He was on his back. The low glow of the candle across the room. She was lying next to him and he turned and saw her black hair and he knew. For a reason he didn’t understand, he wasn’t startled. He lay still and waited to see if she was awake or asleep and he felt her body move in slow breaths and she was sleeping. He picked his head up and her hair was across his arm and then he took his hand and lifted the long black hair and laid it across her back. She breathed a heavy breath and he put his arm down and was still. He was still and he was warm with this body close to him. It was an alien feeling. A natural feeling. And he didn’t understand why she had come and he didn’t understand why he didn’t get up or why he wasn’t in a rage and he was relieved that in the dark it didn’t have to make any sense. He lay still and warm and felt her breathing and he closed his eyes and let it be.
When he woke several hours later, she wasn’t there, and a strange light came in the trailer window. He sat up and felt as if he were moving about in a dream where he couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t real. He wondered if her body against his had been a part of his imagination but then the truth of her body settled against him and he rubbed his eyes and the back of his neck and felt a complacency in the thought of someone there.
On the floor next to the mattress was his shoe box. On top of the box were Elisa’s wedding rings, her earrings, her necklaces. Next to the box was the envelope, the letters and documents inside.
He sat up and leaned to the side. He felt in his back pocket for her picture and it was still there. Then he took her jewelry and he lifted the lid of the shoe box and put the photograph and jewelry with the rest and then he replaced the lid and lay back down and looked out of the window at the sunshine.
THE WOMEN CONGREGATED IN THE middle of the circle of trailers and talked about the miracles.
“Look at it,” one of them said.
“I swear to God it almost looks fake,” another said.
The group of women stared admiringly up into the crystal-blue sky as if today were the day of its creation. The storm had moved on and in its wake was a clarity that had been forgotten. No clouds. Only the sun in the afternoon sky. A calm wind.
The other miracle was being passed around between them. He had been cleaned and he slept wrapped in a blanket and none of the women could believe he was alive.
21
COHEN STOOD OUT IN THE field. A low ribbon of pink wrapping the late-afternoon horizon. His hands stuffed in his pockets and the blade wiped clean and back in its sheath and his weight on his good leg. Aggie had not said anything to him as he limped out of the trailer and past the ashes of the fire and out into the field but he could feel the man’s eyes on him. Could sense his pleasure in discovering what Cohen was capable of doing. Could feel the strength of the unknown.
He wondered what would happen if he started walking. How far he would get before the rifle rang and a point in his body burned and he lay still like a hunted animal. He was a couple of hundred yards from the tree line and the grass was high and he thought he could drop and crawl but his leg was lame and he didn’t want to be hunted down and killed while he was crawling. He’d rather be dead standing up. Birds passed above and there was movement in the tall grass from the small things that needed the break in the weather to find food. He stared south and imagined the water of the calm morning, crawling onto the dilapidated shore quietly, as if careful not to wake it. The emptiness of the ocean and the stretch of the water and the sky, meeting on a seemingly infinite horizon, and he remembered standing on the beach as a boy. His eyes looking out into nothing. Imagining the men, hundreds of years ago, who had stared out across that vast expanse and braved its uncertainty as they loaded ships and said goodbye to their families and hoisted sails and drifted away, the love of land and man overcome by the curiosity of what might be. Drifting away, their homelands becoming smaller and smaller and then disappearing in the distance, the questions out before them like great constellations. Their minds filled with notions of sea dragons rising from the depths, swallowing them whole or burning them with fire or wrapping and squeezing them until the blood ran out. Swirling black whirlpools that could swallow entire fleets, sucking them down into bottomless, twisting graves. Or a world that would simply end. An edge to sail to and then fall off of and fall off into what?
Cohen had played these games in his head as a boy, standing waist-deep in the ocean, and he played them now as a man, looking out toward a limitless sky, curious about those men and what was held in their imaginations and had they been disappointed, at least a little, to find that the wildest creations of their minds could not be true. That there was only rock and sand on the other side that was not much different from the rock and sand they had departed from. That the fountains of life and the mountains of rubies and pearls did not exist any more than the spear-headed, long-necked monsters. Or was the world unknown enough for them no matter what it held? No matter what they found or whom they saw when they got there but simply that it was unknown to them and that was plenty to feed their hunger. Plenty to fill their spirit to the highest plateau. Plenty to reward their risks. The unknown was enough and then some and Cohen thought now as he looked south toward the ribboned horizon that this would have been the perfect place for that kind of man.
He reached down and picked at the dried, crusted blood on his leg. Behind him the women remained, looking at the baby, talking softly to one another as if passing on sensitive information. Ava held him, his pink head poking out of the top of the blanket and his eyes half-open and his mouth stretching in a feeble cry. In between whispers they made soothing sounds to the infant, dirty fingers reaching out to the child and touching his soft head and swelled cheeks. Aggie pulled dry wood out from a storage trailer and he worked to get the fire going while they huddled and embraced the new day. Evan and his small brother gathered wet wood and put it in the storage trailer, leaving the women and child to themselves. Cohen heard them but did not turn and look. He watched the sky and thought of the explorers.
HE WAS STILL STARING WHEN the blond-haired boy walked up behind him and said, “I didn’t mean nothing that day.”
Cohen turned around and faced him. The boy’s hair was slick and flat against his head and he held one hand to his mouth to keep it warm and with the other he held the hand of a young boy.
“I really didn’t,” he said. “Kinda had to.”
“Kinda had to what?”
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 so
ftly, “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.
Rivers Page 13
