Rivers

1

IT HAD BEEN RAINING FOR weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn’t rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and the sunshine glistened across the drenched land. It rained now, a straight rain, not the diagonal, attacking rain, and it seemed that the last of the gusts had moved on sometime during the night and he wanted to get out. Had to get out of the house, away from the wobbling light of the kerosene lamp, away from the worn deck of cards, away from the paperbacks, away from the radio that hardly ever picked up a signal anymore, away from her voice that he heard in his sleep and heard through the storms and heard whispering from all corners of the short brick house. It rained hard and the early, early morning was black but he had to get out.

He stood from the cot and stretched his arms over his head and felt his way across the room in the faint lamplight. He slept in the front room of the house. The same room of the house where he cooked and read and changed clothes and did everything but relieve himself, which he did outside next to where two pines had fallen in a cross. He wore long johns and a sweatshirt and he put on jeans and a flannel shirt over them. When he was dressed, he walked into the kitchen and took a bottle of water from a cooler that sat where the refrigerator used to be and he drank half in one take and then put the bottle back into the cooler. He picked up a flashlight from the kitchen counter and he walked back into the front room and went to a closet in the corner. He shined the light first on the .22 rifle and then on the sawed-off double-barrel shotgun and he chose the shotgun. On the floor was a box of shells and he opened it up and there were only two left and he loaded them.

He turned and looked at the dog, curled up on a filthy towel in the corner of the kitchen.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I ain’t even asking you.”

The rubber boots were next to the cot and he pulled them on, picked up a sock hat and the heavy-duty raincoat from the floor and put them on, and then he walked to the front door, opened it, and was greeted by the roar of the rain. The cool air rushed on him and the anxiety of the walls inside disappeared into the wet, dark night. He stepped out under the porch and then went around the side of the house, hundreds of tap tap taps on his hood and water to his ankles and the flashlight pointed out in front, the silver streaks racing across the yellow beam.

Around the back of the house, Habana whinnied. He opened the door to what had once been a family room and was barely able to avoid the horse as she raced out into the back field. She ran small circles, Cohen holding the light on her and her steps high in the moist land and her neck and head shaking off the rain but her own anxiety being set free in the downpour. He let her be and he stepped inside and took the saddle from the ceramic-tiled floor and once she had run it out, he whistled and she came over to him and he saddled her.

With the sawed-off shotgun under his arm, he led the horse down the sloppy driveway to the sloppy road and they rode half a mile west. He rode Habana carefully in the storm, the single beam out before them, but he knew the route. They moved around trees that had fallen years ago and trees that had fallen months ago and trees that had fallen weeks ago. Back off the road, abandoned houses sat quietly, lined by barbed-wire fences brought down by the fallen trees or the wild ivy or both. After an hour or more, they came to the fence row that at one time had been cleared all the way to the sand in order to lay pipe or cable or something that was supposed to help lift them from their knees but that had been abandoned like everything else.

The rain came stronger as he turned the horse south and they splashed through the brush and mud. There had once stood an electrical pole every hundred yards but only half of them remained upright and the lines that linked them together had been rolled up onto giant spools and taken away. Habana buckled several times in softer spots but fought on and in a few miles they came to the clearing and there was only ocean in front of them and beach to the east and to the west. He shined the light down on her front legs and they were thick with mud and he told her she did good and he stroked the side of her wet neck. They stood still in the rain and it washed them clean.

He turned off the light. Blended with the sound of the storm was the sound of the wash against the shore, the tumble of the whitecaps. A cold wind blew in off the water and he pushed the hood from his head and felt the wind and rain on his face and leaned his head back and felt it around his neck and ears and it was in those moments that he could feel her still there. Still there when there was only the dark and the sounds of what she had loved. He closed his eyes and let the rain soak into him and she was there at the edge of the water, the salty foam rushing around her ankles and her hair across her face and her shoulders red from the sun. He let himself fall back and he lay stretched across the horse, his arms flailing to the sides, the barrel of the shotgun pointing down toward the wet sand and the flashlight dangling from his fingertips. The rhythm of the waves and the crash of the rain and the solitude and the big black world around him and it was in these moments that he felt her there.

“Elisa,” he said.

He sat back up in the saddle and pulled on his hood. He looked out across the dark ocean and listened and he thought that he heard her. Always thought he heard her no matter how hard the wind blew or how hard the rain fell.

He listened, tried to feel her in the push of the waves.

Thunder roared out across the Gulf and then far off to the west a string of lightning turned the black to gray for an instant. And the rain came on. Twice what it had been when they left the house. Habana reared her head and snorted the water from her nostrils. The ocean pushed high across what was left of the beach and the thunder bellowed again and Cohen raised the shotgun and fired out into the Gulf as if this world around him were something that could be held at bay by the threat of a bright orange blast. Habana reared with the sound of the shotgun and Cohen dropped the flashlight and got hold of her mane and she leaped forward a little but then steadied. He patted her. Talked to her. Told her, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

When she was still, he got down and felt around for the flashlight, and then he mounted again. He turned the flashlight on, then off, and he turned Habana and they started back.

“It’s getting worse,” he said to Habana, but the words were lost under it all.

COHEN STOOD AT THE KITCHEN window with a cup of coffee. The dog, a shaggy black-and-white shepherd-looking thing, stood beside him and chewed beef jerky. Cohen stared at the pile of lumber, switching the coffee cup from hand to hand, trying to bring himself into the day. The morning was a heavy gray and the rain had eased some. Maybe enough for Charlie, he thought. The pile of two-by-fours and two-by-sixes was so wet that he figured he could pick one up and simply fold it end over end. The grass and weeds grew high around the lumber as it had been sitting there for years. He sipped the coffee, looked away from the lumber pile and over to the concrete slab that stretched out from the back of the house. The last frame he had built, months ago, was in a splintered mess in the back field. Almost got to the last wall before another one came and lifted and carried it away. Twice he had gotten two walls done. Twice more he had gotten to the third. He had never gotten to the fourth before it was destroyed.

It wasn’t going to be a big room. She won’t need a big one for a while, Elisa said. Then you can build us a big house with rooms like concert halls. With whose money, he had wanted to know. She shrugged and said we’ll worry about that then. So it was going to be an average room, built onto an average house, protected by the same blond brick as the rest of the low-ceilinged ranch-style house. An average room for what they expected to be a much more than average little girl. Her place to sleep, and play, and grow. Four years ago the foundation had been poured, before it was impossible to pour a foundation, before it was impossible to imagine such things as building a room onto your house.

Now all it did was rain. Before the storm. During the storm. After the storm. Difficult to tell when one hurricane ended and the next one began.

He sipped the coffee and then lit a cigarette.

Goshdamn wood will never dry out, he thought. And he had thought and thought of ways to frame a room with wet wood, onto a wet slab, that would stand against hurricane-force winds, but he hadn’t made it there yet. Unless God changed His laws, he wasn’t going to ever get there. He scratched at his beard. Drank the last of the coffee. Watched out the window and smoked the cigarette. Then he decided to go and see if Charlie was around.

He climbed on a chair in the kitchen and moved away a water-stained ceiling tile, reached his hand up into the hole, and took down a cigar box. He opened the box and there was a stack of cash and he took out four hundred-dollar bills and he folded and stuck them in the front pocket of his jeans. After he put the box away and set the ceiling tile back in place, he picked up the radio from the kitchen counter, turned it on, and listened with his ear close to the speaker, the distant voice of a man overrun by clouds of static. He turned it off, and then he walked over to the cot and picked up the raincoat and sock hat and put them on and then he walked over to the closet. He chose the sawed-off shotgun over the .22, kicked at the empty box of shotgun shells, and then made sure the one and only shell was still in the chamber. The dog crossed the room and stood at his side and followed him to the door but stopped there.

“I’ll leave the door open for you,” Cohen said and the dog looked up at him, out at the rain, then went back inside.

He went out to the Jeep and sat down behind the wheel and set the shotgun on the passenger seat. He had drilled holes in the floorboard to keep the water from puddling, and an overflowing rain gauge was tied to the roll bar. The Jeep cranked and then he drove across the front yard toward the muddy gravel road, leaving tire tracks in the earth.

At the end of the road, he turned onto the two-lane highway that connected him to the busted interstate running parallel to the water. The sky was a lighter gray to the west, but far off in the southeast was a gathering of pillow-like clouds. He turned onto the highway and drove along with cold rain against him. At a lower stretch of road, he slowed because of the water and drove on with his eyes far ahead to where the road showed itself again and he aimed for the higher ground, hoping he would remain on the asphalt that he couldn’t see beneath the muddy water. He made it through the water and then after several miles he came to a crossroads with an old gas station where he used to buy boiled peanuts from an old man who sat on the tailgate of his truck in the parking lot. Past the crossroads he came to a small community and he slowed and looked at the remaining houses and stores lining the highway, wondered if there were people somewhere back in there, back in the faceless gray buildings that seemed to be disappearing, as if they were slowly flaking away and sinking into the earth. Even so, he felt like somebody was watching him. Always felt like somebody was watching him when he made his way through one of these ghost towns.

There was a beautiful sadness to it all that he couldn’t explain. It was a sentiment he had tried to ignore, but it had seeped into him and remained, some kind of grave nostalgia for the catastrophes and the way of life that once had been. As a boy he had ridden with his father, and his father would point out the buildings and houses he had framed. Seemed like he had worked on the entire coastline. Gulfport, Biloxi, Ocean Springs, Moss Point. Didn’t matter where they were, what road they were on, his father was always pointing and saying put that one up. Put that one up. Worked on that one there. Put that one up. And Cohen sensed the pride in his father’s voice. Felt his own pride in his old man and his rough hands and what he did with them. His father seemed magical. During the day erecting houses and buildings along the coast and in the evenings feeding cows and bush-hogging the place and in the night sitting in his chair and sipping a drink and walking outside to smoke and talking to Cohen like he was a little man and not a little boy and Cohen wanting to be like him. He had always believed that one day he would ride around with his own children and then grandchildren and he would point out of the window and say put that one up. Did that one over there. Put that one up. And he had been like his father. He had put some of them up. But there were no children to show them to, and even if there were, what he had put up was now down and all he could say was that’s where one used to be. Put one up over there that’s gone. Used to be one right over there. Whenever he went out in the Jeep, he looked around at the concrete foundations, at the splintered remains, at the heaps of debris, at the places where his work once stood, and there was sadness, and despair, and awe. And he wondered what his father would say if he had lived to see his work stripped bare. He wondered how his father would feel now to have his work gone. Simply not there. Removed by the wind and the rain. Removed with violence. Removed without prejudice.

As if it had never been.

