Rivers

11

THE NEXT MORNING, COHEN GOT up and he decided what to take and not to take. In the corner of the room where they slept, in a small closet, he left his extra clothes, some food, and all but one of the paperbacks. He fed the dog what was left of the dog biscuits and then he gathered the rest of the food and water and went outside. He put the food and water and aspirin in Habana’s saddlebag along with the flashlight and some matches and the book. In his back pocket remained the picture of Elisa and in his front the small socks. He then covered himself with one of the purple robes and mounted the horse. He looked down at the dog and told it to stay, I’m coming back here at some point in the next few days. But the dog ignored him and walked and then trotted along with them.

A gold cross decorated the back of the robe and Cohen had the appearance of a medieval crusader scouring a godless land in the name of the Almighty. For the next three days, he suffered the rain, rode Habana, and looked for his Jeep and the two who had taken it but he spent most of his time ducking away from others he came across. More movement than he had seen on the coast since before the Line. There was movement along the beachfront, movement in the wastelands of the casinos and hotels and restaurants. Movement even in the scattered remains of the neighborhoods of Gulfport, where there was usually only the quiet of the world of concrete foundations and chimneys. He hid away and watched them. Groups of men standing in a spot and digging. And then maybe gunfire, and ducking and dodging and driving off fast in any direction. He came upon this a couple of times a day, and he had no choice but to hide, and watch them through the rain, and marvel at their dedication to a legend.

He searched most freely away from the city limits and in the miles surrounding his place, and in the miles surrounding the stretch of flooding where they had abandoned him. He followed dirt roads and jagged highways that he had known all his life but they all led to nothing and there was too much space to search it all. His fever came and went and he was sore all over. More sore in his shoulder than anywhere else and he always slept on the other one.

For a time he had taken refuge in a mostly standing gas station and garage on the outskirts of Gulfport. The doors to the bays remained locked down and he built a fire in the garage at nights and the smoke sneaked away through the gaps in the metal roof. The roof dripped from everywhere, smacking at the concrete. At night he slept under the counter in the station and Habana and the dog stayed in the garage. The wind blew and the sounds of the metal roof bending kept him anxious, so on the second night he put the dog outside in order to differentiate between the real and the imagined. During his searching, he had been able to gather a few items of need—clothes, canned foods, a lighter, a hatchet, and a length of rope. He’d held on to some things, not from necessity but because they interested him—a personalized coffee mug with a picture of twin girls, a Saints football jersey with a faded autograph, a pair of roller skates, and a Merle Haggard CD. He sat around the fire in the garage and held these things and imagined the lives they had belonged to. The names of the twins and which one had been born first. What kind of kid still knew how to roller-skate. The boy standing against the railing with his football under his arm and a hopeful look on his face as the players stopped and began to sign autographs. The roughneck or maybe the old man sitting on the back porch in a still, starry night, with a strong drink in his hand, while Merle played over the stereo. The woman who came out and sat with him and their hands together and no words. Only the song in the air and the quiet that belonged to two people who loved each other. He kept these things on a shelf in the garage next to empty oil drums and forgotten socket wrenches.

As he lay down to sleep at the end of the fifth day, he decided they were gone. Didn’t matter where to. Just that they were gone and the Jeep was gone and he could not believe that he had been separated so easily from the Jeep. On the morning of the sixth day, as he sat eating from a can of peaches, the rain stalled, and then another one blew in.

The hurricane rains came violently and he recognized the menacing tone of gray that had moved in from the south and he knew he wouldn’t be going anywhere. It rained relentlessly for two days, and then the winds picked up, shooting the rain diagonally and then horizontally, an infinite array of tiny stinging pellets. Cohen tried to figure out the best way to ride it out but there was only the small office of the gas station and the garage, so he left Habana in the garage and he hid under the counter in the purple robe with her saddle across him and the dog at his feet. With him he kept the flashlight and some water. As he lay hidden several miles inland, at the waterfront the water began to rise and surge and it reached across the beach and slapped against the highways and the ruins of the coastline.

And then the worst came on. The sky turned dark, almost night, and he had no idea of time. A constant roar as if he were trapped inside an engine. He shined the flashlight on the dog and it was wide-eyed and trembling. The rains fell and the wind blew as the storm began to exert her strength. In the next hour, the already strong wind became a force and he heard groans in the steel frame of the gas station and the snaps and crashes of trees falling to the ground. Water began to drip onto the counter and sheets of metal were torn from the roof and once or twice there was an extended moan of metal and he sat up and so did the dog. Habana reared and wailed. Moments later the groan came again and there was a cracking above him. The next thing he heard was glass shattering and the wind and rain invaded the station. On the other side of the wall, Habana reared and whinnied and snorted and bumped into the wall in her frantic pacing. He called out to her but it was no good and the dog stood with its ears perked. Then there was the metal groan again and he realized that the garage was about to go.

The winds bore down and the rain bore down and underneath the door a stream of water ran across the concrete floor and all he could do was lie and wait until the garage gave and as soon as the last piece of roof was twisted off into the storm, the bay doors bent and snapped away like buttons and the aluminum walls were ripped free and that was the last he heard of Habana. There was nothing but a metal frame bending and moaning as if it felt the pain.

The dog jumped up on his chest and he hugged the dog as the roof of the station came off and everything not hammered down and even some things that were began to fly away and the rain whipped. He curled himself up as tightly as a skeleton could curl and he held the saddle on top of his head as the wind tried to take them away and he and the dog held on to each other and Cohen called out to Elisa and he called out to God though there was nothing to do but take it.

COHEN STAYED CURLED WITH THE saddle pulled over him to protect himself from any flying or falling debris. The hurricane sat on top of the coast and punished through the night. By morning, the rain fell straight and the damage had been done. He had been sitting in several inches of water for hours and he was beyond cold. His lips had turned purple and his body cramped with the shivering and the jerkiness of his breath. Around him, everything seemed blurred. He stood and the water was over his ankles and he looked up to where there once was a ceiling and the rain fell on him. He walked out of the station and into the parking lot. His hands and fingers were wrinkled and waterlogged. His entire body soaked and shivering.

He knelt down and cupped his hands and lapped the rainwater. The dog stood beside him and whined. Cohen raised and looked up and down the road. He called for Habana, but his voice was muffled by the rain and she didn’t come.

They got back to the station and crawled back underneath the counter. The rain played a song in the water and he stared out and was overcome with the notion that before night, he was going to die. He wasn’t sure how it would happen, only that it would. Something hungry and savage would find its way to him and sniff him out and tear him apart with its claws and jaws. Or his fever would explode something in his head and he would fall face-forward into the standing water. Or he would nod off and never wake again because his body and his mind and his heart didn’t want to go through the trouble. Or this goddamn rain would finally erode his brain to the point to where he would simply find a deep hole and stick his head in it and never raise it out. He felt as if he were sitting at the end of the world, in a place that the light had long ago abandoned and undiscovered creatures moved about in the black using their instincts to feed off one another. Somewhere unknown to man and unsafe for man and forgotten by the one who had created it. He was going to die in this place and it wrecked his spirit at first but then this became an apathetic notion. He didn’t know what there was to live for. And he didn’t know what there was to die for. Only that he would die in this forgotten place and be a part of its unaccounted history.

The water ran down his head and face and arms and legs. Under his skin. In his bones.

He looked at the dog and said, “I don’t understand.” He fell over on his side with his arms over his head. Rubbed at the red streak around his neck while the rain fell on him. He was too tired to think. He just lay there, cold and wet, and he fell asleep.

Hours later Cohen woke and sat up. Massaged his shoulder. Wiped at his face with his hands and decided that he was going to get up and walk to that church and get his food. He was going to sit down and eat and drink the bottles of water and maybe the roof was still on the place and he would be able to put on dry clothes. “And when I’m done with all that,” he said to the dog, “we are getting the hell out of here.”

12

MARIPOSA HADN’T SLEPT AND HER jaw was sore from holding it clenched through the worst of the storm during the night. She stood and looked out but there was nothing new to see. There was enough light now, at least, and that was what she had been waiting on.

She had been sleeping with the large envelope she’d found in the bottom of the shoe box. Holding it, dreaming about it, imagining what was inside, not wanting to open it because she knew the reality of its contents would be a letdown. But her curiosity had won out and she had only been waiting for enough light so she could open it and see what it held and she discovered that she wasn’t disappointed.

There was a deed to a house and to land. A marriage license. His and her passport, each with a single stamp from Italy. There was a letter from the state of Mississippi, making an offer for his house and land. There was another letter, dated three months later, from the U.S. government, making a slightly larger offer for his house and land. There was another letter warning him to take the offer or risk losing full rights to the properties. And there was a final letter explaining that the time to accept an offer had passed but he could retain the rights to his house and land but that those rights would disappear once the Line became official, and in the event that the region ever regained its original status, rights would revert to him.

There was a death certificate. There were bank statements from closed accounts. There were letters from insurance companies claiming that, according to recent legislation, they were no longer responsible. There was a letter from a bank in Gulfport that confirmed a certificate of deposit in the name of the child. She noticed the dates on each of the letters or statements and everything went back three to five years.

She spent time with each document that came from the envelope. She read again and again, trying to put it together, their lives becoming more vivid now, the truth blending with the illusion of the memories in the shoe box. These people had been real, not simply whispers of romance that swirled away and landed safely somewhere else. Outside the rain fell and the wind pushed, but inside she was in another world, lost in Cohen’s creation.

13

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN—he is not dead he is risen.

Joe read it once. Twice. Three times. He sat up on the mattress, naked with a blanket across his legs. The white paper once clean and pure against the filth of his hands and fingernails but now smudged with the same filth. He had read it a hundred times over during the night as the rain and wind beat against the trailer. As the storm had dragged on and the winds became stronger, he drank harder and clenched his jaw tighter and by the light of the lantern he read that note over and over and over. By the end of the worst, he was no longer reading it but reciting it aloud, pacing across the short, narrow floor and rearing back his head and screaming it upward as if to join with the forces of nature. He is not dead he is risen! He is not dead he is risen! Turning up the bottle and reciting it louder and stripping off his clothes and falling drunkenly against the walls of the trailer as it rocked with the weather. Howling all night until the storm let go a little and the bottle was empty and then he fell face-first on the bed with the note clutched in his hand.

Joe sat on the bed with it now and thought of tearing it into a thousand pieces. But instead he held on to it as he got to his feet, put on his clothes, searched around and found a half bottle of water. He drank the water in one take and wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve and then he walked outside.

Aggie stood under a tarp, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. A coffeepot sat on top of a small gas burner and Aggie poured Joe a cup as he walked over. Joe took it and cast his bloodshot gaze out at the rain. He coughed some and spit and rubbed at his forehead. “I want to go off and look around some.”

Aggie leaned over and took the Bible from his back pocket and turned it back and forth in his hands, its cover worn and soft like sheepskin. “Might wait until it lets up some.”

“I can’t. I can’t wait.”

Aggie drank the coffee. “You all right?”

“I’m all right. Just a rough night, you know.”

“Seemed like it.”

“I guess you slept through it.”

Aggie shrugged.

“I’m getting out for a while. You might let them out, too,” Joe said and he motioned his coffee cup at the locked doors of the trailers.

Aggie nodded. “Go on, then. Keep your eyes out for stragglers and whatever else. God knows who’s running around down here now. Take that Jeep.”

“All right,” Joe answered. He drank his coffee. Waited for any more instruction from Aggie but it didn’t come. Aggie stuck the Bible back in his pocket and he took the key ring from his belt loop. He picked out the key to the Jeep and he took it off and gave it to Joe. As Joe took it, one of the women began to beat on her trailer door and call out.

“That was a bad one last night. Let em breathe,” Joe said.

“I’ll worry about that.”

Joe shoved his hands down in his pockets. Pushed his boot heel into the ground. “It was a bad one last night and it’s been like one long bad one here lately.” He waited for Aggie to say something, but he didn’t. “Seems like it’s badder all the time. Don’t it?”

“Don’t feel much different to me.”

“I didn’t say it feels different. I said it is different.”

Aggie turned to him. “So?”

“So, all I’m saying is, we got a plan for if it gets too bad?”

“It ain’t gonna get too bad.”

“You don’t know that. I damn near shit the bed last night.”

“Then you need to get your shit together,” Aggie said. “This is where we are.”

Joe took a couple of steps back and forth, then said, “Fine.”

“You look stir-crazy. Go on out of here.”

Joe nodded, then said, “You got Mariposa and that boy locked?”

“Yep.”

“You better keep them that way.”

“How come?” Aggie asked, his tone gently patronizing.

“They both got that look here lately. They’ll get brave.”

“That boy is plenty smart enough to weigh the consequences. He listens when we read.”

“He listens but he’s got that look. And so does she.”

“She,” Aggie said and he stopped. Thought about her and her amber skin and her wavy black hair and the look in her eyes. “She is just right.” He tossed the cigarette. “See what you can see,” he said.

Joe nodded and walked back to the compound and into his trailer. He opened up a beer and drank it fast. Let out a grunt when he was done. Then he picked up a towel off the bed and wiped his face and he put on a pair of work gloves and a black sock hat and a coat with a hood. Before he walked out, he grabbed his newly acquired sawed-off shotgun and he took a fistful of shells and stuck them in his coat pocket. He walked out and across the red mud and saw them beginning to peek out from behind the curtains, like they did every morning. Their doors locked from the outside. The pale, exasperated faces in the dirty windows. The sunken eyes. Wondering if he was making the rounds and unlocking the doors. Wondering if they would be allowed outside. Wondering if this would be one of the days when they were allowed to be human. Wondering why they couldn’t have just been blown away.

14

COHEN’S MIND BEGAN TO BETRAY him as he walked on. The hunger and the fever and the exhaustion. Things that weren’t there dashing in and out of ditches and out from behind trees and calling to him with hollow, singsong voices. He shook continuously now. Stopped every hundred yards and knelt or sat down. Water standing everywhere. He sometimes held the trunk of a tree to keep himself upright. He moved along with pain in his shoulder and down his back but he kept on, fighting off the tricks in his mind, trying to keep toward the church, trying to ignore the rain, thinking about the food and water he would find when he got there. He called out as he walked on, Please God be there. Please God be there. There was no knowing if the church was standing but he believed it would be. He didn’t have another choice.

The dog started out with him but would get ahead and turn back and look at Cohen, impatient with the lack of pace. Now and again the dog would wander off, out into a pasture or off into a stretch of woods, and then come back and walk with him again. He found freshly flooded roads and bridges that caused him to detour several times, but he kept going in the right direction and could feel the church road getting closer. He fought on, burning and chilled but encouraged by the familiar landscape. Not fifty yards away from the gravel road that would take him to the church, he sat down in the middle of the road. Then he lay down in the middle of the road. He draped his wet arm across his wet head and closed his eyes and there was only the constant drumming of the rain but as he lay there it seemed quiet to him. The quiet of the forgotten.

And then he heard it coming.

He sat up. Listened. Wasn’t sure if he was imagining it.

But the sound remained. Coming from the other direction. Getting a little bit louder. He looked down the road and there was a curve and coming from the direction of the curve was the sound of a vehicle that he knew. A deep, chugging sound that rose with the push of the gas pedal and fell with the ride of the clutch.

He got up and slid off the road and splashed into the ditch, his head just high enough so that he could see it coming from around the curve. He waited, anxious, like some hungry animal. And then there it was.

“Please God, be real,” he whispered.

And it was real. The Jeep was coming in his direction and he could see that there was only the driver.

Then it slowed. And then it stopped.

The driver stood in his seat and looked around. It wasn’t the boy and it wasn’t the girl. Cohen wanted him to come on his way but didn’t know what he could do if he did. He looked around for a stick or a big rock or anything but there was nothing except wet, limp grass and weeds. He thought to simply get up and flag the man down. Try to get the Jeep back the way it was taken from him. But he wasn’t strong enough to fight. Wasn’t strong enough for anything. So he lay there and watched.

The Jeep came on forward a little, and then it turned down the church road.

Cohen hurried out of the ditch and onto the road and he was running. The frail, broken run of a sick and hungry man and he kept it up until he reached the church road and he saw the tracks in the mud. He bent over with his elbows on his knees. Gasping for breath and his head light.

He stayed bent over until he caught his breath and then he began again, the sound of the engine fading away.

HE WAS GOING TO SHAKE this free and then that would be that. The Note that was driving him crazy. The note that had stirred the past with the images of the burgundy dress of his mother and the backwoods church. It would all be gone after this. For reasons that he didn’t understand, he was drawn back to this road. Back to this place. Back to years long before the barrage and the lawlessness.

He drove and thought about Aggie. How he first saw him standing outside of the liquor store, drinking out of a pint of whiskey and smoking a cigarette. Wearing a heavy jacket with his hood pulled over his head but his eyes sharp even from a distance. Joe had walked past him, exchanged a glare. It seemed like that was all anyone did at that time, glare at each other, the coast quickly becoming the land of desertion, a smattering of liquor stores and strip clubs turned whorehouses and the random gas station all that remained with lights on and doors open. The Line only a few months from being official. The coast rats sleeping in what was left of abandoned houses and businesses. Nobody trusting anybody. Destruction all around.

Joe had gone inside and gotten his own bottle and when he came back out Aggie was still there. Watching him. Joe walked toward his truck with his eyes on the man with the hood.

Aggie tossed his cigarette and said, “You got a hitch on that thing?”

Joe said, “What’d you say?”

