Rivers

27

IT WAS A SPECTACLE AND difficult not to watch. Out across the gulf the lightning storm snapped and delivered steady strikes against the darkening backdrop. A circus of lightning that seemed like it might be shooting straight from the fingertips of God. Those who weren’t driving watched. Those who were driving watched out of one eye and spied the road with the other.

Once they stopped to change the baby’s diaper and once more for the pregnant woman to pee and soon they arrived at the ocean. The sights were almost new for Nadine and Kris as neither had been away from the compound since their capture. The washed-away chunks of beach. The water sitting where houses used to be. The buckled storefronts and uprooted ancient trees. They had almost forgotten.

But not Mariposa. The sights and lightning strikes only triggered her memories of the old world and as she surveyed the landscape, she heard the voice of her grandmother warning anyone who would listen. Pack it up and go she had said from the start. We need to pack it up and forget all this. This is only the beginning. The crazy will go crazier and the wind will blow harder and the rain won’t stop. But none of them listened. Her father didn’t listen. Her mother didn’t listen and neither did her aunts or cousins or anyone in the neighborhood. No one listened until the men in uniforms with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders started making them get on the buses and even then it had been too much to believe. Too crazy. So much insanity with the National Guardsmen lined around Jackson Square, the last evacuation, herding people onto buses where locals once climbed into horse-drawn carriages, women and children and the young and the old in a fury of pushing and shoving, while maniacs shot at them from alleys and from behind cars and from rooftops under a gray lightning-infested sky. A war against itself. Something beyond hysteria. The buses finally filled and they drove away, the Guardsmen shooting from the windows, the buses escorted by tanks, bodies left behind to be cleansed by the coming storm.

That had been the last time she had seen anybody from her family, the buses driving in different directions, and she had been pushed onto one, separated from anyone that she knew. The woman at the high school gym where they were delivered five hours later told her that it’d take some time but we’ll find them but Mariposa could tell by the sound of her voice that there were too many people asking the same question.

She felt it again now. Heard the screams and the gunfire and the roar of a confused, desperate crowd.

Cohen leaned on the steering wheel and interrupted her thoughts.

“What?” she asked.

“I ain’t real enthusiastic about Charlie with the rain and the sky looking the way they look.”

They drove carefully, passing the fallen neighborhoods, navigating the telephone poles and roofs and debris scattered across the four-lane running parallel to the water. They moved on until they came to the Grand Casino parking lot, and when Cohen saw what was there, he stopped. He told Mariposa to get out and go and tell them to back up.

“You see something?” she asked.

“We’re not turning in here. Just go tell them.”

She got out and did as he’d asked and returned to the Jeep. The vehicles backed up until Cohen waved and then he stopped. He got out and called for Evan.

“What is it?” Evan asked.

“Something your little brother doesn’t need to see. Something nobody needs to see. Keep everybody back here.”

“But what is it?”

“A bunch of bodies.”

“Dammit. New ones?”

“It looks like it from here. Keep everybody where they are.”

Evan walked back to the trucks. Cohen took one of the pistols out of his coat pocket and he started walking toward the parking lot and Mariposa came up beside him.

“Go on back there with them,” he said.

“I don’t want to,” she answered.

“You don’t want to come up here, either.”

“I wanna see.”

He stopped arguing and walked on and they crossed the front lawn of the Grand Casino. There were giant holes here and there in the lawn with big piles of dirt next to them. One palm tree stood though several had fallen and a thick black electrical wire weaved across the lawn like a sleeping snake. They walked to the circular driveway where limousines once delivered well-dressed patrons and then they came to the parking lot where the bodies lay in awkward positions like castaway dolls.

It had been a massacre. Bodies scattered across asphalt. Mariposa gasped and Cohen said stand here and he moved out among them. He had seen some of them before at Charlie’s truck. There was the fat man with the poker chips. Next to him lay the old man with the sign, now splattered in dark red. Twenty or so bodies in all, some of them with closed eyes, others with open eyes staring at the sky and taking in the rain. The blood had washed from them and out into wide circles on the pavement, thin rain-mixed blood that spread in abstract, almost artful shapes. He noticed the holes in their chests and arms and heads. The bewildered looks on some of their faces as if they had posed for a sudden, brutal death. Then separated from these men were two of Charlie’s muscle, barrel-chested men in their black shirts and black pants, their strong arms and thick thighs no longer the sign of strength. Their weapons were gone and their laced black boots taken from their feet. Cohen stepped over them. Around them.

He stopped and looked up and down the road. All gray and getting darker and the rain kept anything from appearing clearly.

Thunder roared across the choppy Gulf waters and the lightning remained as the wind was beginning to push the waves. He looked again at the parking lot where the bodies lay and he realized that there were very willing and capable men out there. Probably not far away. Maybe even watching. Men who would take whatever they found from whoever had it and it seemed that everyone had already had enough of that.

“You know any of them?” Mariposa asked.

“I’ve seen most. Those two in the black over there are Charlie’s. Some of these others were Charlie’s customers.”

“Rain makes it look like they’re still bleeding. Are they?”

Cohen shook his head. “Nah. That part’s over.”

“We better go,” she said and her eyes seemed nervous. “I don’t like this.”

“I know.”

There wasn’t enough gasoline to get to the Line. Maybe not enough gasoline to get halfway to the Line, depending on what roads and bridges were available. He looked across the street and counted one, two skeletons of gas stations. He looked back in the direction they had come from and he wondered how many miles had been lost in the gasoline used to burn the trailers.

Nadine and Evan walked up and Nadine said, “I told Kris to stay in the truck with the baby and Brisco. She’s a little freaked out over this shit.”

“So am I,” Evan said.

“How many is it?”

“A lot,” Mariposa said. “I wouldn’t walk over there.”

“I ain’t walking over there. I can see it from right here. Aggie and Ava are the only dead people I ever laid eyes on up close and that’s how I plan to keep it.”

There was more thunder and more lightning and they were hunched underneath their hoods, looking at one another with bent necks. A truck door slammed and Kris came toward them.

“Where’s the baby?” Nadine asked.

“Asleep on the seat,” she said. “So I’m guessing no gas.”

“No gas. No nothing. I’d siphon the gas for the trucks together if I had something to siphon with, but I don’t.”

“Well, I don’t like standing here. It’s a goshdamn graveyard,” Kris said.

“We better hide out,” Nadine said. “We got food and stuff. We can wait.”

“Hide out and wait for what?” Evan asked.

“Hell I don’t know but there’s plenty of vacancy. All we need is half a hotel. Not even half. A quarter.”

“I ain’t waiting down here no longer,” said Kris. “My stomach hurts. My back hurts. My legs hurt.”

“Hiding out doesn’t get us gasoline,” Cohen said and then he motioned toward the sky. “And you all know what’s coming.”

“Hiding don’t get us gas but it don’t get us killed by whoever did that. And there ain’t been a storm yet to lift and carry this bunch.”

“We didn’t leave out there to go hide somewhere else,” Kris said. “We left to get back to the world.”

“Won’t do no good if we ain’t alive when we get there,” Nadine answered.

“You don’t know we won’t be.”

“You don’t, neither.”

“Don’t nobody know,” said Evan. “But I got the keys to one truck and I ain’t hiding out and waiting on a miracle.”

“Me neither,” said Kris.

“You ain’t got the keys,” Nadine said and she reached into her pocket and pulled out the keys to the truck she and Kris were riding in.

“That ain’t yours,” Kris said. “It’s ours.”

“I know whose it is. But my half says we hole up for a little while.”

“My half don’t want to have a baby in the middle of goddamn nowhere.” The two women had inched closer to one another as they spoke, Nadine a head taller than Kris and the fingers cut off from her gloves and she looked like something that might hide in an alley and jump on you. But Kris, in all her roundness, bellied up to the taller woman and she squeezed her hands in tight, hard fists.

“I guess you forgot about the baby,” Mariposa said.

“I ain’t forgot about nothing.”

“It’s gotta see a doctor or somebody.”

“I know what it needs.”

“Not this,” Evan said.

The thunder came again and momentarily silenced them. They all looked at one another. Looked around at the trucks. Looked around at the weather.

“I ain’t staying here,” Evan said to everyone. “Simple as that.”

“Me neither,” said Kris.

“Fine.”

“Thank God,” Cohen said as the thunder gave a long, bellowing roar.

“There ain’t nothing to thank Him for yet,” Nadine said with a cautious air. “But we’d all better hope there is before it’s over with.”

“Look down there,” Mariposa said and she pointed east along the highway. Far off in the distance, there was a white dot.

“What is it?” Evan said.

“A headlight. Gotta be,” said Kris. “Can we please get the hell outta here?”

“Go get in,” Cohen said and the women hurried back to the vehicles, but Cohen grabbed Evan by the coat and said, “Come with me.” Across the highway were two gas stations and though there was likely no chance, Cohen didn’t want to leave without finding out.

“Run over to that one and try every pump,” he said to Evan. Evan hurried across the road. The only things left standing at the stations were the pumps, as the buildings that once sold cold beer and lotto tickets and wooden-tipped cigars were long gone. Cohen had eight pumps to check and there was nothing. Evan had six and there was nothing. They ran back to the vehicles. Cohen looked east and the white dot remained. He told Evan to keep his headlights off. No way they can see us if we don’t show ourselves. Then he told Nadine the same thing and he hurried to the Jeep. Mariposa had it cranked and he put it into first gear.

It was several miles east to Highway 49 and impossible to do anything but drive methodically against the weather and around the debris. The makeshift cover did little to protect Cohen and Mariposa and they were both drenched. She had brought her knees up to her chest and made herself a ball that her big coat could cover and Cohen leaned forward as if the slight difference in his posture might make things more visible. It’d be nice to have the damn windshield, he almost said to Mariposa but he’d already made one comment about their last ride together and decided to let that be. He had told her to keep watch on the white dot ahead, and sometimes it was there and sometimes not, and she reported when it came and went.

At Highway 49 the entire intersection was underwater. The harbor, once home to a battleship that crawled with elementary school children and sightseers, had pushed inland, and a small lake covered the intersection and the highway had become a canal. They had to backtrack through the crumbled remains of downtown Gulfport, the fallen historical buildings and the landmarks and the bumpy stone-paved streets. They finally made their way back around to 49 and turned north.

Away from the beachfront and old downtown were miles and miles of concrete. Vast, empty parking lots in front of superstores without their glass doors, busted by bricks or tire irons or crowbars. Strip malls and bank branches. Restaurants and gas stations. An abundance of pawnshops and liquor stores and video stores for adults only, the only kinds of stores that had prospered in the months leading up to the declaration of the Line. Here and there metal frames were exposed through roofs and telephone and electrical poles had crashed across storefronts and across the six lanes. Trash everywhere. Graffiti everywhere. Abandoned cars on the roadsides and in the parking lots. Giant steel poles that supported billboards stood straight without the advertisements. An abandoned National Guard outpost was situated in the parking lot between two strip malls, cinder-block painted black, thick glass riddled with bullet holes, a head-high chain-link fence with barbed wire wrapping the top. One of many like it that had been erected across the coastal region in the year before the declaration of the Line.

It was vigilant driving. As if some elaborate obstacle course had been set up for a school of stunt drivers. Cohen led, weaving around bigger traps, bouncing over smaller ones, one eye on what was in the road and one eye everywhere else. He was expecting to see Charlie’s truck or the men who had apparently ambushed it, though he had no idea what to do if either appeared.

It took over half an hour to reach the north side of Gulfport and the thunderstorm was heavy. Six lanes became four. Corporate concrete gave way to locally owned concrete. Fewer stores and more apartment buildings that stood like very old men with their third and fourth floors missing. Up ahead Cohen saw something broad and white blocking the road and it was two trailers of eighteen-wheelers, end to end, turned on their sides. Cohen pulled up to them. There was room to get around on either side but he noticed one of the back doors lying open. The trucks pulled up behind him and stopped.

