Rivers: A Novel

by Michael Farris Smith

  Then he cranked the Jeep and turned out of the parking lot.

  At the end of the gravel road, the dog was standing there. Wet and ragged. He whistled and the dog jumped up into the passenger seat, and they started down the highway in the direction of Himmel Road.

  15

  AGGIE HAD ALWAYS BEEN THE kind of man who needed to be watched. A strong, wiry build and a sharp brow and thin lips that held tight when they weren’t sucking on a cigarette. Thick gray-black hair down tight on a low forehead and tanned skin that didn’t lose its dark shade even in the winter months. He had been fired for stealing, stabbed for sleeping with married women, jailed for taking cars that didn’t belong to him. He had seldom slept in the same place for longer than a couple of months and the women that he had known weren’t aware until he was gone that the name they called him wasn’t really his name. He’d always had a curious ability to make friends, to get people to trust him, that had allowed him to live the life of a renegade and when, on a dare, he had started handling snakes in front of a congregation in the strip-mall church on the east end of Biloxi, his calling had been found.

  Energized by the reaction of the worshipers, his adrenaline pumping with the pulse of the snake in his hands, its tail rattling and tongue seething, he had become the man who could heal or cleanse or predict the future before he had hardly even acknowledged to his followers that he was capable of such things. It was as if those who sat in the metal chairs and chanted and sang as he twirled the rattlers made him what he was without his consent. Yet he knew that it was right. That the power he held over them was in the proper hands. And he had been wielding that power for almost twenty years, back and forth across the Gulf Coast, moving his serpent church in a carnival-like caravan that waved the flag of the Holy Spirit until the room was full and then in the dark corners of the night, using his position that had been delivered by God to penetrate both bodies and souls that didn’t belong to him.

  In this new world, the snakes had been exchanged for guns and the strip-mall church exchanged for a colony.

  He had let the women out to go to the bathroom and to eat. They were scattered in the fields around the trailers, pants down and squatting, the high grass the only shroud of modesty. Aggie stood under the tarp next to a low fire with the revolver in his hand, dangling down against his leg. The rain blew in below the tarp and the fire hissed back at it like a threatened snake. He watched them carelessly as he tapped the revolver against his leg, humming an old gospel he remembered his grandmother playing on the living room piano.

  Four days now since Joe went off, he thought. He couldn’t decide if Joe had run off or if he was dead or dying, but he didn’t believe the man would desert. They’d been in it together for too long, gotten in and out of too much, hoodwinked too many people, and Joe had been as much of this new world as he had. Helped him find the place, helped him tow and circle the trailers, helped him loot houses and stores, helped him smile at the stragglers, promise them food and shelter. Helped him keep the women and get rid of the men. And nothing Joe had done or said suggested that he would run off. Aggie had taken one of the trucks and gone where he could, looking for the Jeep. Looking for Joe. But Joe was gone. At least for now. Aggie was finding it more difficult to believe that he’d see him again. So without his enforcer, he’d been more careful with his colonists, keeping the doors locked longer during the day, showing the revolver when they were out.

  He thought that without Joe, it was time to start working on Evan. He would need another man. Someone strong enough to help hold them the way they needed to be held. Someone to increase their numbers.

  One by one they came back into the circle of trailers and on a table next to the fire there were paper plates and plastic forks and gallon jugs of water and Coke. Next to the plates were two loaves of sliced bread, a package of bologna, peanut butter, and jelly. A bag of apples sat on the end of the table. They moved about slowly, as if resurrecting from a lengthy, dreamless slumber, unfamiliar with this place and what might have brought them here. Odd, shapeless figures, so draped in layers that it seemed as if the bodies beneath were nothing more than knobby frames of bone and flesh. They formed a line and waited for him to speak. Their coats were too big for their hungry bodies, some with bandanas tied around their heads, some with sock hats, some with gloves. Eight of them. Eight women who did not do anything that they were not supposed to do. Two of them pregnant. One in a big way. At the end of the line stood the blond boy and the dark-haired girl and the child, Brisco. Evan held Brisco’s hand and the child pushed the man-sized sock hat up off his eyes so he could see. All of them were damp, like everything else. The smoke gathered against the tarp and made a cloud around them.

  Aggie stood in front of them and he tossed away his cigarette. Then he removed the Bible from his back pocket and opened it up to the same place that he read from every day before they ate. His rough fingertips brushed the featherlike pages, then he began.