“A hitch. You got a hitch on your truck there?”

“Yeah, I got a hitch. So what?”

Aggie drank from his bottle and took a few steps toward Joe. “You wanna make some money?”

Joe laughed. “You ain’t got no damn money.”

“I got it if you want to make it,” Aggie said. He pushed his hood back from his head, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a folded stack of bills.

“I ain’t queer,” Joe said.

“Me neither. Damn.”

“Then what you want?”

“I need a truck with a hitch. I got some things I gotta get towed.”

“To where?”

“Not far. I got two trucks already but the hitch is busted on both.”

“If you got two trucks, why you standing here without one?”

“Walking don’t kill people.”

“It might down here.”

“My trucks are where I need them to be. You wanna see, take the money. You wanna help, take the money. If you don’t, don’t take it.”

Joe thought about it. He needed the money. Everybody needed the money. “How much?”

Aggie held the folded bills out to him. “All of it.”

“Shit,” Joe said, shaking his head. “You must think I’m damn crazy.”

Aggie had kept moving toward him, was close now, could reach out and touch him if he wanted. “I don’t think you’re crazy. I need something. You probably need something, just like everybody else down here. Or why else would you still be here?” Aggie held out the money again. “Take it,” he said. “Take it and let’s ride and talk a little while. We got drinks. I got a pack of smokes. You smoke?”

“Yeah, I smoke,” Joe said and he reached his hand out for the money. He then took a long, cautious look at the man. “Open up that coat.”

Aggie opened his coat and he had a pistol tucked in his pants. “I know you got one, too,” he said. “So we can call it even.”

“You’re gonna have to let me hold it while we ride.”

“No, I ain’t. You got every nickel I have in your hand right there. You won’t hold my gun. I won’t be dead and broke.”

Joe thought about it. The man seemed to stare straight through him and there was something about him that told Joe his side would be a good one to be on in a place like this.

So he had told Aggie to get on in. That was three years ago.

It had been easy to go along with Aggie. He was a man who spoke with conviction, with a straight-ahead honesty. A man who had a plan and a way of making Joe feel like there were only benefits. At times he had felt like Aggie was a brother and at other times he had felt like Aggie might cut his throat before daylight. And Aggie had a way of talking to people, a way of getting them to believe. He had heard the way Aggie spoke to the stragglers, to the people they had found at the rope’s end. Come on, we’ll get you something to eat, he’d say with the compassion of a grandfather. We got a warm, safe place to sleep. People down here gotta help each other, he’d say. Like the Father takes care of the birds of the sky, He takes care of us. And I’m helping Him. Come on and let’s get something to eat and then you can decide what you wanna do. We can even drive you up if you want, he’d tell them. And they would climb in the back of the truck, maybe because they trusted him, maybe because they had no other choice, but they climbed in. And they were grateful for something to eat and for the dry place to sleep and they thought they had come upon a savior. Joe believed Aggie when he said this was for their own good. They would die without this place. And you know that the men are a danger and if you don’t want to walk them out in the woods, then I will do that. I will do what we need to be done and you stand up straight. This is yours as much as mine. This is your land. It is ours.

Joe had watched. He had learned. Had participated. And he had finally walked a man out into the woods and returned him to the earth and everything else seemed easier after that. But last night was on him. Or maybe it was the culmination of many nights like that one and their growing consistency. The wind never seemed to cease. The rain never seemed to stop. It was bad and getting worse and sitting in the trailer in the dark with his knees tucked under him while the storm pushed and pulled was a too common event. He had to get drunk to get through the nights and then getting drunk spun him around inside and it was a vicious loop. And now he had this note and he had these memories of his mother and this church and what this world looked like before and he felt a pressure welling up inside.

He drove slowly as he moved along the muddy gravel road, the Jeep sliding some and him uncertain if this were the right place. It was difficult to remember anywhere in this land the way it had been because of the way it was now. It was so much worse and there appeared to be no end in sight. The tree line tight against the road seemed familiar, but there were gaps in it that hadn’t been before. Houses that might have reminded him were no longer there. It was only his hunch that led him to where he thought the small church would be.

A careful mile or two and he saw it. Sitting up ahead, to the right, back off the road. He drove on up and stopped and looked. He could see the men standing outside in the Sunday sunshine, in their short-sleeved shirts and ties, smoking their cigarettes with their calloused hands. The kids running between the cars playing chase, their shrieks and laughter breaking into the peaceful Sunday morning. The women and their clean dresses with their Bibles tucked under their arms and their faces a soft pink.

The thought occurred to him that all he had to do was to get in the Jeep and keep going. Maybe his time with Aggie had run its course. Maybe he didn’t want to be responsible for all those women and what was to come. Maybe he had found that note for a reason, to shake him loose, to set him free. Maybe it wasn’t going to be as simple as coming to this place and clearing his head and going back to the circle of trailers and the faces that occupied them.

The shotgun and the shells sat in the passenger seat and he picked up the shotgun but then set it back down. He got out and pushed the hood from his head. He looked at the place. The beige brick stained and molded. The front doors gone. He walked up closer and saw the wet black ashes from a fire on the concrete porch. He poked at them with his foot and then he walked over and stood in the doorway. The fallen tree splitting the roof of the sanctuary and its moss hanging down across the pews. The stained glass in shards below the windows. He looked for the pew where they had sat. Listened for his mother telling him to sit still. Wondered what she would say if she knew what he had become a part of. He stood in the doorway and smoked. Thought of what he’d say in his own defense.

It’s a different world, he thought. And he could think of no more explanation.

He walked back outside and around the side of the church. Thought he’d take a look in the back. See if there was anything worth having. At one of the windows he knelt down and picked through the broken stained glass that sat at the bottom of a puddle. He fished the pieces out. The purples and blues and reds. He held several together in his palm and admired the purity of color. Imagined the sunlight against them. The illusion of something brighter and better.

And this would be the last memory that he would have as he lay dying. The memory of kneeling there, in this place where he had been a boy with a mother, with the pieces of the holy glass in his hands. Not the realizations of what he had done, the flesh and blood that he had claimed along with Aggie, the women he had corralled and made his own, their bodies and their minds and maybe even their hearts and souls, unlocking the doors when he wanted and feeding them when he wanted and doing what he wanted when he felt the urge. For what other reason was there to keep them? He didn’t think of them or the men he had separated them from. The blood on his hands and the filth on his fingertips. He didn’t think of the man that he was and the power he had grasped and he didn’t sing for forgiveness or call out for redemption. In the next hour, as he lay dying, he thought only of that moment of serenity, kneeling next to the church where he had been a boy before he had grown into a man and realized the clarity of strength, his knees damp in the wet ground and in his palm the blue and red and purple glass. As he lay dying, his flesh ripped like fabric, his blood flowing freely like the rain that came so often, he thought only of those beautiful shards of glass and the weight that they carried, and he found it difficult to comprehend that while he held those small holy things, how something so big and so powerful and so violent could have been so silent as it crept up behind him.

COHEN DIDN’T WAIT FOR THE dog to reappear and he went as quickly as he could along the gravel road because he thought the sound of the Jeep had quit. Not disappeared far down the road and out of distance but quit as if whoever was driving it had stopped and the only place close by to stop was the church. He hurried on, pulling at his pants pockets as if to drag himself. When the church was in sight he saw the Jeep parked in front of it and he stopped running and he moved over to the edge of the road, closer to the tree line, to keep out of sight.

He didn’t see the man who had been driving and it occurred to him to make a run for it. The rain would muffle his steps and the keys would be in the ignition and just go, take off, don’t slow down. Go as hard as you can.

But then his thoughts were interrupted by the high-pitched howls and screams of he didn’t know what. Something awful and horrific and acute slicing through the hazy morning. He kept on, walking faster now, breaking into a light run and then he was at the church and next to the Jeep and then he saw that the terrible sound, the howling and screaming, was coming from a tangle of man and panther at the side of the church and the panther was winning.

Cohen looked over into the Jeep and saw his sawed-off shotgun and some shells on the passenger seat. He took it out and loaded it and put some shells in his pocket, keeping one eye on the panther and the man. He tugged at the backseat as if to lift it but it didn’t move. The man shrieked as the panther had him pinned and was tearing at him with its mouth and claws. Cohen walked over very carefully, staying behind them so that the panther wouldn’t perhaps turn and rush him, and ten feet away he aimed the shotgun and fired and the panther jumped and twisted and cried out. Cohen fired again and the panther jumped again but there was no more crying and it fell dead next to the ripped, screaming man.

Cohen moved closer and looked down. Half the man’s face was red and torn and there were gashes across his throat and on his head and down his chest and arms. A bad tear in his rib cage. He was breathing in a terrified, irregular rhythm and his eyes were wide and sharp against the red surrounding them. He held his arm up to Cohen and tried to say something but only a shaky grunt came out. Cohen didn’t reach for him but he knelt a few feet away. The rain washed the blood as quickly as it came out of him.

The man’s grunting kept on and Cohen watched him for a minute and then he held the shotgun out toward him. “Where’d you get this?” he asked. Then he turned and pointed at the Jeep and asked the same thing. “All of it’s mine. Mine. Where’s them two that jumped me out there on the road?”

The man turned on his side and coughed out blood and he acted as if he were trying to get up. Cohen moved back. The man seemed to be trying to say something but Cohen didn’t know what, so he asked again. “Where are they? If you want anything else from me, you better speak up.”

The man got over on his belly and began to crawl toward him. Bleeding from everywhere and his face like some horror film and he moved himself forward on the ground inches at a time, reaching for Cohen. He kept coughing and spitting and coughing and spitting, the bloody mess like the trail of a slug across the ground as he inched forward and Cohen kept moving back.

Cohen then lay down on his stomach, eye to eye with the man, and said again, “Where the hell are them little shits? I ain’t asking you again. You want help, speak up.”

The man dropped his head and cleared his throat, then spit up again like a sick baby. Then he tried to say something. “Umrow,” he said.

Cohen leaned in and said, “Huh?”

“Umrow.”

“Calm down. Speak up.”

The man extended his arm and pointed awkwardly as if trying to give directions. Then he said, “Him. Himmel.”

“Himmel?”

He nodded his red head. “Row,” he said.

“Road?”

He nodded again.

“Himmel Road,” Cohen said. “Himmel Road out there past Crawfield. That old plantation?”

The man nodded and grunted and he began to push himself up from the ground. Cohen stayed back. “You sure?” he asked.

But the man didn’t answer and he managed to get himself to his knees. Moaning and crying out but his voice feeble. Cohen got to his feet and stood back and he saw that the man was reaching behind him for something. Cohen raised the gun on him but the man only went into his back pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. He dropped it on the ground in front of him and then fell on his side. Cohen stepped over and picked it up and he looked at it. He read his own note. And then he said, “I told you.”

The man was on his back now and he reached his arm up. Tried to talk again but couldn’t, but he formed an imaginary pistol with his thumb and index finger and he held it to his head and pulled the trigger. When Cohen only looked at him, he slapped his hand on the ground and grunted and did it again. Still Cohen only looked at him.

“If you wanted something from me, you should have thought about it before,” he said and he tossed the note aside. Then he walked on away from the dying man and the dead panther, toward the back of the church, out of the rain, where he found his food and his water and he sat down and tried to make himself better.

AFTER HE ATE, HE CHANGED into the dry clothes he had left behind and then he fell into an exhausted sleep, lying in the middle of the purple choir robes. He dreamed of a backyard with thick green grass and pinks and whites in the flower boxes and a clothesline. A wooden picnic table in the middle of the yard, surrounded by people he had known. Uncles and high school friends and Mom and strange faces from random moments in his life. On the table were plates of food. Fried chicken and hamburger steaks and mashed potatoes and biscuits and sliced watermelon. Everyone ate and ate but the food from the plates never seemed to diminish, yet every time he tried to fill his own plate, someone pushed him aside to talk or took him out front to show him a new car or something. He kept trying to eat and they kept distracting him and when he had the grease of the fried chicken on his fingertips, he woke with his fingers in his mouth.

He shook free from the dream and sat up. He was sweating and this seemed a good sign. The day was nearly gone and the rain had let up. He got up and walked outside and he dragged the dead man and the dead panther out into the woods, laying them next to each other like ill-fated lovers. He then went to the Jeep and looked under the seats and in the glove box. Under the seat he found a hatchet and a half box of shotgun shells and in the glove box there was a flashlight and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

Over the next few days he went through the rest of the food and water, and the empty tin cans and water bottles were scattered across the floor of the back room of the church. He ate and slept, ate and slept. Between sleeping he would walk up and down the road looking for the dog but he stayed off his feet mostly, knew that he needed to get his strength back as soon as possible because there was a journey ahead.

The rain and wind came and went. At night the wind howled as it whipped through the church roof and windows and the water dripped from everywhere. In the day he sat out by the road and imagined a sun sitting in the sky, the sky open and pale and the chill gone from the air for a little while. In the field across the road, a quarter mile away, he saw two black cows meandering about, seemingly unaffected. Heavy, rippled clouds covered it all. Sometimes when the rain and wind eased, there were birds and armadillos and deer.

His fever remained but he felt it beginning to break. At night he listened to the symphony of Mother Nature and smoked the cigarettes. Possums and raccoons visited the church in the darkness and he wondered if they knew about the panther so he told them about it. Pointed out toward the woods where its body lay if they wanted to see for themselves. Each night they came and went as he sat on the front porch next to a small fire reading one of the left-behind paperbacks and each night he spoke to them about the panther or the weather or the advantages of being nocturnal.

When he slept his dreams were less the nightmare and more the comfort of a life that used to be, but when he woke he never hurt any less from having seen the faces of those he missed.

He had options. He could drive to Gulfport, to the casino parking lot, and hope for Charlie. He could get enough gas and supplies to make it to the Line and go from there. But he couldn’t be sure that Charlie would appear, or if he had already come and gone. The last hurricane had seemed stronger and more bitter than the recent ones and there could have been roads and bridges washed away, keeping Charlie from making it to the coastline.

Or he could go out on Himmel Road, find the Crawfield Plantation, and find those two who had jumped him. He believed that where he found them, he would find his gas cans, his .22, probably some food and other supplies. Didn’t know what else or who else he’d find. But it seemed worth pursuing because he also knew he’d find the things that belonged to Elisa, that belonged to their life together, that belonged to him.

And then after that, he would go for the Line.

He tried for days to talk himself out of caring about those things and that shoe box. It was only tiny bands of silver or gold, only a small diamond, only dainty things that went in your earlobe or hung around your neck, rhinestones and rubies, and all of it together didn’t add up to much. Only pieces of paper that didn’t prove anything. Only silly little mementos of years long gone. They’re not worth anything, he’d think. They won’t do no good. Let it go like you should have already. Let it go.

Even in the moments when he had convinced himself that finding Charlie and getting out was the safest, easiest plan, somewhere beneath it all where there was the truth he knew that he was going to find that girl and that boy and get back those small, precious things. Because it was her and because she didn’t belong with them and if he was leaving, he was going to leave the way he wanted to leave. He had his Jeep. He had his shotgun. He was finding his strength, invigorated by hope. On the morning of the fourth day, as a steady, drifting rain crossed the land, he loaded the shotgun, draped a robe across his shoulders and head, lit a cigarette, and sat down in the Jeep. He sat and smoked, talking to himself. Telling himself that he was ready for anything. When he finished the cigarette he flicked it out and then adjusted the rearview mirror and looked at himself. It was the first time he had looked at himself in weeks. He noticed his cheekbones and he put his fingers to them, more round and pronounced than they had been. Then he touched the healing line around his neck. He leaned closer to the mirror and looked at his eyes. Thought they had changed color. Or maybe it was the skin and face around them that was so different and made them strange. He leaned back. Huffed.

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

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

15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She took a slow step back.

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

“No. I ain’t forgot,” she mumbled.

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

16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come here and shut up.”

“I said get on.”

Aggie came forward and Cohen stiff-armed him.

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

“I ain’t holding still.”

“You will if you want it to quit.”

“Fuck you. You shot me.”

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

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

“Then get up,” Aggie said.

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

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

Aggie took out a cigarette and offered Cohen one.

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

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

“Shit,” Cohen said, shaking his head.

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

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

Aggie smoked. Didn’t look at him.

“I said where’s that boy and girl?”

“Where’s Joe?”

“Who’s Joe?”

“You know who Joe is.”

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

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

“Where’s that boy and girl? She got something of mine. You all got something of mine, from the looks of it.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Naw, I didn’t kill him.”

“Then where is he?”

“Where’s that boy and girl?”

Aggie turned and walked closer. Knelt down. The glow of the fire dancing on their faces in the cold night. Aggie looked at his leg and the wrapping turning red and then he looked up at Cohen. “Only what is alive is strong,” he said.

Cohen adjusted himself on the ground. Grimaced and pulled at his leg.

“And what is strong gets the right. You killed him, that’s fine. That makes you strong. That makes us strong. That gives us the right.”

Cohen took a long drag from his cigarette, tilted back his head and blew the smoke, then he said, “I ain’t interested in your rights or my rights or nobody’s rights. I want to know where that boy and girl are. I didn’t kill your boy. A panther got on his ass and tore him up and he laid there and bled to death. So there.”

Aggie sighed. Stood up. He walked back to the fire and said, “That’s why I shot your dog. ’Cause there ain’t no trusting animals.”

“My dog wouldn’t rip your balls off. Animals ain’t all the same.”

“Animals are all the same. They’re down here,” Aggie said, holding his hand down toward the ground. Then he held the other hand up and said, “We’re up here.”