2

IT HAD BEEN 613 DAYS since the declaration of the line, a geographical boundary drawn ninety miles north of the coastline from the Texas-Louisiana border across the Mississippi coast to Alabama. A geographical boundary that said, We give up. The storms can have it. No more rebuilding and no more reconstruction. The declaration came after several years of catastrophic hurricanes and a climate shift suggested that there was an infinite trail of storms to come and the Line said we give up. During those 613 days, there had been no letup in the consistency and ferocity of the storms. Recent months had seen a turn for the worse, something few thought possible.

Those that decided to stay had decided to stay at their own risk. There was no law. No service. No offering. No protection. Residents had been given a month’s notice that the Line was coming and a mandatory evacuation order had been decreed and help was offered until the deadline and then you were on your own if you stayed behind. The Line had been drawn and everything below was considered primitive until the hurricanes stopped and no one knew if that day was ever coming.

Left to itself, the region below the Line had become like some untamed natural world of an undiscovered land. The animals roamed without fear. Armies of red and gray squirrels and choruses of birds. Deer grazing in the interstate medians and packs of raccoons and possums living in garages until they were blown away, then moving on to another dwelling that was now welcome to them. Honeysuckle vines bunched together and azaleas bloomed like pink jungles with the warmer temperatures of the spring. The lemony scent of the sprawling magnolias wafted in the air like perfume.

The kudzu had begun to creep like some green, smothering carpet, taking over roads and bridges. Finding its way up and around chimneys and covering rail lines. Swallowing barns and houses. Sneaking across parking lots and wrapping itself around the trunks of trees and covering road signs. The constant flooding and drying out and temperature swings had split the asphalt of parking lots and roadways, the separations becoming the refuge of rats and skinny dogs. Chunks of beach had disappeared as if scooped out by a giant spoon, leaving the flat waters of a lagoon where people used to sit with their feet in the sand and drink beer from cold glasses and eat shrimp from a bed of ice served in a silver bowl.

This was Cohen’s world as he navigated the Jeep carefully through the rain and the debris.

He came to where the highway met the interstate, and standing on the side of the road were a teenage boy and girl. A thin white boy, his hair wet and stuck to his head, and a dark-skinned girl with long black hair under a baseball hat. The boy wore a letter jacket with an LB on the chest and the girl wore a tan overcoat much too long and dragging the ground. They were soaked. She had her arm around the back of his neck and she limped along with his support. Cohen moved over to the side of the road opposite them and he watched them as he passed but he didn’t slow down as the boy called out to him. Hey or Help or Stop. He didn’t make it out and he looked in the mirror and they turned and watched him driving away and the boy raised his hand and motioned for Cohen to come back.

He drove along the ragged remains of Highway 90. Keeping it slow. A sign read Gulfport 5. The once busy highway now littered with sand and driftwood and much closer to the water than it used to be. Along the highway, the antebellum homes were long gone, the first to go in the earliest and most violent of the storms, and splintered marinas floated in the water like broken toys. A pier where he had stood in a black suit with Elisa in her white dress, holding her white flowers, was nothing but a random cluster of stumps sticking out of the water. Some lampposts stood and some leaned and some lay across the interstate and he bounced over these as if they were dead logs. He looked out onto the beach and noticed tire tracks in the wet sand and he reached over and took the shotgun and held it in his lap.

A few miles on and he saw what he had hoped for. Despite the rain, the U-Haul truck was there, off the interstate and in the parking lot next to the charred remains of the Grand Casino that was still standing, though crippled. Black streaks stretched out of the window frames and stained the orange stucco. The roof gone and the floors caved in. A small gathering of people stood at the back end of the truck, half with their shoulders slumped and jackets pulled over their heads. The other half simply took it.

Cohen drove up and stopped the Jeep and the back of the U-Haul was open and Charlie was standing in the back pointing out something to a heavyset man wearing a flannel shirt that was too small and revealed the beginnings of his belly. Outside of the truck stood Charlie’s muscle—four broad-shouldered guys in black hats and black pants and black jackets with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. If they knew it was raining, they didn’t acknowledge it as they stood like watchdogs. While Charlie bartered with the man in the back of the U-Haul, the muscle watched those who were waiting their turn as if they were capable of an overthrow. But of the twenty or so gathered, none of them appeared capable of much more than hopefully getting back to wherever it was they came from. All men. Unshaved and dirty and with sunken faces but not the menacing faces of power. Some stood with bicycles. One had a warped guitar on his back. A few more stood in a circle and tried to light cigarettes while pointing at an old Chevrolet truck that must have belonged to one of them. A couple of other trucks off to the side. Another man, an older, hunched man, stood a few feet away from the back of the U-Haul, next in line, and he wore a sign draped around his neck made of plywood that read THE END IS NEAR. But NEAR had been crossed out, and written underneath was HERE and all the words were streaked.

Cohen put the shotgun back underneath the seat as it wasn’t allowed. He then got out of the Jeep and pushed back his hood, took off his sock hat and left it on the seat. He rubbed at the hair stuck down on his head and then took the empty gas cans from the backseat and he walked over to where the other men stood in a staggered line.

He watched Charlie. The same old Charlie. Much had changed but not him. He was the cow trader, the horse trader, the guy who sold used cars and used tractors or whatever else he could scare up right out in his front yard. No wife to complain about killing the grass. Just Charlie and his land and his barn and his storage shed and his knack for hustling a dollar. Cohen had sat between his father and Charlie on the bench seat of the truck. Both windows cracked. His father driving and smoking with his left hand. Charlie’s arm propped on the door and smoking with his right hand. This was how they rode up to Wiggins to the sale, the trailer hitched to the pickup, sometimes getting rid of cows, sometimes buying. Sometimes bringing home a horse. Always looking for something better than what they already had, the haggle the most anticipated moment of the day. They would ride up to Wiggins and pull into the big gravel parking lot filled with more trucks and more trailers, and his father and Charlie would toss their cigarettes and tuck their pants in their boots and tug at their belts and light another cigarette. Let me have one, Cohen would say each time. Hell no, his father would say. Let him have one, Charlie would argue. He ain’t but ten, Charlie. And the next year his father’s answer would be, He ain’t but eleven, Charlie. And so on until Cohen was big enough to find his own cigarettes elsewhere but it was still fun to ask. He would walk with the men across the parking lot toward the giant metal-roof building, his father and Charlie waving and making small talk to the other men who all seemed to walk at the same lethargic pace, as if they were in slow motion or maybe some type of pain. They walked slowly and kinda crooked, smoked slowly, spoke to one another in half sentences. Cohen watched and listened and sometimes felt like he was in one of those black-and-white westerns his father used to watch as he mingled with the rough-faced cow traders of southeast Mississippi.

He watched Charlie now. His pants still tucked in his boots. Still hustling for a dollar. Still the man you needed to see.

“I told you, I ain’t got no power cords today. You gonna have to wait till next time,” Charlie was saying to the heavyset man, who looked at him dumbfounded. Charlie wore his glasses on top of his head, and his face had the wear of a man who had worked outside his entire life.

“What about right back there in that box?” the large man asked and pointed.

“Are you goddamn deaf?”

“Naw I ain’t deaf but I know you got some. You got some every time.”

“I got some every time when I leave out, but this ain’t the only place I stop. I had em when I left out this time but sold em all before I got here. Hell, it’s a wonder I got anything by the time I get way down here. You understand that?”

The man shook his head. Tugged at the bottom of his shirt.

“You want something else?” Charlie asked, poking his head toward the man.

“Gimme some of them lanterns and some of them batteries.”

“What is some?”

“Three.”

“Three lanterns or three batteries?”

“Three lanterns and enough batteries for all of them and then some more. Come on, Charlie.”

“Don’t come on me. It ain’t that hard to tell me exactly what you want the first time. I ain’t got all day.”

Charlie reached over into a box filled with camping lanterns and he lifted out three and handed them to the man. Then he took a plastic bag from his back pocket and reached into another box and filled the bag with D batteries. He gave the man the bag and then he counted on his fingers and mumbled to himself. “Fifty dollars,” he said.

“Jesus,” said the man.

“I meant eighty.”

“Fifty’s fine. Don’t piss on me.”

The man set down the plastic bag and unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out two poker chips and held them out.

“What in God’s lovin name is that?” Charlie said and he shook his head in frustration. “You think the damn counter is open over there for me to cash in?”

“These here are hundred dollars apiece.”

“Hundred dollars apiece in what world? Where the hell are they a hundred dollars apiece?”

The men with guns and the other men waiting began to laugh as they watched and listened.

“Take em on up to Tunica,” the man said. “You can use em there, I’m guessing.”

“Tunica? Tunica floats.”

“Vegas, then. Or somewhere.”

“Yeah. Vegas. Hell yeah, let’s go to Vegas, like they’re gonna give me two hundred dollars for two dirty old chips from the shithole casino in Gulfport, Mississippi. Not to mention it’d cost me how much to get to Vegas? Spend three grand to cash in two hundred damn dollars. Hell, maybe I’ll just mail em to them and they can mail me back my money.”

The man put the chips back in his pocket and looked at his feet. He bit at the inside of his cheek. “I ain’t got no money this time,” he said. “I ain’t got nothing.”

Charlie propped his hands on his hips and walked a circle and then turned back and said, “I ain’t the Red Cross and I ain’t running no credit applications. You want something, you got to have money or something mighty fine to trade up. You got neither. Gimme them lanterns.” He didn’t wait for the man to hold them out but reached over and took them out of his hand. Then he scooped up the bag of batteries at his feet. Charlie set two of the lanterns back in the box and he gave one back to the large man. Then he took two packs of batteries out of the plastic bag and handed them over.

“Take this shit and go on and you owe me next time. You got it?”

The man nodded and said I got it and then he turned and walked down the metal ramp that led in and out of the truck.

Charlie stepped to the edge and said, “Anybody else out there got anything other than money or trade needs to go on. I thought that was common knowledge.”

Two of the men in line stepped out and walked away.

Charlie looked to the back of the men and saw Cohen and waved at him. “Come on up here, Cohen. You ain’t got to wait.”

“Hell naw,” said the old man with the sign. “You know how far I had to walk to get here?”

“Take that stupid sign off and shut up. How long you gonna wear that thing?”

“I’m gonna wear it till I want to.”

“That don’t even make no sense.”

“Well, that don’t matter. I’m sick of standing in this rain.”

“Then dance around.”

Cohen walked past the line and set the empty gas cans down at the back of the truck. He walked up the ramp and shook hands with Charlie. Charlie looked at him sideways and said, “I see you still cuttin your own hair.”

Cohen nodded. “My beauty parlor is on vacation.”

“Same ol shit. I try harder and harder to get down here, though. Don’t never stop. Your house still standing?”

“Still standing.”

“I knew when your daddy built it that it’d take the damn apocalypse to knock it down. Me and ol Jimmy Smith stood there and made fun of him triple-stacking the frame, but he was like that third little pig, just kept on how he wanted.”

