Rivers Read online

  His mind raced and the storm raged on and lying on his stomach, with his arms folded and his face buried in his arms, he fell asleep. And the dreams began. The anarchy came back to him, the hours after the Line became official. The fires that were set to the looted stores and the crumbling buildings and the empty homes. The coastline going up in flames, bands of those left behind setting fire to whatever would burn and then moving on to something else that would burn. The casinos the most direct targets, the symbol of frustration among the coast dwellers who had watched the casinos always be the first to go back up while everyone and everything else around them suffered. Some of the casinos had been lifted by the roaring tide and turned on their sides and pushed inland. Some of them had sunk. Some of them stood like Roman remains, only structural shells of a more prosperous time. Those that would burn, were burned, like all else, patches of fires burning red in the night, across Gulfport and Biloxi and other small, deserted communities.

  He saw the fires in his dreams, heard the gas lines catching and exploding and the glass shattering like pistol shots, and he saw the fire setters celebrating like a ritualistic people who believed that the carnage was somehow serving this way of life. He saw the smoke gathering and forming a far-reaching cloud that sat in the sky and waited for the next hurricane and he saw the next hurricane and how it sucked the smoke into its swirl and gave the already gray sky a deeper, more menacing gray, like some slick, sharp stone. He saw the fires and heard the screams and the explosions and in his dreams there was destruction and swirling around him in his sleep there was destruction and he slept without being startled, desensitized to the orchestra of demolition.

  Cohen woke with a jerk and the pain shot through his shoulder. He forgot where he was and he raised up and banged his head on the pew and he lay down again, holding his shoulder with his face twisting in pain. When the pain eased, he rolled out from under the pew and got up and sat on it. The wet chill all over him and the wind and rain bruising the land. He hugged himself, shivered. He closed his eyes and tried to think of somewhere warm. Somewhere safe.

  He was standing at the back door of the house watching them. They sat together on a blanket out in the field. Elisa’s brown hair in a low ponytail, a sundress baring her shoulders, sunglasses on. The little girl with the same brown hair, wavy and long, sitting next to her mother. The light drawn to them like angels. They played together with something, he couldn’t see what. They talked with one another but he couldn’t hear their voices, some kind of static drowning them out. He called to them but neither responded and he began walking out to them and the sunshine grew brighter and brighter until the landscape flashed white and blinded him and when he looked again they were gone, and the blanket was gone, but the static was there and he pulled at his ears and rubbed at his eyes as the static filled his brain and he cried out and then he opened his eyes and they disappeared in the dark church.

  The wind shoved something through the busted roof and it landed with a crash and he slid off the pew back onto the floor. He lay with his eyes closed and arms crossed in half an inch of water, and somewhere through it all he heard the sound of the voice, calling, Shoot him. Shoot him now.

  4

  IT WAS LIKE RIDING IN the bed of a truck. Some rocking, some pushing. Enough uncertainty to be wary of letting go. Mariposa sat on a mattress on the floor of the trailer, her arms beside her, hands flat on the floor, the winds jerking at the trailer that was strapped to the earth by an erratic arrangement of ropes wrapped tightly to spikes driven deep into the ground. The ropes were tightest across the middle of the trailer top and the ceiling gave some with the strain and the ropes crisscrossed the trailer like the web of some deranged spider. The small trailer rocked in the big winds and she had sat there many nights before and she had yet to take flight but that didn’t keep away the fear. Three lit candles stood in three empty beer bottles in the corner, knocking together but standing up, and the candlelight danced with the rhythm of the storm.

  She was wrapped in a sleeping bag and she wore only panties and a flannel shirt. Her clothes lay spread at the foot of the mattress, soaked from the day’s work. Her thick, long hair still had not dried and it lay across her shoulders, down across her breasts, and touched her folded legs. She swayed back and forth a little, mumbling to herself, trying to talk herself through the storm, trying not to think about tomorrow, wondering what had happened to the man they left behind. She looked over at the overcoat Aggie had given her to wear and she thought that the lawn-mower cord was in the pocket and she imagined the flakes of skin from the man’s neck that must be crusted in the rope.

  She was a Creole girl with Creole parents and grandparents and she had grown up on the east edge of the French Quarter in a shotgun house with wood floors and windows painted shut. Anywhere from six to ten other people lived in the house, depending on how many cousins or uncles or sisters settled in at a particular time. Her family owned a convenience store on the corner of Ursuline and Dauphine that sold groceries on the right side of the store and liquor and wine on the left. There was a room at the back of the store that was for the voodoo. Incense and spirit soaps and books on the occult and herbs of the darker arts. And in another room, farther back into the soul of the building, was where her grandmother sat in a cloud of cigarette smoke at a rectangular wooden table and read tarot cards or palms or whatever anybody wanted reading.