“That’s good. Real good,” Cohen said and he put his hands behind him and leaned back and watched Aggie. He stared down into the fire as if waiting for something to rise from it. Then he looked around again. Heads disappeared behind curtains when he caught them looking. This man in his army coat and his cigarettes and his face like something hardened in the sun. Locks on the doors. Guns leaning against the trailer door. He let his head fall back and the whiskey made him dizzy so he raised his head again to stop the spinning.

“What kind of sight is that on your rifle?” he asked and nodded toward the rifle that had shot him.

“The kind that you can see far with.”

“And I’m guessing the kind you can see in the dark with.”

Aggie nodded. “You’d be surprised what you can find clutched in the hands of a dead man.”

“How many dead men you been around?”

The man held his palms out to the fire. “Enough. Everybody down here’s been around enough. If the weather don’t get them, something will.”

Cohen looked around again when a light flashed in a window. “Who are they?” he asked.

Aggie lifted his head and his eyes went from one trailer to the next, slowly, as if he were trying to remember something about each one. Then he said, “You want something to eat?”

Cohen moved his leg a little and grunted. “I don’t want nothing to eat.”

“Got plenty.”

“Why they locked up?”

“Drink some more whiskey. You need to keep it in you with that leg.”

“Why you got people locked up?” Cohen’s voice raised as he spoke, no fear of the man. No sense in any fear now. He had been shot and dragged up and his house was done and he was sitting on the wet ground surrounded by a circle of trailers tied down with ropes and it didn’t seem to matter. Didn’t know if he had been done a favor by being allowed to live but he didn’t care and if he was going to die the least he could do was get a straight answer about something before he was shot by this old man who seemed to be the gatekeeper of this prison or slum or whatever it was. He had come for Elisa’s keepsakes and he knew that the boy and girl were behind one of these locked doors and that was all he cared about.

Aggie stood still and quiet, turning his hands in the warmth.

“Where’s that boy and girl?”

Nothing from the man.

“That girl’s got some stuff of mine and I want it and then I need some gas and I’ll be on my way. I’m getting to the Line.”

Aggie laughed a little. “What Line?”

“You know what Line.”

“You must’ve been way down in a hole somewhere, not laid up in that nice house of yours.”

Cohen adjusted some to sit up straight. “What does that mean?”

Aggie then turned from the coals and walked slowly to a stack of cinder blocks on the other side of the fire and sat down on top. “The Line is our problem.”

“I don’t know what your problem is. It ain’t my problem.”

“The Line is the problem for us all. Those above it. Those below it. Those who drew it. It’s the symbol of hate. Fear. Symbol of disbelief.”

Cohen took a swallow from the bottle.

“The Line don’t do nothing but point fingers,” the man continued. He sat with his legs crossed and his arms folded. “It tells us some people are all right. Some people ain’t.”

“Well. It’s true. Some people ain’t all right. Nobody down here is all right. Except for me. I was all right until about a week ago.”

“You ain’t all right, either,” Aggie said, looking at Cohen. “You think you were, but you weren’t. What makes you all right? Alone. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to pray to. You pray to anybody?”

Cohen took another swallow, ignored the question.

“The Line thought it was taking away, but it don’t. The Line gives. Gives those who believe and who care about something more a place to go and live their own way. With their own kind. It’s them above that will wash away. Not those below.”

He spoke like a man who had thought for a long time about what he was saying. Either that or he spoke like a man who had rehearsed. His tone was certain and the air of certainty was in his face and eyes.

“So who are they?” Cohen asked again.

The man raised his arm and held out his hand as if reaching for something, and then he began to wave in slow motion. “They are like me. Like us. They belong here. They are who I take care of. Who I am responsible for. They are for me and I’m for them and we are for you. You came to us and we’ll make a place for you.”

“I didn’t come to nobody and I don’t need a place. I need that girl and some gas.”

“You need a place. We all need a place.”

“Why are they locked up?”

Aggie lowered his hand. Got up and walked a circle around the fire and then sat back down. They were quiet for a while. Cohen’s leg throbbed and the bleeding slowed and they watched the fire dying out. There was no more use in talking, Cohen thought. Not now. Not tomorrow. Talking wasn’t going to get him what he wanted and talking wasn’t going to get him out of here.

The whiskey caught up with Cohen and he felt light and numb. Around them the night was black and still like a painting.

But then the quiet was interrupted by a knocking. Cohen seemed to be the only one to hear it as Aggie didn’t move. It kept on. A patient, consistent knock coming from the trailer closest to them. Cohen looked over and there was the round beam of a flashlight in the window and the knocking kept on, turning into a banging, and then there were the voices of two women calling out. “Aggie, open up. Aggie, come on. She’s ready. It’s ready. Open up.”

Aggie stood. He reached into his pocket and took out a ring of keys, and he turned himself toward Cohen so he could see the revolver stuck in his pants. Then he walked over to the guns and picked them up and opened his door and set them inside, locked the door and turned, then walked over toward the voices. “Get back,” he called out.

“Open the door. She’s ready,” a woman called back.

“I said get back.”

From behind the door, there was a painful moaning.

Cohen got to his feet and stood with his back to the fire. Aggie unlocked and opened the door and one woman held the flashlight on another woman who stepped out. Her face was twisted in pain and she held her hand across her big, round belly and she was wearing two coats, one with a hood pulled over her head. She stepped out of the trailer carefully, as if the ground might crack beneath her. The woman with the flashlight came out behind her and held the pregnant woman by the arm.

Cohen almost didn’t believe it but he had learned that in this land you should believe everything. And not believe everything. Somewhere in the midst of his thoughts, in the middle of this night, the woman’s moaning seemed like the perfect sound. He watched her walk with her back arched and her steps small and her anguished expression, and he momentarily forgot about the pain in his leg as he realized what type of hurt was coming for her. He felt for the knife beneath his coat. In its sheath, tight against his belt. Then he felt for the picture of Elisa folded in his back pocket. And then Aggie reappeared, holding what looked like the medicine bag of an early-century good country doctor.

18

AVA WALKED WITH AGGIE AND the pregnant woman, holding her arm and hand, asking Aggie what they were going to do as if having this baby in this place was an idea that only moments ago had occurred to any of them. While they walked laps around the fire, Aggie moved away from the circle of trailers and off into the field to a cow trailer with two pieces of plywood laid across the top. He opened up the back of the trailer and the iron groaned from rust and he stepped up and in. Cohen stood still as the women passed him around the fire and they acted as if he wasn’t there until he asked if he could do anything.

They stopped and the pregnant woman shook her head and the other said, “Why don’t you run on down to the hospital and bring back a doctor and a nurse and a grenade to shove up Aggie’s ass.” They were short women and the one who did the talking wore a faded blue bandana tied around her head and the same kind of army coat as Aggie and mismatched gloves. The pregnant woman’s hands were bare and she made fists when she grunted. She pushed her hood back and sweat glistened on her forehead in the dim light of the fire.

Their names were Ava and Lorna. Lorna about to become the mother.

“You need to get some help out here, Aggie,” Ava said. She spoke as if she were unafraid of the man with the keys. “And figure out where the hell we gonna do this.”

“We don’t need any help,” he said and he set the worn black leather bag on the ground. He lit a cigarette and sat down on top of the stack of cinder blocks. “Ain’t no hurry.”

“You don’t know that,” Ava said.

“Holy Lord,” Lorna said, squeezing at Ava’s hand.

“Breathe big and let it go. Breathe big.”

The contraction lasted a long minute. No one spoke as they watched her breathe. When the pain subsided, they walked over to where Aggie sat and he got up and the pregnant woman eased down.

“That your new boyfriend?” Ava asked without looking at the men.

“How long you think it’s gonna be?” Aggie asked.

“Don’t know. Before the night is over.”

Another contraction came on and the woman clenched her jaw and threw back her head.

“This ain’t a good idea,” Cohen said.

Aggie cleared his throat, spit. Took a drag off the cigarette and looked at Cohen and said, “At times I am afraid, I will trust in the Lord.”

“Go tell her that,” Cohen answered.

“Holy Lord, holy Lord,” Lorna cried out. “Holy Lord, here it comes again. Goshdamn it hurts. Holy Lord, holy Lord, holy Lord.” She talked through it, her voice rising and falling with the rise and fall of the contractions, and almost as if summoned by the gods, the sound of her voice and the promise of a new life into this land brought on the spirit of the winds and the sound of thunder.

Cohen looked at her and at all the other women pacing about and then he thought of Elisa. When I’m big and fat people are gonna open doors for me and give up their places in line, she had said. They already do that, he told her. Because you’re so damn pretty. I’m gonna eat and eat some more and you know some women eat dirt and he didn’t believe that but she explained that it was true and then she stuck a pillow under her shirt and patted her belly and said she was gonna get fat and not worry about it and he’d better not, either. And enough with all the sweet talk ’cause you already knocked me up. The work is done. She took the pillow from under her shirt and threw it at him and he said if the work is all done then I’m getting a beer and she didn’t like that, either. Didn’t like that he could drink beer and coffee and smoke a cigarette and she couldn’t and she didn’t like that he didn’t mind doing any of these things right in front of her. Drove her crazy. Made him laugh.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Lorna said, breathing hard as the contraction eased.

Cohen walked around. He remembered being right, though she was certain it was going to be a boy. Told him every day for three weeks before they found out. It’s a boy. I know it’s a boy. Nope, he told her. And I’ll bet you twenty bucks. She laughed and said you don’t have twenty bucks and you’d better hope like hell it’s not a girl anyway. Because you won’t be worth a damn if it is.

“Oh hell, it’s coming again,” Lorna groaned and the intensity returned.

He thought of the twenty dollars she had given him when they got back to the house after the doctor visit and the piggy bank he stuck it in. He thought of his hand on her belly. Her stomach was round now and it all seemed more real than it had before they knew it was a girl. As he walked around the compound and listened to the woman cry out, he held out his hand and tried to feel that round belly again, tried to feel the baby in the only way that he had ever felt her. But his open hand didn’t feel anything but the cold air and his memories of Elisa were chased away by the sounds of the pleading woman and the notion of what Aggie had done to her.

NEARLY DAWN BUT NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to tell beneath the cover of thick clouds. The women had gone back into the trailer, where Lorna could lie back and spread her legs. The labor had lasted through the night and nobody knew if it was time to push or not but she was going to anyway. Aggie had let out two other women to help and the four of them were inside the trailer, Lorna’s grunting and sometimes screaming and the voices of encouragement blending with the beat of the storm. Cohen was inside an empty trailer, only a bare twin mattress on the floor and a rack of empty shelves against one wall, and he slept on his back with his mouth wide open and his hands at his sides as if posing for the portrait of a dead man.

The other women who had seen what was going on were beating on their doors, calling to be let out so they could help, but Aggie ignored them until they stopped. He braved the storm, leaning against the trailer, holding on to one of the ropes, soaking wet, listening to Lorna, and he wanted it to be a boy. He was going to need boys to make this what he wanted it to be.

Cohen jerked up from his sleep as if a grenade had exploded in his dreams, wide-eyed and with quick breaths he looked around frantically. The bullet hole in his leg stung and he grabbed at it and tried to remember where he was and what was going on. He looked around at the empty room, the cabinets and mini-kitchen ripped out, leaving scarred walls, and it smelled like old sweat. He got to his feet and out of the window, through the storm, he saw the man with the revolver leaning against the trailer, and then he saw other faces in the windows of the other trailers and he was reminded that this wasn’t a bad dream but the real thing. He licked at his dry lips and rubbed at his throat. The ring of whiskey in his head. He lay back down and calmed himself, recalling what had happened and where he was so he could figure out how to get out of it.

Then the pregnant woman screamed. A twisted, howling scream that split through the storm.

He limped to the door. He unbuttoned his coat and lifted his shirts and he opened the sheath. He took out the bowie knife and he turned it back and forth in his hands, trading it from palm to palm. It was cold and he squeezed it and he felt strong and then the woman screamed again. Cohen slid the knife back in the sheath and put his shirts over it and buttoned his coat. He hobbled out and over to Aggie just as Ava opened the door and yelled out, “Something ain’t right.” She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips and the look of the confused. Aggie stepped up to her. Inside, Lorna screamed again. And again and again. They all just looked at one another.

“Something ain’t right,” Ava said again. “I can see it but it ain’t moving. And I ain’t sure it’s the right way or not.”

“You gonna have to cut her, then,” Aggie said.

“You cut her. I don’t wanna cut her.”

“You gonna have to.”

“Or you are.”

“She’s gonna die if you don’t,” Aggie said with no notion if this was true or not but from the sound of Lorna, it sounded right.

“She might die either way,” Ava said. “If I cut her, how am I supposed to fix it up? There ain’t nothing in the bag showing me how to do that.” She no longer wore the army coat and her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows and there was blood on her hands.

“You gonna have to get that baby,” Aggie said. “He’s the start.”

“I know what he is. Or she is. Or whatever it is,” Ava said. “I been here long as you. Remember?”

“The start of what?” Cohen asked but they ignored him or didn’t hear him.

Lorna screamed out again. And then she stopped. They waited for her to start back but a quiet minute passed and Ava hurried back inside.

Aggie stepped back out and stood on the doorstep. The rain beat on the men and they hunched over and peered at each other from under their hoods.

“Got coffee over there in that one,” Aggie said and nodded toward another trailer but Cohen didn’t answer. He badly wanted some water but he didn’t want to get in the habit of asking this man for anything and before he could decide what to do the screaming started again and this time it didn’t stop. The screaming and the women calling out to her above her screams, above the storm, begging her to hold on, yelling directions to one another, chaotic directions that went around in circles and didn’t help or mean anything but only added to the hysteria of the moment. Cohen closed his eyes. Clenched his jaw. Wished to God he were somewhere else.

Aggie stood without expression.

Cohen opened his eyes and yelled to him, “You proud of this?”

Aggie yelled back, “I probably should have gone ahead and killed you last night. Or right now.”

Cohen wasn’t sure he’d made it out against the noise of the women, so he asked the man to say it again.

“You heard me,” Aggie said.

“No, I didn’t,” Cohen said defiantly. “Say it again.”

“I said I’m going to save you. You were sent here and you know it. Like the rest of us.”

“Nobody was sent here.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand enough of what I see.”

“That’s what you see now.”

“It won’t be no later.”

Aggie nodded. He grinned at Cohen from under his hood with the eyes of a man who had been set free. The eyes of a man who understood the power of conviction when there was no one around to judge.

The screaming then became something more than painful. It became torturous. Grotesque. Cohen watched Aggie and he didn’t know what he was dealing with here in this place, with this man. Didn’t know exactly who Aggie was or what he had done or what he was capable of but he knew it was some bad shit. Women behind locked doors and one man with the keys. The Holy Bible stuck in his back pocket. Wearing the coat he’d taken off a dead man. The power to send out others to ambush and steal. The drop-dead glare of the unrepentant.

The woman’s scream was shrill and pleading and there appeared to be no mercy in this land. Cohen stood still, listening to her, watching the man with his brow unchanged while the screaming of the woman splintered the storm around them and he thought of Elisa and what it would have been like with her belly round and the name chosen and the room built and painted yellow or pink or blue. He thought of the tiny nameless thing that died with her and he thought of the small thing fighting for its life inside that trailer where the women stood helplessly around the mother as if they had been ushered back to a time when there was no other choice than to wring your hands and pray. There were the screams and the pleas but there were no answers and the sun was creeping on the edge of the horizon and somewhere people were sleeping in warm beds and somewhere it was going to be a beautiful day.

It was then that Cohen lifted his coat and shirts and he unsnapped the sheath and took out the knife. He held it in his right hand and waved it like a badge. Aggie’s eyes widened and he stepped back but Cohen wasn’t going for him. He was going for the trailer where the screaming came from and when he got there, he opened up the door and he walked right in and he saw the blood and he saw the anguish and Ava, kneeling between the woman’s legs, turned and looked at him and he pushed her out of the way.

19

ON THE MORNING OF THE fourth day in venice, they awoke to a faint sunshine. Elisa rolled over onto Cohen, kissed him, and said I’m going for a run.

Cohen reached for her as she tried to get up from the bed but she playfully pushed him away and stood at the window.

“I can’t believe you brought your running shoes,” he said. “Me and you need to discuss what the word ‘vacation’ means.”

She took off the T-shirt that she slept in and she pushed back the white drapes and stood in the open window in only the panties she had bought the day before that had CIAO written across the bottom.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She stretched her arms and she was beautiful in the morning light. “It’s Italy. Nobody cares,” she said. “It feels good.”

He stared at her freckled back and shoulders and all he wanted to do was snatch her back into the bed and do wild things to her. He was about to go for her when she moved from the window and opened the armoire next to it. She found shorts and a tank top and her running shoes and she began to dress.

“Only a short one,” she said. “I gotta sweat out some of this wine we’ve been putting away.” On the nightstand was an empty wine bottle and on the floor by the bed was another.

“You’re gonna get lost,” he said.

“Probably. But I’ll figure it out.”

“Well,” he said and he rolled over. “I’ll be right here when you get back.”

She tied her shoes and found her running watch in the suitcase. Then she kissed him again and went out the door and he listened to the sound of her footsteps on the stairway.

HE AWOKE TWO HOURS LATER and heard the tenor voice outside. Elisa hadn’t returned. He checked his watch twice to make sure she had been gone that long and he believed she should have been back by now. A short run for Elisa usually meant forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour.