“I know it. Mom wanted it tall but he wouldn’t have that either.”

“Nope. You and that dog and that house are about like cockroaches.”

“Don’t jinx me.”

They stepped up into the back of the truck and Cohen looked around at the open boxes stretched across the floor, a small pathway made down the middle. At the front end of the truck was a small backhoe.

“What the hell’s that?” Cohen asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Don’t never know what you might need. Got a deal, anyways.”

“Don’t tell me you’re one of them now.”

“One of them what?”

“You know what. Treasure hunter. Tomb raider. Whatever you wanna call it.”

“I ain’t no tomb raider ’cause there ain’t nothing but dead shit buried in a tomb. What I’m after is alive and kickin.”

“Come on, Charlie. You don’t believe that.”

“May or may not believe it but I’m gonna find out and that backhoe is the thing to do it.”

“Well, if it turns up, I want fifty percent off what’s in the back of this truck.”

“If it turns up, you can have this truck.”

Cohen shook his head and moved in between the boxes and said, “First off, I need some water and some liquor.”

“Got that,” Charlie said. “Back left.”

Cohen found a stack of cases of bottled water and he lifted two and brought them to the end of the truck. Charlie grabbed a fifth of Jim Beam from a box up front. “You need a bag?” he asked. Cohen nodded and Charlie gave him one and Cohen walked back down the middle. He picked up boxes of macaroni and cheese and packs of dried fruit and a carton of cigarettes. He asked Charlie if he had any chain-saw blades and Charlie pointed and Cohen found the box. He took two and then he asked about gas.

“Got a couple of full tanks in the truck cab. They only three gallons, though.”

“That’s fine. It’ll hold till next time.”

While Charlie got the gas, Cohen got two boxes of shells for the shotgun and a box for the .22 and he took two bags of beef jerky. Charlie came back with the gas cans and told one of the gunmen to put them in the back of Cohen’s Jeep. Then he climbed back up into the truck and looked at all Cohen had gathered.

“This ain’t as much as usual,” Charlie said.

Cohen shrugged. “I don’t guess I need as much.”

Charlie frowned at him and said, “Why don’t you just come on and work for me. I told you a thousand times. Ain’t no reason to stay down here.”

Cohen didn’t answer. Shook his head with his lips together.

“You been hearing anything?” Charlie asked.

Cohen thought a second. Heard himself talking to Elisa. “No. About what? Who am I supposed to hear anything from?”

Charlie looked out of the back of the truck. Rubbed his hands together. “Nothing, really. Just wondered. You got a radio still?”

“Yeah, but it don’t pick up like it used to. Am I supposed to be hearing something, Charlie? About what you’re after maybe?”

Charlie turned back to him. “Not about that, Cohen. You know me and your daddy was friends for a long time. And he’d want me to tell you to get on out of here. When’s the last time the damn sun shined down here? Hell, anywhere?”

“I know what he’d say.”

“I know you got that place and all and I know it goes way on back with the family. I know you got them ghosts out there. But I don’t know about the rest.”

Cohen wiped the dampness from his face, then said, “It doesn’t matter.”

“There ain’t nothing to do down here but die, Cohen,” Charlie said, turning his back to the line of men and lowering his voice. “And it’s just gonna keep on.”

“From what I hear there ain’t nothing but hell at the Line anyway.”

“Wouldn’t nobody blame you for leaving,” Charlie said.

“Guess not. Ain’t nobody here.”

“You might think about moving on, Cohen. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Why?”

Charlie didn’t answer. He looked past Cohen out of the back of the truck.

Cohen reached into his pocket and pulled out some money. “How much I owe you?” he asked.

Charlie huffed. “Gimme forty,” he said.

“I know it’s more than that.”

Charlie reached down and picked up a couple of four-packs of the Ds and dropped them in Cohen’s bag. “No charge for these,” he said.

Cohen reached into his pocket and took out a hundred-dollar bill and gave it to Charlie. “I don’t need no change,” he said.

“Why the hell you do that?”

Cohen shrugged. “What else am I gonna do with it? Put whatever’s left toward one of them.”

Charlie took the bill and shook his head. “At least listen to the damn radio. You got a radio?”

“I got a radio,” Cohen said and he set the bags on top of the cases of water and picked it all up. Charlie slapped him on the back as he headed down the ramp.

“Come on up, old fellow,” Charlie said to the man with the sign.

“ ’Bout time,” he answered.

“Really? You want to move to the back?”

Cohen nodded to the muscle as he walked over to the Jeep. He set the water and bags in the backseat next to the two gas tanks and then he put his sock hat on. One more look back at the ocean and then he got in the Jeep and turned around and headed back in the other direction. The rain, for now, was tolerable, soft and steady, but the southeastern clouds seemed to be turning into great black mountains. When it was time to turn off the highway, he stopped and opened a bag of the beef jerky and drove on with it between his legs. A couple of miles along the highway, before he got back to where the water covered the road, he saw the boy and the girl again. Her arm draped around his neck like before. Her limping along and him helping. The sound of the Jeep stopped them and they turned around to see what was coming and Cohen stopped again. He put the jerky on the floorboard and he took the shotgun from beneath the seat and then he drove on toward them. He knew they would wave him down and he knew better than to stop. As he approached, the boy moved the girl’s arm from around his neck and began waving and the girl doubled over.

Keep on going, he thought. Keep on going. Then the look on the face of the big man in the flannel shirt crossed his mind. I ain’t got no money this time. I ain’t got nothing.

He slowed down. Rolled to a stop several car lengths from them. “Stay right there,” he called out.

The boy reached back out to the girl and she leaned on him. Her baseball hat was gone and her long black hair fell across her face and shoulders in a wet, tangled mess.

Cohen raised himself up to where he could talk to them over the windshield. Before he spoke, he gave them a careful look and they didn’t appear to have anything other than what they were wearing. The wind blew cold and the girl folded her arms and held herself.

“What you doing out here?”

“Walking,” said the boy.

“Where to? I don’t see nowhere you could be going.”

“We’re going to Louisiana,” the girl said, throwing her hair back off her face with a toss of her head.

“You got a good long ways to go,” Cohen said. He pointed out toward the water covering the road ahead and the land on either side of the road for as far as they could see. “That right there is good as a swamp.”

“We know it,” the boy said.

Cohen leaned over and spit on the ground. Then he sat back up and said, “You got something in Louisiana?”

“They got power over there, we heard,” the boy said. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and his shoulders were narrow even in the bulky letterman jacket.

“So,” Cohen said.

“So what do you care?” the girl snapped and she stood up straight.

“Hush,” the boy told her.

“You hush.”

“Y’all both hush. What’s wrong with her?”

“What you mean?” the boy asked.

“Why you dragging her along?”

“She got snakebit on her leg.”

Cohen rubbed at his rough beard. Watched their faces for any kind of strange look or movement. “Too cold for snakes. Has been for a while,” he said.

“It’s been a while. Back before it got cold. Look,” the boy said and he bent down and pushed the overcoat away from her leg and raised her pant leg. She was wearing tennis shoes with no socks and the area around her ankle looked like it had been poked with the tip of a knife.

“That ain’t a snakebite,” Cohen said.

“Hell it ain’t,” she answered and she pushed her pant leg back down. “It swelled up and won’t quit.”

“It ain’t swelled. And if it was, walking don’t help it,” Cohen said.

“Don’t nothing help it,” said the boy. “Nothing but a doctor. You seen one?”

Cohen shook his head. The three of them stared at each other. Cohen looked behind him to the east and those deep clouds were beginning to creep across the late-afternoon sky. Lightning flashed beneath them, a crooked sharp line that touched the horizon. There was maybe an hour of daylight left and it was getting colder.

Let them be, he thought.

Then the boy said, “I don’t guess you’d take us over the water.”

“If I take you over the water, I’ll have to keep on taking you.”

“No you won’t. Swear it.”

“Don’t beg him,” the girl said.

“I ain’t begging. I’m asking. What the hell.”

Cohen raised the sawed-off shotgun and showed it to them. “You see this?”

They nodded.

“You understand?”

“Yes sir,” the boy said. The girl didn’t answer.

“What about you, snakebite?” Cohen asked. “You understand?”

“I get it.”

“Across the water,” he said. “Across the water and then you get out.”

“That’s fine,” said the boy. “That’s all I’m asking. We just got to get to Louisiana.”

“Stop saying that,” Cohen said. “Don’t know who you been talking to. That water over there you’re wanting to get across is about half as deep as the same water all of Louisiana is under. Now wait right there.”

He climbed down out of the Jeep and rearranged the gas cans and plastic bags and cases of water so that one of them could sit in back. He then took the boxes of shells and the chain-saw blades out of the bag and slid them way up under the driver’s seat. When he was done, he waved them over and the girl limped alongside the boy without his help. Cohen pointed at the boy and told him to sit up front and put her in the backseat. The boy helped her up over the side of the Jeep and she shifted around in the seat to unwind the coat and then he got in the passenger seat. When Cohen was happy with the way they were sitting, he climbed behind the wheel. He now had to shift gears with the same hand that held the shotgun and he didn’t like the loose grip but the decision had been made and they moved on.

He turned his head and told the girl to get them some water and she tore the plastic wrapping off the bottles and handed one up to the boy. They drank like thirsty animals and had each killed a bottle before they got to the water’s edge. Cohen told her to take a couple out and put them in the pockets of that coat and she did.

The Jeep crept through the pondlike water. He had to watch the road ahead and maintain a grip on the shotgun and keep an eye on them. The boy reached down and took the bag of jerky off the floorboard and asked if he could have some and Cohen told him to take it. The boy handed a few strips to the girl and they chewed and chewed as the Jeep made small waves across the flooded land. Halfway across, the boy turned and seemed to say something to the girl and Cohen told him to face the front and don’t look back there no more. He then told the girl to keep her eyes ahead, too. The gearshift shook some in the steady low gear and knocked against the barrel of the gun and he had to squeeze his thumb and forefinger tightly to keep from dropping it. They moved on, the deepest part behind them, and they were beginning to climb when the boy turned and looked at the girl again and Cohen slammed on the brakes and the jerk caused the water to splash into the floor of the Jeep. He stuck the shotgun under the boy’s chin.

“You hear me?” he said. “You hear me now? Do you goddamn hear me?”

The boy’s chin was toward the sky. Without moving his mouth, he said, “Yeah.”

“Face forward or get out.”

“Yeah.”

Cohen lowered the shotgun and shifted into first gear and moved on.

“I was just checking on her,” the boy said.

“Don’t say nothing else,” Cohen said.

“You know she got snakebit.”

“I said hush.”

“I swear to God she got snakebit.”

“I said shut the fuck up.”

