Joe rubbed at his eyes. To him, it was just another morning after another night of big wind and big rain and all he wanted was a cigarette to deliver him to Aggie’s level of tranquillity. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an empty pack.
He sighed and walked out toward Aggie.
AGGIE SMOKED AND GAZED ACROSS the flooding. He had never been anything but grateful for the calamity of the storms and the subsequent drawing of the Line, this perfect godforsaken land where a man like him could create his own world, with his own people, with his own rules. The rage of God Almighty. The fractured and forgotten order. In his most selfish moments, he believed that this had all somehow come about explicitly for him.
In his back pocket was a worn, floppy Bible, the size of a small notebook. The books and chapters he didn’t like had been ripped out and there was a cigarette marking chapter six in Genesis, where the story of Noah began. On his belt loop was a ring of keys. He turned his head from side to side, as if being careful to record and save this image for some later time when he would need it. His hair was thin and slick and age spots spread across his forehead and over his hands. A revolver that he made sure everyone could see was tucked inside the front of his pants and he wore an army coat that he’d pulled off a dead man floating in the water in a long-gone cul-de-sac down the shoreline.
Aggie didn’t turn when he heard the footsteps. Eyes out across the land. Joe stopped next to him. They stood in silence for several minutes and the rain bothered neither man.
Finally, Joe took a light out of his back pocket and flicked it a couple of times.
Aggie didn’t move at first, but then he eased his hand into the front pocket of the army coat and he held out a pack of cigarettes. Joe took one and nodded and then he lit it. The two men stood there with their cigarettes held inside their coats. The rain on them and the waters out before them. Their kingdom behind.
“I don’t guess we lost nothing last night,” Joe said.
Aggie lifted his hand to his mouth and smoked. Then he shook his head.
“If it didn’t get us last night, won’t get us,” Joe said.
“You say that every time.”
“Damn ropes must be tight as hell.”
Aggie turned to him. A bend in his eyebrows as he said, “Don’t doubt God’s muscle. If He wants them trailers, He’ll have em.”
Joe smoked and let out a frustrated exhale. Some mornings there was no talking to Aggie and this seemed like one of them already. He rubbed at the back of his neck to try and ease the throbbing. He squatted down and picked at the weeds. “You letting them out today?” he asked, his eyes on the ground.
“Later on,” Aggie said.
Joe pulled his cigarette out of his coat and smoked. “We going out to work?”
“After we let them two take us to where that house is.”
“We ain’t spinning wheels, are we?” Joe asked. “Seems like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Aggie shook his head. “No. We ain’t spinning wheels. And if we are, it’s better than not.”
“Yeah. I reckon.”
Aggie looked away from the birds and the lowlands and looked at Joe. He grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t doubt me, Joe.”
Joe nodded.
“Then come on. Go get them two and then come and help me hook up the trailer. That little one stays here. Sooner we get back, sooner we can go out and have a look. I’ll go ahead and throw the shovels and pickax in the other truck over there,” Aggie said. He looked once more across the flooded fields and then he walked on toward the trailers.
6
COHEN HAD NEVER KNOWN ANYONE who had gone to Venice. Or Italy. Or Europe. When he asked Elisa what she wanted for their first anniversary, he expected her to say she wanted a necklace. Or a day at the spa. Or a swanky dinner at one of the upscale casino restaurants. Or anything but what she said.
“I wanna go to Venice.” They were sitting on the front porch, late in the day, in the falling purple light. He kicked off his work boots and leaned back in the wicker chair and drank from the cold beer. She was barefoot and had her legs crossed in the chair, her legs and arms and everything brown from the summer sun.
“Venice where?” he asked.
“Venice, Texas,” she answered and kept her eyes ahead and waited for him to give up.
“Never heard of it,” he said and she reached over and slapped his arm.
“You know damn well what I’m talking about.”
“I know, I know. What makes you want to go all the way over there?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Saw it on TV the other day. Looks nice. All the canals and the old buildings and churches and stuff. No cars or nothing. Don’t you think it’d be kinda cool?”
He wrinkled his brow. Thought about it. “How much?” he asked, knowing she had already looked.
“A lot.”
“A lot a lot, or just a lot?”
“Just a lot.”
He drank from the beer. The crickets and tree frogs sang their song and it echoed through the twilight and across the land.
“Well,” he said.
“We probably can’t save it before our anniversary.”
“Probably not.”
“But we could probably save it by the spring. That’s six months. You think?”
He liked how she sounded. Excited and hopeful and a little nervous. He had never once thought about Venice but the thought of it now, with this woman, made him feel as if he were about to commit to a romantic adventure that you only read about in paperback.
“I think we can. If that’s what you want,” he said.
She uncrossed her legs and got up from her chair. She pushed his arms back and sat down in his lap and squeezed him around the neck until he coughed.
THEY ARRIVED IN AN OVERCAST city and for the first three days of the ten-day trip it rained off and on, but they didn’t care. Their hotel room was on the top floor and the window looked out across a courtyard and a canal. In the mornings the man who arranged the small tables in the courtyard sang beneath the light rain in a gentle tenor voice. They crawled all over one another as it rained, then fell back asleep and woke again and listened again and felt as though they had been removed from reality and set free in some other place that existed only to please them.