He took a long shower and then shaved and brushed his teeth. When he was done he thought of standing naked in the window like Elisa but realized her curves provided a much more desirable picture. He put on some jeans and a white T-shirt and then he stood in the window and looked out at the courtyard. Healthy vines grew out of terra-cotta pots and up a trellis and red blossoms stuck out from window boxes on the building across the courtyard. The handful of wrought-iron tables were filled this morning with the absence of rain and a young waitress moved between them delivering coffee and plates of bread.

What she has done, he thought, is run until she got lost, then found herself a young Italian stud. They are now on a little boat that will take them to his bigger boat and by this time next year she will be speaking Italian and standing naked in her own bedroom window with her hunky young Italian traded in for a new hunky young Italian.

He smiled but didn’t laugh because it didn’t seem an impossible scenario with the fairy-tale look that had been in Elisa’s eyes since they had arrived.

He sat down on the bed and turned on the television and watched the replay of a soccer match from last night. Milan and Barcelona. He couldn’t tell which was which but he listened to the constant chantlike choruses from the crowd and felt almost hypnotized. He watched for half an hour and then he began to worry some, so he turned off the television and put on shoes, socks, and a shirt, and went out to walk around and look for her.

He turned right when he came out of the hotel. A short walk and he arrived at a busy plaza. Tucked in the corners of the plaza were kiosks for newspapers and magazines, cigarettes and postcards, tourist maps and T-shirts. Restaurants and cafés lined the streets and waiters in white shirts and black ties moved from table to table and tourists walked slowly from café to café considering the best place to sit. In the center of the plaza was a small fountain where angels arched their backs and reached toward the heavens and at their feet children tossed in coins and splashed one another playfully. Branching out from the plaza were numerous streets and alleys and Cohen looked around and tried to imagine which one Elisa might have taken, but he realized it didn’t matter, as in this labyrinthine city your first turn had little bearing on where you eventually wound up.

He crossed to the other side and bought a pack of Lucky Strikes at a kiosk. He unwrapped the pack, lit a cigarette, and watched the plaza scene for another moment before picking a random alley to follow and try to find his wife.

Cohen moved along the street and crossed a canal and then he crossed another canal and he seemed to have merged into more of a local neighborhood. He passed a grocery store, a Laundromat, an appliance store, and a flower shop. A woman came out of a doorway with a dog on a leash and in another doorway a bicycle leaned against the wall. Cohen walked until he was out of the neighborhood and into a retail shopping district, a series of store-lined streets with sleek, scantily dressed mannequins and shiny jewelry and Venetian-made glass vases in the different windows.

He looked for a running woman. The day was warming and he was sweating some on his face and neck and now he was really worried. He noticed the dead ends where the water was stagnant and the alleys covered in shadows and he realized there were a thousand places to drop and disappear. He kept walking and smoking and looking and he came to a plaza that he recognized from the day before and it seemed he was making some sort of circle back toward the hotel. Maybe she’s back, he thought, but the thought only lasted an instant and he decided to call out. He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Elisa!”

Movement in the plaza paused and people looked at him.

He took advantage of the quiet and again yelled, “Elisa!”

From a window somewhere an unfriendly voice yelled back so he kept walking. As he walked he continued to call out, the echo of his voice sometimes shooting along a passageway and sometimes falling dead in a dead end. He called out and walked more briskly and even looked into the canals as his imagination pictured a floating running shoe or running watch or her beautiful bare back afloat in the still tepid water.

He came to the intersection of five streets and in the middle of the intersection was a statue of a conquered winged lion with a woman in a long, flowing gown, wielding a spear, sitting on top of the lion. Cohen climbed up on the lion, stepped from the lion’s head into the woman’s lap, and managed to get on her shoulders so he could have a better view. A store owner came out of a gift shop and yelled at Cohen, pointing and waving and clapping his hands. Another Venetian passing by joined with the store owner. Cohen ignored them and from his perch looked down each street, screamed out her name. The store owner came closer to Cohen, waving his arms and shouting and Cohen jumped down from the statue and yelled back at the man and the man backed off. Cohen then turned in a circle, looking at all the streets, trying to decide what to do and sweating more now than before.

He realized he hadn’t left a note or word with the front desk and that if she had returned, she would be wondering what had happened to him. So he started running. He ran in what he thought was the general direction of the hotel, hoping to find a familiar street that would take him there. He called her name. Screamed her name. He paused at the ends of streets and looked both ways, he looked down into the canals when he went over a bridge. He hurried but tried not to miss anything.

He ran down a long alley and then cut across a canal and ran along another long alley and up ahead he saw people passing on the street. He believed that it was the street of his hotel and he was right. He turned onto the street and after several minutes he recognized buildings and the hotel sign came into sight and then he saw, almost to the doorway, Elisa walking with her arm draped around a short woman in a long skirt. Elisa leaned on the woman and they inched along and Cohen raced and he caught them as they made it to the door.

“Elisa,” he said, out of breath. He saw that she held a rag on her forehead and it was dabbed in blood and he grabbed and hugged her though she still leaned on the woman.

“She okay. She okay,” the short woman said, pushing Cohen away, and then she moved Elisa’s arm from around her neck as if to say, Here you go, she’s yours. The woman’s glasses were held by a silver chain around her neck and she had kind, wrinkled eyes.

“I’m all right,” Elisa said, laughing a little and reaching for Cohen. “You look freaked out.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Got lost. Like we said I would.”

The woman made a fist and bonked her own forehead. “Head hit on ceiling,” she said.

“Street,” Elisa said and she pointed at the ground. “Head hit on street.”

“Okay. Good.”

“Head what?” Cohen asked. Her arm was around his neck and she held her hand out to the woman. The woman took her hand and Elisa said, “Thank you so much. Grazie so much.”

“You okay?” the woman asked, nodding.

Cohen stuck his hand in his pocket and took out some money and tried to give it to her but she wouldn’t take it and she backed away, nodding and saying, “Okay, good. Okay, good.”

“Grazie,” Elisa said again and the woman waved and turned and went back her way.

Cohen and Elisa moved inside the hotel and sat down at a table by the bar. She fell into a chair and moved the rag from her head and she was cut and swollen above her eyebrow.

“Goshdammit,” Cohen said.

One of the teenagers passing by saw Elisa’s eye and Cohen stepped behind the bar. He took a clean rag and wet it with cold water and gave it to her. “Something else?” he asked and she said no and told him thanks.

“I’m stupid,” she said.

“You’re not stupid, but what happened?”

“Running. Lost. Tripped like I almost had about a hundred times already trying to run on these stones and bricks and hit forehead-first. Knocked me a little loopy. Then that woman walked up and found me. Helped me sit up and I guess she lived right there ’cause she went in a building and came back out with the rag and some water.”

Cohen reached over and wiped a trail of blood and water from the side of her face. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I told you that you’re not supposed to exercise on vacation.”

“I get it now.”

He touched her hand that held the rag and moved it from her eye. It was about to stop bleeding. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

“Does it look like it hurts?”

“Yep.”

“Then it hurts.”

He moved her hand and rag back to the cut and said, “I’ll be right back.” He went upstairs to the room and found a bottle of Tylenol and went back down to the bar. No one was around so he went behind the bar and got her a bottle of water and himself a beer.

He sat down at the table and handed her three pills. She looked at them. Looked at him. Looked at his beer and her water.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

He got up again and took another beer from the cooler. He grabbed a bottle opener from the bar top and he sat down and opened the beers and slid one to her. She took the pills, stuck them in her mouth, and washed them down with the cold beer.

“Now that makes a girl feel better,” she said as she set the bottle down on the table.

Cohen reached into his pocket and took out the Lucky Strikes. He picked up his beer and let out an extended sigh. She winked at him with the eye not covered by the rag. The anxiety of separation fell from them but didn’t disappear.

“No more solo excursions,” he said.

She shrugged.

“I mean it,” he said.

“Should we leash ourselves together?”

“If we have to,” he said. He reached over and moved the rag from her face and looked at the cut, swollen and red. He then replaced the rag and said, “Just drink your beer.”

20

MARIPOSA HAD STOOD AT HER window and watched. When she saw Cohen come out of the trailer and walk to where he slept, she waited to see if a light would come on. When it didn’t, she figured he must have gone to sleep so she waited. While she waited, she watched the commotion. A couple of the other women and Aggie went in and out of the trailer and when the door opened and there was some light she saw the blood on their hands and arms and shirts and then she finally saw a bloody mess wrapped in Ava’s arms and she wondered if it was dead or alive. The door closed for a while and when it opened again Ava held a bundle wrapped in white and she walked out into the rain, Aggie holding her by the arm, and across to his trailer and it seemed as if he or she had made it. For now.

She looked again to where Cohen slept. Still only black inside.

She put on her coat and when she got to the door she remembered that she was locked in. But she turned the handle anyway and found it unlocked and she figured in the madness Aggie must have forgotten the doors. She walked out and the wind slapped the rain against her face and with her head down she moved to his door. She paused, looked around, saw them bustling back and forth in the trailer where Lorna lay.

Then she put her hand on his trailer door handle, turned it slowly, opened the door, and slid inside.

She moved in the dark. Didn’t see him. Didn’t hear him at first.

Then he snored.

He was facedown on the mattress, his arms and legs spread out as if he were free-falling. He breathed big and heavy, and her eyes adjusted some and she moved over toward him and knelt next to the mattress. He was still wearing his coat and his muddy boots and they hung off the edge of the mattress.

She took a candle and a lighter out of her coat and she lit the candle and set it on the floor. She removed her coat and laid it on the floor, then put her hands on his left boot and felt for the laces and untied and loosened them. She tugged some. He didn’t move. She wiggled it and the boot gave and she pulled it off, and then she did the same to the right one. He grunted once and heaved but didn’t turn and didn’t wake.

She heard voices outside and she stood and looked out. Two others were moving across the compound, going back to where they slept. The light was off in Lorna’s trailer.

Mariposa knelt again. She listened to him breathing. Listened to the random snore. Listened to the rain and the wind. Listened to the words in her head that wanted to come out and then she let them out in whispers.

“I know what you came for,” she started. “I know you came for her. What’s left of her. What’s left of it all. I know what you came for.”

She paused. Put her hand on the back of his leg.

“Don’t let him keep you,” she whispered. “Don’t be like him. But I know you’re not that way. I already know it.”

She paused again. Removed her hand.

It was the first time in a long time that she had spoken to someone without angst, without vehemence, without fear.

Her hair was held back with a rubber band and she reached behind and pulled it out. Then she eased herself onto the mattress. Cohen snorted and raised his head for a brief moment. Then it fell and he continued on in his restless sleep. Mariposa leaned first on her elbows, waited on him to settle some, and then she let herself down and lay quietly beside him.

SOMEWHERE ELSE. NO COUNTRYSIDE. NO beach. No pastures or barbed wire or crepe myrtles. A concrete world where he walked down a city street on a normal day with normal people up and down the sidewalks and in and out of the stores. Looking at the street signs but in a language that he didn’t understand and there was nothing distinct about this place. He walked on, looking into store windows, stepping into bars and looking around the tables, stopping at a pay phone and dialing and then ringing and ringing and no answer and hanging up and walking on. Newspaper stands and vendors selling hot dogs and a woman in a tight silver dress smoking a cigarette in front of a dress shop. A dog without a collar sniffing at a garbage can. The random honk of a car horn and he walked on, looking in the windows, looking at himself in the reflection. His hands were cold and he blew on them as he walked and then he was lost, stopping and looking back over his shoulder to see if he could recognize which direction he had come, walking on another block or two or three, stopping and spinning and trying to figure where he was or where he was going or how to get back or anything. He tried to ask but no one understood what he was asking and they hurried past or snapped back at him in annoyance or pushed him. He walked on and everything looked the same and he couldn’t figure out what or who he was looking for and with each step the anxiety grew until he was calling out for help but none of the strangers responded and then there was a sudden, heavy rush of clouds and they disappeared inside stores and apartment buildings but he had nowhere to go and he stood and watched the black clouds suffocate the daylight and then he felt the body beside him and he turned but no one was there but he felt the body again and then he opened his eyes and there was the darkness of the night and there was the thing beside him that he had felt in his dream.

He was on his back. The low glow of the candle across the room. She was lying next to him and he turned and saw her black hair and he knew. For a reason he didn’t understand, he wasn’t startled. He lay still and waited to see if she was awake or asleep and he felt her body move in slow breaths and she was sleeping. He picked his head up and her hair was across his arm and then he took his hand and lifted the long black hair and laid it across her back. She breathed a heavy breath and he put his arm down and was still. He was still and he was warm with this body close to him. It was an alien feeling. A natural feeling. And he didn’t understand why she had come and he didn’t understand why he didn’t get up or why he wasn’t in a rage and he was relieved that in the dark it didn’t have to make any sense. He lay still and warm and felt her breathing and he closed his eyes and let it be.

When he woke several hours later, she wasn’t there, and a strange light came in the trailer window. He sat up and felt as if he were moving about in a dream where he couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t real. He wondered if her body against his had been a part of his imagination but then the truth of her body settled against him and he rubbed his eyes and the back of his neck and felt a complacency in the thought of someone there.

On the floor next to the mattress was his shoe box. On top of the box were Elisa’s wedding rings, her earrings, her necklaces. Next to the box was the envelope, the letters and documents inside.

He sat up and leaned to the side. He felt in his back pocket for her picture and it was still there. Then he took her jewelry and he lifted the lid of the shoe box and put the photograph and jewelry with the rest and then he replaced the lid and lay back down and looked out of the window at the sunshine.

THE WOMEN CONGREGATED IN THE middle of the circle of trailers and talked about the miracles.

“Look at it,” one of them said.

“I swear to God it almost looks fake,” another said.

The group of women stared admiringly up into the crystal-blue sky as if today were the day of its creation. The storm had moved on and in its wake was a clarity that had been forgotten. No clouds. Only the sun in the afternoon sky. A calm wind.

The other miracle was being passed around between them. He had been cleaned and he slept wrapped in a blanket and none of the women could believe he was alive.

21

COHEN STOOD OUT IN THE field. A low ribbon of pink wrapping the late-afternoon horizon. His hands stuffed in his pockets and the blade wiped clean and back in its sheath and his weight on his good leg. Aggie had not said anything to him as he limped out of the trailer and past the ashes of the fire and out into the field but he could feel the man’s eyes on him. Could sense his pleasure in discovering what Cohen was capable of doing. Could feel the strength of the unknown.

He wondered what would happen if he started walking. How far he would get before the rifle rang and a point in his body burned and he lay still like a hunted animal. He was a couple of hundred yards from the tree line and the grass was high and he thought he could drop and crawl but his leg was lame and he didn’t want to be hunted down and killed while he was crawling. He’d rather be dead standing up. Birds passed above and there was movement in the tall grass from the small things that needed the break in the weather to find food. He stared south and imagined the water of the calm morning, crawling onto the dilapidated shore quietly, as if careful not to wake it. The emptiness of the ocean and the stretch of the water and the sky, meeting on a seemingly infinite horizon, and he remembered standing on the beach as a boy. His eyes looking out into nothing. Imagining the men, hundreds of years ago, who had stared out across that vast expanse and braved its uncertainty as they loaded ships and said goodbye to their families and hoisted sails and drifted away, the love of land and man overcome by the curiosity of what might be. Drifting away, their homelands becoming smaller and smaller and then disappearing in the distance, the questions out before them like great constellations. Their minds filled with notions of sea dragons rising from the depths, swallowing them whole or burning them with fire or wrapping and squeezing them until the blood ran out. Swirling black whirlpools that could swallow entire fleets, sucking them down into bottomless, twisting graves. Or a world that would simply end. An edge to sail to and then fall off of and fall off into what?

Cohen had played these games in his head as a boy, standing waist-deep in the ocean, and he played them now as a man, looking out toward a limitless sky, curious about those men and what was held in their imaginations and had they been disappointed, at least a little, to find that the wildest creations of their minds could not be true. That there was only rock and sand on the other side that was not much different from the rock and sand they had departed from. That the fountains of life and the mountains of rubies and pearls did not exist any more than the spear-headed, long-necked monsters. Or was the world unknown enough for them no matter what it held? No matter what they found or whom they saw when they got there but simply that it was unknown to them and that was plenty to feed their hunger. Plenty to fill their spirit to the highest plateau. Plenty to reward their risks. The unknown was enough and then some and Cohen thought now as he looked south toward the ribboned horizon that this would have been the perfect place for that kind of man.

He reached down and picked at the dried, crusted blood on his leg. Behind him the women remained, looking at the baby, talking softly to one another as if passing on sensitive information. Ava held him, his pink head poking out of the top of the blanket and his eyes half-open and his mouth stretching in a feeble cry. In between whispers they made soothing sounds to the infant, dirty fingers reaching out to the child and touching his soft head and swelled cheeks. Aggie pulled dry wood out from a storage trailer and he worked to get the fire going while they huddled and embraced the new day. Evan and his small brother gathered wet wood and put it in the storage trailer, leaving the women and child to themselves. Cohen heard them but did not turn and look. He watched the sky and thought of the explorers.

HE WAS STILL STARING WHEN the blond-haired boy walked up behind him and said, “I didn’t mean nothing that day.”

Cohen turned around and faced him. The boy’s hair was slick and flat against his head and he held one hand to his mouth to keep it warm and with the other he held the hand of a young boy.

“I really didn’t,” he said. “Kinda had to.”