“She can’t halfway walk,” the boy said and he turned again to the girl and this time the girl came forward and Cohen felt the cord around his neck and his head snapped back and the shotgun fired off and blasted out the windshield. He dropped the gun and tried to get his fingers between the cord and his neck and the boy punched him in the face and he fought with one hand and tried to pull at one of the girl’s hands with the other and his air was running out in a hurry. His eyes bulged and the girl’s hair fell over his face as she choked him with everything she had and the boy kept punching at him, hitting her as much as him. Cohen tried to twist and get around the seat but the boy held him down and the blood turned his face red and in desperation he let go of her wrist that he was trying to pry away from his throat and he snatched her by the hair and snatched him by the hair and yanked as fiercely as he could before he was choked to death. The girl screamed and came forward enough to ease the pressure from the rope cord that had been yanked out of a lawn mower and the boy clawed at Cohen’s arm to get free. As he got his air he got strong again and they saw they couldn’t handle him. The girl jumped out of the backseat and into the water, the cord still tight around Cohen’s neck, and it brought him down headfirst and he splashed into the water. She yelled at the boy to get the gun, get the gun, and the boy picked up the shotgun and was holding it on Cohen as she let go of the cord and hurried back away from him. She climbed into the back of the Jeep and they waited for him to come up. He’d hit his head on the asphalt bottom on the way down and his body was lifeless in the dark water. They watched. The boy with the gun on him and the girl breathing heavy from the fight.

“You think he’s dead?” the boy said.

“I don’t know.”

“Go poke him.”

“I ain’t going to poke him.”

Suddenly Cohen shot up, gasping for air and falling back again. He fought to get to his feet and he flailed his arms like a child learning to swim and then he was on his feet but staggering, a red line around his neck and red down his face and he choked for air and spit out the dirty water. The boy gripped the shotgun tightly and the girl moved behind him and she was yelling shoot him. Shoot him shoot him now.

Cohen got straight up and he wiped at his eyes and held his arms out in submission.

“What you waiting on?” she said and she elbowed the boy in the back of his shoulder.

He cocked back both hammers and pulled the trigger and there was a click. He pulled it again and there was another click. “Holy shit,” he said and he sat down quickly behind the wheel and cranked the Jeep and Cohen rushed at them, the girl yelling and the boy fighting the gearshift but he got it in first just as Cohen was diving for him and Cohen’s shoulder banged against the crossbar as the Jeep jerked forward. He fell limp into the water and floated there, dizzy and gagging and left in the wake as the Jeep moved on ahead, up out of the water and onto the highway, the girl’s wet black hair flapping in the wind as she stood in the seat with her back to the road, watching Cohen as they drove away.

He raised out of the water, his right arm drooping, and he didn’t have to look to know that his shoulder was separated. He stood still to get his breath and he grimaced with the pain of his shoulder and water and blood ran down his face and neck, his forehead gashed from the headfirst fall. When he was breathing steady, he began walking out of the thigh-high water, his right side lagging. It was a heavy walk and the line around his throat burned and he wanted to wait until he was out of the water to try and pop his shoulder back in but he couldn’t wait. He felt his shoulder socket to figure out where it was supposed to go and then he took a deep breath and with his left hand he lifted his right arm and shoved and it didn’t go and he screamed and went down to his knees. Oh goddamn, oh goddamn, he said and then without getting up and in anger he lifted and shoved the arm again and there was a pop and a fiery pain but it was in.

He screamed out again and let his face fall into the water and then he raised up and spewed the water out of his mouth. He stood up and began walking again and it took a few minutes but he came out of the water and he sat down on the asphalt between the wet tracks from the Jeep. He was cold and wet and the blood from his forehead wouldn’t stop and the pain ran from his shoulder and down through his back and the red line around his neck was raised. He pushed his hair back from his face and found the gash with his fingertips. Floating out in the water was his sock hat and he got up and walked back out and got it and pressed it against the gash. Then he walked out of the water again, looked back behind him at the gathered clouds and the pops of lightning. Still far away but coming. Out in front of him the sun was nearly down and a red sky stretched the width of the skyline. It was cold but would get colder when the sun fell and he was too far from home.

He looked around. Nothing but land and water in every direction. But he couldn’t stay there so he started along the highway, dripping and bleeding and hurting, the clouds moving in his direction.

3

ALMOST DARK AND THUNDER NOW with the lightning back off to the east. The wind had picked up and he shivered in the wet clothes and the falling temperature. He tried to remember as he walked. Tried to remember anything along the road that was still standing. Even halfway. Anything that he could get into for the night, before whatever was in those clouds got to him. But nothing was left save a small church down one of these side gravel roads and he’d have to guess which one as they all looked the same. Maybe the church was still there. He couldn’t be sure but it was the only option. As he walked, he was repeatedly startled by the movements in the brush off the side of the road—rabbits and possums and he hoped that was all. A doe walked out into the road ahead of him, stopped and stared, then went on. Dark now and the sky littered with stars in the low western horizon and he tried to hurry but the fatigue and the pain were wearing on him and he shook with chills and he felt the beginnings of a fever. He came to another gravel road on his right and he looked down it. Some trees remained along the roadside and he thought hard. Knew the church was a mile or two walk down whichever road. There was thunder and he looked back over his shoulder and the lightning danced in the clouds and he didn’t have time to think about it anymore.

The road was mud and it gave under his feet and he slipped over and over again as he half-ran. He hoped that the road wouldn’t be washed away up ahead, sinking mud and giant potholes, and it wasn’t. He hurried on, the wind stronger now and hanging limbs beginning to fall away and the lightning bright behind him and helping to light his way in split-second bursts. He had no idea how far he had gone and it seemed that he had gone far enough but there was still no church and still nothing else and he tripped and fell and tried to land on his good shoulder. Up quickly and wiping mud from his chin and the lightning flashed again and this time he saw up ahead the small brick church. The thunder crashed and felt like it was right on top of him and he took off running, his knees buckling as he hit the puddles and nearly falling but keeping on, and the lightning hit and he saw the front doors of the church missing and then he heard footsteps beside him and he was startled but then there were more and more footsteps surrounding him and he raced into the church doors and collapsed in the aisle as the baseball-sized hail pounded the earth.

It beat against the roof and it beat into the church where pieces of roof were missing above the choir loft and the baptismal. He rolled under a pew, his shoulder throbbing as the hail attacked the earth and what was left of the church, the sound of a hundred hardworking men and their sledgehammers. The lightning snapped and the crack of snapping wood and the scurrying of four-legged creatures sharing the church with him. He rolled over onto his stomach and crossed his good arm and put his head down and his other arm lay limp at his side. More thunder and more lightning and more hail as he lay shivering.

He folded his arms and squeezed, breathing in short bursts and wary of what might be in there with him. The hail beat beat beat against the church and he heard limbs cracking and breaking and thuds to the ground outside. He leaned back, anticipating any moment that the ceiling would give with the hailstorm, but the frequency of thuds became less and less until they stopped and then there was a strange dead calm.

He climbed out from under the pew and sat. Something moved toward the front of the church, the clatter of paws across wooden pews, and then several more to follow and Cohen sat on the edge of the pew as if he might have to make a run for it but then whatever it was moved again and it didn’t seem big enough to worry about.

Everything seemed to pause. There was no more hail. No wind. No rain. All was still, dark, quiet, like an empty theater.

He knew what that meant.

He waited and then a soft rain began to fall. He listened to the trickles of rain coming down into the church and he was reminded of the sound of the spring creek that he played in as a boy. The creek buried in the shade of the trees and the spring-fed water ice-cold and the chatter of his chin as he played in the clear, crisp water. The same chatter of his chin now as he sat there cold and wounded. The rain fell and the thunder echoed and he looked across the shades of black in the broken sanctuary and saw her. Something hazy and gray but he saw her only the way that he saw her now, in undefined, ghostlike images, the clarity of her face and figure beginning to fade some even though she was all he had in his isolation. He watched her move, coming down from the pulpit, moving along the aisle toward him, standing there and waiting for him to say something.

He reached out his hand.

He was shaking and he took heavy breaths to try and stop it but he could not. She hovered there in front of him as if waiting for something and he closed his eyes and it was then that she became more clear as she was lying there with her head in his lap and his hand on her pregnant stomach. On the asphalt of Highway 49, underneath an eighteen-wheeler, surrounded by the screams of those who were running for it as they had all seen them coming, the handful of tornadoes breaking free from the still black clouds, like snakes slithering down from the sky, moving toward the hundreds, maybe thousands of gridlocked cars that were only trying to do what they had been told to do. Get the hell out of here. Don’t pack anything. Don’t stop. Get your family and get in your car and get the hell out of here and that was what they had done. Like they had all done so many times in the last years but this time there had been no head start. No window. Only get in and get out. And the tornadoes splintered out of the sky and weaved toward them and then exploded through the bodies and the cars and trucks, metal and flesh being lifted and catapulted.

As Cohen and Elisa had run between the rows of cars, she had gone down and when he had bent to help her up, a piece of something shiny was sticking out of the back of her head and her eyes were like the eyes of someone who had seen something from another world. Elisa, Elisa, he said, but she didn’t answer and her body was limp and he lifted and carried her and he slipped underneath the eighteen-wheeler and she lay with her head in his lap and the blood puddling underneath their bodies and her eyes open through it all and his hand on her belly that was as big as a volleyball and there was nothing that he could do but scream out against the chaos of the world. Cohen on his knees and her head across them and the rig swaying with the power of the earth and nothing to do but hold her and watch her go with her eyes never closing. Her lost, wandering eyes. As if the dead didn’t understand anything more than the living. The life going out of her and Cohen’s face on her stomach, talking to the baby, telling the baby things he couldn’t remember now, talking to her so that she could hear him and know she was not alone with this terrible thing coming for her. His bloody hands on Elisa’s belly, his mouth against it, his child within, his voice begging the child to somehow know she was loved. The rig swaying but holding and the tornadoes breaking away and tearing off in other directions and the sky blue-gray and nothing to do. Nothing to do.

He opened his eyes and the clarity dissipated and there was only her hazy image out before him and then it was gone like a drift of smoke. And he tried to remember, like he always did, if he had even said goodbye to Elisa.

His lips were dry and he licked them and he was so thirsty but he would have to wait. He adjusted himself on the hard wooden pew and shook and tried to figure how far a walk he had ahead of him back to his place but his thoughts would not settle and for the moment he wasn’t even certain of the direction. The rain fell and the wind picked up and something nasty was coming on now. He lay down across the pew. His chills staggered his breathing and his thoughts twisted in knots and he thought he might be better off if he took off the wet clothes but he didn’t move and then he heard the voice of the black-haired girl.

Shoot him. Shoot him now.