“What are you doing?” Mariposa yelled, no other way to communicate now.

He couldn’t help but think of her, her splintered head in his lap, underneath a rig much like this one.

“Cohen?” she said and she reached over and grabbed his arm.

He shook his head and looked at her and said, “I gotta see what’s in there.”

He climbed out and waved to the others to wait and he bent over and walked through the storm. He held his hand on the pistol inside his coat as he moved toward the back end of the trailer, where the open door was a rectangle of dark. But he didn’t go any farther. Even through the driving rain and wind, he could smell whatever was inside so he hurried back to the Jeep and they drove around. A half mile up the road, Mariposa pointed and said, “Look right there.”

It was a truck on the roadside. The truck that the other women had driven away in as soon as Aggie had been tied up. The back window had been busted out and both doors were open and it sat on cinder blocks, the four tires gone. Cohen paused but didn’t fully stop and Mariposa said, “What do you think that smell was?”

“Something that’s been in there a while,” he said.

Evan honked and waved and Cohen stopped. Evan pulled up beside him and said, “We gotta get out of this storm. The damn truck is wobbling and I don’t wanna be sitting in it no more.”

“All right,” Cohen answered. “We’ll find a spot to pull over. Backside of one of these buildings somewhere. Follow close.”

Most of the superstores were behind them and there wasn’t room to hide behind the smaller buildings and gas stations leading out of town, but when they reached the outer limits of Gulfport, there remained, mostly intact, a larger than usual strip mall that had housed a supermarket on one end and a furniture outlet on the other end. In between was what looked like a kid’s store, with the faded face of a giraffe on the facade. Cohen pulled into the parking lot and they followed him. He told Evan and Nadine to wait a minute and then he drove up close to the storefronts, looking in the windows and doors. Then he moved behind and there were no other vehicles there. The metal door of a loading bay was raised at the back end of the grocery store and he stopped and climbed the steps and he looked in and around. Wooden pallets and animal droppings scattered across the concrete floor and little else. No sign of people. He came back out and drove the Jeep to the front and told them it was all right. They followed him to the back of the grocery store and parked close to the building.

The women and the baby and Brisco got out of the weather and Evan and Cohen unloaded the gas stove and pots and cans of food. Cohen grabbed a bag of clothes as he and Mariposa were soaked through.

“Why don’t you leave that Jeep and get in with us?” Evan asked as they stood in the stockroom of the grocery store. Their voices echoed some in the big empty space.

“Because me and that Jeep been through it and wherever I go, it goes.”

“You’re gonna drown driving it.”

“Not so far.”

“She might,” Evan said, pointing at Mariposa. Her wet clothes hung on her and her hair was limp and dripping.

“She can ride where she wants,” Cohen said.

Mariposa shook her head like a wet dog and then she took off the heavy coat and dropped it on the concrete. She grabbed the bag of clothes and went off looking for a quiet corner, dragging the bag behind.

They found boxes to sit on and in half an hour they were eating. The wind sprayed the rain through the open bay and whistled through the random wind tunnels of the beat-up building. They were silent as they ate, worn out from the anxiety of what already seemed like a long trip.

Cohen had found some dry jeans and a shirt and he had changed in the manager’s office. Kris mixed a bottle and she carried the baby over to Cohen and asked if he wanted to give it to him.

“I don’t know how,” he said.

“That’s the point,” she said. “You might need to one day.” She held the baby out to him. Cohen looked at her sideways, but then he held out his arms and she gave him the child. He was fussing from being hungry and Kris showed Cohen how to tilt him so the milk would go down.

“Is that it?” he asked.

She shrugged and handed him the bottle. “If you figure out something different, let me know.”

He stuck the nipple in the baby’s mouth and the child fought it at first but then took the nipple and went quiet and started sucking. Cohen moved over to a stack of pallets and sat down. He watched the busy cheeks, the tightly closed eyes. Felt the rhythm of the tiny body as it sucked and breathed. He leaned close to the child and whispered, “I buried your momma. I just want you to know she’s not laying out there for the animals.”

“Gotta burp when he’s done,” Kris said to Cohen.

“Him, not you,” Nadine said. She lay stretched across the concrete, her elbow on the floor and her head propped in her hand, picking at her food lackadaisically like someone who had never been without. Evan and Brisco counted Vienna sausages, adding one and counting again or subtracting two and counting again.

Mariposa ate from a can of sweet potatoes and she came over and sat down next to Cohen. She reached over and touched the baby’s hands, pink and shriveled.

“My dad used to have a store,” she said. “Not big, like this one.”

“Where at?”

“The Quarter. Ursuline and Dauphine.”

“Sounds like a good enough spot.”

“It was. I guess.”

“Get flooded?”

She paused. Tossed the can on the ground and it rolled with the wind. “Eventually. Like everything else. But he got shot before that happened. When everything started going crazy. When people started running around taking whatever they wanted to take. But he didn’t want to let them so he and my uncle locked the doors and stood there with shotguns until they busted out the doors and came on in anyway and that was it.”

Cohen adjusted the baby and the bottle. “Reach in my shirt pocket,” he said. She did and she took out a pack of cigarettes and he asked if she wanted one. She shook her head and held the pack and then he asked how she had ended up down here.

“Hitched some rides,” she said and shrugged. “Don’t really know where I thought I was going.”

“It’s hard to know what to do.”

She nodded. “Like you,” she said, looking up at him.

He nodded slightly, as if surprised by what she had said. “Like everybody,” he answered.

Evan came over to them and said that maybe they should look around. See if there was anything worth having.

Cohen got up and gave the baby and bottle to Kris. “How was it?” she asked.

“Different.”

Mariposa looked at him like she wasn’t done talking, but she sat down with Kris and Nadine. Brisco walked over and took hold of Evan’s hand and said, “I wanna go.”

“You want these?” Mariposa asked and she held out the cigarette pack. When Cohen grabbed it, she squeezed tight, kept his hand there an instant. Then she let go. Cohen took out a cigarette and lit it and he and the boys walked away.

Nadine said, “I can’t stop thinking about all them dead people. How many you think it was?”

“At least fifteen or so,” Kris said.

Nadine sat up, shook her head. “I’m beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Mariposa said.

Nadine stood, suddenly unable to be still. She marched around them, rubbed her hands together. “We ain’t had a choice for a long time and now we got one and there don’t seem to be any good ones.”

“We left,” Kris said. “That was a good one.”

“We got to get somewhere,” Mariposa said.

“I know, but damn.”

“We got Cohen to help,” Mariposa said. “We got rides.”

“We ain’t got gas. And Cohen ain’t bulletproof.”

“We’ll find some,” Kris said.

“Where?” Nadine asked.

“I don’t know. Somewhere. Sit down.”

The baby had fallen asleep sucking on the bottle.

“Lay something down over there,” Kris said, nodding toward an empty corner of the storage room. Mariposa got up and pulled a few shirts from the garbage bag. In the shadowy corner she folded them and then she came back and took the baby from Kris. She walked over to the corner but she didn’t put the baby down right away. She held him. Admired him.

Nadine leaned over to Kris and said quietly, “She’s in trouble.”

Kris nodded.

“She better watch it. About twelve seconds after we get over the Line, he’s gonna drop us all like a bag of dirt.”

Kris looked at Nadine and grinned. “You and me both know it ain’t nothing you can help.”

Nadine sat up again. Made a frown.

The rain beat against the building. Against everything.

Mariposa stood in the corner and held the baby, swaying gently.

“You got somewhere to go when we get there?” Nadine asked Kris.

“The hospital. If there is one.”

“Not that. You know what I mean.”

Kris folded her arms. Looked at the floor. “Not really.”

Nadine lay down again and propped her hand under her head. “Me, neither. I used to have some cousins around Aberdeen but probably not no more. I got brothers somewhere.”

“I figured you had some brothers.”

“Why’s that?”

“ ’Cause you’re sitting on go with them hands of yours. You act like you’d fight a wildcat.”

“Shit. You don’t know the half of it. Three brothers, all older. Cousins all boys. And me the youngest. Brought up on a damn chicken farm. And on top of that my momma was the toughest son of a bitch you ever met.”

Kris laughed. Stretched her legs out and leaned back on her elbows. “I don’t know nothing about all that. Only child right here.”

“That’s about what I’d call paradise.”

Nadine’s last word hung in the air between them. Paradise. They were so far removed from anything of the sort that it was difficult to put an image with the word.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” Nadine said.

“About what?”

Nadine pointed at her stomach. “I’m sorry that happened.”

Kris put her hand on her stomach. Rubbed her hand around in a circle. “I’m more sorry for Lorna than me,” she said.

Nadine nodded. Then she turned on her stomach and lay her head on her folded arms with her face toward Kris.

“Maybe I’m wrong about all these bad feelings I got,” Nadine said. “Maybe we’re gonna get somewhere. Maybe it’s gonna be okay. But I swear to God, I’m almost as scared of getting to the Line as not getting to it. Don’t none of us have nothing.”

Kris lay flat on the concrete and stared at the exposed metal beams of the ceiling. Nadine turned over and put her head facedown in her arms.

“Where’s your brothers?” Kris asked.

“Wherever Aggie left them,” Nadine said, her voice muffled. “We hunkered down to guard what was left of our place and equipment and Aggie and Joe came wandering up like they was about to starve to death or something. Played us real good. I went to sleep one night in the cab of Eddie’s truck. Woke up the next morning and they was all gone. Aggie was sitting on the tailgate, smoking a cigarette.” Nadine then rolled over on her back. “I don’t have nowhere to go. And if I did, I wouldn’t have nobody when I got there.”

Kris pushed herself up. Scooted over to Nadine and touched her elbow. “Listen to me. All I want is somewhere to have this baby. That’s it. If God don’t give me but one thing the rest of my life, that’s all I want. And when it comes and when I’m laying there and they give it to me, I’m gonna need somebody.”

Nadine sat up and looked at Kris. “Then I’m gonna be there,” she said.

“And then we’ll figure it all out.”

Nadine nodded. “Okay.”

They touched hands, and then they each lay back down. They didn’t talk anymore. They rested and listened to the rain. Mariposa sang softly to the sleeping baby, but when the thunder roared they were reminded that no matter what kind of tomorrow they dreamed of, they were all very lost.

28

THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT IN the storage area of the grocery and Cohen didn’t expect to find anything in the front of the store and he was right. The aisles remained and there were shopping carts up and down but the shelves and coolers had been cleared. At the checkout, the cash registers had been removed.

“Looks like somebody planned ahead,” Cohen said.

“Looks like it,” said Evan.

“Come on. Let’s see what’s next door.”

They walked back through the grocery and out into the rain and they hurried along the alley until they came to the kids’ store and the lock was busted and the door was open. Cohen opened it wide to let in some light and the storage room was much different here. Boxes opened and pilfered and shelves turned over and the office door off its hinges and lying on the floor. In the small office the desk drawers were pulled out and several file cabinets were open and their papers and files strewn across the floor. They moved on through the mess and went into the store area and it was much the same. Some clothes racks standing and some knocked over. Plundered shelves. But scattered about were kids’ clothes, baby clothes. Toys in unopened boxes. Evan picked up a toy truck and said, “Look here.” Brisco took it excitedly and ripped it from its box and started making truck sounds as he ran it up and down the length of the shelf.

“Go get the others,” Cohen said and Evan went back to the grocery store and called for them. In a minute they were all in the kids’ store, sorting through the leftovers. Mariposa laid the baby down on a pile of blankets and he woke and started to cry. They ignored him as she and Nadine took a box and went around filling it up with baby shirts and pants and rattles. They found random pieces of clothing for boys or girls, for kids and infants, and they put it all in the box, taking the time to hold up each piece and show it to one another and oooh and aaah when something was particularly sweet. When one box was filled they found another and Kris said this one is for the baby to keep. They filled it with only boy things. And when the baby’s box was just about full, and with his crying at its highest pitch, Nadine shrieked and raised her hand in the air and she was clutching a pack of pacifiers.