  The room was no bigger than a closet, no windows, and a single naked blue bulb hung from the ceiling. Three of the walls were draped in dark-colored tapestries, reds and purples and crimsons reaching from ceiling to floor. The fourth wall was made of brick and a strip of wire hung across its width and clothespins held black-and-white photographs to the wire. Most of the photographs were yellowed, some were curled on the edges. Some of them thirty, forty, even fifty years old. The photographs were of family members dead and gone who served as Grandmother’s sources, and as she delivered the promises of good fortune or of ill fate, she would call to the photographs by name, trail her hand back over her shoulder as if to reach out and hold them while they spoke, and it was not unusual for a repeat customer who had been delivered a stroke of predicted good luck to ask for a particular family member by name, believing that the stoic face in the weathered photograph was a guardian angel in a drab disguise.

  Her grandmother was named Mariposa and the girl had been named after her. She had the same features as her grandmother and mother and aunts. Thick, wavy black hair, deep-set brown eyes, and skin like fine, rich cocoa. As a child she was always close to her grandmother, sitting in the corner as her grandmother called to the spirits to give her the prophecy, walking with her around the streets of the Quarter as she told tales of the old buildings and the ghosts who haunted them. Sitting in Jackson Square feeding the birds and listening to her grandmother speak of Christ and the saints one minute, of the spirits of the dead slaves and dead pirates the next. They would walk along the river and the old Mariposa would tell the young Mariposa of the lovers who had been separated at the river, one leaving on the steamboat, the other standing on the pier, torn apart by things they could not control, star-crossed romantic tales that built up the heart and then tore it down. There was not a street that didn’t have a story. Not an alley without a ghost. Not a burning candle without a spirit hovering close by. A carnival of imagination.

  She sat Indian-style on the mattress in the trailer, the sleeping bag covering her, and leaned forward with the shoe box she had taken from the house they found—it had to be the house of the man they’d ambushed—and she rummaged through their lives, him and his wife. She plucked the champagne cork, smelled it, held it out in front of her. Heard the piano playing at the reception, saw the women in their long shiny dresses, wearing their long shiny earrings. She put down the cork and picked out a small stuffed frog. Won at a fair or bought at a gas station on a spur-of-the-moment excursion along the panhandle. She took a hard candy bracelet from the box and put it around her wrist and noticed that some of i
t had been eaten away. She opened up the cards and letters and read the words he had written to her, read the words she had written to him. A whole year? she wrote on a first-anniversary card. One down and how many more to go? And then an I love you and her name with a fancy E and a looping A at the end. I can’t tell if you’re getting better or I’m getting worse, he wrote on a birthday card. There is the water and the sky and there is you above it all, he wrote on a Valentine. Their lives seemed to appear before her in the sultry light of the candles, two people loving and laughing and living with ease. She read and paused and watched them.

  She went through the cards and letters and then there were more things. A red bow, a shiny rock, half of a shoestring, a pacifier. Two dried roses tied together with a white ribbon, and on the ribbon was written Sono ubriaco. She said it aloud, wondered what it meant. She knew it wasn’t French and didn’t think it was Spanish and guessed it was Italian. Sono, she said aloud again, trying to figure out one word in hopes of putting it together with the second. Sono. She tried and tried but couldn’t place it.

  She looked up from the box and stared at the three flames swaying back and forth. She thought of her grandmother and she thought of standing at the river, watching the people get on and off the riverboat. She thought of the stories of the lovers separated by what they could not control and she felt the same rise and fall that she had felt as she walked away from the river, holding her grandmother’s hand, filled with sympathy and envy by whatever story she had been told.

  At the bottom of the box was a large envelope, sealed, folded in half, with nothing written on the outside. But she didn’t open it, wanted to save something for later. She returned everything to the box and put the top on and for a little while she had forgotten about the storm. Forgotten about this place.

  Then a massive gust came and the trailer seemed to rise and drop and the bottles fell over and the candles went out and she let go a yelp. She pulled the sleeping bag tight around her. Dark all around her, the storm beating like a thousand hands against the trailer roof and sides. She tried to sing a little song she remembered her grandmother singing to her but the words were gone and only fragments of melody came out of her nervous mouth and all she wanted was for the night to end but that was a long ways away. She wondered if Evan and Brisco were awake, if any of the others were awake, and knew they had to be, it’d be impossible not to have your eyes open, and she wondered if they were holding on to the floor like she was, or if they were praying that the ropes would hold, or maybe praying that the ropes wouldn’t hold and that the storm would grant mercy and break them free and lift and carry the trailers away and set them down gently in the thick, twisted arms of the kudzu. She stared into the dark and she listened to it all and she held on and she hated most that during nights like these there was no way to hear Aggie coming in your direction.

  5

  IT WAS MIDDAY BEFORE THERE was a moment of relief. The wind finally gave, and the rocking stopped, and the rain slacked. Mariposa unwrapped herself from the sleeping bag, put on her jeans and sweatshirt, socks and boots, stood, and moved to the window. She wiped the fog from the glass with her shirtsleeve and looked around.

  It had the look of a makeshift military compound that you might find in the middle of some forgotten war on the edge of a faraway jungle. A corral of sorts of the trailers that the government had once provided for those who had lost their homes. Short rectangular white things on wheels that symbolized the inadequacy of the effort to provide for the suffering. There were a dozen of them in a loose circle on the high ground of an old plantation where only the chimneys remained from the three-story antebellum. Stretching across the top and down the sides of each trailer were the same wild webs of rope that held her trailer to the ground. All but two of the trailers locked from the outside with deadbolts.