The rain began to crash and the wind roared like an approaching war. It roared and the little church cracked and swayed and held on, the wind whipping around inside, and outside the trees bent and some gave way and he knew it was only the beginning.

He rolled off the pew, underneath again. The vision of Elisa and the child had awakened his mind. She’d be three years old now. No, four. No, three. And Elisa would be how many? He subtracted the five years between them and she would be thirty-four and he made himself stop thinking about it all and then he began to think about the house and how foolish he must have looked with the long flatbed trailer, loaded with enough lumber for several tries, driving down toward the coast while everyone else drove in the other direction. Look at that idiot, he imagined them saying. What the hell does he plan on building? Don’t he know what’s going on? Don’t he know it’s over down here? Even if he gets something up it won’t belong to him no more. Soon as that Line is drawn, we’re all done.

He imagined their conversations. Looks like they were right, he thought. Ain’t no way to get anything built. Not enough time in between them. And now the rain that never stopped. But that hadn’t kept him from trying to finish the child’s room, because he and Elisa had set out to build a child’s room, and he had the foundation to build the child’s room before she and Elisa went away, and fuck all the storms and fuck the Line and fuck the government and their bullshit offer for my house and my land and I’m building this room for this child no matter how many times I gotta build and rebuild and no matter how long it takes. He realized how ridiculous it all looked but there wasn’t anyone around to look anymore and he wasn’t going anywhere until it was done, but for the first time, lying under this pew, with this shoulder, with this whelp around his neck, with his Jeep taken away, with this church cracking and swaying, with the water soaked into his bones, with this goddamn rain that wouldn’t stop, he wondered if there would ever be a child’s room. Wondered if the lumber would ever dry out. Wondered if he would one day be an old man, no longer beaten by the weather but beaten by time.

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 it 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.

Joe rubbed at his eyes. To him, it was just another morning after another night of big wind and big rain and all he wanted was a cigarette to deliver him to Aggie’s level of tranquillity. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an empty pack.

He sighed and walked out toward Aggie.

AGGIE SMOKED AND GAZED ACROSS the flooding. He had never been anything but grateful for the calamity of the storms and the subsequent drawing of the Line, this perfect godforsaken land where a man like him could create his own world, with his own people, with his own rules. The rage of God Almighty. The fractured and forgotten order. In his most selfish moments, he believed that this had all somehow come about explicitly for him.

In his back pocket was a worn, floppy Bible, the size of a small notebook. The books and chapters he didn’t like had been ripped out and there was a cigarette marking chapter six in Genesis, where the story of Noah began. On his belt loop was a ring of keys. He turned his head from side to side, as if being careful to record and save this image for some later time when he would need it. His hair was thin and slick and age spots spread across his forehead and over his hands. A revolver that he made sure everyone could see was tucked inside the front of his pants and he wore an army coat that he’d pulled off a dead man floating in the water in a long-gone cul-de-sac down the shoreline.

Aggie didn’t turn when he heard the footsteps. Eyes out across the land. Joe stopped next to him. They stood in silence for several minutes and the rain bothered neither man.

Finally, Joe took a light out of his back pocket and flicked it a couple of times.

Aggie didn’t move at first, but then he eased his hand into the front pocket of the army coat and he held out a pack of cigarettes. Joe took one and nodded and then he lit it. The two men stood there with their cigarettes held inside their coats. The rain on them and the waters out before them. Their kingdom behind.

“I don’t guess we lost nothing last night,” Joe said.

Aggie lifted his hand to his mouth and smoked. Then he shook his head.

“If it didn’t get us last night, won’t get us,” Joe said.

“You say that every time.”

“Damn ropes must be tight as hell.”

Aggie turned to him. A bend in his eyebrows as he said, “Don’t doubt God’s muscle. If He wants them trailers, He’ll have em.”

Joe smoked and let out a frustrated exhale. Some mornings there was no talking to Aggie and this seemed like one of them already. He rubbed at the back of his neck to try and ease the throbbing. He squatted down and picked at the weeds. “You letting them out today?” he asked, his eyes on the ground.

“Later on,” Aggie said.

Joe pulled his cigarette out of his coat and smoked. “We going out to work?”

“After we let them two take us to where that house is.”

“We ain’t spinning wheels, are we?” Joe asked. “Seems like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Aggie shook his head. “No. We ain’t spinning wheels. And if we are, it’s better than not.”

“Yeah. I reckon.”

Aggie looked away from the birds and the lowlands and looked at Joe. He grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t doubt me, Joe.”

Joe nodded.

“Then come on. Go get them two and then come and help me hook up the trailer. That little one stays here. Sooner we get back, sooner we can go out and have a look. I’ll go ahead and throw the shovels and pickax in the other truck over there,” Aggie said. He looked once more across the flooded fields and then he walked on toward the trailers.

6

COHEN HAD NEVER KNOWN ANYONE who had gone to Venice. Or Italy. Or Europe. When he asked Elisa what she wanted for their first anniversary, he expected her to say she wanted a necklace. Or a day at the spa. Or a swanky dinner at one of the upscale casino restaurants. Or anything but what she said.

“I wanna go to Venice.” They were sitting on the front porch, late in the day, in the falling purple light. He kicked off his work boots and leaned back in the wicker chair and drank from the cold beer. She was barefoot and had her legs crossed in the chair, her legs and arms and everything brown from the summer sun.

“Venice where?” he asked.

“Venice, Texas,” she answered and kept her eyes ahead and waited for him to give up.

“Never heard of it,” he said and she reached over and slapped his arm.

“You know damn well what I’m talking about.”

“I know, I know. What makes you want to go all the way over there?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Saw it on TV the other day. Looks nice. All the canals and the old buildings and churches and stuff. No cars or nothing. Don’t you think it’d be kinda cool?”

He wrinkled his brow. Thought about it. “How much?” he asked, knowing she had already looked.

“A lot.”

“A lot a lot, or just a lot?”

“Just a lot.”

He drank from the beer. The crickets and tree frogs sang their song and it echoed through the twilight and across the land.

“Well,” he said.

“We probably can’t save it before our anniversary.”

“Probably not.”

“But we could probably save it by the spring. That’s six months. You think?”

He liked how she sounded. Excited and hopeful and a little nervous. He had never once thought about Venice but the thought of it now, with this woman, made him feel as if he were about to commit to a romantic adventure that you only read about in paperback.

“I think we can. If that’s what you want,” he said.

She uncrossed her legs and got up from her chair. She pushed his arms back and sat down in his lap and squeezed him around the neck until he coughed.

THEY ARRIVED IN AN OVERCAST city and for the first three days of the ten-day trip it rained off and on, but they didn’t care. Their hotel room was on the top floor and the window looked out across a courtyard and a canal. In the mornings the man who arranged the small tables in the courtyard sang beneath the light rain in a gentle tenor voice. They crawled all over one another as it rained, then fell back asleep and woke again and listened again and felt as though they had been removed from reality and set free in some other place that existed only to please them.

The hotel was three floors and the rooms were small. The staircase was wide enough for one and its turns were tight. The walls were brick with clumps of mortar hanging from between the bricks and Cohen couldn’t go up or down the stairs without commenting on the sloppy job someone did a long time ago. The hotel was run by two sisters and their cluster of indistinguishable teenage children who vacuumed the rugs, watered the plants, attended the small bar and two tables, went out for morning croissants, swept the foyer, changed the towels and the sheets, delivered the morning newspaper, and whatever else. The sisters wore their black hair pinned up and only one showed streaks of gray. They were frumpy and sat with folded arms and talked incessantly and moved only if someone came along and needed something and sometimes not even then, only shouted out a quick instruction to whatever child happened to be in earshot and that child would hurry to it but not without mumbling something in the tone of teenage angst that was discernible in any language.

When it wasn’t raining, they walked and walked. Though Elisa had two guidebooks and a detailed list of what she wanted to see and when she wanted to see it, she was taken by the city and its ancient streets and the heartbeat of the language and the quaint bridges and the architecture and all she wanted to do was walk. They avoided the museums and cathedrals except to admire the exteriors—the Gothic arches and the details of the statues of the saints and the complexities of the stained-glass windows. All of which fascinated Cohen, as in the world of efficiency and symmetry that he had learned from his father, he had forgotten or perhaps never realized that buildings could be constructed with such imagination. Instead of following the lines of tourists in and out of the starred spots on the map, they moved across the canal bridges and walked down narrow streets that led to other canal bridges and other narrow streets. They were frequently lost, having to double back, spending an hour or more trying to figure out exactly where they were but finding local cafés and bars along the way and not caring a bit, reveling in the notion that they had discovered some secret part of the city that the sightseers would never know. For three days they clung to one another in the hotel room and then walked with locked arms through the floating city.

7

COHEN GOT UP FROM THE wooden pew and looked at the place where he had found refuge. A tree covered in Spanish moss had fallen through the roof and lay across the pulpit and mold had spread across the choir loft and the baptismal. The stained-glass windows remained only in fragments. A lamb at the feet of someone in a white robe. The bodiless head of Christ bleeding from the crown of thorns. Half of an angel looking over the headless Mary holding the baby. The Bibles and hymnals remained in the slots in the backs of the pews, but their pages were yellowed and wavy. The hardwood floor of the aisle was covered in water and scratched from the nails of the animals that came and went. He rubbed his forehead and it was damp and he ached all over and he walked to the open doors of the sanctuary and looked out. He figured this was about as good as it was going to get. He was weak but knew that he had to begin.

He walked out in the rain to the muddy road with his arms folded and his hands tucked under his arms. His clothes were still damp and he couldn’t have spit if he’d wanted to. His mouth was dry and his throat tender, the muscles of his stomach and chest tight as he shook from the fever and he wanted to run but knew better. Things moved in the brush, startling him and startled by him. At the end of the road he knelt and rested for few minutes and then he got up and kept on, the walking easier along the two-lane highway, out of the mud and puddles.

He walked on. An hour behind him and he hoped he was halfway. At a gathering of honeysuckle along the fencerow, he stopped and put his face into it and opened his mouth and shook the bushy vine. The rainwater splattered onto his face and tongue and he lapped like a desperate dog at the cold, refreshing drops. The water from the leaves ran down into his mouth and throat and momentarily relieved the fever and he moved along the fencerow, doing the same thing with anything leafy that would shake, and then he sat down for another few minutes before walking again. Another hour and he could see his road up ahead and his pace quickened as he thought of the bottles of water and the dry clothes and the bottle of aspirin and the dry place to lie down. He moved in some half-walk, half-run, gimpy and awkward with his wet, numbed feet but driven by the thought of home. He came to his road and hurried across the red mud, sloshing along as fast as his worn body would take him, and then there was the house and he almost cried out in relief but as he got to the driveway and saw the tire tracks and the front door open his anticipation quickly turned again to despair.