“Thank you, dear Jesus,” she said and she opened up the package and walked over to the baby. She knelt down and said, “Here you go, little madman.” She touched the pacifier to the edge of his open mouth and he took it in and his eyes opened wide. He sucked on it and the tension left his face and the tears slowed and soon he was sucking and quiet and in another minute he had returned to sleep.

“Do not lose these,” Nadine said and she handed the remaining pacifiers to Kris and picked up the two boxes and walked out back.

On the other side of the store, Mariposa was helping Evan with his own box of toys for Brisco. A couple more trucks and a Frisbee and some coloring books. A dinosaur and a robot and a checkerboard and checkers. Brisco circled them with the first truck he had found, treating it as an airplane now, his arm extended and moving the truck in a rising and falling motion, landing it and lifting it again and lost in his own world.

Cohen sat in a chair next to the cash register. He smoked a cigarette and watched. He looked out the storefront where windows used to be, and the wind came in and the thunder was on them and the lightning flashed around them now, brilliant shards of white interrupting the gray. The rain seemed to have eased some but remained constant. He finished the cigarette and stomped it out on the carpeted floor and then he slumped a little in the chair. Leaned his head back against the wall. Closed his eyes.

As he drifted, he found himself thinking about Mariposa. Thinking of her in Elisa’s black dress, believing she was doing something that he wanted her to do.

He opened his eyes and saw her sitting on the floor, trying to piece together an arm onto the body of something shiny and blue. She had pushed up the sleeves of her shirt. Her forearms were girlish but she seemed more of a woman in her shoulders and chest and she bit her lip as she worked the arm into place. Her hair was blacker than a clear night and he noticed how soft her eyes could be when her mind was taken off this thing surrounding her. He wondered if she was even twenty but he didn’t think so. He wondered if she might lie against him again tonight, wherever it was that they would lie down to sleep. The arm popped into place and she held the toy out in front of her and she caught Cohen looking at her. Her eyes went down in embarrassment, then back up with satisfaction.

He stood up and walked to the storefront and tried to light a cigarette but couldn’t in the gust. He stepped through the doorway and he walked along the covered sidewalk to the furniture store. Like the grocery store, it had been cleared out by the people who were supposed to clear it out, not looters and animals. The front windows remained and he stepped back and looked at his reflection. It was the first time he had seen his full figure in a long time. He noticed that he was thin. His beard was uneven. He leaned to one side because he kept his weight on his good leg. He noticed that the hand that wasn’t holding the unlit cigarette was in his coat pocket and he was unconsciously grasping the pistol.

He let go of the pistol and took his hand out of his pocket and he made a peace sign. Then he shot the bird. Then he turned his hand sideways and made a dog. When he was out of tricks, he posed as if holding the baby, imagined what he looked like with a child in his arms. He thought of that baby boy and how out of place he seemed down here, this child of thunder. How out of place they all seemed. For so long, staying below had made sense to him but no more. He was sick of the rain and had been sick of the rain for months and he was sick of the cold and sick of the wind and sick of trying to build that goddamn room that he swore to God that he would build. He knew that whenever he was above the Line, a day from now or a week from now or a year or five years from now, that he would feel a guilt in having left. He knew that some part of him would want to come back. Want to return to the place and want to imagine her there and want to go and sit out by their tombstones and talk to them. He didn’t expect that there would ever be a time when he would be free of his desire to be there, with them. But he realized that he had started something new and he wanted to finish it.

He let his hands fall to his sides and stared at his reflection. He looked at himself as if he had seen someone from across a room and knew that he knew the person from somewhere but couldn’t remember exactly who it was. And the stranger stared back with the same curious expression.

They looked at each other, but their curiosity was interrupted when he heard a strange thunder. When he turned to look out, it wasn’t thunder but the murmur of an engine and along the four-lane, a camouflage-colored lifted truck with tires as big as small people was rolling in their direction, a spotlight above the truck cab slicing through the storm.

“Shit,” he said and he ran back to the kids’ store and ducked inside and he told them to get to the back, get to the back. They’re coming this way.

Kris scooped up the baby and Nadine helped her along and Evan grabbed Brisco by the arm and lifted and carried him. Mariposa followed and Cohen was behind them all. They ran into the storage room and Cohen ran outside and to the back of the grocery store. He jumped off the loading bay into the back of the truck that held the guns and ammo. He reached under the tarp and grabbed three rifles and ammo and hurried back up and he shoved one in Evan’s chest as the boy put Brisco down and he told Evan to come with him and everybody else to find a dark corner to hide in. And keep that damn pacifier in that kid’s mouth.

“Get down,” Cohen said in a whisper as he and Evan crept back into the storefront. They made their way behind the counter and knelt. He set one rifle on the floor with the boxes of shells and then he propped the other rifle on the countertop and told Evan to do the same. Steady yourself. Use the counter. Don’t jerk. Keep your head down as far as you can but still see. Don’t move.

They listened and the hum of the big truck grew a little louder as the seconds ticked away. “They’re going slow,” Cohen whispered.

“Did they see you?” Evan asked.

“Don’t know.”

From where they were back inside the store, they wouldn’t be able to see the truck until it was almost directly in front of the strip mall and it was not visible yet but almost there. Cohen took his hand from the trigger and flexed his fingers and hand. Evan saw him and did the same thing.

“Don’t be scared,” Cohen said.

“Too late.”

And then the truck stopped, not yet in their sights. The engine was turned off. Then the sound of doors opening and closing and the voices of loud-talking men.

“What’d he say?” Evan asked.

Cohen shook his head. “Couldn’t tell.”

There was a banging on the side of the truck and the back door sliding up and more voices back and forth in a brief dialogue and then silence.

“Listen,” Cohen whispered. “If they come walking this way and we have to shoot, you start on the far left and I’ll start on the far right. Don’t matter how many it is. You start left and I start right. Got it?”

Evan nodded. He was breathing heavy but his eyes were steady.

“Show me your left hand,” Cohen said.

“What?”

“Your left hand. Show it to me.”

Evan took his left hand off the rifle barrel and waved it.

“Just making sure you knew which was which,” Cohen said.

In the back room the women and Brisco scurried around looking for a place to hide as Cohen and Evan waited on the men to show themselves.

29

THE MEN WALKED INTO SIGHT, moving cautiously into the parking lot, sticking close together. Four of them. They all wore thick black raincoats. Cohen recognized the automatic weapons that had belonged to Charlie’s muscle slung over the shoulders of two of them. The one who walked in front didn’t wear his hood but instead a cowboy hat and he had a long goatee that touched the middle of his chest. He raised his hand and they stopped. They looked around. Then the man made other hand motions and they split, two of them walking to the right toward the grocery store, two to the left toward the furniture store. Cohen and Evan knelt in the middle, in the shadows.

The man in the hat whistled and they stopped. Maybe thirty yards away from the storefront. Evan took his hand from the rifle and wiped his sweaty palm on his pants. And then the lead man called out.

“Pretty day out here,” he yelled out above the rain. “Don’t get no better. Might as well come on out and enjoy it.” He paused and waited for a response but the only reply was from the thunder. He waited until it died and then went on. “Come on out and get something to eat. I know y’all are hungry. Get you something to eat. Something to drink. Sandwich cart don’t come around often anymore.” He waited again. Lightning cracked and the men in the black coats jumped but then steadied. “I saw you and I know you’re back in there somewhere. Turns out it’s your lucky day. We always looking for a good man. If you are one. Good man can come on out and get something to eat. Maybe get himself a job and a title. Everybody out here’s got a title. But we can’t divulge until we get a look at you.”

A couple of them laughed. Cohen noticed that none of them held their rifles ready to fire but instead hanging at their waists. One man had his hands in his coat pockets. The man doing the talking had folded his arms and was enjoying listening to himself talk and it was then that Cohen realized their mistake. Their miscalculation in assuming that a single person was somewhere back in there and that he had no way to defend himself against a posse. These same men who had earlier ambushed and slaughtered men who were ready and prepared and armed were now making the most crucial mistake of all in this land and that is you can never be sure. But they seemed sure and unconcerned as they waited on what they thought was a defenseless straggler and Cohen knew that there would not be another opportunity like this one.

“Evan,” he whispered.

The boy looked at him.

“Don’t talk. Listen. You see the one on the left. Put your sight on him and when I count three shoot him. Don’t miss. You got it. Don’t goddamn miss.”

Evan nodded.

“Shoot him and as soon as you do, run to the back and get everybody in the trucks and get ready to drive like a son of a bitch. I got the rest here. You just shoot and hit and then run back and get everybody in the trucks and get cranked and then I’ll come running and hop in the back and we’ll get the hell out of here. You got it?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. On three. You got left and then go and I got the rest.”

“All right.”

“Be cool.”

“Just count.”

“Okay.” They each propped and resteadied themselves. From behind the counter they were undetected and each had a clear shot.

The man with the hat said, “Fine. Have it your way. Never heard of nobody who didn’t want food and a title. But if we have to come in there the offer is revoked. Won’t be nothing but—”

Cohen said three and the man on the left went down with the crack and Evan was up and gone. Cohen took down the man on the right and turned to the other one on the left who had raised his rifle and was firing wildly and Cohen hit him once and he went down and then Cohen hit him again. He turned next to the leader, who had taken off running and gotten behind the concrete base of a parking lot light. But he couldn’t get all the way behind and Cohen hit him in the leg and the man aimed the automatic rifle over his shoulder and sprayed the strip mall. Cohen ducked down on the floor as the bullets shattered through the walls and windows and concrete. He crawled around the side of the counter but couldn’t get a shot from down low. When the man turned to get to his knees Cohen raised and fired and hit the pole and the man fell back, thinking he was dead. But he wasn’t dead and he raised up and sprayed fire again and Cohen went down and from behind the building he heard Evan yelling for him to come on, come on. The firing stopped and Cohen raised and shot and hit the man in the chest and he dropped. Cohen fired once more into the concrete post and then he stopped and waited.

Nothing moved in the parking lot.

“Come on!” Evan yelled.

Cohen waited, counted to five, and still nothing moved. So he turned and ran out the back of the kids’ store and jumped from the loading bay into the back of the truck. Evan was in front of Nadine and the truck leaped and Nadine was close behind as they sped out from behind the stores and the trucks leaned at the left turn into the parking lot and at the right turn onto the highway. Then Cohen slapped on the back glass and yelled, “Stop it! Stop it!”

Evan hit the brakes and Nadine nearly rear-ended them but she swerved to the side. Cohen told her to wait and told Evan to turn around and go back to the big truck and hurry your ass up. Evan spun around in the four-lane and drove hard back to the truck and he slammed on the brakes and Cohen crashed into the back window. He dropped his rifle and grabbed a pistol out of his pocket and told Evan to get turned back around. Cohen ran around to the back of the men’s truck and dropped the tailgate and saw what he was after. He jumped in the truck bed and the first two gas containers he grabbed were empty and he tossed them aside, but the next two were full five-gallon containers.

He lifted the gas containers and set them on the tailgate and he jumped out. He waved Evan to back up and Cohen set the containers in the back of the pickup and as he was climbing in, Mariposa pointed and yelled, “Look back there!”

Coming for them were the headlights of an army utility truck and standing in the back was a handful of men pointing in their direction. The truck was coming fast and Cohen took out the pistol and fired it over and over to make the sound of men with guns instead of man with gun and Evan hit the gas pedal. When the pistol was empty Cohen tossed it over the side and took out the other but didn’t fire. They shot back and the side-view mirror shattered and then a rim shot off the back fender. Evan laid on the horn as he got to Nadine, the shots skipping around them and Cohen lying flat in the back and Mariposa screaming come on, come on. Evan and Nadine together drove off like hell, swerving and splashing through the big stuff and busting through the little stuff and when the army truck got to the U-Haul, they kept firing, but they stopped to see about the others, and within minutes, the two trucks were out of town and out of sight, and the rain came on as if it had something to prove.

