee mugs and plastic cups, lay the newspaper that Cohen had looked at earlier. The light from the storage room filtered down the counter and she picked up the newspaper and lay it out, back page facing her. She stared at the map and the different shades of the different parts of the country and she read the headings and she realized they were a long way from anywhere.

Outside a woman screamed above the pounding rain.

Mariposa folded the newspaper and put it back in place.

She crossed her arms on the counter and put her head down and thought of her father and his belief that he could defend his livelihood and his life against the violence of either man or nature and how foolish it seemed then and how foolish it seemed now. But there was no second-guessing because it had been impossible to make decisions then. Nothing seemed right. Nothing seemed logical. Nothing seemed safe. And nothing had changed. She thought of the stubbornness of her father and his dedication to protect and defend what belonged to him and then she thought again of Cohen in his house, on that land, with those memories and the box of keepsakes and the closets that still held her clothes and the baby’s room with the dusty stuffed animals.

She wondered if he would remember her part in separating him from those things he had tried so hard to protect. She wondered when he would leave her. She wondered where he would leave her.

There was another scream and this time it sounded like a man and Mariposa lifted her head. She looked toward the window but there was nothing clear, only vague rain-covered images. More screaming and yelling and now the images moved in a shuffle along the sidewalk, pushing and grabbing and going for one another. A loud crack cut through the storm and she thought she heard breaking glass but the voices gained strength and she couldn’t tell what was going on. Part of
her wanted to go to the window and wipe it clean and take a closer look. Part of her didn’t.

Behind her, the door to the staircase opened and she turned and saw Cohen. There was another scream and Mariposa looked from him and back to the window. As she watched anxiously the scene on the street, Cohen came across the café to her. He touched her elbow and she looked at him. “Come on,” he whispered. “You don’t want to see what’s out there.”

A WEEK AGO THE DECISION
would have been simple. Go get the jeep. Much like the decision had been made to go and get the shoe box of memories. Just go get it. There was no one else to think about, no one else to ask, nothing else that needed any consideration. What do you want to do and do it and that’s the end of it, like every other decision he had made in the last four years, including the one to bury Elisa under the tree in the back field and stay there with her. But that was a week ago and walking away and going back down there was not a simple decision now.

He wanted to tell Mariposa that he was leaving and give her enough money to eat for the next couple of days and go find a ride with somebody crazy enough to take him back down there. By now it had to be sixty-five, seventy miles to the Jeep on the north side of Gulfport. But he figured that he knew the way, and if he went alone he could make it down in three or so hours, make it back in less time when he was sure of the way, do the whole thing in a night. He wanted to extend his arm when she came near him. He wanted to tell her to be quiet when she started talking. He wanted to slide out of bed in the middle of the night and go and do what he needed to do.

Instead of making the move, he had spent the next two days and nights with her in the hotel room, the rain strong and the room warm. They had made love carefully, awkwardly, and sometimes clumsily, like two kids learning their way, unsure of their movements, their sounds, their reactions, this thing different in a real room with electric light and
pillows and sheets than it was in an abandoned, candlelit farmhouse. They would fall asleep naked and he would wake with her talking and he would lie there, pretending to be sleeping, and listen to her, her voice low and patient like a mother speaking to an infant. I will listen to you when you want to talk about her. Or about anything. I will listen to you. If we go together we might be able to believe in each other and I will believe if you will believe. I don’t want to be left alone and I don’t think that you do and there is nothing that makes sense and I think that is okay. I don’t think we should try to make any sense. I will listen to you if you ever want to talk about her. And I will stay with you as long as you want me to.

He would wake in the middle of the night and she would be talking, her head against him and her black hair across him like some type of protection. He noticed her hands, her fingers long and beginning to get into him, to sink below his skin and through the blood and into the places that mattered. He smelled her and listened to her and sometimes he wanted to answer her and sometimes he wanted to stop her and sometimes he was disappointed when she had nothing else to say.