  “ ‘The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. So God looked upon the earth, and indeed it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them, and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life, everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall go into the ark—you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you, they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, of animals after their kind, and of every creeping thing of the earth after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.’ ”

  One of the women coughed and Aggie stopped. Looked for the culprit. Then he read again. “ ‘Then the Lord said to Noah, Come into the ark, you and all your household, because I have seen that you are righteous before Me in this generation. So Noah, with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, went into the ark because of the waters of the flood. Of clean animals, of animals that are unclean, of birds, and of everything that creeps on the earth, two by two they went into the ark to Noah, male and female, as God had commanded Noah. And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were on the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights.’ ”

  Aggie paused. He looked up at them and moved his eyes from one to the next to make certain they listened and watched the man who spoke. He rubbed his hand over his mouth, smacked his lips, turned a page in the Bible and began again.

  “ ‘So He destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth. Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark remained alive.’ ”

  Aggie closed the Bible. He looked toward the sky, shut his eyes and held out his arms, and repeated the last verse with something akin to vengeance in his voice. “ ‘Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark remained alive.’ ”

  He lowered his arms, opened his eyes, and nodded to them. In unison they spoke a broken amen. One of the women stepped out of line and toward the table.

  “Hey,” Aggie snapped. “You hold your ass right there.”

  She took a slow step back.

  “You forget how we work?” he asked and pointed the Bible at her. She shook her head. “What did you say?” he yelled.

  “No. I ain’t forgot,” she mumbled.

  Aggie put the Bible in his back pocket. “You better not. None of you,” he said. Then he clapped his hands together, said a final amen, and told them to eat.

  16
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br />   IT TOOK A WHILE TO find it, but he found it. Roads washed over that hadn’t been washed over before. Detours off the highway, trailing the back roads, sometimes off into fields or ditches to get around fallen trees or light posts. But he found Himmel Road, a single-lane road that had been patched many times, and at the beginning of the road was a moldy white wooden sign that read CRAWFIELD PLANTATION in Old English lettering. The sign was on a fence post and was amazingly erect though it stood in a pool of water in what was now a ditch.

  He remembered Crawfield Plantation from school field trips when he was a boy, and then later looking at cattle and horses with his dad. A few hundred acres of thick forest and grazing pastures. Stables and barns and a white wooden fence stretching the length of its acreage along the road. And what seemed like a sky-high antebellum, with four columns across the front reaching from the porch to the roofline, a balcony that stretched across the length of the front of the house, and on the backside two smaller balconies that reached out from bedrooms. Azaleas circling the house and along both sides of a bricked pathway that led from the front door down to the circular driveway. Magnolias and oaks in the front and side yards and in the back a courtyard with a bricked patio and walkways, a concrete fountain in the middle, and arches and columns decorating the corners with vines of moonflower and black-eyed Susies and honeysuckle twisting and blooming.

  None of this was there now. Cohen moved along the road in low gear, looking ahead to where he remembered the wonderful house that sat up on a hill and seemed to keep watch across the land like a mother might watch her children playing. Nothing now. The house gone and the magnolias and oaks broken and in the place of majesty was a gathering of the once white rectangular boxes that the government had delivered with a handshake and a smile. He slowed, then stopped. A half mile away. Then he turned off the ignition. The rain was dying some, falling in random, almost undetectable drops. He pushed the robe back off his head and shoulders and he lit a cigarette. The gas gauge was on empty and he knew he wasn’t going much farther. In any direction. It seemed that the dying man may have told him the truth, that the boy and girl were at Crawfield Plantation. But so were others. He watched a group of them mill around the trailers. And he reminded himself that whoever was there, they weren’t safe. Nothing was safe and nothing was certain.

  He smoked and thought about it some. It was probably mid-afternoon, hard to tell from the sky, but dark couldn’t be more than a few hours away. He’d wait, go take a closer look. Maybe it would rain harder and keep him covered and quiet. The dog sniffed around in the backseat and they discovered the bag of beef jerky still tucked underneath the driver’s seat and they sat and chewed while they waited for night.

  HE TOOK OFF THE ROBE and knocked the jeep out of gear and rolled it back some to the side of the road, along the bushy fence line. He took the flashlight and the shotgun and he and the dog started walking up the road, close to the barbed wire wrapped in thick, leafy vines. In the time that he had been watching there had been little movement and he figured from the array of vehicles scattered around the trailers that there had to be gas up there somewhere. He walked hunched over, his knees bent, as small as he could be. His breath out before him. The nightfall bringing the cold. The rain steady. Fifty yards away he told the dog to stop and they knelt down and he watched. Low lights burned from the insides of the trailers. Candlelight, he thought. The solitary man who had been moving about all day sat on the end of a let-down tailgate of a truck, facing their direction, with a hood over his head. It was getting difficult to see.

  They edged along. Ten yards or so at a time and then stopping and listening. Then moving some more. He was at the gate that led into the plantation land and he stopped again. Told the dog to stay. The dog looked around, stayed at his heel. Then they moved across the opening of the gate and there was an alarming clap and the dog fell dead as the clap echoed across the land. Cohen jumped, and then froze, and then darted back behind the gatepost as another shot rang out and splintered the post above his head. He sat with his back against the post, breathing hard, trying to decide if he should run for it or fire back and he pointed the shotgun around the post and fired without looking. Another shot splintered above his head and he fired back and then he hurried to reload with the shots from the compound whacking against the post and their echo stretching out into the early night.