When it felt safe, they pulled the trucks off the highway underneath the cover of a half-standing auto shop and they all got out and walked around and the wind and rain relieved their anxiety-ridden faces. Some thanked God and some were still breathing heavy from the excitement and some did both. The baby had to be fed so Nadine climbed in the back and found the formula and a bottle of water and gave it to Kris, who sat in the truck cab with the baby. Brisco and Evan walked behind the building to pee. Cohen, after taking the gas cans and pouring gas into the trucks, walked away from them all and stood alone, looking back south from where they had come. It was charcoal gray and the rain fell in big drops and swirled with the twisting winds.

He managed to get a cigarette lit this time and he couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe he had panicked and left the Jeep. Made the decision to hop in the back of the truck without thinking about the Jeep. Son of a bitch son of a bitch son of a bitch, he kept saying to himself.

“What?” Nadine said.

“Nothing,” he snapped.

“Bullshit.”

“My Jeep. I left the Jeep and I got to have it.”

“It’s a Jeep. It ain’t a gold brick.”

“I know what it is and I got to get back to it.”

“Like hell,” she said.

30

COHEN GOT AWAY FROM HER and he smoked and cussed himself. By the end of the cigarette he had calmed some and he went to each of them to make sure no one was hurt or hit.

“That was like a movie,” Nadine said. “And I like watching a lot better than being in one.” She rubbed her wet head with her hands and her short hair stuck up in different directions. “I’m going to sit with Kris,” she said.

Brisco hopped around with his hands made into pistols and he shot imaginary bullets at imaginary bad guys. Evan told him to stop it but he kept on. Cohen asked Evan if he was all right and Evan nodded.

“That was a good job,” Cohen said and he patted the boy on the shoulder, but Evan still didn’t answer.

Mariposa told Cohen she’d like that cigarette now. He lit one from his and gave it to her.

“You’re not hit, are you?” she asked.

“No.”

“You think that was them that got all the others down in the parking lot?”

Cohen nodded.

“You think that’s all?”

“It’s never all, Mariposa.”

She smoked and squinted. Seemed to get used to it. She looked scared. They all looked scared but for Brisco. Evan walked away from them, his hands in his pockets. Cohen wanted to say something to him but he didn’t know what.

Mariposa’s hand shook as she moved the cigarette to and from her mouth. Her head was wet and she shivered from the cold or from what had just happened or from both or from something else altogether. She dropped the cigarette and looked at Cohen and she was about to cry and she said, “I didn’t mean nothing in her dress. I swear it.”

“I know.”

“I swear,” she said and she was in a full shiver and Cohen stepped to her and wrapped his arms around her. He couldn’t tell if she was crying or only shaking but it didn’t matter to him. His chin sat on top of her head and he felt her shivering against him and he saw Evan standing alone staring out into the storm and he looked out at the truck where the women sat with the baby. He held Mariposa and it crossed his mind that it had been years since he had held on to anyone like this. He thought to let go once, twice, but he didn’t. He let her cry or whatever it was she was doing. He held on to her until she stopped shaking. He let her move away from him.

And she finally did. She wiped her eyes. Wiped her face.

“We better go,” he said and she nodded and sniffed.

Brisco raced by and shot Cohen with each hand. Pow, pow, pow, he cried with each shot. Evan had turned to see what he was doing and he stomped over to Brisco and yanked him up and yelled, “Don’t you do that shit!”

Brisco yelled ouch and Cohen said, “Calm down. He don’t mean nothing.”

“You let me be. He ain’t yours.”

“I know he ain’t but he’s playing.”

“That ain’t no way to play,” Evan said and he shoved Brisco away. “I mean it, Brisco. Quit that shit.”

“Jesus,” Cohen said. “Settle your ass down. We got enough shit going on.”

“You settle down,” Evan said and he told Brisco to come on and get in the truck. He took the boy by the coat arm and dragged him out into the rain.

Mariposa called out to Evan but Cohen said let him go. Let him be for a while.

“What’s wrong with him?” Mariposa asked.

The storm roared now and it was damn near dark. They had to get somewhere. Cohen tugged at his beard, looked out at the weather and looked back at Mariposa. “What’s wrong with him?” he said. “Only the same thing that’s wrong with all of us down here. Come on.”

They got back into the truck cabs. Mariposa wiped her face again with her hands. She noticed Cohen’s anxious look and she asked him if he was all right.

“I got to go back,” he said.

“No you don’t.”

“Yeah. I damn sure do,” he said. Son of a bitch. He was sick for not thinking about the Jeep when it mattered.

Mariposa said, “You don’t need anything down there. We’re almost there.”

“We might be almost there.”

“We are.”

“If you were to look at a map, we are. But it doesn’t matter where we are or what’s between here and there, I got to go back.”

She moved closer to him on the seat and said, “You don’t. Really, you don’t.”

“Really,” he said. “I do.”

She moved closer. “I don’t understand.”

He fidgeted in the seat. “I just have to go back. It’s my Jeep.” He wrapped his hands tightly around the steering wheel and stared out at the weather. She touched his arm, pulled at him some. He let go of his grip on the steering wheel and she pulled his arm to her.

“You don’t have to, Cohen,” she said. “I know you want to but you don’t have to.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek delicately, almost undetected.

Cohen didn’t move. Didn’t look at her. He cranked the truck and started out and said, “Let me think.”

Despite the rain and wind, they had luck the first ten or so miles, moving up Highway 49 with nothing more to navigate than the occasional fallen tree or light pole. Kudzu had overlapped the highway here and there like a green rug meant to beautify the rough asphalt. They passed through the tiny communities of Saucier, McHenry, Perkinston. The road signs were bent and twisted and they saw random cars but little else.

The first trouble came somewhere between Maxie and Dixie. A bridge had been washed out by what was once a creek but was now more like a flowing marsh. They had to backtrack six miles to try and detour around it but found another washed-out bridge along the cut-through and they had to backtrack again. No one was familiar with the roads in this part of the country but they knew north from south and they kept trying to get themselves north on nameless back roads or strips of forgotten highway. It was all but dark and the storm was gaining strength and even with headlights it was almost impossible to see. Cohen was in front and when it was too much, he stopped and ran back to Evan and the others and said, “Let’s find shelter for now and try again in the morning. I know it’s hard but if you see something flash or honk or something.”

In another slow mile, the other truck honked and Cohen stopped. He looked around but didn’t see what there was to honk about. Evan ran up and hit on the door and Cohen cracked it open.

“Back across there, did you see it?” Evan yelled against the rain.

“Where?”

“Right back over. That gravel lot. Looked like an old store or something back some. Looked like it had a roof.”

“All right,” Cohen yelled back. “Get in and back up and we’ll see.”

He shut the door and Evan ran to the truck. Both vehicles moved in reverse for twenty or so yards, then stopped. Like Evan described, to the right was a gravel parking lot and back from the road was a small brick building. Cohen turned and shined the headlights on the building. Crossbars covered the empty windows and there was no door. A rusted ice machine stood guard and a sign had been ripped from the front awning, but it looked like the roof was intact and it showed no sign of living things.

Mariposa leaned forward with her hands on the dash. Cohen flashed his lights on bright but it didn’t change anything. “Might as well go see,” he said.

He took a flashlight and made sure the pistol was in his coat pocket and he got out. The four headlights shined on Cohen and the old store and the rain fell sideways through the yellow beams. He stepped into the door and momentarily disappeared from sight, but then he waved for them to come on. Mariposa killed the ignition and Evan killed the other truck. Brisco hopped from the seat into Evan’s arms. Kris held the baby and Nadine held Kris by the arm and they stepped carefully to the doorway.

“Careful, it’s slick,” Cohen told them as they came in one by one. He shined the flashlight out across the linoleum floor that was wet and black with dirt and scattered with overturned stock shelves. Along the back wall of the room glass coolers once held beer and Cokes for the workingmen who had spent the day in the field or on the job site. The doors were open and the racks still there as if waiting optimistically for the day when the bottles and cans would once again sit inside and be greeted by thirsty eyes. It was a small store and the weather came through the windows but it seemed like it would do.

They congregated in the middle of the room, the fallen shelves around them. Evan kicked at one and it slid and banged into another. Nadine jumped and said, “What the hell.”

Brisco hugged Kris around her leg.

“It’s gonna be a long night,” Nadine said.

Cohen continued to move the light around and they watched, standing closely together, a tension binding them, as if only waiting for the moment they would be shocked by what the light revealed. In the back corner of the store was another door and it was closed and locked with a padlock. The cream-colored walls were spotted with mold and the ceiling sagged from water leaks and there were drips here and there but no holes.

Evan looked around and found a couple of folding chairs and a short bench behind the counter. The women and Brisco went and sat down. Evan and Cohen moved over toward the locked door. Cohen held the light on the padlock.

“That door don’t look like much,” Evan said. “Not if you really wanted to get in.” He shined the light up and down the metal door and there were footprints about waist-high and indentions up and down it.

“Maybe it’s tougher than it looks,” Cohen said.

“Probably ain’t nothing,” Evan said.

“Probably not.”

“You gonna get it open?”

Cohen shrugged. He turned and walked to the counter and Evan followed. They both hopped up and sat on it. Cohen shined the flashlight around again and then turned it off. Nadine said let me take a turn and Kris handed her the baby. Then each of them sat still and quiet. It rained and the wind came in gusts.

As they sat there in the dark, the weight of it all began to collapse around them in the confined space. The storm muted all and left them suspended in the absence of sound. A steady, heavy drone. Mariposa slumped in her chair and Brisco lay across her lap. Nadine held the baby, her head bowed and resting on top of the tiny bundled body. Kris stretched out her legs and rested her hands across her stomach. Evan stared at Brisco. Cohen stared at his hands. Quiet, fatigued silhouettes.

They were small things against this big thing. Against this enormous thing. Against this relentless thing. Small, exhausted things whose lives had become something so strange and extraordinary that it didn’t seem possible that they could be anywhere but sitting in this abandoned building in this abandoned land in this storm-filled night in this storm-filled world. They sat still and exuded exhaustion. Maybe even hopelessness. Maybe even helplessness. The day had begun with the idea of a finish line, but that idea was being washed away in this torrent of despair.

Cohen stood up from the counter and folded his arms. He walked away from them and stood in the center of the floor between fallen shelves. He listened. Looked around in the dark. Water dripped all around him. He thought about the baby and what would become of his life. Or would he have a life? Would he live to see another place? A normal place where lights shined and refrigerators kept food cold and beds were soft and sometimes the sun came out and people rode in cars and had jobs and if you needed something you went to a store to get it and the sound of thunder didn’t sound an alarm but only meant nourishment for rosebushes and the front yard. Would he live to another place? And if they managed to get him somewhere, who would change his diapers and teach him his colors and ABCs and would he have friends and would he go to school and would he ever call anyone Momma and would he ever call anyone Daddy? Would he ever play T-ball or learn to ride a bike or not have to worry about being hungry? Would he ever know the story of how he was born and where he was born and who his father was and what a miracle it was that he was alive at all and would he ever know the story of the group of misfits who somehow managed to get him across the Line? He was a long shot. They were all long shots. In every direction, a long shot.

Cohen uncrossed his arms and looked at his hands and he thought of the knife in his hands and the baby’s mother and her screaming and her pleading and her blood. In this blackest night, her blood flowed across his mind and turned his thoughts crimson, and he saw crimson on the walls and on the floor and dripping from the ceiling and puddled on the floor and blowing in from the windows and he felt it dripping from his beard. He saw crimson and he heard her begging for somebody to do something and then her voice became his voice and he heard himself cry out as he sat on the road with Elisa’s head in his hands, crying out for somebody to do something but there was no one who could do anything as it had already been done. The choice for her to die and for the baby to die had already been made and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it. He heard his own voice and now the blood that flowed in his mind was Elisa’s blood and he felt it on his hands and he felt it across his legs and he cupped his hands and felt her head resting in them and he begged for help but there was none and he felt her heartbeat disappear and then he felt the heartbeat of his little girl disappear.