The hotel was three floors and the rooms were small. The staircase was wide enough for one and its turns were tight. The walls were brick with clumps of mortar hanging from between the bricks and Cohen couldn’t go up or down the stairs without commenting on the sloppy job someone did a long time ago. The hotel was run by two sisters and their cluster of indistinguishable teenage children who vacuumed the rugs, watered the plants, attended the small bar and two tables, went out for morning croissants, swept the foyer, changed the towels and the sheets, delivered the morning newspaper, and whatever else. The sisters wore their black hair pinned up and only one showed streaks of gray. They were frumpy and sat with folded arms and talked incessantly and moved only if someone came along and needed something and sometimes not even then, only shouted out a quick instruction to whatever child happened to be in earshot and that child would hurry to it but not without mumbling something in the tone of teenage angst that was discernible in any language.
When it wasn’t raining, they walked and walked. Though Elisa had two guidebooks and a detailed list of what she wanted to see and when she wanted to see it, she was taken by the city and its ancient streets and the heartbeat of the language and the quaint bridges and the architecture and all she wanted to do was walk. They avoided the museums and cathedrals except to admire the exteriors—the Gothic arches and the details of the statues of the saints and the complexities of the stained-glass windows. All of which fascinated Cohen, as in the world of efficiency and symmetry that he had learned from his father, he had forgotten or perhaps never realized that buildings could be constructed with such imagination. Instead of following the lines of tourists in and out of the starred spots on the map, they
moved across the canal bridges and walked down narrow streets that led to other canal bridges and other narrow streets. They were frequently lost, having to double back, spending an hour or more trying to figure out exactly where they were but finding local cafés and bars along the way and not caring a bit, reveling in the notion that they had discovered some secret part of the city that the sightseers would never know. For three days they clung to one another in the hotel room and then walked with locked arms through the floating city.
7
COHEN GOT UP FROM THE wooden pew and looked at the place where he had found refuge. A tree covered in Spanish moss had fallen through the roof and lay across the pulpit and mold had spread across the choir loft and the baptismal. The stained-glass windows remained only in fragments. A lamb at the feet of someone in a white robe. The bodiless head of Christ bleeding from the crown of thorns. Half of an angel looking over the headless Mary holding the baby. The Bibles and hymnals remained in the slots in the backs of the pews, but their pages were yellowed and wavy. The hardwood floor of the aisle was covered in water and scratched from the nails of the animals that came and went. He rubbed his forehead and it was damp and he ached all over and he walked to the open doors of the sanctuary and looked out. He figured this was about as good as it was going to get. He was weak but knew that he had to begin.
He walked out in the rain to the muddy road with his arms folded and his hands tucked under his arms. His clothes were still damp and he couldn’t have spit if he’d wanted to. His mouth was dry and his throat tender, the muscles of his stomach and chest tight as he shook from the fever and he wanted to run but knew better. Things moved in the brush, startling him and startled by him. At the end of the road he knelt and rested for few minutes and then he got up and kept on, the walking easier along the two-lane highway, out of the mud and puddles.
He walked on. An hour behind him and he hoped he was halfway. At a gathering of honeysuckle along the fencerow, he stopped and put his face into it and opened his mouth and shook the bushy vine. The rainwater splattered onto his face and tongue and he lapped like a desperate dog at the cold, refreshing drops. The water from the leaves ran down into his mouth and throat and momentarily relieved the fever and he moved along the fencerow, doing the same thing with anything leafy that would shake, and then he sat down for another few minutes before walking again. Another hour and he could see his road up ahead and his pace quickened as he thought of the bottles of water and the dry clothes and the bottle of aspirin and the dry place to lie down. He moved in some half-walk, half-run, gimpy and awkward with his wet, numbed feet but driven by the thought of home. He came to his road and hurried across the red mud, sloshing along as fast as his worn body would take him, and then there was the house and he almost cried out in relief but as he got to the driveway and saw the tire tracks and the front door open his anticipation quickly turned again to despair.
He stopped in the front yard. Watched and listened.
Then the dog stuck its head out of the front door and he walked on up. The dog met him at the steps and he touched its head as he walked past and into the house.
In the front room, the cot and the blankets were gone and the closet door was open and the .22 and the black raincoat were gone. The electric heaters that he ran off the generator to keep warm were gone. He limped on into the kitchen and the cooler that had been filled with water bottles was not there and the upper cabinets had been cleaned out. Every can. Every box of anything. He got down on his knees and opened the bottom cabinets and what little there was in them remained, including a dozen or so bottles of water, and he opened one and drank and drank and when it was done he tossed it aside and he opened another and did the same. He found a few ounces of whiskey in a long-forgotten pint bottle and he opened it and took a swallow and it burned and warmed. He took another swallow and it twisted his face and then he sat on the floor and let the whiskey settle all the way through him. He looked again through the lower cabinets and there was nothing to eat as he had put all the food up high to keep it safe. He stood and opened the drawer where he kept medicine and bandages and antibiotic ointment and other pills and creams and it was emptied but for half a bottle of aspirin that had slid to the back. With his hands shaking he managed to get the top off and he shoved a handful of the chalky tablets into his mouth and chased them down with several gulps of water.