“Kinda had to what?”

The boy looked back over his shoulder and Aggie was watching them. He lowered his voice as if the old man had a magical ability to hear all. “Nothing.”

Cohen looked down at the small boy and hobbled closer to them. “Who are you?” he asked.

“This here is my little brother. He’s why I did what I did out there.” The small boy wore a denim coat buttoned to the top, and a scarf was coiled around his neck and up above his mouth. He held a half-deflated football tucked under his arm.

“You got a name?”

“Which one of us?”

“Either. Both.”

“I’m Evan and he’s Brisco.”

“What’s he got to do with you and that girl back there trying to kill me?”

Evan shook his head and said, “I wasn’t trying to kill nobody.”

“You shot at me.”

“Didn’t nothing come out.”

“That ain’t the point.”

“The point is I didn’t want to. I told you, Aggie keeps Brisco when he sends me and Mariposa out looking around. So he knows I’ll come back. And it’s best to come back with something.”

Cohen looked past the boys. Aggie was smoking a cigarette. His eyes on them. The women passing the baby around behind him. The smoke from the young fire rising and mingling with Aggie’s cigarette smoke like a team of serpents stretching up into a watchful perch. Mariposa stood alone, leaning against a trailer, and watched them.

“Cover your ears up, Brisco,” Evan said and the boy put his pale hands over his ears. Then Evan said softly, “You kill Joe?”

Cohen paused and tried to figure how to answer. He didn’t know if he wanted them to know that he’d never killed a man. Never shot at a man. Never shot at all except to shoot back in the direction of gunfire to let them know to go the other way. He knew they would talk about him and wonder about him, so he said, “Yeah.”

Evan reached down and picked the top off a blade of tall grass. “Good,” he said. Then he moved Brisco’s hands off his ears.

Cohen blew on his hands and rubbed at his face. The small boy moved the football from one arm to the other and then he tossed it to Evan.

“Go long,” Evan said and Brisco took off, not looking back and quickly out of range of a deflated football. “Hold up,” Evan called and Brisco hit the brakes. Evan let fly of the wobbly, saggy ball and it short-hopped Brisco.

“Practice kicking,” Evan told him. Brisco tucked the ball and ran a quick circle. Then he tried to drop it and kick it but it didn’t work out and he lost his balance and fell to the ground. But he laughed at himself and got up and started trying again.

With the small boy out of earshot, Cohen asked Evan what the hell was going on out here.

Evan moved his eyes back and forth. Said, “Maybe I shouldn’t.”

“Go on,” Cohen said. “Talk low. It’s all right.”

Evan’s eyes moved across the landscape again, but then he started talking. Said it began with Aggie and Joe and that woman over there named Ava. Said that from what he could tell, them three had gone around like Good Samaritans, picking up stragglers here and there. Finding people along the road or hid back up in houses or wherever and told them they had food and a safe place if they’d come on. Sometimes it’d be two or three people and they’d bring them out here and give them a trailer to sleep in and feed them a couple of days. Pray with them. Preach to them. All that shit. But they’d only pick up women or women with a man and then when they’d get out here, they’d tell the man they was going hunting and they’d walk out in the woods and shoot him dead. Next thing there’d be a lock on the door and that woman wasn’t going nowhere. They got some plan for mankind or something like that. Aggie thinks he’s got something to do with Jesus or God or at least that’s what he’ll tell you. Evan looked out at Brisco as he talked and he had the stare of someone who had seen a lot in a short amount of time, but in his voice remained the charming tone of youth.

Cohen stared at him. Evan’s cheeks and eyes thin and hard. “And you. Where’d he find you?” Cohen asked.

“Found me and him the same as the others. We were with my uncle but my uncle disappeared on us and we was walking up Highway 49 when him and Joe pulled up beside us. We didn’t know what else to do but to go with them. I couldn’t let Brisco starve. They was real nice at first. Then they locked us up like everybody else.”

“But he didn’t take you hunting?”

Evan shook his head. “No. Not yet.”

“And what about the girl?”

“She was here when we got here. She won’t tell me nothing else.”

Cohen looked across toward the camp. Aggie was drinking coffee now, not looking at them.

“Why ain’t I dead?” Cohen asked.

“Guess for the same reason I ain’t and Brisco ain’t. He’s a old man and he can’t make all these women have babies by himself. Joe did that. So he don’t want to kill us. He wants to convert us.”

“For the sake of the human race,” Cohen said.

Evan shrugged. “I reckon.”

Brisco got the hang of it and kicked the ball a couple of times but grew tired of it. He ran back over to Evan and tossed him the ball again.

“How come y’all don’t run off?”

“It ain’t that easy,” Evan said, tossing the ball back to his little brother.

“No. I guess not.” Cohen then nodded in the direction of the women and asked if that was all of them.

Evan looked a minute, then said, “Yeah. That’s it. Minus Lorna.”

Cohen shook his head some, replayed that instant with her. The screaming and the swipe of the blade and the moment of disbelief from all of them. Then he told the boys that he wasn’t going to be staying around.

“That’s what I said, too,” Evan said. “But I ain’t got nowhere else to go. I’d rather be alive here than dead out there.” He reached down and took Brisco by the hand. “There ain’t much more of a decision than that,” he said, and then he and the boy turned and walked back toward the others.

Cohen let them go a few steps and then he said, “Hey.”

They stopped and looked back at him.

“That girl. What’s her name?”

“Mariposa.”

Evan started to walk off again but Cohen called him again and when he and Brisco stopped, Cohen walked over. He reached into his front pocket and he pulled out the pair of baby socks. He handed them to Evan and told him to take them to whoever had the baby.

THE WOMEN SPENT THE DAY with the look of apprehension. Joe had been gone for days now and the women were savvy enough to realize that he wasn’t coming back, and even if he were, he wasn’t there now, and half of the strength that had held them was missing. They didn’t know the man with the gunshot in his leg but he didn’t seem to care about what was happening. He had the same formless look on his face that they all had as the blunt finality that awaited each of them came like a siren in Lorna’s cries. You can get used to anything. That was something that each of them had come to realize and accept but now as the sun unexpectedly spread out across the land, with Joe disappeared, with the infant fighting to live, and with Lorna dead, the sense of rebellion rose silently in them and they looked at one another as if to say, This can no longer be.

They were careful about what they said around Ava, as she had been working on Aggie’s side for as long as any of them had been there. Sometimes they walked around in groups of two or three out in the fields or around the fire and they spoke to one another in the low, serious voices of people who were plotting or gun-shy or both. There was that apprehension in their expressions but also something more. They had heard the screams in the night. They were aware of Lorna’s suffering and her fate, and while they had known there would be combat with the pain, none of them was the least bit interested in going through what Lorna had been through. They squinted and their cheeks tightened as they spoke to one another about the moment that was to come for each of them. Caution in their voices and anxiety in their hearts and agreeing with no hesitation that this first episode of deliverance in this place should also be the last. And if we’re going to do anything about it, we got to do it now. God knows when there’ll be another day like this.

The afternoon wore on and the clear sky disappeared. A soft rain fell and deep gray clouds sat across the Gulf and promised more. The women spoke less but seemed to communicate with their eyes and bends of the mouth and each of them expressed the same thing. He is one man and there can be no more of this. Throughout the day, as they began to help gather wood, stacking the branches and limbs in the storage trailer, or preparing food, or washing out clothes in silver bins, they moved with calculated, robotlike motions, cutting their eyes at one another, as if there were some countdown going on in each of their heads.

Cohen sat on an upright cinder block with his shot leg extended. Twice Mariposa had come over and sat down beside him and twice Aggie had told her to get up and go help the others.

Twilight arrived and the rain was steady and all was gray. They moved around in big coats, hoods over heads, shoulders slumped from the hours, days, weeks spent out in the rain.

Aggie called on Cohen to help him hook up a trailer to the back of a truck. Cohen got up and hobbled out into the field where the trucks and trailers sat.

It was a ten-foot-long flat trailer that wasn’t the work of two men and Cohen basically stood there while Aggie dropped the trailer onto the hitch. When he was done, he raised up and wiped the rain from his face and said, “Just so you know, there may be an example set here before this day is done. Don’t like the looks of it all. The birth caused a tremor. A tremor when there should be rejoicing.”

“Somebody died,” Cohen said. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong.”

“Life was given for life and there should be no crying over that. There should be no crying over the beginning. And I see desperation. And desperate people need a message. They need reminding. And if one of them so much as flinches I’m gonna goddamn remind them in a way they won’t forget.”

Cohen didn’t answer. He pulled a broken cigarette and lighter from his shirt pocket.

“Don’t you get no bright ideas either or you’ll be laying with the dog,” Aggie said. He took a step closer to Cohen. “You might start thinking about your place here. About what has been set at your feet. You look around a little more closely and you might see something different from what you think you see.”

Cohen snapped off the broken piece of the cigarette, bent over to hide it from the weather, and lit the stump. He looked away from Aggie, and he noticed two shovels in the bed of the truck. “What’s all this for?” he asked.

“We going digging. Me and you and that boy. But we gonna wait till it gets dark.”

Cohen sucked on the cigarette, then said, “I got some news before we go, you should know.”

“Yeah. What?”

“If you think I’m going off to dig my own grave, you might as well go ahead and shoot me dead in this spot.”

Aggie shook his head. Laughed. “Jesus, boy. We ain’t digging no graves. We going to dig up that money.”

Cohen shook his head. “Not you, too.”

“Trunkfuls. Ain’t no telling how much it is.”

Cohen was quickly done with the short cigarette and he tossed it. He’d seen and heard enough about the hunt for the money. The groups of men he’d seen working around the same spot. The shots that had been fired that had caused some of them to drop and the others to scatter.

Aggie stepped back from Cohen. He bent down and yanked on the trailer hitch to make sure it was secure and then he raised up and said, “So see, you put everything together and you might end up a man with all he needs.”

“You and everybody else who thinks there’s money buried somewhere along the beach are out of your goddamn minds.”

“That right there is what the man who won’t find it will say.”

“Won’t nobody find it. ’Cause it ain’t there. It’s crazy to even be trying.”

“Crazy, huh?”

“Yeah. Crazy. Just like the rest of this shit,” Cohen said and he turned and waved his arm around the place.

Aggie propped his hands on his hips. Bent his dark eyebrows. “Crazy?” he asked again.

Cohen nodded. “Batshit.”

Aggie nodded a little. He took a few steps away from Cohen, turned and took a few steps back to him. “Crazier than living down here in a house with dead people?” he asked in a low, deliberate voice.

Cohen’s certainty disappeared. He stared back at the man but didn’t know what to say.

“I know you,” Aggie continued, speaking slowly. “I know you. I seen everything. Read everything in that envelope. I saw where you were. What you were doing. I put her rings on my pinky finger. Sniffed them little love notes in that sweet little box you kept shoved up under the bed. Saw them baby clothes and them dresses still hanging in the closet. Don’t tell me nothing about crazy. You ain’t no different from nobody else down here, including me. Crazy comes in lots of different ways. And you got as much in you as anybody else.”

He stopped. Waited for Cohen to answer. When he didn’t, Aggie walked past him and across the field toward the trailers. Cohen heard him call to the women and he followed, wanting to see what Aggie had to say.

When Aggie was in the middle of the circle, he waved them into their line. Cohen stood back from them, leaning against a trailer.

Aggie told them to close their eyes and then he prayed in his gravelly voice, thanking God that there was a place for them to live and love and breathe and hide themselves from the thunder. Thank you God that we are on the higher ground and that there is food for our bellies and fire to warm our hands and safety in the night from the wolves who patrol these lands for the taste of helpless flesh. Thank you God that this beautiful child has come to us and our family has multiplied and in this child we can see today and tomorrow and forever and this sunshine is your answer to us that you love us and approve of what has come. And this place is our home and your winds are your might and do not let me hesitate to strike down those that rise against you and me. And I will not hesitate to strike.

It was almost dark, an ominous deep gray surrounding them. The rain fell straight and Aggie pushed the hood back from his head and welcomed it on his face and head. As he prayed, he stroked the butt of the revolver that stuck out of his pants. As he prayed, his brow grew tense and he held a fist toward the dripping sky and he reared back his head and closed his eyes and then he was taken away. The hand came off the revolver and then both hands were stretched out before him and in his mind he was back there before them, the pulsing of the chanting and the organ music as he moved his arms around in dancelike motions, the imaginary snake in his hands, its sleek, poisonous body intertwined with his own and the heat of the hot, strip-mall church and the energy of those out in front of him, praising and chanting and speaking in no discernible language, and he moved the imaginary snake from arm to arm, moved it around the back of his neck and down his chest and then back into his hands and the entire time he prayed out to God, You are the power and the glory and this land belongs to You and bring them on, bring them on and deliver us and wash away that which is unclean and may my own strength be like Your strength and we will inhabit this land and keep it pure and we will multiply and be with the beasts and create for You the sons of thunder.

He went on and on, his words filled with conviction and his neck muscles taut and he began to twist his hands and arms, wringing the snake like a wet towel, the feeling that he needed something to kill rising up through him and as he prayed for strength and prayed for vengeance against those who would question the way, my way and Your way, dear God, he became so lost in his own power and might that he never saw the women rush on him and before he could rid himself of the fury of his prayer, he was on his back with his arms pinned and his legs pinned and his own revolver pressed against his lips like the biting kiss of a fierce lover and the snake had crawled away.

22

NONE OF THEM WAS SURE what to do with him. They hadn’t thought that far ahead. Several wanted to kill him with his own gun. Several others wanted to lock him up and let him starve. Still another wanted to cut off his manhood and throw it out in the field for the buzzards and as soon as he bled to death, do the same with the rest of him.

With the help of Cohen and Evan they had tied him to the back end of a cattle trailer in the field. His arms were stretched out wide, and he was sitting on the ground, and he was bound at the wrists, elbows, around his neck, and around his chest. The baby was taken out of Ava’s arms and they made clear to her that she had a choice, die with Aggie or live with us. She decided she’d rather keep on living. No sooner had her decision been made than two of the women who weren’t pregnant began to dig through the pile of keys they had taken from Aggie. They found the keys to one of the trucks that they knew would run and without another word, without packing a change of clothes or any food or water, they went for the truck and the engine dragged a few times but then it cranked. Before they could get turned around and headed toward the road, three more women had run and gotten into the back of the truck and they were gone.

That left the pregnant woman and two not pregnant and Evan and Mariposa and Brisco. And the less-than-a-day-old child. Cohen rubbed at his beard and looked around and then he knelt on the ground and began looking through the keys for the Jeep key. He picked it out and stood and put it in his pocket and then he walked out to where Aggie was tied and he reached into Aggie’s shirt pocket and took his cigarettes and lighter. The rain beat against the rusted iron trailer like some random back-alley drumbeat outside a late-night Royal Street blues bar.

“You could be my brother,” Aggie said to him in a humbled voice.

Cohen looked at him and shook his head and covered and lit a cigarette. When he walked back to them, they were standing in a circle, holding hands, and the pregnant woman was crying. They were wet and worn but it didn’t seem to matter. Seemed like they had accepted that they were part of what came from the sky. He looked around for Mariposa but didn’t see her. Cohen let them be, not wanting to intrude on the things that they had suffered together, and he went into the trailer that had belonged to Joe. Clothes were scattered about and there were empty plastic bottles and empty beer and whiskey bottles on the counter and a bowl filled with cigarette butts on the floor next to the bed. Cohen found a pair of jeans that looked about right and he tossed them over his shoulder and walked out of Joe’s trailer and over to the trailer where the woman had given birth to the child.

He opened the door and was greeted with the smell of the sick and the dead and he stepped back. There wasn’t much light now but he leaned his head inside and he looked at the woman, covered in crimson, her legs spread and her arms at her side and her head fallen over with an open mouth. He looked at her and then he stepped in and stood at the foot of the bed.

There was dried blood underneath his feet. The sheet across her legs had stuck to her and her naked breasts were smeared dark red. Her bare feet were sticking out of the end of the sheet. Her hands so still against her, never having held her own. The moment replayed in his mind like some memory of a horrific dream and he shook his head to rid himself of it and then he looked around and found the black bag. It was open on a short table next to the bed along with a stack of towels and a gallon of water. He looked inside and found the spray and gauze that Aggie had used on him. He took off his pants, unwrapped the bandage from his leg and washed it with the water. Then he sprayed the wound, front and back, and he wrapped a fresh bandage around his thigh. When he was satisfied with his work, he put on the jeans he had taken from Joe’s trailer, then he looked at the woman again. She seemed almost otherworldly, an apparition from the underworld sent to warn them.

He bowed his head and whispered an unfinished sentence. He listened to the rain. And then there came a great boom of thunder that echoed across the night. He wondered if something of his had been lost. Or maybe something had been found.

When he came out they had broken from their circle and begun to plunder through the trailers that Aggie always kept them from. All of them but Mariposa, who stood alone, staring at Cohen, as if waiting for him.

Cohen limped over to her. He held out a cigarette but she shook her head. “You don’t look like you’d be much in a fight,” he said. “But my neck still hurts some.”

Mariposa folded her arms. “You gonna lead us out of here?” she asked.

Cohen smoked. Thought about it. “That sounds kinda biblical. I’m guessing y’all have had enough of that.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“I’m about like everybody else here.”

She let her arms fall to her sides. “Not really,” she said. She looked away from him, at the others plundering through the stockpile of food, water, clothes. Cohen watched her and what he noticed now was her youth. Half my age, he thought. At least.