  Around the trailers the grass was high but in the circle there was slick red clay and a square fire pit built from cinder blocks taken from the rubble of broken-down country stores. Scattered behind the trailers were old pickups, some that would crank and some that wouldn’t, a couple of cattle trailers, refrigerators and freezers, odd pieces of furniture and mattress frames.

  She saw Cohen’s Jeep behind the old man’s trailer. Then she took a step over to her trailer door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. Which she figured was a reward for what she and Evan had done. She walked over and took the shoe box from the floor and set it on the mattress and laid the sleeping bag over it. She then opened the door and hurried next door to Evan’s trailer and it was also unlocked so she went in.

  Evan and Brisco both rose up, startled.

  “What the hell,” Evan said. His blond hair was wild and his young brother, Brisco, squeezed a deflated football.

  “Nothing. Just don’t want Aggie to see me out.”

  The boys sat up on the mattress. Clothes and empty water bottles strewn about. An overturned chair and a busted Styrofoam cooler across the floor. Brisco lay back down and Evan got up, rubbing at his head and face.

  “Where you think he put the keys?” Mariposa whispered.

  Evan moved past her. Picked up an empty cup and looked in it as if expecting something to be there. He tossed it aside. “Why you whispering?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Then stop.”

  Mariposa moved around the small space, her arms folded. “I wish we wouldn’t have told Aggie about that house,” she whispered again.

  “Me, too,” he answered. “Stop whispering. You’re making me nervous.”

  “The keys,” she said at a normal volume. “Where you think he put them?”

  “Keys to what?”

  “To the Jeep.”

  “I don’t know. Same place he keeps the rest of them, I guess.”

  Mariposa exhaled. She dropped her head in disgust. Brisco picked up two empty water bottles and started playing drums on the wall.

  Evan moved to the door, opened it, and sucked in the rainy, cool air, and closed it again.

  “I can’t take it anymore,” she said.

  “I know it.”

  “I ain’t joking around. I mean it.”

  “Just don’t do nothing dumb.”

  “I already did something dumb when we came back here with the Jeep. I told you we shoulda run on.”

  “Jesus, I can’t leave Brisco. What the hell are you talking about? Haul ass if you want to, but I’m with Brisco, don’t matter what shit I gotta put up with.”

  Brisco stopped the drumming and said, “Leave me where.”

  “Nowhere,” said Evan.

  She shook her head. “I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I hope like hell you didn’t.”

  He paused. Eased up. “You could if you want, though.”

  “I can’t do it by myself. Neither can you and him.”

  They squared off. One waited on the other with an answer. Like they did together most every day. And still neither had one. Brisco tossed aside the water bottles and sat down and crossed his legs. His shoe was untied and he played with the lace.

  “We could walk together,” she said.

  “It’s too far. We done decided that.”

  “Well, maybe we need to decide again.”

  “We’d starve before we got there. Or get found and end up worse off than this. You heard all the same stories I heard.”

  “We could walk at night.”

  The boy shook his head. “Night’s worse. And now it’s raining all the time. We can’t walk in the dark and the rain. And Brisco can’t do it anyway. He’s too little.”

  Brisco turned on the mattress and said, “I ain’t too little.”

  “Yes, you are,” Evan told him.

  “I’m seven, you know.”

  “Not yet, you ain’t.”

  Brisco flopped back over and Evan turned to Mariposa and said, “We got to hold on. We got to keep doing what he tells us and he’ll keep our doors unlocked and we’ll find a way, I swear it.” />
  But it didn’t matter what he said because she was already gone, already turned from him, already done with the same conversation they’d had a hundred times. She moved over to the corner of the trailer and sat down on the floor and put her face against her knees. She had come to know desperation but it seemed as if her desperate feelings were beginning to develop into something else. She didn’t know what that was but she felt herself moving degrees past desperation. She didn’t like the thoughts in her head and in her heart when she promised herself that she would do anything to get out of this place. It scared her to imagine what those things might be.

  ACROSS THE WAY A TRAILER door opened and out came Joe. He wore a flannel coat and muddy boots and his hair was long and brushed straight back. He walked over to the fire pit and looked down at the floating ashes, his eyes puffy and red. The smell of whiskey and cigarettes in his breath and on his clothes as he drank all night, through the duration of the storm, sitting on a crate inside his trailer with one hand on a bottle and the other clutching at his knee until it was over. He rubbed his hands together then tugged at his coat and coughed a hacking cough and he leaned over and spit. Around the compound the locks were on all the doors but for the two belonging to the boy and the girl and he had told Aggie it was a bad idea to leave them open, no matter what they’d earned, but Aggie hadn’t listened. A dull pain filled his head and he stretched his arms and twisted and when he did he saw Aggie standing out in the field, looking out across the low, flooded countryside. Out above Aggie was a cluster of white birds, circling and diving and circling and diving. A grace in their rise and fall, as if they were high-class performers trained to illustrate beauty in the arc of flight. But Joe paid more attention to Aggie than the birds. His fixation on the landscape, his concrete stature, his apparent adoration for the new morning.