He brought his hands to his face and he touched his fingertips to his cheeks as if to make sure that he was real. He held them there. Closed his eyes and the spirit of renewal that had filled him earlier in the day was buried under all else.

She sat in the seat with her legs crossed while they drove on Highway 90. Summer sun and the windows down and they went to Ocean Springs and parked downtown and walked to a patio bar and sat down and drank draft beer and ate crab claws and then they got up and walked to another patio bar and drank more beer and ate boiled shrimp. A white-bearded man sat on a stool in the corner and played his guitar and the day faded and when they were done they got up and walked again, underneath the moss trees and past the two-story houses and once or twice they exchanged waves with people sitting on an upstairs balcony. They walked on, pushing and pulling at each other, laughing at stupid jokes and stopping now and then to kiss and then slapping and grabbing at one another as they walked on and then they came to the beach and it was getting dark. They left their flip-flops at the sidewalk and stepped into the white sand, holding hands and smiling devilish smiles at one another. A mother was corralling the kids and packing up towels and plastic buckets and shovels and some teenage girls sat in a circle and passed around a cigarette. The two of them walked on until there was no one around and then they sat down in the sand and watched the last of the light drift away. The stars appeared and he lay on his back and she lay her head on his stomach and stretched out and they made the letter T. The water washed gently onto the shore. Down the beach somewhere a dog barked. Elisa hummed a song he didn’t quite recognize. He slipped his hand into his pocket and eased out the ring box. He reached over and lifted her shirt and ran his hand across her tan stomach, and then he set the ring box on her bare skin. She stopped humming. Sat up and looked at him and smiled and he smiled back and she didn’t open it but squeezed it in her hand and fell back on top of him and they rolled in the sand, laughing and kissing and crying a little.

Cohen moved his fingertips from his face and opened his eyes. He opened his coat, reached inside, and took out the pistol. It was cold in his damp hand. Everything was cold and damp in his hand. Everything was cold and damp. Or cold and wet. Or cold and soaked. Or cold and underwater. Or cold and wet and knocked over. Or cold and wet and shattered or cracked or busted or gone. Or just gone. Everything was gone. Everything was gone but for his very real Jeep and it was his very real chance if they ever got the hell out of here but none of that mattered because he had panicked and left it behind. He had to go and get it, wanted to go and get it, but the chance of getting back down there and out with it didn’t warm him with confidence. It was his and he didn’t have to share it. He had his chance and missed it and now here he was, with them, stuck in the middle of this, and somewhere was his life, but he didn’t know where.

He lifted the pistol and touched its nose to the bottom of his chin. He held in a breath. The water was all around them and the wind was all around them and hell seemed to be closing in and if there was a darker place on the face of the earth he didn’t know where it could be.

“Jesus Christ,” Kris said with a start and then she let out a quick shout of pain.

Cohen jerked at the sound of her voice and he lowered the pistol and put it back inside his coat. She yelled out again and Evan hopped down off the counter and moved to her and she was grabbing at her sides again. Cohen stepped around the shelves and came to her and said, “Same shit?”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah,” she said. Her breaths were quick and had little moans in between.

The others sat up and they all formed a circle around her. Oh God, oh God, she kept saying. She rocked back and forth, took deep breaths. Oh God, oh God.

Mariposa stood behind her and put her hands on Kris’s shoulders. She rocked and moaned, rocked and moaned. They stood there and watched because there was nothing else they could do. And then the baby woke up and started crying.

“Shit,” Cohen said.

Nadine talked to the infant and put her lips on his forehead. “Damn, he’s hot as fire,” she said.

“Ooooooh, hell,” Kris said and Mariposa told her to hold on. Hold on.

Cohen reached over and touched the baby’s face. “Goshdamn,” he said.

“Yeah,” Nadine said. “Goshdamn. He’s smoking.”

The baby wailed and Kris grunted and said Oh God and squeezed Mariposa’s hands. Brisco made a sound like he might start crying and Cohen went to reach over and touch his shoulder but they all jumped at the loud thwack from the back of the store.

“What the fuck!” Cohen yelled.

Evan stood at the metal door with part of a busted shelf. “I wanna see what’s in here,” he yelled back.

“Leave it alone,” Cohen said.

“Quit messing around, Evan,” Mariposa said.

He drew back the shelf and whacked the door again.

“Oh God, oh God,” Kris said.

“Quit that shit!” Nadine yelled over the crying baby.

Evan drew back and whacked the door again and this time Cohen walked over to him, kicking at whatever was in his way, and he tried to yank the piece of shelf from Evan but Evan didn’t let go.

“I wanna see what’s in there,” he said defiantly.

“Why the hell you gotta see what’s in there right this damn second?”

“I just wanna see.”

“You might not.”

Kris yelled out and Cohen let go of the shelf piece and turned to look in her direction.

Thwack!

Cohen grabbed Evan by the collar of his coat and yanked him back. He shined the flashlight on the padlock and pulled out the pistol and fired. The lock busted and he fired again and the doorframe exploded.

“There,” he told Evan and the gunshots sent Brisco crying and Nadine and Mariposa were both yelling something and the baby screamed and Kris gripped her sides and said Oh God oh God.

“Here,” Cohen said and he shoved the flashlight into Evan. “Go see for yourself, you little shit.”

Evan took the light and told Brisco to calm down but the boy didn’t listen. Cohen stood there and waited to see if he would open the door. Evan shined the light on the busted lock and frame, then he stepped over to the door. He pushed, but it wouldn’t open. He pushed a little harder, and the top of the door opened but the bottom was stuck.

“Listen,” Cohen said.

“What?” Evan asked.

They stood still a moment.

“You hear something?”

Evan waited. Shook his head.

“Nothing,” Cohen said.

Evan put his foot on the bottom of the door and pushed and when he did, whatever was on the other side gave way and the door fell open. Almost instantly, Evan started hopping up and down and then Cohen did the same and Evan shined the light down into the room and hundreds of rats came pouring out of the storage room that had been filled with boxes of pasta and peanuts and bags of potatoes and whatever else might be good in a bind. The rats quickly filled the store and Evan and Cohen were jumping around and slipping and sliding and the rats skidded across the wet floor and went up and over the shelves and along the walls and everywhere. The women were up and screaming, even Kris whose pain had been momentarily overwhelmed by rat terror. Mariposa helped her up and then she lifted Brisco onto the counter and it was screams and leaps and rats rats rats. Evan busted his ass and went down and the rats climbed up and down his body. He came up swinging and twisting and shook them off and Cohen slapped at the rats up and down his legs and then he screamed for everybody to get the hell outta there. Nadine and the baby were the first ones out and Mariposa held Kris and helped her out. Brisco was jumping up and down on the counter and screaming and Cohen snatched him and went for the door and Evan nearly knocked them both down as he flailed like a runaway scarecrow toward the exit.

Outside, Nadine held the baby tucked like a football in one arm and she held Kris with the other and she was fighting the wind to get into the truck. The last of the aluminum awning on the storefront snapped free and crashed across the windshield as they were ducking in the door. Mariposa stepped in a deep puddle and went down with a yell. She rolled in the water and grabbed at her ankle and Evan ran to her and helped her up and over to the other truck. The rain beat and beat and Cohen carried Brisco on his hip and managed to get the driver’s door open and he tossed Brisco in.

When the four were inside, Cohen said, “I got to go see about her. Evan, drive this one.” Mariposa moaned and held her ankle and Evan climbed across her and Brisco to get to the steering wheel. Cohen was out and over to the other truck and when he got in, Kris was leaned over grasping at her sides and the baby screamed and Nadine had the look of the bewildered.

Cohen cranked the truck and turned on the lights and the rats were wild in the doorway and across the storefront but none of them went out the doorway and into the rain.

“Can you sit up?” Cohen asked Kris but she said oh shit and the baby screamed.

The storm beat like a thousand drums and the truck moved with the wind.

“Fucking-ass rats!” Nadine yelled.

“Oh shit,” Kris groaned.

“Where the hell’s a pacifier?” Cohen said.

Nadine reached around on the seat and floorboard but couldn’t find one and then Kris said, “My pocket.” Nadine felt in Kris’s coat pocket and pulled one out and touched it to the baby’s lips. He took it in his mouth and sucked and Nadine thanked God. But Kris didn’t as she was too consumed with the feeling that something was going to pop out of her from somewhere. One of the doors of the ice machine whipped open and broke off and disappeared across the gravel lot that was quickly becoming a gravel pond.

“Goshdamn,” Nadine said in a high, anxious voice. She was touching the baby’s face and head. “He’s hellfire hot. We gotta do something.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Cohen said, but he didn’t know what.

The other truck honked and Mariposa was waving to them. The truck then moved in reverse and Cohen backed up and followed Evan out of the parking lot and back onto the road.

“He don’t know where he’s going,” Nadine said.

“I can’t help it,” Cohen said. “You want me to let them ride off?”

“Son of a bitch,” Kris said with her teeth clenched. She huffed and puffed and then said help me up. Nadine held out her arm and Kris grabbed on to it and got upright. She slumped down in the seat and squeezed her stomach. “Oh hell no,” she said.

“Cross your legs,” Nadine said.

“What the hell?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Nadine yelled.

They were back out on the skinny back road and it was almost impossible to see. Evan drove out front at a crawl and moved on until the road declined and at the bottom was a wash. Flooded as far as the headlights could show. Cohen saw the red taillights and stopped, then began to back up. Water and dirt and mud rushed along the road and the tires spun some but caught enough to make it in reverse to the store.

They turned around, and Cohen got out in front this time. So dark and so much rain everywhere. In the next few slow miles, Kris’s pain subsided and the baby sucked the pacifier and fell asleep and Nadine was oddly quiet as they crept along the back roads. The houses were separated by miles of countryside and Cohen several times went up a long driveway only to find that there wasn’t a house anymore. Or there was half a house and he couldn’t trust it to ride out a storm. After several more tries and another hour, they were all surprised when they followed a winding driveway and came upon a two-story farmhouse still standing.

31

EVAN PULLED UP BESIDE COHEN and they sat for several minutes with the four headlights on it. It had once been white but was weathered and the paint was peeling and half its shutters had blown away and some windows were gone. They watched for some minutes more to see if there was any light or any movement but it sat quiet, its tall rectangular windows like big black eyes staring back at them. Cohen waved at Evan and they drove up closer to the house and parked around on the backside where a porch stretched the house length. The right side of the porch had sagged to the ground and parts of its roof were missing and water dripped or poured all through the porch. The back door was closed and a refrigerator lay on its side next to the door.

Cohen waved at Evan to hold on, and then he backed up the truck and shined his headlights on the house and they watched again. Looked for shadows or anything. Still nothing.

Cohen killed the truck, got out, and hurried around to the passenger door to help Nadine and the baby out first and then Kris. They went carefully up the porch steps and opened the back door. Cohen called out, “Anybody in here? Anybody? We’re just looking for somewhere for the night. That’s all.”

“Ain’t nobody here,” Nadine said and pushed through. She walked in the house as if it were hers and Kris followed her. Mariposa and Evan and Brisco trailed Cohen through the doorway.

Cohen pulled a flashlight from his coat pocket and he shined it around the room. They stood in a big kitchen with tall cabinets and wide-plank hardwood floors that were bowed from the wet and humidity.

Together they moved through the bottom floor of the house. Four great big empty rooms with the same wooden floors throughout. Two fireplaces surrounded by handcrafted mantels that had to be a hundred years old. Water stains down the walls and on the ceilings, and branches and leaves scattered across the floor that had blown in the missing windows. The stairway separated the bottom rooms and they went up carefully, wary of rotted steps. Upstairs were four more rooms and more water stains and drip spots on the floors and only one room with its windows remaining. The wind and rain pushed in all the windows not covered with plywood and with a big gust the house moved some and they collectively held their breath. There was no furniture anywhere. A bathroom separated the rooms on the east side and there was a claw-foot tub and two pedestal sinks. Cohen shined the flashlight on the tub and he stopped. Held the light on the curved neck of the faucet.