Aggie hollered out something that Cohen didn’t make out. He then called out very clearly for Ava. She was crossing the compound and she stopped and looked in his direction. He called her again. Ava looked around and saw Cohen and Mariposa and she shook her head and moved on to her trailer.

Mariposa said, “Somewhere I got somebody.” She looked at Cohen again. What he noticed now wasn’t her youth but in her expression, in her deep-set eyes and the bend of her thin lips, he saw something contradicting that youth, far removed from innocence by no fault of her own.

“I got family,” she continued. “Somewhere.”

Cohen nodded.

“Like you,” she said.

He felt like there was something he wanted to say, but he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know who she was. Didn’t know if he wanted to find out. Didn’t want to care. Didn’t want to talk to her about her life or his life or anything that mattered. He thought of simply walking away but didn’t have to when Brisco came bounding out of a trailer with an armful of Coke cans. He dropped one and kicked it over toward Cohen and Mariposa and then he walked to them and handed them each a can. “There’s a whole bunch,” he said.

Cohen looked down at Brisco and said, “How old are you?”

The boy set the other cans on the ground, lifted his arm, and slid his jacket sleeve under his nose, and then he only shrugged.

“You don’t know how old you are?”

“I know.”

“Okay.” He waited on the child to continue but he didn’t and then Cohen didn’t have to worry about walking away from Mariposa because she turned and walked away from him. Brisco headed back toward the trailer. The women had finished their plunder and gone in from the rain.

There was a murmur of thunder and a flash off to the west. Cohen looked down at the ground and watched the rain splatter in the red mud.

Then he walked over to Mariposa’s trailer. A low glow of light leaked behind a shirt or sheet or something hung across the window. A concrete block below the door. He stepped up onto the block and stood close to the door, so close that if he leaned forward, his nose would bump it. He heard her moving inside. He lifted his hand and touched his wet fingertips to the wet door and he wondered what she was doing. He wondered why she had come to him like she had, in the middle of the night, no words, no want, only coming to him quietly and almost reverently and lying there with him. He wondered how he had known it was her, how when he woke in the dark and felt the body that he had known it was the girl with the black hair. He wondered why it hadn’t startled him and he wondered why he hadn’t moved away from her. He wondered why it felt like it had and he wondered what it might feel like again, if it would be the same, tranquil and assuring, or if it would cause disgust and guilt and cause him to run. Inside the trailer, her movement stopped and he wondered what she was doing. He wondered what he was doing. His head tilted forward and he rested his forehead on the door.

“You can come in,” he heard her say.

He lifted his head.

“It’s okay,” she said.

He slid his hand from the door and slowly moved it to the door handle and there was more lightning and for a split second he saw his shadow on the door.

He let go of the handle, stepped down off the block, and backed away.

He turned from her door and walked over to Aggie’s truck and took a shovel out of the truck bed. Then he walked down the driveway toward the dog. The rain was coming on and the thunder more frequent. He couldn’t see and he tripped over the dog when he came to it. He knelt and scratched its soggy head and its body was cold and stiff. He moved off the gravel and started digging. The earth was soaked and gave easily and when he had a hole big enough, he set the dog’s body down into it and he covered it with mud and rocks. He said I’m sorry I got you into this and then he bowed his head and said amen.

He picked up the shovel again and he took ten steps away from the dog’s grave and sank the shovel into the ground. He dug and dug, fighting the water running down into the hole, but finally managing to get farther down to where it was easier to dig. He worked for nearly an hour until he was standing down in the hole, almost waist-deep, and he thought it was both deep enough and long enough. He tossed the shovel and climbed out of the big hole and he walked back up the driveway and to the trailers. Lights were off inside all the trailers but hers. His hands were aching and blistered and he wiped them on his wet pants and then he walked over to the trailer where Lorna lay. He opened the door and felt around on the floor and found a blanket and he was glad that it was dark so he didn’t have to see her. He spread the blanket beside her and rolled her body over and he wrapped her in it, careful to cover her head and her feet as if to salvage some bit of dignity. She was heavier than he thought she would be but he lifted her underneath her knees and shoulders and they moved out of the trailer and into the rain. He looked across and Mariposa’s light was off.

But from the corner of her window, she watched him.

When he had moved back out into the dark, she lit a candle and turned to a plastic bag next to her mattress. In the bag were the dresses she had taken from Elisa’s closet. She laid them across the mattress, three of them. A white sundress. A black long-sleeve with a low neckline. Another with pastel blue and pink flowers that looked like it could’ve been worn with a bonnet on Easter Sunday. She stood back and admired them. Imagined the places they had been. For what occasion each had been worn. Imagined Cohen’s hands helping to remove them from her body. Mariposa put her hand to her chin, the pose of decision. After a thoughtful moment, she began to undress, and soon she stood in the candlelight, chill bumps up and down her legs and arms. She picked up the black dress and put it on.

23

IN HIS PREDICAMENT, THE ONLY thing Aggie could do was think. And he did. He thought of the sweaty nights in the sweaty room with the sweaty snakes slithering through his arms and around his neck and waist as the organ played and the people sang and shouted. Thought of how it moved them and how the men wanted to shake his hand and the women wanted to be led by him and how he did lead them all the way and how good it felt when they were only nodding, no matter what he asked them to do. He thought of fists against his face in barrooms and the thrill ride of whiskey and the summer dark and he thought of nights in jail staring out of a square window at a black dotted sky when he felt like he was at the bottom of a well.

He thought of the anarchy of the evacuations and how it filled him to be alive in the midst of the panic and he thought of once when he was a boy and a man who was living with him and his mother had slammed her against the wall and he thought of the knife he had stuck in the back of the man’s leg later as he slept on their couch and the sound the man had made as the blade sank in. He thought of the work he had done to gather a community and he thought of the crying of the newborn child and he thought of the purity of the rising sun across the horizon in the morning after a storm. He sat there, tied to the trailer, the rain on him as if he were nothing more than a tree stump, and he imagined that the thunder was calling out to him, a voice from somewhere out there speaking to him in a language that only he could understand. He soaked in the rain and listened to the thunder and his arms ached from being stretched and tied. What more can you give to them? What more can they want? It has always been like this, they did the same thing to Him. He gave them all they could want and all they could need. He showed them the path to glory and they tortured Him, spit on Him, watched Him bleed and bleed and bleed. And now here I am and all I did was protect them, shelter them, feed them. All I did was lead them through the storms, a watchful shepherd and his flock, and now I can scream out in the night and they will hear me and no one will come. Not a one. It has always been like this. And it always will be.

He thought of how this was going to end, realizing the things he had gained and the things he had lost, and it almost seemed to him like these thoughts were the thoughts of another man’s life.

SINCE THE MOMENT THAT CHARLIE first heard the rumors of the buried money, he had begun to lose interest in his truck and his deliveries below the Line and the small bills he got in exchange for his assortment of small goods. Initially he had figured it was like the other ridiculous news that had been delivered to the Gulf Coast over the years. The prediction that the storms would not stop and would become more harrowing. The prediction that they could go on for years. The prediction that the government was thinking of drawing some bullshit line that you weren’t supposed to cross over. All of it had seemed so far-fetched at one time. Yet all of it had been true. And the rumor of this buried money seemed to Charlie exactly like these other bits of fairy-tale information that had come to fruition. So strange that it had to be right. And he wasn’t going to be outhustled for it by a bunch of yokels in pickup trucks packed with shovels and picks and coolers of beer.

For two years he had called everyone he knew to call trying to figure out exactly what had been said and who had said it. Most recently, some ex–casino man admitted on television that he had ordered trunks of cash to be buried. And he hadn’t thought any further ahead than that because nobody truly believed the storms would last this long or that the Line would last this long. But in the interview, the ex–casino man had his face blacked out, his voice altered, and he didn’t identify what casino he had worked for or if that casino was in Bay St. Louis, or Biloxi, or Gulfport, or wherever. Only that it was down there somewhere, buried on casino grounds. Unsure how much but that it was millions, at least ten or fifteen. He had lost count when they were stacking it into the trunks.

Those were the bits and pieces Charlie had put together from his phone calls, the he-saids and she-saids that had spread across the Southeast with jetlike propulsion. The images of buried treasure dancing in the heads of anyone who thought they had the means and ability to get down and search, nearly all of the dreamers unequipped and unprepared for the risks they would encounter below.

But Charlie was not unprepared. He had the means. Knew the roads. Had the muscle. Had the firepower. Had the guts.

He was unlike others who had lost so much. He had been without a wife, without children, and his friends had either passed on or evacuated, and he had taken the government’s first pathetic offer for his land to get as much cash in hand as possible to prepare for his role in the new world. The gradual breakdown in order had fed his talents as a hustler, as a trader, and he had found satisfaction in a return to the natural world, where there was no credit. There was no payment plan. There was what do I have that somebody wants and how much are they willing to pay for it. It was a system that he thrived in. A system that gave him a purpose.

He had come into possession of a backhoe, which heightened his expectations and obsession. He explained to his crew that the focus of their responsibilities would be in pursuit of the buried money, which had not been a difficult sell as the job of warding off potential looters of Charlie’s truck had become tiring and cumbersome. He told them that things might get a little hairy. He told them that shooting first and asking questions later was acceptable. He told them to be prepared to receive the same treatment. He told them that whoever saw the backhoe would want it. He told them that many a son of a bitch had been put down over a hundred dollars, much less a million. He told them to expect everything. He told them there would be several hundred thousand dollars in it for the finished job. After that, he didn’t have to tell them anything else.

Charlie and the crew had begun on the east end of the coast. If it was possible to identify a casino’s grounds, and possible to dig on those grounds, they dug. Charlie would drive the backhoe and the muscle would make a wide circle, keeping watch, fingers on triggers. Charlie would dig a hole and move on. Dig another hole and move on. And over and over until the casino land appeared as if it were home to a brotherhood of giant aggravated gophers. The first few digs had been uneventful and fairly irritating, as the rain didn’t stop to let Charlie dig a hole. But as they had moved west across the coast, the digs had become more lively as more treasure seekers appeared, and warning shots had been fired.

The more holes Charlie dug, the more frequent the sound of warning shots, until the warning shots finally hit the side of the truck and pinged off the backhoe and the friendly fire several times turned into straight-up gunfire. In reaction to the increasing danger, Charlie decided to dig at night with a rack of rigged spotlights, but that damn near got them killed the first night out as all it did was shine a bright light to the targets on their backs and blind them from seeing who it was attacking them and from which direction.

But he kept on digging and sliding across the coast. The muscle kept on ducking and firing back. And the influx of interested parties only fueled Charlie’s insistence that somewhere out there was the buried money. He believed that it existed. He was certain of it. And like most of the treasure hunters he had seen in movies or read about in books, he decided that he was either going to find what he was after or he was going to die trying.

24

THE RAIN CONTINUED ALL DAY. Not much stirred around the compound except for trips back and forth to the supply trailer for something to eat or drink. From time to time a high-pitched cry from the baby cut through the sound of the rain. Ava paid most attention to the child. She was the oldest woman there, with wrinkled hands and eyes, but she moved in a straightforward manner, with a stiff back and shoulders high, like a kid at boot camp. She knew where to find the bottles and formula and diapers because she had helped Aggie stash it all away. She moved in and out of the rain, taking things for the baby, delivering something to drink to Brisco, helping open cans and slicing apples for the others when they were hungry. She had been a part of Aggie but now seemed a part of them once the decision of life or death was presented to her. She wore a pair of men’s jeans, baggy and rolled to midcalf, and two sweatshirts and the faded blue bandana around her head, with strands of gray-black hair trailing down her neck.

During the day, each time Ava moved from one trailer to the next, Aggie called out to her but she ignored him. Even shouted once for him to shut up.

Around evening the rain let up and Cohen and Evan built a fire. The others came out, stretched, passed around the baby. The woman named Nadine was the first to notice Lorna’s grave and she walked out to it. Stood with her arms folded. Stared at the soggy mound and off into the slate-colored horizon. Then she came back to the fire with the others.

In half an hour the fire was going strong and they sat around it in their newfound freedom with their plates full, after taking what they wanted. Baked beans and yams and corn and the empty cans of whatever else appealed to them littered about. Some drinking beer. Some drinking Cokes. Some smoking cigarettes. All of them thinking about tomorrow. The keys to the vehicles and trailers sat on a table as it had been decided that no one alone was to keep them.

The woman named Kris held the infant and held a bottle to his mouth. But he wouldn’t take it and he fussed and wailed.

“What he needs is a good tit,” Nadine said. She had a scar on her forehead and her legs were long and she had a sharp chin. She wore a pair of black laced boots with her pants tucked into them. Ava sat with them drinking coffee.

“Well,” Kris said and she set the bottle on the ground. Her hands were small and her eyes were close together and she was six months pregnant. “He ain’t getting one. Not one that’d do him any good.” She took her pinkie finger and held it down to the baby’s mouth and he sucked at it and closed his eyes and sucked more until he fell asleep.

“Mine never would do it,” Ava said. She ate from a can of green beans.

“Yours? You got kids?” Nadine said.

“Somewhere. Two boys. I ain’t seen or heard from either one in probably twenty years.”

“Damn,” Nadine said. “I thought I hated my momma but I at least knew how to call her.” Nadine’s long legs were crossed out in front of her. Her dirty-blond hair was cut short and uneven and a small harelip gave her the kind of snarl you might see at a county-fair roller derby.

“I didn’t say they hate me,” Ava said. “I said I don’t know where they are.”

“It’s all the same,” Nadine said.

Ava shrugged. Looked at her wrinkled, spotted hands. “Maybe it is,” she said.

Kris hummed a lullaby while she held the sleeping baby, but she paused to say, “Aggie’s sure been calling out for you.”

“Yep,” Nadine said. “You ain’t been over there to him, I’m guessing.”

Ava shook her head. “I done told y’all.”

“You might tell us again.”

“Fine. I want to go like everybody else,” she said.

“I saw her walk on past him,” Kris said to Nadine.

Nadine cut her eyes at Ava but didn’t say anything else.

The night went on and the wind began to pick up, pushing at the fire and blowing cups and napkins out across the field. Cohen tried to keep the coffee going on the gas burner but it kept blowing out. Mariposa offered to put the burner in her trailer but Cohen shook his head, said he didn’t really want any more. Finally he got up and walked over to Kris and the baby and said, “Can I hold him?”

Kris looked at him, a little surprised. “You ever held one before?”

“He ain’t gonna break,” Nadine said.

“No,” Cohen said. “I never held one.”

Kris stood. Cohen folded his arm and Kris set the tiny child in the crook. Cohen adjusted the baby some, couldn’t believe how small and light the child felt. He wrapped his other arm around the baby and cradled it.

“It’s easy when they’re asleep,” Ava said.

“Let him be,” Mariposa answered.

Cohen looked at the baby’s wrinkled eyes and chin. A little sound came from the baby’s nose when he breathed. Cohen walked a few feet with him, stepping carefully around the fire, around the others sitting close to the flames. He kept walking, away from the firelight, away from the others, out of the circle of trailers and out into the dark field, where it was easier to pretend that this was a little girl and this was the dark of his own land and the light from the fire was the light of home.

COHEN RETURNED AND GAVE THE baby back to kris and they all sat for a little while longer. Howls and screeches came from the woods surrounding them. Aggie called out every half hour or so for something to drink or something to eat but no one reacted to him any more than they did to the animals in the woods.

Thunder and lightning joined the wind and they knew it was time to go in. But before they dispersed and went to bed it was decided that in the morning they would load whatever they needed and leave out for the Line. Cohen had gone from truck to truck to see what would crank and out of the four sitting in the field, two of them would run. Two trucks and his Jeep. He and Evan searched around for gas cans and they rounded up a handful of containers that still held some gas. They would keep all the supplies in the back of one of the trucks. Cohen would drive the Jeep alone. He told them about Charlie and the supply truck and they decided it would be best to go and see if he were around before heading north. There wasn’t enough gas to make it very far otherwise.

The women went to bed, the infant and Brisco going with them, and Cohen and Evan stayed up looking around for what they’d need. In Aggie’s trailer, they found plenty of protection. Back in the bathroom, the toilet and sink had been ripped out and the small area was stacked with rifles and shotguns and boxes of ammunition. Cohen spotted his sawed-off shotgun, his own blood smeared across the stock. He picked it up and handed it to Evan and told him to set it in there on the bed. Then he began going through the stack. There were pump-action shotguns and rifles and semi-automatic pistols. As he held each piece he imagined where it had come from. Where it had been found or who it had belonged to and the way it had been taken away. He asked Evan if he could shoot and Evan said all you gotta do is aim and pull the trigger.

“Guess so,” Cohen said. “What about Mariposa? Can she shoot?”

Evan shrugged. “All you gotta do is aim and pull the trigger,” he said again.

Then Cohen remembered her urging the boy to shoot him, shoot him, and giving her a gun didn’t seem so smart. Not until he was certain whose side she was on.

Cohen chose a pump-action .12-gauge for himself and a rifle for Evan. He took two of the pistols and stuck them in his coat pockets. And then he told Evan to go get a bag somewhere and when Evan came back he filled the bag with boxes of ammunition.