He stopped in the front yard. Watched and listened.

Then the dog stuck its head out of the front door and he walked on up. The dog met him at the steps and he touched its head as he walked past and into the house.

In the front room, the cot and the blankets were gone and the closet door was open and the .22 and the black raincoat were gone. The electric heaters that he ran off the generator to keep warm were gone. He limped on into the kitchen and the cooler that had been filled with water bottles was not there and the upper cabinets had been cleaned out. Every can. Every box of anything. He got down on his knees and opened the bottom cabinets and what little there was in them remained, including a dozen or so bottles of water, and he opened one and drank and drank and when it was done he tossed it aside and he opened another and did the same. He found a few ounces of whiskey in a long-forgotten pint bottle and he opened it and took a swallow and it burned and warmed. He took another swallow and it twisted his face and then he sat on the floor and let the whiskey settle all the way through him. He looked again through the lower cabinets and there was nothing to eat as he had put all the food up high to keep it safe. He stood and opened the drawer where he kept medicine and bandages and antibiotic ointment and other pills and creams and it was emptied but for half a bottle of aspirin that had slid to the back. With his hands shaking he managed to get the top off and he shoved a handful of the chalky tablets into his mouth and chased them down with several gulps of water.

The shivering now at its height, he walked back into the front room and took off his clothes while the dog watched him and then he walked naked to the hall closet where he found that some but not all of his clothes were gone. He took out a pair of jeans and socks and two long-sleeve shirts and he put it all on and then he looked down the hallway. The drywall that he had used to cover up the entrances to the bedrooms had been busted and pulled away from the frame. He cussed himself for putting up and puttying the drywall but then not finishing it. What the hell good did it do to make a wall to hide a room if you’re not gonna finish the damn wall. No good, that’s what. He went back into the front room and put on the wet boots and then he walked down the hallway, stepping across and kicking at the broken drywall, and he stopped in the dark doorway of the bedroom that he and Elisa had shared.

There was a musty smell as the room had been closed up for over two years. He walked in and the drawers to the dresser had been pulled out and her clothes that remained lay scattered across the floor. He knelt in the midst of the clothes, the gray light coming through the sheer curtains and around him like a cloud and holding him like some nameless black-and-white character from an old movie. He picked up one of her gowns, silk and silver, and he felt its softness in his rough fingertips. Touched it against his damp, hot forehead as if it had the power of remedy.

He set the gown on the floor and picked up and put down her other things—a bra and her T-shirts and black stockings and red panties. He picked them up slowly and held each garment and set it down just as slowly, as if they were dead, dry leaves that could crumble with the slightest force. He got up from his knees and saw their fingerprints and handprints across the top of the dresser in the filthy, almost slick film that had settled over the room during its closure, and then he noticed the cobwebs stretched across the blades of the ceiling fan. He moved across the room, stepping around the bed that had been stripped of its comforter and sheets, and he sat down on the bare mattress and saw on the top of the nightstand more traces of their hands. Her wooden jewelry box had been opened and turned over and there was nothing left. The engagement ring and the wedding band and earrings and necklaces were gone and he pictured them in the hands of strangers. People who thought no more of what belonged to her than they thought about rocks in a gravel road. He picked up the empty jewelry box and closed the lid and held it on his lap and tried to force himself into a good memory but all he could think of were those strangers who had taken what he had left of her and who had taken everything else they could take and who were probably unloading and planning to come back and take the rest.

He held the jewelry box on his lap and he swung his legs up onto the mattress and he leaned back and stretched out. He wanted to sleep. Needed to sleep. Needed to lie still and let the aspirin help chase the fever. Needed to drink water and eat something and rest until he was strong again but he knew that he didn’t have that option. They would be back and there might be more of them and they had his guns and his Jeep and he didn’t have anything. The dog wandered into the bedroom and sniffed at the clothes on the floor and then looked around as if to say, I didn’t think this woman lived here anymore.

He closed his eyes. Wanted to sleep and one day wake up and this life would be a different life. The dog walked around to his side of the bed and lay down beneath him. They both lay still for several moments as if the day belonged to them. At the edge of sleep, Cohen made himself sit up, and he put the jewelry box back onto the nightstand next to the picture of them waist-deep in a blue ocean. He picked up the frame and opened the back and he took out the picture and held it close to his eyes. Touched his fingertips to the faces of another time. He folded the picture in half and he stood and put it in his back pocket and then he got down on his knees and said, “Be there.”

He bent over and looked under the bed and the shoe box was gone and he yelled goddamm it and pounded his fist on the floor. Bent over and pressed his head against the floor and pounded at it and yelled out over and over again. Goddamm it, goddamm it, goddamm it.

He sat doubled over for a minute and then one more pound at the floor and he got up and walked over to the closet. The sliding doors were open and they had taken the things that held warmth. Her coats and her sweatshirts and her jeans. The dresses remained. The summer dresses that once hung delicately on her tanned body. The black thing that she wore with grace when they buried someone they had known. The other thing that she wore that gave away the freckles between her breasts. He looked away from her clothes to his side of the closet and he looked down and noticed an old pair of work boots that he had forgotten. He picked them up. Black and dusty and steel-toed and dry. He tucked them under his arm and he ran his hand along the length of one of her dresses and then he walked out of the room and down the hallway and stepped inside the other room.

It had been an office until the news of the baby and then it had become a shared room for all, a place to keep things until her room was finished. The dresser had been opened up and some of the tiny clothes had spilled out onto the floor. He walked over and put down his boots. He knelt and picked up each small sock or nightshirt and folded it neatly and put it back in the dresser. Two drawers had been filled in anticipation, Elisa unable to go anywhere without picking up some little hat or pair of tiny slippers. Unable to stop thinking about it, smiling as she’d come home with something else, him smiling back and making fun. He closed the dresser drawers and stood. Empty picture frames on top of the dresser. A lamp with a giraffe lampshade. A piggy bank that he raised and shook and the coins rattled. He set it back down and walked over to the closet. The door open and his two suits hanging there, next to them a gathering of tiny pink hangers. Toys in boxes on the floor. A stack of colorful books on the top shelf.

He stepped back. Stood in the middle of the room. It felt as though a great hole might open up beneath him and swallow him into the earth and he wished that such a thing were possible.

He stood there, still and insignificant, with unfocused eyes.

Minutes later, he walked back to the dresser and opened the drawer and took out a pair of the tiny socks and stuck them in the front pocket of his jeans. Then he picked up his boots and left the room.

He sat down on the floor in the front room and took off the wet boots and put on the dry ones and tied double knots. Then he walked outside to look for Habana and the dog followed him.

At the back of the house he expected to find her door open and he was right. He looked inside the converted family room and was surprised to see her saddle and bridle there. He called out and whistled for her as he looked across the back fields. He asked the dog where she was but the dog didn’t answer. He walked out into the backyard and stepped across the mangled barbed-wire fence and he stood out in the field with his hands on his hips and turned in a circle, calling for her and looking for her and hoping she would appear from somewhere along the tree line once she knew it was him. “Go look for her,” he said to the dog, but the dog stayed at his side. He called for her three times more and then he walked back to the house shaking his head as he looked for what might have been left outside. Below the kitchen window he found the generator and he was certain now that they would be back. That they had put everything they could into the Jeep and were unloading and coming back for the rest. Nobody left a generator.

The dog barked and Cohen turned and looked and Habana was walking across the field toward them. He walked out to meet her and he stroked her neck and then he hugged her. With her mane across his face, he began to cry a tearless cry, short rhythmic pulses of hurt. He held on to her and his body shook and the hacking sound of anger and pleading came from his mouth and the horse stood still for him as if she understood. A passive sunshine bled through the veiled sky and found them and he held on and cried as they stood together in the soft, wet ground and then when he was done he raised up and told her not to ever tell anybody what had just happened. Don’t know what somebody might say if they knew about this. Promise me, he said and in her large glassy eyes he saw that he could trust her. He sniffed and then he spit and then they walked back toward the house. The dog had waited in the backyard and watched them and Cohen tried to swear the dog to secrecy as well but the dog turned and twitched its tail as if it were jealous that it hadn’t been included.

He put the saddle and bridle on Habana and left her grazing in the backyard and he started walking out across the back field. A hundred yards away was the tree line and he splashed his way there, the ground sucking at his feet. The trees had the look of losing the fight, some splintered, some on the ground with their massive roots reaching out like flailing arms, some sagging from the rain like old men. Scattered around in the trees were two-by-fours from his efforts with the child’s room. He walked to the base of a fractured oak to the two tombstones. Only one body but two tombstones.

He knelt in the wet earth.

Around him the blue-gray world. The world that he tried to hold on to, that he tried to keep alive with the old colors. The gray world that he didn’t think could win but was winning.

He stared at Elisa’s tombstone. Only her name and the dates of her birth and death. He stared at the baby’s tombstone. Only her name.

The stones were slick, splashed with dirt and wet leaves. Cohen leaned forward and with his hand he wiped them clean. Once he had walked out to the graves with a hammer and chisel with plans of carving a cross for each of them, but when he got there, he changed his mind. The rain tapped and the sky rumbled.

She was difficult to see now. She had been for a while. Even the photographs seemed to change her image, shifting her eyes and ears and nose slightly, making her out to be a little different than the way she was. She appeared most clearly in his subconscious. In the dreams. As an apparition shifting with the clouds or flashing in the lightning crashes. Her voice in the thunder or the drone of the rain. He leaned over and pushed his fist into the soggy ground and wondered if she were even there. If he started to dig, whether he would hit a casket, whether she would be in it if it was there, or was there only a bottomless, muddy hole where she used to be and a wet earth that would suck at his feet and drag him down, farther and farther from the surface into a never-ending tunnel of mud, an earth soaked to its core and slowly devouring itself.