  He looked over at the motionless dog and said son of a bitch, son of a bitch. The shots kept coming and he felt them coming from closer and closer and he was dead if he ran and dead if he didn’t run and all he knew to do was to turn and fire out into the dark in the direction that he thought was right. So he caught his breath, ignoring the shards of wood scattering about his head, and he leaped out and fired twice. Bright blasts in the gray-black world and then he felt the seething-hot pain shoot through his thigh muscle and he hit the ground. Writhing and wrestling with the shotgun, trying to reload, then he heard the voice say, “Don’t do it, boy. Don’t do it or I swear you’ll drink the blood.”

  17

  THE MAN HELD THE RIFLE on Cohen as he limped through the mud to the circle of trailers. He told him to sit down over there by the red coals covered by a head-high tarp tied off between two trailers. Cohen did and the heat that had shot through his leg was up into his head and he clenched his jaw as he sat down on the wet red ground. He squeezed the gunshot wound with both hands and they were covered in blood and it ran warm down his leg and into his boot.

  “Don’t move,” Aggie told him as he left him at the fire. He went into a trailer and came back with a tackle box and a pint of whiskey. Heads looked out of windows in the trailers surrounding the fire.

  Aggie held out the bottle and Cohen let go of his leg and took it and unscrewed the cap and turned it up in one fluid motion. He drank some and spit some out and by then Aggie had opened the tackle box and taken out a roll of gauze and something in a spray can and a heavy bandage.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cohen said, spit and whiskey running down the sides of his mouth. He turned the bottle up again and then tossed it aside and it spilled out.

  “Careful with that,” Aggie said. “Shit don’t grow on trees.” He held the spray can up and sprayed it once and then moved toward Cohen.

  “Get the hell away from me with that shit,” Cohen said and he slid across the ground.

  “Come here and shut up.”

  “I said get on.”

  Aggie came forward and Cohen stiff-armed him.

  “Ain’t no bullet in there,” Aggie said. “So we gotta clean it up. Stop it bleeding. Looks like it missed the bone. Hold still.”

  “I ain’t holding still.”

  “You will if you want it to quit.”

  “Fuck you. You shot me.”

  “Shot you. And could have killed you. Still could. So quit squirming and rip them pants. It’s that or sit here and bleed.”

  Cohen shook his head. Breathed frustrated, painful breaths. Shook his head hard, then said, “You rip them and you fix it.”

  “Then get up,” Aggie said.

  Cohen struggled to his feet and Aggie stuck his fingers in the bullet hole of the pants and ripped them open. A circle of crimson, fresh and flowing. The leg shook and Aggie sprayed it with a white spray that made a freezing white foam and then he put a thick bandage on top and told Cohen to hold it. Then he moved around to the backside and sprayed the exit wound and put a thick bandage on it and told Cohen to hold it with his other hand. He quickly wrapped the gauze once around the leg, then several more times tightly. Cohen stood straight-legged and his fists were balled and then he fell back down on the ground, grabbing for the pint bottle and taking a big drink. He didn’t toss it away this time but held it close to his chest as if someone might try and take it from him.

  He finally caught his breath and he sat up straight, his legs out before him. He kept drinking the whiskey in little sips. Aggie stood back from him, facing away from the fire, his features vague. His rifle and the shotgun lay on the grou
nd at the door of his trailer and Cohen looked over at them. Cohen’s face was streaked with mud and sweat and rain. Nobody talked for a while and Cohen couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t dead. “You shot my dog,” he said.

  Aggie took out a cigarette and offered Cohen one.

  “Light it,” Cohen said and Aggie lit them both and handed one to him. “You didn’t have to do that. Shoot the dog.”

  “I know it,” Aggie said. “But I don’t trust animals.”

  “Shit,” Cohen said, shaking his head.

  Aggie turned toward the fire, his silhouette sharp and menacing. “Where’d you get that Jeep?” he asked.

  “It’s mine,” Cohen said. And then he looked around and between two of the trailers he saw the generator and some of his furniture. “So is that and that and that,” he said and he pointed. He noticed the heads in the windows. “Where’s that boy and girl?” he said.

  Aggie smoked. Didn’t look at him.

  “I said where’s that boy and girl?”

  “Where’s Joe?”

  “Who’s Joe?”

  “You know who Joe is.”

  “Just like you know who the boy and girl are.”

  Aggie took out another cigarette and lit it with the one in his mouth. Then he tossed the old one in the coals. “Come over here by the fire,” he said.