She fell asleep quickly then, as if what she had to say emptied her, and afterward he would lie there and listen to the music and the voices coming from the square below, the yelling and the breaking bottles and the wild laughter, and he wondered if this was what we would all become if given the opportunity. If what they had seen below would ultimately win when it was all broken down. He imagined a world where there was nothing to rule but man’s own instinct and desire and wondered would that make us better or worse. Cohen had seen the worst and it seemed to be standing at attention, ready to strike, but then he would remember Evan and his almost inexplicable goodness and the image of Evan and Brisco walking together, holding hands, would be enough to ease his mind and allow him to sleep.

Each time he woke she was talking and later, when they were both awake, he did not mention it and neither did she. He didn’t say anything about the Jeep for two days, as the monster in the Gulf crept closer, grew stronger, prepared itself to teach them all a lesson in true power.

During other moments in the night, when he wasn’t listening to her whispers, he thought of Nadine and Kris and the baby and the other baby that was to come. He regretted the haste with which they had all been separated. He regretted the quick ending because he had suffered his share of quick endings. Elisa and his unborn child. The ambush and the house being ransacked. Habana disappearing in the storm. The dog being shot by Aggie. It seemed as if each ending came and went like a pulse of lightning and he wished now that he had told the men at the station to hold on, I need to talk to them a second. And he wished he had gotten out in the storm and gone back to them and climbed in the truck and held the baby once more and he wished that he had told Kris and Nadine that he thought they were braver than hell and he wished that he could have been with them for a moment. To see them before they were gone. He believed they were safe. He believed they were going to be taken to a place that would help them all. But he knew that though there was a quick ending, it also meant that there was a quick beginning. And this time their beginning seemed hopeful.

For two days, he had been clean. He had been dry. He had thoughts of others. He had touched and been touched. Sometime during the second night, as he lay still next to her, as he thought of the others, as he replayed his dreams filled with voices and sunshine, he decided that the Jeep and the shoe box could stay right where they were. The road was out in front.

MARIPOSA STOOD IN THE WINDOW
looking down across the square. It Was the evening and the lights had gone out in most of the buildings but the lights had now come on in the few places that stayed open until whenever. The music had started, the clunky sound of an electric guitar accompanied by clunky drums, sounding out into the early night, through the rain that had not stopped. Cohen sat on the bed watching television, trying to figure out when the lull would come, those handful of hours when the rain stopped and the wind fell still, before the next storm poured onto the coast. The sound of another television came
from the other room, as Evan and Brisco had been for days hypnotized by the bluish glow from the nineten-inch screen that picked up two random channels from somewhere, one of them in Spanish.

The bedsheet was wrapped around Mariposa and it had been this way for most of the two days, as they only got fully dressed to go down to the café to eat. She turned from the window and slid herself down onto the bed and leaned against him, her hand across his bare stomach.

He raised the remote and turned off the television. “It’s coming. Tonight. The lull is after midnight. Before dawn,” he said. “And that’s our best chance to make a move.”

She raised up from his chest and sat with her back against the headboard. He stood and put on his shirt and jeans. She crossed her legs Indian-style and pressed her fingertips on her knees. “What about the Jeep?” she said.

“I don’t care about the Jeep,” he said.

“What about the other stuff?” she asked.

“What other stuff?”

“Her stuff. And your stuff. The box.” She uncrossed her legs. Held her hands together.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “It’s gone.”

“It might not be.”

“No. It’s gone,” he said.

“It’s okay if you want it.”

“I know it is. And I do want it. But I don’t want to die because of it. Not now.”

He stood from the bed and walked across the room. Looked out of the window. It was almost dark, gray turning black. A neon light glowed from the corner building down to the right. He shoved his hands in his pockets, thinking about Elisa. He wondered if there was such a thing as rising and living in another world where there was only light and no rain and no pain.