When they were done they went into the storage trailers. Several empty boxes were on the floor and they filled the boxes with canned food and bags of coffee and gallon water jugs. There were diapers and a few cans of baby formula and they packed it all and Evan walked the boxes out to one of the trucks while Cohen kept on. Cigarettes and cases of beer and charcoal. Blankets and pillows and toilet paper and towels. Cohen filled up another half-dozen empty boxes and Evan took them out and when the boxes were gone, Cohen sat down next to the fire with a case of beer. Evan sat down with him and he gave the boy a can. The wind pushed the flames down to nothing and a steady stream of orange sparks trailed away.

They sat, drinking the beer, listening to the crack of the fire and the sound of the wind. There seemed to be something in that natural quiet that Cohen didn’t want to leave. A humble silence. An honest silence. A silence that seemed so pure, veiled by the dark.

After a little while, Evan said, “You think we’ll make it?”

Cohen smiled at the boy. Turned the can in his hands. “Don’t see why not.”

Evan moved his hand across his smooth face. He had been leaning back in the chair but he sat forward with his elbows on his knees and he stared into the fire. His pupils reflected the red. “The thing is, when we do, what then?”

“Maybe it ain’t that bad.”

“Maybe not. Think there’s even roads to get all the way there?”

“Could be we’re gonna hit the highway and be there in two hours. Like the good old days.”

Cohen got up and walked circles around the fire, trying to keep his leg from getting too stiff. He sat back down and finished his beer and took another one. Evan continued watching the fire.

“It’s gonna be slow going,” Cohen said. “No idea what roads are left. What bridges are left. Looks like it’s gonna be raining all the damn time. Not to mention we got a full load of not the most agile.”

“And a baby.”

“Yep. And a baby.”

“What’d that feel like holding him?”

Cohen thought, then said, “Felt good. Like you really got something.”

Evan blew on his hands then held them out to the fire. “Wouldn’t nobody hurt a bunch of women anyways,” he said.

Cohen watched him. Tried to figure what to say. He wanted the boy to be certain about getting to the Line, but he also wanted him to be certain about what might have to be done to get there.

“Men down here aren’t like the men you think of,” he said. “Men down here will probably hurt a bunch of women before they’ll hurt anything else. I don’t figure nobody ever hurt anything without knowing they could hurt it first. That’s the way it is and probably the way it’s always been.”

“Then that’s right,” Evan said.

“What’s right?”

“The men down here are just like the men I think of.”

Cohen set his beer and down and lit a cigarette. “Where’s your momma?” he asked.

“Where’s yours?”

“Heaven or hell.”

“Mine, too,” Evan said and then he tossed his empty can into the fire. He sat back down and said, “What we supposed to do when we get there?”

“I don’t know.” Cohen shook his head. “But this ain’t a place for nobody.”

“How come you stayed? Your woman?”

Cohen laughed some. “My woman. I guess so. My woman.”

“She get killed?”

“Yeah. A while back. Before all this.”

Evan looked confused. He thought a second, then said, “So. What’d you stay for?”

“What for,” Cohen repeated. “What for.” He sat up and looked around. Out across the fields where there was nothing more black. “You can probably understand better one day a long time from now. A long time from now you can probably understand carrying something around with you that can’t be real in no way but yet it feels as real as a bag of cement strapped across your shoulders and you walk around with that heavy thing and can’t get loose from it. And for whatever reason, that time is now up.” He leaned back in his chair again and stretched his legs out in front of him.

Evan got up and took another beer from the case and he stood closer to the fire. “What you gonna do with it when we get there?” he asked.

I don’t know, Cohen thought. “Don’t know,” he said.

“Sounds like it’s going with you.”

He looked at the boy. So lean and so young and responsible for so much. Cohen said, “You’re doing good taking care of that boy.”

Evan turned around and went back to the chair and sat. Then he said, “You worry about something that ain’t here. At least can’t nothing else happen to her. She can’t get hurt no worse. But mine walks around and gets hungry and cold. Cries when he’s scared. Holds on to my leg.”

Cohen sighed. He already understands, he thought. “You ever drink beer before?” Cohen asked him.

“Not more than one.”

“So how many is that?”

“Two.”

A few minutes later, Evan got up and went off to his trailer, leaving Cohen alone. He kept on drinking. Kept on thinking about what had been and what was to come. Thought about this ragtag band of refugees. Thought about walking over and killing Aggie just to see what it was going to feel like to kill another man. Because he had the feeling that he would have to do it before this was all over.

LATER IN THE NIGHT KRIS felt a sharp pain in her back and she shifted around, tried to get comfortable, but no matter how she turned the pain remained and she finally woke up Nadine, who slept on the other side with the baby in the middle.

“I’m dying,” Kris said.

Nadine sat up on the mattress, rubbed at her face. “What?”

“My back feels like a big cramp and it’s moving around my sides,” she said and she was breathing big breaths.

Nadine got up off the mattress and walked around and took Kris’s hands. She helped her to her feet and she moaned going up. The baby was bundled and didn’t wake and Nadine helped Kris to the door and out of the trailer. When they were outside, Kris let out some loud groans and then she doubled over. “At least it’s quit raining for a damn second,” Nadine said. She got a chair and Kris sat down carefully with her legs straight out and she held both hands on the sides of her stomach.

“Shit,” Nadine said. She wanted to do something but didn’t know what, so she paced back and forth in front of Kris as if to distract her. She rubbed her hands together and looked around at the defeated fire and she stopped pacing and jumped up and down a little.

“Ooooohhh, God,” Kris moaned again and her thick head of hair blew around with the wind.

“What is it? Where is it?” Nadine asked and she knelt at Kris’s feet.

“It’s all around me like somebody’s squeezing a belt. Oh shit.”

“Hold my hands.”

“Oh shit.”

They joined their four cold hands and Kris squeezed like hell, grimacing and grunting. Her round face twisted and she showed her teeth when she moaned. Her short legs lifted slightly off the ground when she squeezed hands and her bushy, matted hair fell around her head like some wild woman’s.

“Hold on, honey,” Nadine said and she kept talking, kept urging her to hang on but she didn’t know what she was telling her to hang on for. Kris squeezed harder and harder and she seemed gripped all over, and she let out a long, extended moan like an animal dying in the woods. Nadine begged her to hold on, held her hands, let go and went behind her and rubbed her shoulders but Kris reached up and took her hands again and squeezed her fingers together tightly. Nadine let her hold on. Several more minutes like this, but then whatever it was began to ease some and the moaning eased, and then whatever it was had gone.

“Oh God,” Kris said. Exasperated.

Nadine let go of her hands and pushed Kris’s hair back from her face. Her forehead was damp with sweat. “You need to let me cut this wild stuff,” she said.

Kris shook her head. Slowed her breathing. “And look like you? You got a worse haircut than Brisco.”

Behind them a trailer door opened and Cohen came out. He was pulling on his coat and holding a flashlight and the beam shined on the two women. He walked over and said, “What’s going on?”

Nadine said, “She’s hurtin.”

“How so?”

Nadine shrugged. “Bad.”

Cohen then asked Kris.

“I don’t know,” she said. She was trying to sit up straight in the folded chair and Nadine helped her up. “Got these cramps or something. Started in my back like somebody had elbows all across and then it moved all around.”

Cohen looked back at Nadine, who looked at him, and they both waited for the other to say something that would help. Neither did.

Finally Cohen said, “First time?”

Kris nodded.

“We gotta get the hell outta here,” Nadine said.

“Is it stopped all over?” Cohen asked.

Kris nodded again.

From the trailer, the baby cried.

“I’ll get him,” Nadine said and she left them and went to the infant.

“There’s a bottle in there somewhere,” Kris called.

Cohen took a cigarette out of his coat pocket and lit it and then he walked back to his trailer and came back with a bottle of water. He gave it to Kris and she seemed okay for now. Cohen smoked and she drank the water and they listened to the crying baby and the faint hiss of the few remaining embers.

“You want something else?” Cohen asked.

“Nah. Just to sit still.”

Cohen finished and tossed his cigarette and he moved over to the fire pit and tossed a couple of branches on the coals. They watched for several minutes but nothing happened except a little smoke.

“What was her name?” Kris asked.

Cohen looked to her. He cleared his throat and spit. Didn’t answer.

“Most people have names,” Kris said.

“There were two. Elisa and Rivers.”

“Rivers was a little one?”

“Yeah.”

“Sounds like a little one. How’d you pick that name?”

Cohen rocked back and forth a little. “We went to Venice one time. Biggest thing we ever did. She loved it there and liked calling it the city of rivers. Took her about nine seconds to name the baby Rivers when we found out it was a girl.”

They were silent again. Nadine had found the bottle and the crying had stopped. The fire snapped.

“Mariposa said something about your stuff. That’s why I was asking,” she said.

“That’s all right.”

“You was still in your house?”

“Yeah. Was.”

“That’s a little bit remarkable.”

“Not as remarkable as all this shit,” he said and he motioned around the circle of trailers strapped to the ground with ropes and spikes.

Kris held out her hand and Cohen took it and helped her to her feet. She was a little round thing in all the bundles of clothes covering her growing stomach. She pushed her hair away from her face, then put her hands on her back and stretched. She edged toward the fire. Cohen lit another cigarette.

Behind them a door opened and Mariposa came out. She tied a scarf around her head to hold back her hair and she stood up a cinder block and sat on it. “You okay?” Mariposa said.

“For this second,” Kris answered. She arched her back again. Looked off into the dark. “He killed my husband,” she continued. “Right out there somewhere. Just walked him out and killed him after pretending he was gonna take us up to the Line. We got stuck down here trying to come back for some of our stuff. It was so stupid and we knew it was but he had some tractors that was worth something and it seemed like money if we could somehow get a couple up. Soon as we got back down we got caught in a bad one. Him and Joe fished us out and brought us out here. I took one look at it and knew something wasn’t right and I told Billy but he shrugged it off. I told him about thirty seconds after we got here, we gotta go. Let’s just go. Next day Aggie walked him out there and he killed him. And then he locked me up with the other two or three and then found some more and locked them up and then they stuck this in me.” She pointed at her stomach and then she bent over and put her hands over her face and started to cry. She bounced and cried and looked like she might go to her knees but Cohen grabbed the chair and stuck it under her and Mariposa hurried up and helped ease her down. They stepped back from her and she cried and cried and for some reason that Cohen couldn’t explain he felt like a fool.

He kept on smoking and Mariposa paced back and forth. Kris cried and then she wiped her eyes. Sniffed. Got it together.

“What about her?” Cohen asked and pointed toward the trailer where Nadine had gone.

“I don’t know much. She was here when I got here. You, too?”

Mariposa nodded.

“Think she’s been here a long time. She don’t say much about it. I know I saw her take a swing at Aggie one day and him and Joe put down that revolution real quick. Think that might’ve happened a few times.”

“At least a few,” Mariposa said.

“Did you know them other ones that run off already?” Cohen asked.

Kris shook her head. “Not so much.”

“Me neither,” Mariposa added.

Cohen flicked away the cigarette. Random raindrops tapped in the red mud.

“It ain’t never gonna end,” Kris said. She held her hand out toward Mariposa, who took it and pulled her up from the chair. A little more rain came on as Mariposa helped her to her trailer and inside.

COHEN DRANK ONE MORE AND then he took one of the pistols out of his pocket and stood. A little drunk. He limped away from the fire and out into the dark where Aggie was tied to the trailer.

“You want to live or die?” Cohen asked him, but he couldn’t see his eyes and didn’t know if he was asleep or awake. So he asked again but this time he pointed the pistol at him.

Aggie didn’t answer. Didn’t move. The wind had picked up and lightning cracked to the south. Aggie’s body hung limply against the trailer, lifeless and broken. His head forward and heavy. If cut free, it seemed as if he would flop to the earth and never rise again.

Cohen lowered the pistol. Watched for a moment. Then as he turned to walk away, Aggie raised his head and said in a low voice, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Cohen stopped and looked back at him.

In the dark, Aggie spoke. “Probably ten, fifteen years ago, we was going real strong one night. Summer night. Hot as hell and then some.” His voice was low but strong, like a quiet engine. “I had this rattlesnake burning me up, biggest damn one I think I ever had. Sliding all over me. Organ playing loud and people hollering and jumping and Amen this and God Almighty that and then from the back this man got up. Him and his boy. I hadn’t even noticed them there. They got up and come right between the chairs, right up front. Man was carrying the boy. Maybe eight, nine years old. Didn’t say a word, neither one. Just stood right in front of me until I noticed and quit, and then the organ quit and all the hollering and dancing quit and everybody just stood there, waiting on them to say something. And then when he finally said something, you know what he said, don’t you?”

Cohen said, “Yeah. I know.”

“Yeah. I knew. We all knew what was coming. He said fix my boy. Lay your hands on his legs. They ain’t never worked right. Doctor says ain’t never gonna, but lay your hands on him and let the good Lord fix him. Let the good Lord make him right. Lay your hands on him.”

Aggie paused. Coughed some. Cohen waited.

“It got so quiet. I swear I heard sweat hitting the floor. I’d done a lot of shit. A lot. But I’ll be goddamned I wasn’t claiming to be no healer. Never did mess with it. Didn’t want to. And here he was in front of all my people asking me to lay my hands on that boy. Let the power of God come through me and rise him up, fix his legs.”

He stopped. His head dropped.

“So?” Cohen said.

Aggie raised his head. “So I set that rattlesnake in its box. I told the organ to play soft. I told everybody to raise their hands to the ceiling and pray for this boy and then I took off my shirt and wiped my face and acted like I was gathering up the Holy Ghost from some deep, dark well and I held that boy’s legs and prayed like some lunatic until I didn’t have no more gas. And then I let go. Looked at his daddy and looked at the boy and I turned around and ran out the back. Ran out and kept on running till I was at least a couple of miles gone and then I wandered in some shithole bar and drank Jack Daniel’s until they laid me out back with the garbage.”

When he was done, Aggie let out a heavy sigh. Cohen looked around in the dark. Moved the pistol back and forth in his hands. The wind was against his face and pushed his hair back and the rain washed over his cheeks and eyes.

“I couldn’t do nothing. No way around it. No trick. A dead end any way you went,” Aggie said. He sighed again, then his voice became sharper. “Like you. Any way you go, dead end. You just think you got plans but you don’t got any idea what you’re doing. What you think is gonna happen to you? To them? What you think is gonna happen? I know what you’re walking around with. Got the rooms boarded up like you can lock the ghosts away but they only seep under the doors. Seep between the cracks in the walls and live right there with you. I saw your place. Saw what you tried boarding up. What you think is gonna happen when you get to the Line?”

He paused, laughed a little. His voice became confident, mocking. The wind whipped around them and Aggie bound to the flatbed seemed to gather himself with the growing storm and rise up. “That is if you get there. If. You see what we got going here and all you see is the locks on the doors. That’s all you see and all they see. What you and them don’t see is you’re alive out here and you’re alive ’cause I let you be. You’re alive and you eat and sleep and you got protection and I give all that. Every one of them I give all that and I could give it to you too but you’d rather see the locks on the doors and decide that something here is wrong but there ain’t nothing here wrong. Every one of them was either alone or damn near alone without no food. No safe place. Every one of them would be dead or worse if I hadn’t brought them here and given them everything. All you see is the locks on the doors but you and them are gonna find out what’s out there and don’t none of you want to find out. I can swear to that. And here you got me crucified. The one who gave and the one who knows how to live out here and the one who created the family that not a goddamn one of them had or ever will have. So you crucify me except you ain’t even got the empathy to pierce me so that I can bleed to death. Instead you’ll leave me to starve or be devoured by God knows what and all I ever did for every one of them was give, and they’ll know it this time tomorrow.

“When it’s dark and there’s nowhere safe to lay their heads and they’ll look at you like you got some answers but you ain’t got no goddamn answers. You don’t even know how to answer yourself when you ask yourself questions. If you did you wouldn’t be living like you were living. You ain’t got no answers for yourself or for them and this time tomorrow when it’s dark and cold each of you will want for me and want for this place. You’ll want to gather and pray and eat but you won’t be able to. You’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven and you’d rather crucify than love. There’s no answers between you. None. Tomorrow you and them will set out for the end of your lives and I’ll be here. The one who gave and would keep on giving if you’d let me. But you don’t want to let me. You and them are going to walk through the valley but you’ll have no shepherd. You’ll have no answers. And you’ll kill the babies. And you’ll die. You ain’t no healer, no more than I am, but I can give more than you. So I guess if I ask whether you want to live or die, you already answered when you tied me up.”

When he was done, he turned his head away from Cohen and fell silent. As if he had been turned off. Cohen stood still and waited. Didn’t know why but he waited to see if the older man had anything else to say. And when Aggie didn’t speak again, Cohen walked back and sat down. The peaceful night had become something different.

Through the rain and wind, Aggie called out to him. “Maybe you wanna die. Then you’ll get to love your ghosts again.”

A half-empty beer sat near Cohen’s foot and he picked it up and took it all in one swig, got up, and walked over to the trailer that held the guns. Leaned against the wall was the rifle with the infrared scope, the one Aggie had used to shoot him. He picked it up, found the shells and loaded it, and then he walked out of the trailer and away from the compound. He walked until he was only a silhouette.

He looked into the sky. Clouds raced and Cohen knew how quickly it could all come on.

He lowered the rifle and through the scope he found Aggie. Arms wide. Head down. The same pose of death as the crucified man Aggie had used for so many years to feed his wild and insatiable appetite.

Cohen lowered the rifle. Off in the night something howled, long and draining, as though it might have been a final one.