“What is it?” Evan whispered.

“Why are you whispering? It ain’t more rats, is it?” Nadine asked.

“Hold on,” Cohen said. He held the light on the tub and walked over to it. When he got there, he reached down and touched his fingertips to the end of the faucet and it was wet. Then he shined the light down to the drain and he touched it and it was also wet. He then turned the handle for the cold water and there was a delay, and a groan, and then water sputtered out of the faucet, copper-colored and filled with little specks of something. It kept on sputtering and spitting but Cohen left it running and soon the line had cleared and a stream of water ran from the faucet.

Cohen stood back and smiled and said, “I’ll be damned.”

“I got it. I got it first,” Nadine was yelling as she turned and gave the baby to Kris. She ran out of the room and back down the stairs and then they heard her running through the house, yelling, “We got a tub and water. We got a tub and water, a tub and water.” Kris and the baby and Mariposa and Brisco followed her back down the stairs.

“Hadn’t seen one of those in a while,” Evan said. “Gotta say I wouldn’t mind a bath myself.”

“Gonna be a cold one,” Cohen said.

“No colder than these birdbaths we been taking since forever.”

“That’s true.”

Evan walked around the tub, moved around the dark room. “Sorry about that back there,” he said.

Cohen shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I was curious.”

“No shit.”

“I didn’t think it’d be a thousand rats.”

Cohen moved across the room and shined the flashlight out of the window. He thought about the look on the boy’s face after they had gotten away from the men in the parking lot. He turned back to Evan and said, “I hate I had to ask you to shoot.”

Evan didn’t answer.

“You all right?”

He nodded. “I’m all right.”

“Just so you know, Evan, there is one thing in this world I won’t worry about,” Cohen said. “And that one thing is you.”

Evan was about to speak again but the footsteps of the others were on the stairs and into the upstairs hallway and they came in the bathroom with lanterns and bars of soap and towels and clothes. Mariposa came in behind them, holding the baby.

“Get out, get on out,” Nadine said and she and Kris ushered the men out of the room.

“Come on, Mariposa,” Kris said. “Let’s get the baby first.”

“Where’s Brisco?” Evan asked.

“He said he didn’t want a bath,” Mariposa said.

Cohen said, “Go ahead and run the water but don’t get undressed. I got an idea.”

He and Evan headed downstairs and outside to the trucks. Evan held the flashlight while Cohen raised the tarp covering the truck bed and stuck his head under. He found the propane burner for the stove and he went back into the house and up to the bathroom. He took the legs off the stove and the tub sat just high enough to slide the stovetop underneath. Cohen took a lighter from his pocket and lit the stove and the blue flames wrapped the bottom of the tub. “That’ll help knock off the chill,” he said.

“That’s plumb genius,” Nadine said. “Now get on.”

Cohen and Evan went back to the trucks and worked against the storm but were able to get out what they needed for the night. Food and drink and some blankets. They took it all into the kitchen. Then Cohen went out one more time and he came back with a shotgun and shells.

COHEN AND EVAN AND BRISCO had taken off their coats and they sat on the floor in the kitchen. Cohen drinking a beer. Evan and Brisco sharing a bottle of water and eating from a can of green beans. The voices of the women upstairs and the rain coming down and the wind shoving at the house and Brisco trying to explain why he did not need to take a bath and Evan trying to explain why he did.

And then Evan said, “You know that girl likes you.”

Cohen didn’t answer.

“I said you know that girl likes you.”

“I heard you.”

“Don’t you know it?”

Cohen shook his head. He started to make some crack about he-said-she-said up and down the high school hallway, but then he realized Evan wouldn’t know anything about that. That he had never been up and down a high school hallway, had never passed notes, been to ball practice, skipped out on class in the afternoon, climbed into the backseat with the girl from history class and felt around for things. Never been to a movie with a girl or gone riding with the windows down and the music loud on a spring afternoon. That he was the perfect age for such things but he would not know them and he seemed to be so far beyond them anyway. And it was then that Cohen began to feel the weight of the others in this house on this dot on the map below the Line. He had always been aware that he wasn’t the only one who had lost, but the losses for others seemed different to him, more true and exact, now that the losses of others had eyes and faces and arms and legs.

“I think she’s just lonely. Like everybody else,” Cohen said.

“Nah. I think it’s more than that.”

“You remember she wanted to kill me. You remember that?”

Evan laughed. “I remember. She didn’t mean it, though. I told you we didn’t mean nothing. We had to.”

“You told me you didn’t mean nothing. You didn’t say we.”

“Yeah, but you know it. Anyway, you’re probably twice as old as her.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“You might be.”

“How old is she?”

Evan shrugged. “Eighteen? Nineteen?”

“But you don’t know.”

“I never asked.”

“How old you think I am?”

“About twice whatever she is.”

Cohen shook his head. “Got me there.”

Brisco got up from the floor and started playing with his shadow on the wall, his arms out and gliding like a hawk.

“You like her?” Evan asked.

“No. Not really.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“That ain’t no answer.” Evan huffed. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve and set the can of green beans on the floor. “Just seems like—” he started, then stopped.

“Seems like what?”

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“Seems like a miracle that anybody down here would find anybody else. Especially you.”

Cohen drank his beer. Tried to figure out how to answer. “Nobody’s found nobody. Nobody’s looking for nobody. I’m guessing about forty more miles and the road splits us all.”

“You think?” Evan asked.

“Which part?”

“That we’ll all split up.”

On the floor next to Cohen were two more beers and he took one and handed it to Evan. “Here,” he said.

Evan took it. Nodded. “What’d you used to do?”

“Do?”

“Yeah. Like work or whatever.”

“I framed houses. Built a bunch of these houses that are nothing but litter now.”

“How’d you learn all that?”

“My dad did the same. Started working with him in the summers when I was, I guess about your age. Kept on from there.”

Evan thought a minute. Sipped from the beer. “I think I’d like that. Be outside and stuff. See something happening every day. You like it?”

“Yeah,” Cohen said. “I liked it. Even kept on for a while after all this mess started.”

“You mean that thing on the back of your house.”

Cohen nodded. “That thing.” He felt so stupid now, thinking he could finish that room. “Let’s talk about the weather instead.”

“Okay. I think it’s gonna rain.”

“It’s already raining,” Brisco said, making an alligator chomp with his shadow.

“Then it’s a good thing we own a farmhouse,” Cohen said. “Complete with a tub and running water and a kitchen.”

“Too bad it didn’t come with firewood,” Evan said.

“That’s true,” Cohen said. Then he thought a minute and he set down his beer and said maybe it did, to come on and bring the lantern. They walked into one of the other rooms where the floor was warped and bowed. Evan held the light and Cohen set down his beer and got his fingers up under one of the boards and he pulled. It came right up. And when one was up, it was easier to get the others, and in minutes they had the floorboards of half the room pulled up and in a pile. Evan gave Brisco the lantern and he and Cohen gathered the boards in their arms and they walked into the front room of the house where there was the fireplace. They dropped the boards on the floor next to the fireplace.

“Think it’ll burn down the house if we light it up?” Evan asked.

Cohen knelt and said come here with that light, Brisco. Brisco stood over him and shined and Cohen ran his hand across the brick bottom of the fireplace, feeling for bits of crumbling mortar. When he didn’t find any, he said we might as well give it a try. And they did, and the floorboards were made of oak and they burned easily, and by the time the women came downstairs with their wet hair and shiny faces, the room was aglow and warm, and no one cared that the house that protected them was also the house they were burning up.

32

MARIPOSA SLIPPED AWAY. SHE FOUND a candle on the kitchen counter and lit it and she went upstairs to look into the other rooms. More warped wooden floors. More crumbling plaster and peeling wallpaper. Shredded bird nests and molded fireplaces. The rooms were great and wide and she imagined a large family living there, the children upstairs and the steady rumble of their running and playing while the mother and father sat downstairs and read the newspaper and drank coffee and felt the cool autumn breeze through the open windows.

She stayed away from the windows as the rain and wind bullied the house and she held her hand across the flame to protect it. She came into a room where the wallpaper flapped in the wind and the closet door hung by its top hinge. The candlelight led her to the fireplace mantel and it was decorated with hand-carved rose vines. She touched the vine and then the rose petals, running her fingers along the grooves that were still smooth. She set the candle down on the mantel and listened to the storm, listened to the voices and movement of the others about the house. The flame danced and Mariposa put her hands on the mantel, stretching them wide, letting her head drop as her hair fell around her neck and head and nearly reached her knees.

“There’s no such thing,” she whispered. She waited for her grandmother to answer. “There’s just no such thing,” she said again and she raised her head. Looked at the twisting, delicately carved vine.

It was all disappearing. The French Quarter ghosts that she had chased as a child, hiding with her friends as they trailed the horse and buggy and listened to the man in the overcoat and floppy black hat regale his passengers with the wraithlike tales of the pirates and the hanged criminals and the brokenhearted debutantes who still roamed the dark and murky streets. The smell of incense wafting from her grandmother’s reading room as she delivered the messages from the grave beyond to the hopeful soul sitting across from her at the table. The notions of spirits and gods and angels that hovered in the realm between life and death and helped us along, or drove us into a corner, or waited and watched until it was necessary to intervene and save us from catastrophe. It was all disappearing as the very real world beat at her, beat at them, beat at all things from every direction.

She waited for the voice of her grandmother to come in through the window or exude in a slow smoke from the flue of the fireplace. That voice that had created that childlike hopefulness in wondrous things. She waited for that voice to appear gently, like the candle flame, and assure her that such things would always exist. No matter how hard the world strikes, no matter what men do to one another, no matter what men do to you, no matter what is lost, and no matter how badly you may want something that you cannot have, there are such things that stand in the shadows and drift with the clouds and rise with the sunshine and wait for you. Watch for you.

Mariposa waited but couldn’t hear her grandmother’s voice. She looked at her wrinkled, wet fingertips. Touched them to her mouth.

The ghosts will kill you, she thought, and then there was the image of Cohen living alone in that house, with his memories overwhelming him when he thought they were protecting him. The power of what he had loved and what he had lost so incompetent against the careless strength of the living.

She picked up the candle and crossed the room. The rain blew against her as she passed the window and she walked into the corner and stopped. She nudged her back into the crevice of the walls and slid down and sat with her knees up against her chest. With both hands she held the candle. She let her faith in other things, in other worlds, fall way down inside her.

Right now, she thought. And she waited for Cohen.

33

EVAN AND BRISCO WENT UP next and got clean despite Brisco’s pleas against it. The women sat with the baby next to the fire. Cohen had laid the blankets across the floor, where they could all sleep in the same room with the fire and now he sat with his back against the wall. No one knew where Mariposa had gone.

“She didn’t take no bath,” Nadine said.

“Can’t understand that,” said Kris. “I coulda sat in that thing for a month.”

“You know some people have babies like that. Sitting in a big ol’ tub. Baby and everything else comes out floating.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kris said. “That makes me want to vomit. I want the drugs and tell me when it’s over.”

“Amen to that. Why the hell would anybody want to be in the same tub with all that mess.”

Kris held the baby but he began to cry and she handed him to Nadine. Nadine rocked him in her arms and got up and walked around the room with him but he kept on.

“Gotta be hungry,” she said.

“I tried already. Didn’t want nothing.”

“Give it here,” Nadine said and held out her hand and Kris held the full bottle up to her. Nadine tried to give it to him but he fought it and kept on crying. “You think getting his ass clean would make him happy. Not the other way around,” she said. “He’s still hot.”

Cohen stood and looked out of the window. Outside was as black as a hole. He thought about the Jeep again. Thought about the shoe box that had gotten him into all this, sitting on the backseat of the Jeep, being pelted by the rain. Being ruined by the rain. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the key to the Jeep. Mumbled to himself and shook his head.