He turned and looked at Mariposa. “There’s more than one reason I wanted to go back to the Jeep. And one day I’m gonna tell you what that reason is, but not tonight.”

“I’ve been dreaming about you,” she said quickly, almost interrupting him. “You leave and you don’t come back.” It seemed to leap out of her mouth as if it were something she’d had to fight to hold in.

He sat down on the bed next to her. Outside the voices howled. The music howled. The storm howled. He could see that she had resigned her fate to him. And he thought that maybe he was doing the same.

She crawled off the bed and began to get dressed. He moved across the room and stopped her. “I’m not leaving,” he said.

She wouldn’t look up at him.

“Mariposa,” he said and he waited on her to look at his face. He held her shoulders and waited and then she turned to him. “I’m not leaving. Not without you. Not without Evan and Brisco. Tonight when it calms, we’re all getting in that truck and we’re all driving out of here and we’ll go as far as we can. And whenever we get to where we’re going, I’m not leaving you there. But you gotta promise me something.”

Her anxious expression relented. “What?”

“I said you gotta promise.”

“Okay, okay. Promise what?”

He moved his hands from her shoulders down to her arms and held them carefully. “You won’t leave me.”

She moved her hands to his. “I won’t.”

It seemed as if a window had been opened in the room. He moved back from her and she continued to dress. She pulled on her jeans and buttoned up the shirt and pulled a hooded sweatshirt over her head. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

He put on his socks and boots and said that he was going to go out and try and find Charlie and if he couldn’t find Charlie then find some gas from somewhere else. Maybe the man in the café can help us out. He put on another shirt and a coat. He stepped through the bathroom and knocked on Evan’s door. Evan said come in and he and Brisco were in the bed, the covers over them, watching a cartoon cat chase a cartoon mouse.

“I’m going out for a minute,” Cohen said. Neither Evan nor Brisco acknowledged him. So he walked over and stood in front of the television.
“I said I’m going out,” he repeated. “I gotta find some gas. See if I can find Charlie. After we get back, I need you to help me take some stuff to the truck.”

“What for?” Evan asked.

“ ’Cause we’re leaving tonight. Should be a lull sometime and we’re gonna get going.”

“You want me to go out with you?”

Cohen shook his head. “No. You stay with him.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Relax. Mariposa is in the other room. If y’all want something to eat, go get it. I’d hate for you to miss five seconds of television, though.”

But Evan didn’t hear the last part as he stared at the light. Cohen shook his head, then closed the door and went out of the room and down the stairs, imagining how good it was going to feel to be somewhere else.

THE CAFÉ OWNER WASN’T THERE
, so Cohen went out across the square. He made his way around to the back of Charlie’s building but he found the door locked. He beat on it but there was no response and he didn’t figure Charlie could hear from upstairs even if he was there. So Cohen set out to find somebody to tell him where he could get gasoline.

Charlie was sitting in the top-floor window and he had watched Cohen come out of the café and over to his building. But then Cohen had disappeared into the alleyway alongside and Charlie decided he didn’t want to talk to him right now. He didn’t want Cohen to come in there and see what he would see.

The building had been a checkpoint for him and his men for as long as he’d been tracking back and forth with the U-Haul. A handful of folding chairs and a couple of cots and empty beer and liquor bottles littered an otherwise empty space. The hardwood floors bowed and a bathroom in the back sometimes worked.

Charlie got up and looked at the man lying on the cot. He had been lying there for two days, slowly bleeding to death, slower than Charlie wanted. He’d been shot in the low back and through his shoulder and he was lying there dying. Charlie had promised to find him some help but they both knew there was none to be had. The first day Charlie had tried to talk him through it with the promise of that money-filled trunk at their fingertips. How there were fewer people to split it with now. I can’t help they came from all sides like a bunch of goddamn fleas. You know they all been sitting and waiting for us anyhow. That backhoe is
the key to the promised land. Another five minutes and we’d have been gone. One more shot is all.