Rivers

by Michael Farris Smith

  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.”

  37

  THE GAS GAUGE WAS RIGHT at the e as they drove into ellisville. The high-way led them into downtown, a decrepit town square with a
fractured awning running the length of the buildings, and underneath the awning stood groups of men sheltering from the rain, watching the truck as Cohen drove around the square looking for a place to park.

  “What they all waiting for?” Evan asked.

  “Nothing, it looks like,” Cohen answered.

  Lights shined from the square buildings. A café stood in one corner and its door was open and a big man with an apron loomed in the doorway. Cohen lapped the square twice, watching them, some with the look of menace, others with the look of the defeated, but all seemingly interested in the unfamiliar truck and the unfamiliar refugees.

  Cohen turned off the square and drove around to the backside of a row of buildings. He parked in between two dumpsters. A metal staircase rose up the back of one building, and at the top of the staircase, standing with an umbrella, was a square-shaped woman in only her panties and bra and she was waving at them to come on up, calling out in a singsong voice muted by the rain.

  “Let’s go to that café and eat. Maybe find out about a place to stay,” Cohen said.

  “You sure?” Evan asked.

  “Not much other choice. Just stay close. Hold on to Brisco.”

  “What about all that stuff in the back?” Mariposa asked.

  Cohen reached into his coat where he still held two pistols and he took them out, made sure they were loaded. The bowie knife was still on his belt. The rifle leaned against the truck door next to Evan and Cohen told him to lay it down across the floorboard. They raised their legs and Evan set it down and pushed it under the seat.

  “We won’t be long,” Cohen said. “Nobody saw us park back here.”

  “Except her,” Evan said and he pointed up at the woman, who waved again.

  “She ain’t going nowhere. Come on.”

  They got out of the truck and hurried through an alley that took them to the square. The water rapped against the awning and it was mostly rotted and let in almost as much as it kept out. The café was on the other side so they started walking. Along the sidewalk, nobody moved to let them by and they wove carefully through and around the faces of men ready to take what didn’t belong to them. Some of them whistled at Mariposa, called out the things they’d do to her. Evan held Brisco tight and Mariposa held Cohen tighter. It smelled like cigarettes and old beer and here and there were bodies curled against building fronts, sleeping or passed out or dead. At the first corner a group of women huddled around a doorway of a building that had iron bars across the windows. The women were dressed like thrift-store mannequins with strangely matching low-cut shirts and hiked skirts that ignored the rain and cold. A woman wearing a baseball hat and a boa promised them anything they wanted for twenty dollars.

  “I’ll do all that twice for fifteen,” another one said and they all laughed and called out after Cohen as he crossed the street and made a left and continued along the square. Cohen saw the big man with the apron protecting the doorway of the café and they walked a little faster and halfway there, a man threw his shoulder into Cohen as they passed, knocking him off balance. He staggered against Mariposa but kept his feet. Several of them stood together, all of them with beards and wild red eyes and they each held a bottle and together they smelled like hell. Cohen stood up straight and looked at the one who had shoved him. Tattoos circled his neck and his nose was a little crooked.

  “Good day, sir,” the man sang out and a couple of them laughed. Up and down the sidewalk, everybody stopped and watched and waited.

  Cohen nodded and he took Mariposa by the arm and started to walk again but the man moved in front of him.

  “I said good day. You got manners, you say the same.” He stood close to Cohen and glared, then he looked at Mariposa, up and down. A couple of his buddies moved in behind him.

  “Go on, Evan,” Cohen said. “Take Brisco and go get something to eat.”

  Evan and Brisco started to move and Cohen was surprised the men let them but they did and the boys walked on toward the café, Evan watching over his shoulder.

  “What you want here?” the man asked.

  Cohen nodded at the café. “Something to eat.”

  “Who you got with you? Sister? Cousin? Daughter, maybe.”

  “We’re just walking over there.”

  “You might have to hold on. We here are the welcome-to-town committee. I’m president and them behind me is vice presidents.”

  Cohen looked past him and counted. “You got four vice presidents.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What for?”

  “It don’t matter. Does it?”

  “Not to me. But I wouldn’t split the vice presidency with three others.”

  The man reached out to touch a strand of Mariposa’s hair and Cohen swatted his hand away.

  “You better be careful,” Cohen said.