He pushed his fists into the ground and they sank and the brown water covered his knuckles and he felt there was nothing there, only this wet, sucking ground that had taken everything he had loved. And what had he loved? He had loved the sweet, sticky ocean breeze and swimming in the ocean and the salty taste on his lips and the gritty feel of the sand on his hands and feet. He had loved the pier on Friday nights and the buckets of wings and ribs and bottled beer and the two guys with the guitars who played Buffett and Skynyrd and Steve Earle and whoever else you called out. He had loved the bush hog and its rhythm and cutting in the hot-ass sun in July and sweating until he couldn’t sweat anymore and the neat rows he cut and the nameless cows and their calves that had fed off their land. He had loved the girl with the red toenails and their quiet spot along the gravel road and what they had discovered together in the summer nights with the windows down and the mosquitoes at their bare bodies. He had loved baseball practice and the thwack of the ball coming off the bat and sliding headfirst and the ridiculous dugout conversations and winning. He had loved the sting of a sunburn. He had loved the blooming dogwood trees in the sprawling lawns of the antebellum homes in Biloxi. He had loved riding up and down Highway 90 with a cooler of beer and two or three buddies and all the bullshit they fed one another and cranking up the radio to the hair metal. He had loved the excitement of the coast once the casinos started going up and he had loved the jingle-jangle of the slot machines and the free drinks you got while playing blackjack and he had loved the long-legged waitresses in the fishnet stockings who brought them to you. He had loved the first warm day and smell of her suntan lotion and he had loved taking a blanket to the beach at night and her falling asleep with her head on his chest and the way the stars looked as he held his hand on her back and felt her breathing. He had loved marrying her in bare feet, standing on the dock with the ocean out before them. He had loved the buildings that he framed and he had loved going to the cooler he kept in the back of the truck at the end of a long, hot day and the sound the beer can made when he popped it open. He had loved the gleam in her eyes when she came out of the bathroom and nodded and said you’re gonna be a daddy and he had loved that she wasn’t scared of the storms and he promised her he would stick it out because this is our home and it can’t last forever and he had loved sitting on the living room floor and thinking about baby names. He had loved that it was going to be a girl.

He lifted his fists out of the ground. Small imprints where he had been pressing filled with water. He didn’t know if she were there or if the earth beneath her tombstone was as vacant as the earth beneath the child’s.

His fingers dripped with muddy water and he held out his hand and watched the brown drops fall from his fingertips. He then got up from his knees and walked back to the house, refusing to turn around and look again.

He went inside and in the kitchen he climbed up on a chair and slid over the ceiling tile and took out the cigar box. He took out all the money, a stack of hundred-dollar bills. He then reached up into the ceiling again and felt around once more and his fingers found the knife his grandfather had given him. It was a bowie knife in a leather sheath and he took out the knife and the blade was a smooth and clean silver from the years that the boy and then the man had taken care to shine it. He slid the knife back into the sheath and then snapped the sheath onto his belt loop. He tossed the cigar box back up into the ceiling and moved the tile into place. Then he stepped down from the chair and folded the stack of bills and put them in the front pocket of his jeans.

In the front room the pillow from the cot was on the floor. He picked it up and removed the pillowcase and began rummaging through the kitchen, filling it with whatever he could find. The remaining bottles of water and the nearly empty pint of whiskey and the aspirin. Knocked onto the floor in haste were a can of pears and small tins of Vienna sausage and two cans of green beans and a pack of crackers. In the bottom cabinets he had a spare flashlight and a few feet of rope and some duct tape. It all went into the pillowcase and then he walked to the hallway closet, and what clothes were left he put in. Some random socks and faded T-shirts and underwear and a long-sleeve shirt. In the front room he looked again in the closet where the shotgun and .22 had been. A couple of paperbacks were on the floor and a pair of work gloves and half a box of dog biscuits. He took the random items and he tossed the pillow case over his shoulder like a white-bearded man with a sleigh waiting outside. He walked around the side of the house and set the sack on the ground next to the generator, then he pulled the cap off the spark plug and unscrewed the plug and put it in his pocket. He took out his knife and cut the gas line and he unplugged the extension cord and sliced it through.

The dog was in the backyard with Habana and he came over to them and said, “It could be the start of one long day. Longer than it has been. Thought I’d let you know. Especially you, girl.” He scratched at Habana’s ear. Thought of the day she had appeared across the field, wet and muddy and saddled but without a rider, her name engraved across the saddle. He thought of how he had approached her slowly, and she had let him, and he had checked her for cuts or scratches or the blood of whoever had been on her last. How she had helped him survive, taking him places the Jeep couldn’t go, into the swamplands that now extended by miles from the flooding rivers, where pieces of boats and the tin roofs of wooden shacks hung in the clutches of the gray monsterlike moss trees. Along the highways obstructed by trees and telephone poles and covered in lower stretches by still, tepid waters. Along the beachfront that had shrunk back and served as the dumping grounds for whatever the storms could drag in or haul away. Half-trailers and metal signs from flattened hotels and gas stations and dead animals. Poker tables and mattresses and steel pieces from crumbled oil rigs and a school bus. He thought of filling garbage bags with canned foods and paperback novels and blankets and batteries and gas cans and whatever else seemed necessary, how for weeks they had moved across the countryside until he felt like he had hoarded all there was to hoard.

And then he thought of how they were back in the same spot, starting all over again, and he hoped Habana knew how much he needed her.

He left the animals and walked inside, once more into the bedroom.

Closing his eyes, Cohen listened for their voices. The voices of the two people who had made a home here. In the house they had built. On the land that had been in his family for generations. The ocean so close. Everything seemingly where it was supposed to be. He listened for those voices. Tried to hear the laughter. Tried to hear what they were talking about as they stood together in the kitchen or sat in the living room with the windows open on a cool night. He couldn’t hear them, so he tried harder. Squeezing his eyes shut with his face tense as if fearful of some imaginary, invisible, yet very real monster.

Still he couldn’t hear them. He opened his eyes.

He walked to the window and looked out at the concrete slab. Looked at the pile of lumber. In the wildest part of his mind he thought that maybe one day, when all of this was over, he’d be able to come back and finish like he had promised.

He walked over to the nightstand and opened the drawer. He found a pencil and a piece of scrap paper and he wrote a note. At the doorway, he looked around the room once more, and then he felt in his back pocket to make sure he had the photograph and it was there. He stepped across the hallway and looked at the child’s clothes and toys and he said good night. And then he walked into the kitchen and left the note on the counter and he walked outside into the damp, chilling world where he picked up his pillowcase and climbed onto Habana and told the dog to come along. They moved lazily down the driveway to the gravel road. At the end of the driveway, Cohen turned Habana and he looked again at the house. He had said goodbye to them a thousand times, but this time felt the most real.

And then he nudged Habana and they moved on.

8

THEY ARRIVED HALF AN HOUR after Cohen rode away with habana and the dog.

The Jeep stopped on the carport slab and the four of them got out. Joe walked over to the generator and noticed the cut gas line and said, “Looks like your boy has been here. Damn cut the gas line. And took the spark plug.”

Aggie said grab it anyway and they each took an end and loaded it onto the trailer hitched on to the Jeep. The boy and the girl went inside and searched through what they had left on the first run, taking anything that might matter but mostly happy about the clothes. The girl went into the bedroom and she stood in front of the dresses, looking through them as if spending a leisurely day in a department store. The men came in and began taking the furniture out of the bedrooms and they called for the boy to help them. Piece by piece the nightstands and dressers and mattresses were taken out and loaded onto the trailer.

“I didn’t know there was nobody down here still living this good,” Aggie said as he carried out a set of bed rails.

“Me neither,” said Joe. “He ain’t no more, though. What you reckon he’s doing?”

“He might be sitting out there behind a tree somewhere with his sight on the back of your head.”

“Evan said they got all the guns. Didn’t you?”

“Think so.”

“Think? Better goddamn well know.”

“Don’t worry,” said Aggie. “If he was sitting behind a tree with something to shoot we’d be shot.”

They went back to work. Around the back of the house, Joe noticed the foundation and the wet, discolored pile of lumber. He called out to Aggie and Aggie came around.

“Looks like we got a winner for most ambitious resident,” Aggie said.

They kept on and soon the house was emptied and Evan called out to Mariposa to come on. She was lingering in the bedroom, had picked five dresses, and they were folded and stuck into her overcoat. She came out of the front door and said, “Go see if that horse is still back there.”

“That horse is long gone,” said Joe. “But there’s a cellar back around there, about two feet of water in it. Got some shelves, though. A bunch of saws and nail guns and stuff.”

“That’s gonna do a lot of good,” Aggie said. “Leave that stuff. We know where to find it if we change our minds.”

“All right,” Joe said. He turned to Mariposa. “You and Evan sit back there on top of the stuff to keep it from bouncing off.”

“I ain’t sitting back there,” she said.

He reached over and slapped her hard across the face and told her to shut her goddamn mouth and get back there. One of the dresses fell out of her coat and onto the ground and the man said, “Where the hell you think you going? To the ball, Cinderella?”

The two men laughed and Evan picked it up for her and looked to see if she was okay but she pushed him back and walked to the trailer and climbed up on top of the mattresses. Evan followed her and sat beside her and Mariposa glared at the two men. Aggie got behind the wheel and Joe said he was gonna walk through one more time. Inside, he passed through each room, checking for anything they had missed that might be of use or value, but the place had been stripped of its offering. In the kitchen he found a note on the counter that none of them had noticed. He picked it up and read. Didn’t laugh but smiled an uncomfortable smile. He folded the note and walked out and got in the passenger side of the Jeep.

“This is a good old place,” Aggie said as he settled behind the steering wheel. He cranked the Jeep and then Joe handed the note over to him.

“What’s that?”

“Looks like their friend left us a little note.”

The older man unfolded it, read it, then huffed and gave it back.

“What you think?”

Aggie paused. Pursed his lips and put the Jeep into first gear. “Don’t think nothing,” he said. “Too much of that’ll get you killed down here. You should know that by now.”

The gray of day was beginning to fade and thunder that had been far off now rumbled more closely and Aggie said the digging would have to wait until tomorrow. The Jeep moved off the concrete slab and out into the backyard and circled the house, the tires spinning some and the trailer tires sinking some but they made it around to the gravel and moved on, the girl and the boy vibrating with the furniture and generator like mindless wind-up toys. Aggie had shrugged off the note but Joe thought about it as he tucked it into his pocket. They moved along the skinny road and he looked out at the crippled trees and the twisted countryside and thought for the first time in a long time about his mother in her burgundy dress, his hand in hers as they walked through the front door of the little brick church on the dusty road. It seemed like the memory of some other woman and some other child and his thoughts drifted away from what he had become as he considered the mother and child and the tranquillity of the sanctuary. The cream-colored walls and cherrywood pews and slightly out-of-tune piano that played for the slightly out-of-tune choir composed of workingmen in short ties and old ladies with their glasses held around their necks by beaded silver chains. The rough voice of the preacher and the stories that he told about the man who walked from place to place. Touching them and healing them. Speaking to them of forgiveness and tolerance. Feeding them with crumbs and giving them all the chance to live in golden castles on golden streets in golden clouds.

And then how they nailed him up and laughed at him.

They moved off the road and onto the highway and he thought about those stories and he thought about that woman in the burgundy dress and he thought about the place they had just left where they had taken what didn’t belong to them. He thought about the man who had written the note and why he had chosen the words that he had chosen. He looked out across the sky, imagined it clear and blue, and imagined the words from the note written in large, looping trails of white.

To whom it may concern—he is not dead he is risen.