The shivering now at its height, he walked back into the front room and took off his clothes while the dog watched him and then he walked naked to the hall closet where he found that some but not all of his clothes were gone. He took out a pair of jeans and socks and two long-sleeve shirts and he put it all on and then he looked down the hallway. The drywall that he had used to cover up the entrances to the bedrooms had been busted and pulled away from the frame. He cussed himself for putting up and puttying the drywall but then not finishing it. What the hell good did it do to make a wall to hide a room if you’re not gonna finish the damn wall. No good, that’s what. He went back into the front room and put on the wet boots and then he walked down the hallway, stepping across and kicking at the broken drywall, and he stopped in the dark doorway of the bedroom that he and Elisa had shared.
There was a musty smell as the room had been closed up for over two years. He walked in and the drawers to the dresser had been pulled out and her clothes that remained lay scattered across the floor. He knelt in the midst of the clothes, the gray light coming through the sheer curtains and around him like a cloud and holding him like some nameless black-and-white character from an old movie. He picked up one of her gowns, silk and silver, and he felt its softness in his rough fingertips. Touched it against his damp, hot forehead as if it had the power of remedy.
He set the gown on the floor and picked up and put down her other things—a bra and her T-shirts and black stockings and red panties. He picked them up slowly and held each garment and set it down just as slowly, as if they were dead, dry leaves that could crumble with the slightest force. He got up from his knees and saw their fingerprints and handprints across the top of the dresser in the filthy, almost slick film that had settled over the room during its closure, and then he noticed the cobwebs stretched across the blades of the ceiling fan. He moved across the room, stepping around the bed that had been stripped of its comforter and sheets, and he sat down on the bare mattress and saw on the top of the nightstand more traces of their hands. Her wooden jewelry box had been opened and turned over and there was nothing left. The engagement ring and the wedding band and earrings and necklaces were gone and he pictured them in the hands of strangers. People who thought no more of what belonged to her than they thought about rocks in a gravel road. He picked up the empty jewelry box and closed the lid and held it on his lap and tried to force himself into a good memory but all he could think of were those strangers who had taken what he had left of her and who had taken everything else they could take and who were probably unloading and planning to come back and take the rest.
He held the jewelry box on his lap and he swung his legs up onto the mattress and he leaned back and stretched out. He wanted to sleep. Needed to sleep. Needed to lie still and let the aspirin help chase the fever. Needed to drink water and eat something and rest until he was strong again but he knew that he didn’t have that option. They would be back and there might be more of them and they had his guns and his Jeep and he didn’t have anything. The dog wandered into the bedroom and sniffed at the clothes on the floor and then looked around as if to say, I didn’t think this woman lived here anymore.
He closed his eyes. Wanted to sleep and one day wake up and this life would be a different life. The dog walked around to his side of the bed and lay down beneath him. They both lay still for several moments as if the day belonged to them. At the edge of sleep, Cohen made himself sit up, and he put the jewelry box back onto the nightstand next to the picture of them waist-deep in a blue ocean. He picked up the frame and opened the back and he took out the picture and held it close to his eyes. T
ouched his fingertips to the faces of another time. He folded the picture in half and he stood and put it in his back pocket and then he got down on his knees and said, “Be there.”
He bent over and looked under the bed and the shoe box was gone and he yelled goddamm it and pounded his fist on the floor. Bent over and pressed his head against the floor and pounded at it and yelled out over and over again. Goddamm it, goddamm it, goddamm it.
He sat doubled over for a minute and then one more pound at the floor and he got up and walked over to the closet. The sliding doors were open and they had taken the things that held warmth. Her coats and her sweatshirts and her jeans. The dresses remained. The summer dresses that once hung delicately on her tanned body. The black thing that she wore with grace when they buried someone they had known. The other thing that she wore that gave away the freckles between her breasts. He looked away from her clothes to his side of the closet and he looked down and noticed an old pair of work boots that he had forgotten. He picked them up. Black and dusty and steel-toed and dry. He tucked them under his arm and he ran his hand along the length of one of her dresses and then he walked out of the room and down the hallway and stepped inside the other room.
It had been an office until the news of the baby and then it had become a shared room for all, a place to keep things until her room was finished. The dresser had been opened up and some of the tiny clothes had spilled out onto the floor. He walked over and put down his boots. He knelt and picked up each small sock or nightshirt and folded it neatly and put it back in the dresser. Two drawers had been filled in anticipation, Elisa unable to go anywhere without picking up some little hat or pair of tiny slippers. Unable to stop thinking about it, smiling as she’d come home with something else, him smiling back and making fun. He closed the dresser drawers and stood. Empty picture frames on top of the dresser. A lamp with a giraffe lampshade. A piggy bank that he raised and shook and the coins rattled. He set it back down and walked over to the closet. The door open and his two suits hanging there, next to them a gathering of tiny pink hangers. Toys in boxes on the floor. A stack of colorful books on the top shelf.
Rivers: A Novel Page 5