He raised the rifle and looked again through the scope and this time someone was with Aggie, kneeling and swiping at his arms and wrists and it could only be Ava, cutting at the ropes with a knife. “Son of a bitch,” Cohen said and he steadied himself. One arm came free and she moved to the other side and Cohen didn’t have time to think about it anymore. He fired and Ava reared and arched her back and then she fell across Aggie’s legs. Aggie reached and took the knife from her limp hand, but he didn’t go for the rope wrapping his other arm and hand. He simply held the knife, and he looked out toward Cohen, and it was difficult to tell, but Cohen thought he was smiling.

Cohen fired again and Aggie leaped as if receiving a severe shock. Cohen shot him once more, and seconds later, Aggie was still.

The others were out of the trailers and milling around when Cohen came walking in from the dark. With disgust he tossed the rifle on the ground. It didn’t take them long to figure out what had happened. The rain fell against their faces and they shielded their eyes and stared at Cohen. Then Nadine told them to come on, let’s go see.

“You stay here,” Evan told Brisco.

“Why?”

“Just go sit over there a minute.”

Evan, Nadine, and Kris went out toward Aggie. Mariposa picked up the rifle and she walked over to Cohen’s trailer and set it inside.

“I’m getting wet,” Brisco said and he ran back inside the trailer.

Mariposa moved over to Cohen. His head hung down.

“Don’t you wanna see?” he said without looking at her.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“Him and her. She was trying to untie him.”

“Ava?”

He nodded.

Then they heard Nadine and Kris screaming at Aggie’s dead body. And then at Ava’s dead body. You fucking liar, Nadine yelled at the dead woman, her voice savage and vehement. Cohen got up and went over to them and Kris and Nadine were kicking the limp bodies and screaming son of a bitch and go to hell. The bodies absorbed the kicks like old mattresses and lay heavy on the wet ground. The women’s voices were filled with hate and celebration and seemed to carry out across the land on the wind. Evan only stood there. Kris kicked little kicks with her round belly and short legs but Nadine reared back and crushed ribs and cheekbones with her heavy boots and winding, skinny legs. Cohen stood back from them in the dark with his arms folded. Mariposa sneaked up behind Cohen and she wrapped her arm around his and when he turned to her she pulled closer to him and kissed him on the mouth. She held her hand against his wet beard and he let himself go and leaned in to her and felt her wet mouth and wet nose against his own. The women kicked and danced and screamed and cussed and Cohen let himself fall.

Only for a moment. He pulled back from her as quickly as he had gone to her. He stared at her but it was too dark for expressions and she let go of his arm. Wiped at her face. Then she turned around and walked over to the bodies and started kicking with Kris and Nadine.

“Come on, Evan. What you waiting on?” Nadine said. She was bent over with her hands on her knees, getting her second wind.

“He’s already dead,” Evan said.

“And he deserves a lot worse,” Nadine answered. Then she went back to it.

Cohen said, “She was working to get him loose if anybody wants to know.”

Kris held her hands on her sides and was out of breath. She backed away and let Nadine and Mariposa have it and Evan took her by the arm and said, “You better calm down before you pop.”

She raised up and said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with me.”

“Hell yeah,” Nadine yelled at her. “Get back on it.”

Kris moved back to the body and kicked and kicked. Nadine stomped on Aggie’s head with the heel of her boot and Mariposa had run out of steam and stood back.

Evan walked quietly to the fire.

Something cracked under Nadine’s heel and she screamed I fucking hate you and she stomped and stomped and there was another crack and now Mariposa and Kris kicked at Ava, her body so layered in clothes that it sounded like they were kicking a mattress.

Cohen watched with his arms crossed. He wondered what it would feel like to join them, to let it out, whatever he would be letting out. But he wasn’t going to invade and knew he couldn’t understand what they had been through or what they owed the two dead bodies.

Kris paused again and bent over. “I can’t do no more,” she said, huffing.

Nadine and Mariposa stopped and looked at her.

“You all right?” Cohen asked.

“She’s all right,” Nadine said. “Why don’t you let us be for a bit? Go sit down.”

“You sure you’re okay?” Cohen asked Kris again.

“Cohen,” Mariposa said.

Kris dropped down on a knee and Nadine and Mariposa moved to her.

“If you need me I’m over there,” Cohen said, but they didn’t hear him, and he left them and went and sat down with Evan. A few minutes later, they were at it again.

EVAN HAD GONE INSIDE WITH Brisco and Cohen was alone when the women walked back into the compound, hands on hips. The rain had lightened and they all sat down. Cohen found bottles of water and passed them out and he stood next to the dying fire.

“I knew it,” Kris said. “I knew she was gonna do some shit no matter what she said.”

“Yep,” Nadine said. “I damn well knew it, too. And we ain’t burying nobody just so you know.”

Cohen lit a cigarette and blew warm air on his hands. He looked at Mariposa and she was looking at him. When their eyes caught, he stared at her a moment. Then he blew on his hands again. Nadine turned up her bottle and finished it and tossed it onto the red coals. The bottle twisted and melted.

“I been thinking I’m gonna give it away,” Kris said. “That’s the first thing I thought today when I realized we were getting out of here. Don’t even wanna see it. Just take, I’m gonna tell them. Don’t show it to me only take it on. But when it started hurting before I started changing my mind. Right in the middle of them cramps, I started wanting it to be all right and wanting to see it. Even when I was hollering it hurt so bad I was wanting to be able to hold on to it and hoping I get to. Now I’m hoping I get to.”

Cohen said, “You’ll get to.”

“If we make it,” Nadine said.

Now he was tired of smoking and he wanted to drink again. He went over to his trailer and came back with a whiskey pint. He handed it to Kris and she shook her head.

“One sip ain’t gonna hurt,” Nadine said.

She took the bottle and a sip and her shoulders raised and fell. “I never did like that shit,” she said as she passed it to Nadine.

Cohen said, “You’ll be fine.”

“Maybe.”

Nadine drank and then she said she was sick of being wet and Aggie was dead and gone and no offense but there was nothing else worth sitting out there for. She took another drink and passed the bottle to Mariposa and went inside.

Mariposa held the bottle to her nose and sniffed. Then she took a little drink and winced. Cohen shook his head and took the bottle from her.

“What’d she look like?” Kris asked.

Cohen switched the bottle from hand to hand. He thought of the picture in his back pocket and started to pull it out. But instead he said, “She looked like a runner ’cause that’s what she was. Kinda tall. Ate whatever cause she burnt it all up. Ran cross-country in high school. Ran whatever after that. Used to run on the beach. I’d lay there and drink beer and she’d run up and back a few miles. Then she’d go out into the water and cool off and call me names for being so damn lazy.”

“You shoulda got up,” Kris said.

“Nah. I shouldn’t have. That was her thing. I liked it being her thing. Said it kept her sane and I woulda screwed that up huffing and puffing trying to keep up.”

“That was probably smart.”

“Yeah. One of the smart things I’ve done, I guess.”

Cohen drank some more. Knelt next to the ashen fire. “Not that long until light,” he said. “You know it’s gonna rain hard again soon. You should probably go lay back down.”

“Probably,” Kris said. “Lemme have one more sip.”

“It ain’t no good, you said.”

She held out her hand. “I know it ain’t. But it’s a sleeping pill.”

He handed her the bottle. She took a sip, shook her head, then took another. She gave it back and said ugh. Then Mariposa helped her out of the chair and walked with her as Kris moved gingerly toward the trailer. Cohen asked if they needed any help but Kris said no. “Save all your help for getting me to the Line, ’cause I told you I decided I want to hold on to it. If God’ll let me.”

Mariposa closed the door behind Kris and she walked back. Cohen drank again. She wiped at her face and said, “I don’t wanna sit in the rain. Do you?”

He looked up at the night sky. “It’s not raining much.”

“It will be. You said.”

He nodded.

She stepped over to him and held out her hand. He looked at it. It was wet and frail-looking. She seemed the same way. He looked around the compound, out into the dark acreage, out toward the place where Aggie and Ava lay. Then he looked back to her and down at her extended hand and it seemed to shake from cold or fear or something.

He reached out and took it and she led them to her trailer.

25

IT SEEMED AS THOUGH HER entire life had been driven by her imagination. From an early age, her head filled with ghost stories and listening from behind the curtain to the spiritual confessions of those who paid for her grandmother’s otherworld connections and the French Quarter spirits that gathered in the glow of the lampposts and her own childlike manifestations of the space between the imagined and the real. The tarot card readers in Jackson Square who let her sit and listen and the friendly vampire who stood outside Lafitte’s in the winter and led the cemetery tours and the Mardi Gras masks and the fabulous costumes of the parades. The stories she created for the Quarter regulars who came in and out of her father’s store and the stories she spun while she looked into the windows of empty buildings as she and her mother walked back and forth from home to school and the boats up and down the river and the beautiful women and handsome men she imagined sitting on the decks and drifting in and out of her city.

And then the storms. From bad to worse and more frequent and sometimes evacuations and then regular evacuations and then bold predictions of a weather pattern that would go on for years and years and continue to destroy and many scoffed and many refused to believe but her mind processed it easily. She would lie awake nights, on the eve of another storm, and dream of the catastrophe in vivid colors, see the shingles ripping from rooftops and hear the cracking of tree limbs and feel the flooding waters around her neck. She saw the skeletons of buildings and wrecked ships and heard the crashing of waves and heard the great roar of thunder before it ever arrived. And when the storm did arrive and perhaps it hadn’t been quite what she had imagined, melancholy came over her that lasted until the next warning and then her mind would create havoc all over again and eventually the reality of the storms caught up with the projections of her imagined landscape. Even as the storms worsened and morphed into one long stream of destruction, even after the insanity arrived with the proclamation of the Line, it all seemed to be something that she had seen before, as if when she closed her eyes she had always been off in some other world where Mother Nature was a vengeful authority. There was not a sky darker than the skies behind her eyes, there was not a wind more powerful than the winds of her mind.

Then she had found herself alone and she had discovered that there were plenty of things in this world that were unimaginable. She had never been able to understand this place with these men and their roped-down trailers. Never been able to conjure anything more horrific than this as she lay down at night. Instead of creating new worlds, her dreams were filled with fascinations of escape. Filled with fascinations of revenge. Filled with the faces of those she had loved and now missed. And in the waking hours, she could only wonder where they were. Wonder if someone was looking for her. Wonder if anyone was still alive who cared. She was certain she had family. Somewhere. But this new world was so vast and shifting and unanswerable that she hadn’t been able to create anything but an unhappy ending for herself and the others. The little girl whose mind once was a carnival of ghost tales and spirit worlds and the romance of hurricanes was now a young woman whose insatiable imagination had been replaced with the sharp edges of the real thing.

Then she and Evan had gone out, and she had choked the man in the Jeep, and she had gone to his house and she had seen where he slept and whom he slept with and what his life had been like and what he was holding on to. And she had taken his shoe box that held the contents of his life and she had held the letters and worn the jewelry and her mind had come alive again. It was as if she had walked through a secret door and taken the hand of someone she once created and had led him out of the dream into reality. It was as if she had become again that little girl. Since she had been alone, since she had been brought to this place, since she had been forced to endure what all the women there had been forced to endure, she had in some ways forgotten that she was alive, that her life belonged to her.

She held Cohen’s hand and led him into the trailer and on a shelf on the wall she lit the candles. He stood holding the whiskey bottle and she took it from him and set it on the shelf. She stepped back from him and removed her coat. He reached out and took a strand of her black hair and let it trail through his fingers.

She whispered to him, “I can be who you want me to be.”

She wore a flannel shirt and she began to unbutton it as he held her hair, rubbed it between his fingers as if it were a fabric that he had never touched before. She unbuttoned the shirt to the end and she pushed it back from her chest, and then her shoulders, and it fell and the wind pushed the trailer and the candlelight waved.

He let go of her hair and looked at her.

Her hair was around her neck and down her chest and he moved it back and exposed her neckline. The V of the dress reached between her breasts.

Cohen stepped back. The long black sleeves. The tie around the waist that he had tied for her each time she wore it. Mariposa tugged at her waist and lifted the rest of the dress, which she was wearing tucked into her pants, and it fell over her hips and reached her knees.

He began to shake his head. She took a step toward him and he took another step back. “Stop,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said and she reached out for him, but he grabbed her by the wrist and lowered her hand.

“I said stop,” he said and his voice had changed. “That’s not yours.”

“I know. I didn’t mean it to be. I meant it to be hers.”

He reached to the shelf and grabbed the bottle. He turned it up and drank hard. Then he looked at her again. “I don’t wanna pretend,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d think I would. I don’t know why the hell anybody would want to do something like that.”

The expectation left her face. Her shoulders slumped and she seemed to shrink.

“Whatever else you got, don’t let me see it,” he said and he turned and walked out the door.

Mariposa stood still. Watched her shadows. She realized now that this would be her last night here. That tomorrow night, they would be somewhere else. She lifted the dress over her head and dropped it on the floor. Put the flannel shirt on again. Put on her coat. He is not a dream, she thought. He is not a story. No matter how hard you try. She stood still and wondered if maybe he was just outside the door. Maybe he was coming back. Maybe there would be a long pause and then a knock.

She waited but there was nothing. You can’t put a spell on him, she thought. Not down here. You can’t put a spell on nobody and you can’t make the dead come to life.

26

COHEN CHANGED HIS BANDAGE, PUT on his coat and put the pistols in the coat pockets, tucked the shoe box under his arm and came outside and found them ready to go. Evan was holding the shotgun and he handed it to him. They gathered in the early morning in the middle of the compound, around the smoldering, wasted fire. It rained and the wind had become steady and out across the Gulf the sky was a deep, threatening gray.

Cohen walked over and they told him that these were the rules that had been agreed upon—whatever vehicle you get into belongs to you and the others in it. At the Line, the baby and Kris go to a doctor immediately. After that, no one owes anybody anything. Cohen nodded.

“Yeah, but what about when we get up there?” Kris asked.

“That’s what we’re talking about,” Cohen said.

“Not all that. I mean like, are we still alive or wrote off?”

Nadine said, “Guess we’ll find out. Might be some resurrections.”

They looked around for the last time at this place where some of them had spent weeks, some of them months, some of them almost two years. The rain fell on the drab, lifeless compound. The bodies of Aggie and Ava lay off to the side at the back end of the trailer. It was now a place for restless spirits, a grave site.

They loaded garbage bags filled with clothes and other possessions into the beds of the pickups. Kris held the baby and he was sucking on a bottle and the rare air of optimism appeared on their faces as they prepared for what was next. Cohen stood at the back of the truck they had filled with supplies and checked to see if there was anything that he had missed. In the last act of preparation, Evan began to put the gas cans into the truck bed. Kris and Nadine walked over together to the trucks. Mariposa went with them. Kris handed the baby to Cohen and they began to take the gas cans and he asked them what the hell they were doing.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nadine said.

The three of them went from trailer to trailer, opening the doors and stepping inside and pouring gasoline onto the beds and floors and then out again and along the ropes that held the trailers strapped into the ground. Cohen cradled the child and held the bottle to his mouth and shook his head as he watched them, knew that their journey was becoming more troublesome with each drop spilled into the trailers. He also knew that his voice would not be enough to stop this cleansing. He talked to the baby as the women continued their work. Be a good little man, he said. Got a pretty good trip coming up. Hope you ride well. We’ll get you somewhere if you can stick with it.

When they were done, the women returned the gas cans to the truck bed and then without being asked, Cohen produced a cigarette lighter from his pocket. Nadine took it from him and Kris and Mariposa filled their arms with rolls of toilet paper. They splashed back and forth across the compound, ducking into a trailer, lighting a toilet paper roll and tossing it in, and moving on to the next until they were all done. Then they gathered again in the middle and within minutes there were heavy coils of smoke curling out of the open doors of the trailers, and then there were yellow flames burning through the roofs and out of the windows. Pops and hisses and low roars of the growing flames fought against the rain. They stood and watched until all of the trailers were burning like giant campfires and then they walked out of this ring of fire and they all moved over toward the trucks. Nobody said a word as Kris took the infant from Cohen.

Evan cranked one truck. Nadine cranked the other. And then Cohen cranked the Jeep and Mariposa got in with him. He had cut a piece of tarp and roped it across the top of the Jeep and the rain slapped against it. He looked at her and said, “The last time you rode with me I almost died.”

She held up her hands and showed him both sides, as if she were a magician proving there were no strings. “You should know that story by now.”

“Yeah. I know it.” He pulled off his sock hat and shook the rain from it and then put it back on.

“I see why you did it,” she said.

“See why what?”

“I see why you came looking for it.”

Cohen shook his head in disagreement. “You didn’t see nothing last night.”

She nodded. “I know, but I see now,” she said. “I can see that she really loved you. And you really loved her. I can see that in all those little things. I get it.”

Cohen stopped looking at her. He looked over his shoulder at the shoe box behind the seat as if Elisa might be there in its place and then he looked out toward the burning trailers, across the flooded lowlands. He squeezed his hands together as if they belonged to two different people who missed each other. Behind him one of the trucks blew the horn but he didn’t pay attention. Didn’t move.

She said quietly, “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

He unclenched his hands. Moved his head around in a circle as if stretching his neck. Then he opened his coat and took out a cigarette. He lit it and put the Jeep in first gear, and he told her that it didn’t matter what she said she was gonna do or not do. Nobody really knows what they’re going to do until the moment they decide to do it.

The three vehicles moved across the field, driving slowly across the rough, weather-beaten terrain. As they turned onto Himmel Road, the fires were beginning to lose against the rain.