9

BY THE TIME THEY MADE it to the church, he was slumped forward on habana with his pillowcase of all his possessions dragging the ground and his head resting against her mane. He all but fell off and went down to his knees and the dog licked at his forehead. He reached up and brushed the dog’s head and then got to his feet and walked inside the church, dragging the pillowcase along. Night was closing in and the stiff rain had returned and he sat down on the back pew where he had spent the night before. He found a bottle of water and the aspirin and he took a few more and then he opened a can of Vienna sausages, trying to figure out if it was starve a fever, feed a cold, or feed a fever, starve a cold. Either way, he ate half of the thumb-sized sausages and gave the other half to the dog and he tossed the can on the floor. Habana clip-clopped into the church foyer.

Lie down and sleep, his body told him.

Get up and go find them, his mind replied. Find them. The ones who took your Jeep and invaded your home and took the pieces of Elisa that you had left. Find them and give it twice as bad as you took it. Forget the fever and the soreness and the weakness and get up and go. If they’re not gone already, they will be, and you don’t have long.

Lie down and sleep, his body said again, and he stretched out across the pew.

Just for a minute.

He closed his eyes. The dog pushed the empty can around the floor as it fought for every last taste of food. Habana shuffled, clopping and splashing.

So hot, he thought. So hot so fast. He remembered a fever as something balmy and creeping that eased you gently into bed and let you lie there and watch for a few days until it was gone. Not this sharp, stinging thing that was on him now, burning him in the cold air.

Get up. You don’t have time. Get up.

Only a minute, he thought, and he felt himself beginning to go. Still and drifting. Behind his eyes there appeared strange images of life before that seem to roam in the vast caverns of the mind when it perches on the cliffside of unconsciousness. A barrage of images that stretched from life before the storms, through the devastation, and up to the last days of his life. Faces of those he barely remembered and odd remembrances of grocery lists or the scores of games and the voices of those who had hurt him and then it all left him and there was only black and he was asleep with twitching eyelids.

HE AWOKE HOURS LATER. HE sat up and rubbed himself and shivered. In the pillowcase he found the flashlight and he shined it around. The dog was curled on the end of the pew and he didn’t see Habana. The wind blew through the church and there was a rustling in the dead leaves and limbs of the tree lying across the pulpit and a raccoon crawled along the trunk, stopped and looked at him, then climbed on down and out of the church.

Cohen went outside and shined the light around and Habana was in the field across the road and he called out to her. She saw him and began walking back as he looked around for anything dry enough to burn. Inside the church he filled his arms with small branches scattered about, but anything big enough to last was too wet and mushy. He climbed onto the fallen tree and broke off limbs and dropped them into a pile in the choir loft below. Then he climbed down into the choir loft and took a couple of the straight-back chairs and in the aisle of the church he piled it all together and it seemed like enough to make it through the night. Or at least until he could get a few hours’ sleep because tomorrow there could be no more rest. He felt guilty for wasting the afternoon but it had helped him recover some and he knew he had to be ready for a fight.

He started the fire on the concrete slab outside the front doors. The smoke climbed and hovered in the ceiling of the porch and then drifted out into the night. He sat in one of the chairs while the other one burned and he drank water and ate aspirin. Habana’s saddle and bridle were on the offering table and the dog lay on the concrete next to him on a purple choir robe that he had found in a back room. The rain was steady and almost stopped once or twice.

He talked to the dog.

“The first one was white. Old as dirt but slow and careful like you like the first one to be. Don’t want a bronco to sit your kid up on. Didn’t even know we were getting him. Dad pulled up with the trailer, honked the horn. Me and Mom came out and he called me over. Said look at this. We walked to the trailer and her snout was sticking out and he said about time you got up on a horse. Her name was Snowball, I think. Real original.”

He drank a little water. The dog stood, walked in a circle, lay back down. Cohen rubbed at his beard. Thought some.

“First car was a VW. Little two-door something. Four gears. Couldn’t tear the son of a bitch up. I used to see how fast I could go in third gear. Seventy-two was the record. Damn thing sounded like it was about to blow any second. Crashed it. Or got hit. Or something. It folded up like tinfoil. Me and Elisa went on our first date in that car. Tenth grade. Valentine’s dance in that smelly old gym. It coulda been at the prince’s palace, though, ’cause I was out of my mind, I was so nervous. I mean nervous like wet hands and armpits and nearly-tripping-and-falling-down nervous.”

The dog laid its head down. Whined some.

“She wore a yellow dress. Everybody else had on red or pink. She wore yellow.”

He stopped talking and stared out into the night. It seemed as if his words were floating out there somewhere and if he looked closely enough he could see the pictures they described.

He leaned back in the chair and stretched out his legs. The rain had eased and somewhere out to the side of the church a tree branch cracked and fell. He looked back at the dog. “I don’t know,” he said.

Cohen had always talked to the dog. It had appeared one day. Just like Habana, and he had never bothered to name it because he knew it already had a name. He fed it once and that was all it took to make them friends and he talked to the dog in the way that one might talk to a child or a stranger on a train. Stating the obvious. Asking questions he already knew the answer to. His voice amicable and safe.

The dog rolled over and Habana walked around the side of the church. Cohen watched her and it was then that he saw the orange eyes back off in the trees behind the building. Two large orange eyes caught in the light of the fire, perfectly still in the dark. Habana kept on walking until she was around in front of them but Cohen didn’t move and stayed fixed on those eyes as he knew they were the eyes of something that mattered. The dog, seeming to sense his unease, sat up and looked out to where he was looking and began to growl a low, cautious growl. “Shhhhh,” Cohen whispered. The dog continued on and he reached down and rubbed its head and whispered for it to be quiet. Be quiet. Don’t move.

He slowly moved his hand to his belt and gripped the knife. “Sit down,” he told the dog but the dog stood stiff and its growl had turned into a tempered whine. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “But do not move.”

Habana walked closer to them and snorted and that scared the dog, which tucked itself behind Cohen’s chair.

The eyes remained. Still, like knots in a tree.

His mind raced back to the voices of his grandfather and the other old men that he would listen to at the camp on the edge of the bayou. To the things they had seen and the tall tales they had told and he tried to figure out what those orange eyes belonged to but all the voices of the old men did was conjure images of swamp monsters and nameless bloodthirsty creatures that lifted children from their beds in the middle of the night. The eyes staring at him were real and they were close and they were paying attention with an uncommon patience.

It’s gotta be a panther, he thought. A big-ass panther.

He unbuttoned the sheath and pulled out the knife and tried to figure out the best way to kill a panther or whatever the hell it was and he smiled a dumb smile at the absurdity of the thought.

Cohen shifted his gaze to the horse when she snorted again and when he looked back, the orange eyes were gone. Vanished in the dark as if he might have imagined them. He breathed, unaware that he had been holding his breath. And then he told the dog to relax. For now. He stood slowly and walked around to the side of the church and he called the dog and Habana to follow. There would be no sleeping near the fire tonight, not with that thing so close. So the three of them went through a back door of the church and into the room where he had found the choir robes. There were more piled in a closet, and he felt around in the dark and grabbed several and laid them across the floor. The dog immediately lay down on them but he told it to get up. Cohen picked up one of the robes and wrapped it around himself and then he went back to the door, feeling his way with his hand on the wall, and he closed it. Back in the room, he lay down on the robes and the dog lay next to him and Habana stood at the window with her nostrils against the glass and her breath fogging the window. They would be cold and they would be uncomfortable, but they would be safe. And then he started talking to the dog again.

10

SINCE THE PROCLAMATION OF THE line, they came down like packs of wild coyotes coming in from the hillsides after smelling the scent of fresh blood. Some like gangbusters, with coolers of beer and good weed and radios blaring through the rainstorms, whooping and hollering like crazed spring breakers certain they were having a good time. They crashed the beach, milled around an upturned casino, and started digging not in unison or with any goal but all heads working independently and the holes they dug weren’t large enough to hide a basketball in, much less trunks filled with millions of dollars. The gangbusters didn’t last. They drove hours, maybe days, to get down to the coast, unaware of the severity of the life below the Line, and they left almost as quickly as they arrived, once the buzz wore off and the shots were fired over their heads.

Others knew the terrain. Those that remained below. Those that knew the winds, knew the thunder, knew the gaps in the seaside and where the bridges were washed away, and knew the lineup of casinos that once stretched for twenty miles along the shore. They knew which ones were still there, and if they weren’t still there, they knew where they had once been.

What separated the others were the tools they worked with. Those with no chance came in bunches of four or five, riding in truck beds, shovels and pickaxes for each man. They knew the landscape, had the heart but no guns and no strength or energy to dig quickly and make any headway before being seen and having to make a run for it back into the soggy hole they had crawled out of.

Those with a chance, if there was actually anything to be found, had the guns, had youth, had the vehicles to get through, or across, or over. Men in army-green jeeps and trucks, four-wheel-drive vehicles made for war, with gadgets that detected metal underneath the ground. Men who possessed the physical strength and training to work hard, dig deep, make haste. Men who had been left behind by their government, stuck in outposts in the region below the Line, for God knows what. To help those who didn’t want to be helped. To protect those who didn’t want protection. To sit in steel-braced cinder-block outposts, day after day, ducking from the storms, watching the rain, listening to the snap of lightning and the moan of thunder, staring at the walls and staring at the floors, so the same government that had abandoned the region could still maintain authority over it, even though there was no law to be followed. No law to be made other than what seemed right at the time. These were the men who sat there day after day, because they had been ordered to by other men who lived on dry land, and now they had grown restless and anxious and this was their opportunity to get out and go and do something and they came in their jeeps and trucks, their big guns racked on top or showing out of the open windows, to express to whoever might be interested in the same treasure they were looking for—do not fuck with us.

The coast was crawling with them and they all came after the same thing—the buried casino money. A lot of damn buried casino money. In the panic of the evacuations, and later in the panic of the Line becoming official, it had been rumored that casino executives ordered the burying of trunks of cash in an effort to hide it from the taxman. The less money the casinos moved, the less money they had to claim. Rumors swirled of men in the middle of the night, loading the backs of trucks with trunks large enough to hide bodies, filled with stacks of crisp dollar bills, and then disappearing into the dark to deposit them into the earth.

The rumors of the buried money were not dispelled easily. In newspaper articles and magazine exposés that covered the movement of the casinos and banks and other financial institutions from the region, the buried money was consistently part of the conversation. The men in the suits flatly denied it, but there was always some casino services manager or pit boss or cocktail waitress who had been in the right bed, ready to proclaim that it was not some ridiculous rumor, I saw the money being loaded, so-and-so told me about burying the money and then he laughed because he said it was so primitive and brilliant at the same time, not only were the big trunks taken out and buried but the big shots filled up their own bags and stashed them across the coast as a retirement plan. The economy was breaking down and banks were folding and many of the casinos were not reopening elsewhere and cash was what mattered. And it’s out there. Somewhere.

So they came looking.