“What?” Kris asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

Another half hour passed and the baby kept crying. Evan and Brisco came down from the tub and told Cohen it was his turn.

“I left you a shirt of mine up there if you want it,” Evan said. Cohen nodded to him and took the lantern and he headed upstairs. Evan and Brisco went into the kitchen to look for something to drink.

Nadine paced with the child. Bouncing and singing and talking to him and trying the pacifier and trying the bottle and nothing. But she kept on. She told him about the smell of a chicken farm and told him about the time her stupid brother pushed her in the creek before she knew how to swim and she told him about the time her other stupid brother took their daddy’s truck before he had a license and drank a quart of beer and ran the truck into the back end of a parked cattle trailer. During the stories the baby paused, but when she had finished he’d start crying again. So she’d walk and bounce and sing and talk some more and he finally slowed down enough to take a bottle. Nadine sat down with him in front of the fire.

“You think they’d let me keep him?” Nadine asked.

Kris smiled. “Who you talking about?”

“Whoever is where we take him. Doctor, I guess. First thing they ask is who’s the momma.”

Little sucking sounds came from the infant. She was a rough woman who had lived a rough life, but there was something tender in the way she looked at the baby boy.

“I think so. I think that’s a good idea. He can be a big brother,” Kris said.

Nadine grinned, her harelip snarl disappearing some in the rise of her cheeks. “Don’t be none of my brothers,” she told the baby.

The fire was warm and the room dry.

“It sounds kinda weird, don’t it?” Nadine said.

“What’s that?”

“Making plans.”

Kris folded her arms across her stomach. Rocked back and forth. She nodded and stared at the fire. When the baby finished with the bottle, Nadine propped him on her shoulder and patted his back and he burped and threw up down her back.

“Aw, hell,” Nadine said and the baby began to wail.

Kris took the baby from her and Nadine found a shirt on the floor and wiped herself. The baby screamed and Kris got up and walked with him and tried the bottle again but he wouldn’t have it.

Nadine tossed the dirty shirt aside and got up and took the baby from Kris. “Sit down,” she said. “You don’t need to be walking around no more than you got to.” She cradled the baby and marched around the firelit room, bouncing him and half-singing, and the crying eased some.

“He just don’t look right to me,” Nadine said.

“Babies puke,” Kris answered.

“I know they puke but he won’t quit hollering. He’s so damn miserable.”

“Just keep bouncing around. At least that slows him up.”

Nadine walked him and talked to him. He cried, paused and listened, and cried again. Kris lay down and closed her eyes. Nadine touched his red head and tried to get him to suck on her fingertip but he didn’t want it. Didn’t want anything but to scream. She paced the house, walked in and out of the dark of the other rooms, and felt the child against her. As she rocked him in her arms in rhythm with her steps, she allowed herself to imagine somewhere new, without the crying, the boy learning to walk, the babble of his voice, his tiny hands reaching out for her.

34

THE TRIP WAS HALFWAY ALONG and they decided it was time to do what tourists are supposed to do. They armed themselves with the guidebook and maps and the camera and spent the next three days going to the major and minor museums, the plethora of cathedrals, the war memorials, the Venetian landmarks. They shopped for souvenirs, buying key chains and art prints and T-shirts. They found local markets and Elisa bought a handmade scarf and tablecloth and Cohen got himself a leather belt and he bought Elisa a silver ring that he planned to give her on the plane ride home. They rode the water taxis across the channel and through the major canals to save themselves time and to keep on track. The overcast skies remained and they were chased into a café now and then by a rain shower but the showers were brief.

At the end of the three days, after having seen all they felt like they needed to see, after having bought keepsakes and taken hundreds of pictures, they returned to the earlier pace of sleeping late and perusing the city looking for a good place to sit. A good coffee. A good bottle of wine. A good meal. These were the priorities.

They sat outside at a table in Palazzi Soranzo. Elisa had her feet propped in an empty chair and she wore a Band-Aid on the cut over her eye. Cohen leaned back with his hands behind his head. A carafe of red wine and a carafe of water sat on the table. It was a busy plaza and across the way they watched members of an orchestra take instruments from black cases and sheet music from black folders and begin to get comfortable in their seats. On the stage were several levels of stairs meant for a choir, and milling around the stage and around the center of the plaza were dozens of children in white robes.

“They’d better hurry,” Cohen said, looking up at the cloud-covered sky.

“I hope it holds off. I wanna hear them,” Elisa said. He took the wine carafe and refilled their glasses.

The orchestra began to warm up. The violins and the deep throbbing of the kettle drums, the higher-pitched clarinets and the strumming of harp strings, the tremble of the oboes. As if the instruments had sounded an alarm, the children in robes began to migrate toward the back of the stage. A woman in a sleeveless red dress ushered them and then a man in a gray suit passed by the orchestra and made sure each musician saw the three fingers he was showing.

“That’s weird,” Elisa said. “I just thought about something I haven’t thought about in a long time.”

Cohen reached for his wineglass and asked her what she remembered.

“Something I read back in college. Death in Venice. You ever have to read it?”

“If I did, I don’t remember it.”

“Well, then you didn’t. Because if you read it, you wouldn’t forget it. Especially now that we’re here. I can’t believe I just now thought about it.”

“So. What was it about? A double murder?” Cohen asked.

She stared across the plaza toward the children. “No,” she said flatly. “It’s about this man, an old man. He was an artist or maybe a writer. Anyway, he decides to come to Venice for a vacation and he ends up seeing this boy, this beautiful young boy and he falls in love with him. Crazy love. He becomes completely obsessed by this boy.”

Cohen sipped from his glass of wine. “Old pervert,” he said.

“But that’s it,” Elisa said, turning from the children and looking at Cohen. “He wasn’t an old pervert. It seemed that way at first but if you really looked at it, when he thought about the boy, it’s like he was thinking about a work of art or a sculpture or something. I think I remember something about him comparing the boy to a Greek statue. That’s how it started out. He was an artist and he saw the boy as art. But then when he started following the boy around was when he began to lose it some. He watched the boy all the time. Followed him in and out of the hotel, around the city, to the beach. Wherever. I think he even went to try and leave but couldn’t.”

The sounds of the tuning orchestra began to lessen and the children, who earlier stood in a huddled mass, had broken into lines and were waiting behind the stage with their hands at their sides. The woman in the red dress had come onstage. Across the front of the stage were four microphone stands and she went to each one to make sure that they were on and ready.

“What’d the boy do?” Cohen asked.

Elisa shrugged. “Nothing, really. He noticed the man but didn’t seem concerned. He had a governess or servant and they noticed him following them around but nobody ever said or did anything. The whole thing was strange. He loved the boy, it seemed like to me. But not in some weird sexual way. He just loved him. At least that’s what I thought.”

Elisa took her wineglass but didn’t drink. She held it up and watched the wine move around in it. Then she set it back on the table.

“The end?” Cohen said.

She shook her head. “The strangest part to me was that the old man found out there was a plague in Venice but that everybody was keeping it quiet so the tourists wouldn’t get out of town. The boy and his family were staying at the same hotel he stayed at, and I said he loved the boy, but when he found out about the plague, he didn’t warn the family. He didn’t do anything to try and protect the boy, though he knew that the plague was already killing people.”

“Did the old man leave?”

“No. He waited it out. Finally the family was getting ready to go and the old man kept on watching the boy and then he died sitting in a chair on the beach. I guess he got the plague, but you’re never really sure.”

Cohen emptied his glass and poured himself more. Across the way, the orchestra was silent for a moment and then began to play.

“I don’t know if he loved him,” Cohen said. “If he did I think he would have told them.”

Elisa raised her glass and drank, trying to decide.

“And he killed himself, basically,” Cohen said. “Right?”

Elisa set the glass down and emptied what was left of the wine carafe. The orchestral song echoed across the Palazzi Soranzo, echoed through the streets and alleyways, echoed against the thousand-year-old stone buildings and underneath the arched walkways.

“I think he was willing to die for the boy and he forgot everything else,” she said. She turned her head and looked across the plaza, up into the sky, as if trying to see the music. “I don’t think he knew the difference between right and wrong. Not because he didn’t care. He just lost touch with it.”

Cohen watched her. Could see her head and heart working together. He had always loved her this way and had seen this look on her face many times before as they sat on the beach and stared out across the ocean.

“It sounds like a good story,” he told her.

The orchestra played and the white-robed children began to file onto the stage and fill the rows of stairs. The woman in the red dress stood at the front of the stage with her back to the orchestra, her hands folded in front. People from across the plaza and from the extending streets began to drift toward the stage as if pulled by invisible strings. When the children were in place, the woman raised her hands, held them there. She brought them down gently and the angelic voices of children spread softly across the day.

35

IT WAS COLD AT FIRST but he got used to it and the propane burner helped in time. The first thing he did was clean the gunshot wound in his thigh, turning the water pink. When it was clean, he stood and let the dirty water run out and then he ran a new bath. Then he sat down in the tub and he stared at the wall and tried to figure out the best way to get back to the Jeep.

He figured they couldn’t have come more than twenty miles or so. He closed his eyes and slumped down beneath the water. Felt it cold and refreshing on his head like the spring’s first dive into the Gulf. Twenty miles didn’t seem like such a long way, not if the weather gave a little. He held his breath and stayed down as long as he could and then he came up with a gasp, wiping the water from his face and when he opened his eyes she was there, holding the candle in front of her as if keeping a vigil for the lost. Her overcoat was gone and her flannel shirt was gone and she was in a too-big T-shirt and jeans and barefoot. Her shadow rose behind her against the wall and up onto the ceiling.

They were right, he thought as he looked at her. She had not taken a bath. She stood still and stared at Cohen. He sat up straight and looked away from her, down into the bathwater. Then she walked across the room to the lantern and she turned it off.

He slipped under again, floating some, the images of the Jeep and the storm and the hole in his leg disappeared and his mind wandered off into a vast, empty place, and this time when he came up, her clothes and the candle were at her feet and she held her arms close against her body. Wild patches of hair at her armpits and between her legs. Her wavy black hair fell down across her breasts and reached her belly, like black silk cords of a velvet curtain that could be pulled back and allow you into a secret room. The beating of the rain against the roof and across the land and the light from the candle dim but pure as she came to him. He sat up with his arms on the side and she stopped at the edge of the tub and traced her fingers across the top of his hand. He didn’t look up at her but stared at her hips as she stepped over into the tub and nestled herself between his legs and she lay flat against him and held her mouth close and he smelled her and she waited to see if he would come to her.

He didn’t move. There was betrayal and hope and fear and love and hurt and yesterday and today and tomorrow twisting around in his head like a bed of snakes striking against one another for supremacy.

She moved her head down and leaned her face against his chest and her arms slid down into the water and wrapped around his back and she lay there. This black night and this nowhere and this rain that wouldn’t cease and downstairs the endless crying of the baby who seemed to have taken time to acclimate to this world and had now decided to rage against it with his angry but feeble voice that was as helpless against the grasp of nature as everyone and everything else.

In the corner of the room, water began to drip from the ceiling and it tapped the floor rhythmically as if readying for the strings to join in. One two three, tap. One two three, tap. The rain and the thunder and the crying infant and the one two three tap and the dull yellow light and the shadows long and this woman or maybe this girl but this person across him. Close to him. As close as she could be. Her head against his chest and her arms around him and their bodies together in the cool water and he moved his hands from the side of the tub and he moved them to the curve in the small of her back. She then lifted her head and he felt her tongue across the nape of his neck and he slowly exhaled, as if allowing the years of solitude to escape from him, if only for a little while.

36

THE BABY CRIED THROUGH THE night, never wanting to eat and randomly spitting up something thick and sticky. He slept only in half-hour intervals, his forehead and arms and belly hot like a rock in the sun. The floorboards were plentiful and kept the fire going and with the vague light of dawn they had all risen and were standing together in the kitchen, looking out of the windows at the storm. It had gained strength through the night and several times caused the old house to crack and bend in ways that a house shouldn’t. And now, as they stood together in the early morning, the wind came hard and there was the sound of wood splintering and a lengthy groan.