  “I was thinking the same thing about you,” the man answered, loudly, over the rattle of the rain. The others moved in closer.

  “We just want food and gas,” Cohen said.

  “I done heard that one. Seems like it unites us all.”

  “We’re not looking to be united.”

  “That right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You might get a whole lot more than that. Might get united and anointed and invited and provided and God knows what else. ’Specially her.”

  “Got that right,” one of the others said.

  “How old are you, darling?”

  “Don’t talk to her,” Cohen said.

  She squeezed his arm.

  “Well, then,” the man said and he grinned. He stepped back and waved his arm as if showing them to their table. “Cowboy gets to get on his way. Pardon the interruption. Y’all go and enjoy yourselves and we’ll be right here watching. Right across there we’ll have us a drink or two tonight, maybe.” He pointed at a storefront on the other side of the square where JOINT was spray-painted across the glass in a childlike script.

  “Come on,” Cohen said to Mariposa and they moved ahead. Cohen watched the men as he walked past, uncertain.

  “We gonna make you feel right at home,” the man called out. “Know why? ’Cause there ain’t nothing else to do. Ain’t nothing else to do but take care of the visitors to this fair city. God knows we about to be wiped away anyhow. Might as well enjoy it.”

  38

  IT WAS AS IF THEY were a quartet of unrehearsed actors who had been cast into an ongoing production and directed to play the role of silent, exhausted, and bewildered. They sat in a booth at the front of the café next to the window. Brisco and Evan on one side, Cohen and Mariposa on the other. Along one wall were more booths and nearly every seat was filled. Women with children, old people sitting six in a booth, a table of Mexican boys talking quickly with nervous looks. More people and more normalcy than any of them had seen in years. More normalcy than Brisco had seen in his life.

  Opposite the booths there was a long counter with ten stools occupied by men with coffee mugs and cigarettes. Behind the counter stood a black woman wearing a sweatshirt and a red bandana tied around her neck that she used to wipe the sweat from her upper lip as she worked the grill. A black girl hurried from table to table with a small notebook in one hand and a towel tossed over her shoulder.

  “What’s she doing?” Brisco asked.

  Evan leaned down to him. “She goes around and asks people what they want, then she writes it down and takes it over there to the cook. The cook fixes it, then when it’s done, she goes back and gets it and takes it to the person who asked for it.”

  Brisco’s eyes followed her as she moved between tables, pausing to write down an order or lift plates from a table. “Oh,” he said.

  The girl stepped carefully across the slick linoleum floor. Crooked cracks ran from the ceiling to the floor in the plaster walls and in some places the plaster had fallen away, exposing the original brick walls. The big man with the apron stood in the doorway like a roadhouse bouncer and in his right hand he held the heavy end of a
pool stick, a foot long, and he tapped it on his leg to the rhythm of the song that he was humming.

  Mariposa put her head down on the table and Cohen watched the square through the window. The rain still falling and the people lining the sidewalks and the water rising and spilling over the curb about halfway around. The men drank. They smoked. Some whispered to one another. Every now and then a push and a shove. A ragged blend of the young and the old. Across the square, Cohen noticed two police cars parked in an alley and he figured that was why things hadn’t escalated before when the men confronted them.

  The big man, tall and barrel-chested with his hair in buzz cut, walked over and tapped the end of the pool stick on the table and they turned their attention to him. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows and a scar ran the length of one forearm as if it were an extension of the pool stick.

  “Y’all hungry?” he asked.

  “I am,” Brisco said.

  “I bet you’re always hungry.”

  “Mostly,” Evan said.

  “We got burgers and breakfast, and that’s about it as far as eating,” he said. “Coffee, Coke. Milk, juice.”

  They all looked at one another. Seemingly unsure how to answer being asked what they wanted to eat or even how to think about it.

  “We don’t have anything else so don’t try and dream something up.”

  “Gimme some scrambled eggs. Bacon. Sausage. Toast. Better yet, everything you got with breakfast on it,” Cohen said.

  “Me, too,” said Mariposa.

  “Me, too,” said Brisco.

  “You don’t even know what half that stuff is,” Evan said to his small brother.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t,” Evan said. “Maybe we’ll just get some toast or something.”

  “Hell you will,” Cohen said. “Bring it all for everybody.”