“It’s never gonna let up,” Evan said.

“Something ain’t right with him,” Nadine said. She had held him most of the night. His head was wet with sweat. “I say damn it all and let’s go. We try to sit this one out, we could be here for two weeks.”

“We can’t go out in this,” Cohen said. The house cracked again somewhere. “But we might not have a choice.”

“We got to get the baby to a doctor,” Kris said. “We can’t let him die out here.”

“Look at him,” Nadine said and she showed him to the others as if they had never seen him. His strained face and damp head and dry lips and gasping cries.

Mariposa moved over to Nadine and touched the child’s forehead. She looked at Cohen and nodded.

“So. What the hell?” Evan asked Cohen.

“Nadine’s right. God knows how long it’ll go on.”

“The screaming or the storm?”

“All of it.”

“You think this is the worst?” Evan said.

“I can’t tell anymore.”

“Shit,” Nadine said. “It ain’t safe nowhere in this fucking world.”

“Hey,” Evan said sharply, pointing at Brisco.

“Hell, I can’t help it.”

“Not the F-word. Damn.”

Mariposa moved from the baby and over to Cohen and she said, “Have you figured out which way to go?”

“Kinda. About like yesterday,” Cohen said. “I do know that somehow Charlie used to make it down here and back all the time in that big truck so there’s gotta be a good road somewhere. We just got to find it.”

“It’s probably out there at the highway,” Evan said. “If we could loop back around to it.”

“We can loop back around to it,” Cohen said. “Just depends on what everybody wants to do.”

“We got to go,” Nadine said. “I ain’t letting him die after all the shit Lorna went through to get him here.”

“I say go, too,” Kris said. “I ain’t a baby professional but God knows how high his fever is and he keeps throwing up when there ain’t nothing in him. It was something pink last time.”

Evan said, “With it like this, there’s probably less chance of running into anybody else.”

“That’s a good point,” Cohen said.

“I’m with them,” Mariposa said. “We could sit here for days but I don’t think the baby would make it. Nobody thinks it.”

“Let’s go then,” Nadine said.

“All right,” Cohen said. “Come on, Evan. Let’s try and load what we can.”

“And hurry up,” Nadine ordered and then she walked around in circles with the child.

Cohen and Evan began to gather canned food and lamps and plastic bags of blankets and clothes. Mariposa helped them get it all to the door and Cohen and Evan ran in and out of the storm, loading the truck. When they were done, Mariposa went out and helped them get the tarp tied.

They ran back inside and the wind slammed the door behind them. The baby screamed and Nadine danced around with him and tried to get him to take the bottle but he wouldn’t.

Cohen picked up the shotgun and the box of shells and handed them to Evan. “Let Nadine drive and put Kris in the middle with the baby and Brisco,” he said to Evan. “You ride against the window. We see anybody, you make sure they see what you’re holding.”

IT RAINED SO HARD AND the wind was so stiff that they had to pull over on the side of the road and wait. In lulls, they had gone east and then been able to maneuver north on Highway 29. But they moved at a walker’s pace, through decimated communities, houses and stores huddled around four-way stops and town squares. It took nearly an hour to manipulate several miles. They finally came to Highway 98, a four-lane running east and west. Fifteen miles to the east was Hattiesburg, a once slick university town that had sprawled with subdivisions and shopping malls and movie theaters. The interstate ran through Hattiesburg, which would get them to the Line most efficiently, but it was also likely that with the abundance of places to hide there would be more risks. This was the debate that they were having through rolled-down windows as they sat at a stop sign.

“I say we keep on this way,” Evan said.

“Which way?” asked Nadine. Evan pointed straight ahead, continuing north on 29.

“Might run out of road that way,” Cohen said.

“Better than getting shot.”

“I agree with that,” Nadine said.

“How’s he feeling?” Cohen asked.

“You hear him, don’t you?” Kris said about the wailing baby in her arms. “And hot. Don’t seem like that’s gonna change.”

“I ain’t interested in the interstate and what might be on it,” Evan said.

“I bet Charlie came that way,” Cohen said.

“Charlie had some help,” Evan said.

“Yep.”

“Let’s just keep on,” Nadine said and she pointed forward.

Cohen looked ahead. “All right,” he said.

But before they went any farther, he got out of the truck and took a gas can and put a couple of gallons in each truck, the wind pushing him off balance, his clothes stuck to him and his eyes fighting to stay focused on the job. He spilled a little but most went into the tanks and when he got back in the truck cab he was out of breath. Mariposa gave him a towel from the floorboard and he wiped his face and head. Then they crossed over Highway 98 and continued on north.

AFTER ANOTHER HOUR AND TWENTY careful miles, the rain constant and the roads flooded in some places but able to be crossed, they came upon a sign as big as a billboard, sitting solitary in the countryside, that read: U.S. GOVERNMENT–LEGISLATED TERRITORY 10 MILES.

“That’s it,” Mariposa said and she sat up straight.

The next ten miles were a drowning landscape that, as they drove closer to the Line, became littered with the waste of man—shells of vehicles, abandoned government trailers, burned houses, beer bottles and shredded tires and trash like the remains from a crowd that had made a run for it. All of it soggy and stuck to the earth. It was difficult to see that far ahead and they came upon another sign, as large as the first, that said the Line was two miles away. Two more filthy miles along the desolate highway and then they came upon a station, a square brick thing with a metal roof, the illumination of the electric light from inside a patch of yellow in a portrait of gray. A ten-foot-high fence stretched out from either side of the station and reached out of sight, with three black Hummers parked on the other side. A group of men in black coats, the same black coats they had encountered before in the parking lot, looked out at them from behind the thick glass of the station, like some powerful assembly of storm gods who had taken refuge from the work of their own hands.

Cohen stopped the truck. The other truck stopped behind him.

“What?” Mariposa said.

“I don’t know. What does it look like to you?”

They sat and stared ahead at the station. The rain beating and the windshield wipers thumping and the irritation of it all.

“They’d be coming this way if it was bad. Right?” she asked.

Cohen wasn’t sure. But it was time to decide. He put the truck in drive and they moved on toward the station.

There were five men inside behind bulletproof windows, and two of them put up the hoods on their black coats and walked outside. They both had rifles hanging from their shoulders and across the back of their coats in white were the letters USLP. One of them slid back the gate that crossed the road and the other stood at the entrance and motioned for Cohen to drive forward. Cohen moved ahead and the man held up his hand and Cohen stopped. He motioned for Cohen to roll down the window. He held his rifle like he was ready and he moved toward the window while the other guard moved to the passenger side of the truck. The three on the inside watched closely.

The man stayed two steps back and held his head tucked back in his hood as the rain slapped on the bulky black coat. Cohen leaned toward him to hear through the storm.

“You American?” the man called out.

Cohen nodded.

“I said you American?”

“Yeah. American.”

“What business you got up here?”

“Business?”

“Yeah,” the man said and he pointed his rifle at the ragged tarp and rain-soaked supplies in the back of the truck. “Business. Looks like you got business. Who you got up under there?”

“Nobody. Look for yourself.”

“Then what business you got?”

“I ain’t got no business. We’re trying to get the hell outta this mess.”

The guard moved closer and looked in at Mariposa. “She American?”

“Yeah. American.”

“She don’t look it.”

Cohen looked at Mariposa and back at the guard. “How so?”

“How about them back there? They with you?”

“Yeah, with me and her. All Americans. God bless America.”

The guard looked at the truck behind Cohen. He motioned the other guard to walk back to it. “You sit still,” he told Cohen.

Cohen rolled up the window and he turned and watched the guards as they walked to the other truck. It seemed like he was having the same conversation with Nadine as she was nodding and pointing at the others and then they stepped to the back of the truck and untied the tarp and looked underneath. They moved to Cohen’s truck and did the same thing. The guard tapped on Cohen’s window and he cracked it and the guard told him to cross through and pull over on the side of the road. He did and Nadine did the same.

Two more guards came out of the station. The four of them stood together and talked for a minute.

“What’s wrong?” Mariposa asked.

“Take a look. Just about all this,” Cohen said.

The guards split up. One went back inside the station and picked up a telephone. Another went to one of the black SUVs parked next to the station and he cranked it and pulled around alongside the vehicles. One guard walked to Cohen’s truck and the other to Nadine’s. Cohen let the window down again.

“Women back there say they got to get to a hospital. That right?”

“That’s right.”

“How long y’all been down there?”

Cohen shook his head. “Some longer than others.”

“Who the hell had the bright idea to get knocked up and have a baby down there?”

“I know it. Don’t make sense. But it’s a long story, I can promise that.”

“You got relations with them back there?”

Cohen said no.

“Then we’re gonna take that woman and that baby ourselves. Make sure they get where they need to go. You got anything up here that belongs to them?”

Cohen thought a minute. Looked over his shoulder and Kris and the baby were being helped into the SUV and Nadine was taking Kris’s plastic bag of clothes and whatever else out of the back of the truck. She handed it to the guard, who put it into the back of the SUV, then she hurried up to Cohen and said, “I got to follow them seeing as how that truck belongs to both me and Kris. We got to go.” She reached in the window and hugged Cohen around the neck and he said to hold on. He leaned back and took some money out of his front pocket and he gave it to her. “Be a good momma,” he said.

She took the money and smiled and she was getting soaked so she ran back to the truck. Evan and Brisco got out and came and got in next to Mariposa and they all watched the SUV and the truck drive away.

“Where they going?” Cohen asked.

“Depends,” said the guard. “About a hundred miles northeast to a decent spot for that baby and pregnant woman.”

“A hundred miles?”

“At least.”

“But ain’t this the Line?”

The guard laughed. “Officially, hell yeah. Unofficially, hell no. The Line ain’t nothing more than a line in the sand these days. Where you going, anyhow?”

Cohen shook his head. “I don’t guess we know. I can’t make it another hundred miles or whatever. Not in this thing.”

“Ellisville is straight on up this highway.”

“What’s there?”

“Mostly nothing. But maybe gas and food if you’re lucky.”

“Lucky? They got that stuff or not?”

“You’ll see when you get there.”

“All right,” Cohen said.

“And you got quite the arsenal in the back of that truck. You got plans?”

“Only plans we got is to get somewhere dry and warm and eat something cooked.”

“You can’t go riding around with all those guns in the back. Wrong people get back there, it’d be ugly.”

“What’s the gun law?”

“Gun law? I guess it’s if you got one, you’d better not let nobody take it from you. You’re still a long ways from law.”

“I got it.”

“Then go on. Ellisville is another dozen miles. Better find somewhere soon, ’cause there’s another storm right behind this one and it looks like a monster.”

“I haven’t seen one that isn’t.”

The guard shook his head.

“Ask him about Charlie,” one of the other guards called out.

“Yeah. Any chance you might’ve seen this old guy named Charlie down there somewhere? He runs a truck back and forth. Left out a while back but didn’t come back through this way.”

Cohen nodded. “We saw a couple of his boys. And about twenty others laid out.”

“Damn. Where at?”

“Down at the water. Casino parking lot.”

The guard shook his head again.

“You know,” Cohen said, “there’s some of you running roughshod down there. Even wearing the same coats.”

“I know it. They drive by here about once a week and fire over our heads just to see if we’ll do anything.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not getting paid to do anything. Don’t nobody sent down here know what the hell is going on, but some of us took it different than others.”

Cohen rolled up the window. The guard backed off and walked over to the others. Cohen put the truck in drive, but then he stopped and said wait a second and he got out of the truck and called out to the guards who were walking back into the station. They stopped and Cohen hurried over and asked if there was anything in particular they needed to be looking out for.

The guards smiled. Looked at each other. “Yeah,” one of them said. “If I was you I’d be on the lookout for whatever’s got two arms and two legs and sense enough to make them work.”