“I ain’t queer,” Joe said.
“Me neither. Damn.”
“Then what you want?”
“I need a truck with a hitch. I got some things I gotta get towed.”
“To where?”
“Not far. I got two trucks already but the hitch is busted on both.”
“If you got two trucks, why you standing here without one?”
“Walking don’t kill people.”
“It might down here.”
“My trucks are where I need them to be. You wanna see, take the money. You wanna help, take the money. If you don’t, don’t take it.”
Joe thought about it. He needed the money. Everybody needed the money. “How much?”
Aggie held the folded bills out to him. “All of it.”
“Shit,” Joe said, shaking his head. “You must think I’m damn crazy.”
Aggie had kept moving toward him, was close now, could reach out and touch him if he wanted. “I don’t think you’re crazy. I need something. You probably need something, just like everybody else down here. Or why else would you still be here?” Aggie held out the money again. “Take it,” he said. “Take it and let’s ride and talk a little while. We got drinks. I got a pack of smokes. You smoke?”
“Yeah, I smoke,” Joe said and he reached his hand out for the money. He then took a long, cautious look at the man. “Open up that coat.”
Aggie opened his coat and he had a pistol tucked in his pants. “I know you got one, too,” he said. “So we can call it even.”
“You’re gonna have to let me hold it while we ride.”
“No, I ain’t. You got every nickel I have in your hand right there. You won’t hold my gun. I won’t be dead and broke.”
Joe thought about it. The man seemed to stare straight through him and there was something about him that told Joe his side would be a good one to be on in a place like this.
So he had told Aggie to get on in. That was three years ago.
It had been easy to go along with Aggie. He was a man who spoke with conviction, with a straight-ahead honesty. A man who had a plan and a way of making Joe feel like there were only benefits. At times he had felt like Aggie was a brother and at other times he had felt like Aggie might cut his throat before daylight. And Aggie had a way of talking to people, a way of getting them to believe. He had heard the way Aggie spoke to the stragglers, to the people they had found at the rope’s end. Come on, we’ll get you something to eat, he’d say with the compassion of a grandfather. We got a warm, safe place to sleep. People down here gotta help each other, he’d say. Like the Father takes care of the birds of the sky, He takes care of us. And I’m helping Him. Come on and let’s get something to eat and then you can decide what you wanna do. We can even drive you up if you want, he’d tell them. And they would climb in the back of the truck, maybe because they trusted him, maybe because they had no other choice, but they climbed in. And they were grateful for something to eat and for the dry place to sleep and they thought they had come upon a savior. Joe believed Aggie when he said this was for their own good. They would die without this place. And you know that the men are a danger and if you don’t want to walk them out in the woods, then I will do that. I will do what we need to be done and you stand up straight. This is yours as much as mine. This is your land. It is ours.
Joe had watched. He had learned. Had participated. And he had finally walked a man out into the woods and returned him to the earth and everything else seemed easier after that. But last night was on him. Or maybe it was the culmination of many nights like that one and their growing consistency. The wind never seemed to cease. The rain never seemed to stop. It was bad and getting worse and sitting in the trailer in the dark with his knees tucked under him while the storm pushed and pulled was a too common event. He had to get drunk to get through the nights and then getting drunk spun him around inside and it was a vicious loop. And now he had this note and he had these memories of his mother and this church and what this world looked like before and he felt a pressure welling up inside.
He drove slowly as he moved along the muddy gravel road, the Jeep sliding some and him uncertain if this were the right place. It was difficult to remember anywhere in this land the way it had been because of the way it was now. It was so much worse and there appeared to be no end in sight. The tree line tight against the road seemed familiar, but there were gaps in it that hadn’t been before. Houses that might have reminded him were no longer there. It was only his hunch that led him to where he thought the small church would be.
A careful mile or two and he saw it. Sitting up ahead, to the right, back off the road. He drove on up and stopped and looked. He could see the men standing outside in the Sunday sunshine, in their short-sleeved shirts and ties, smoking their cigarettes with their calloused hands. The kids running between the cars playing chase, their shrieks and laughter breaking into the peaceful Sunday morning. The women and their clean dresses with their Bibles tucked under their arms and their faces a soft pink.
The thought occurred to him that all he had to do was to get in the Jeep and keep going. Maybe his time with Aggie had run its course. Maybe he didn’t want to be responsible for all those women and what was to come. Maybe he had found that note for a reason, to shake him loose, to set him free. Maybe it wasn’t going to be as simple as coming to this place and clearing his head and going back to the circle of trailers and the faces that occupied them.
The shotgun and the shells sat in the passenger seat and he picked up the shotgun but then set it back down. He got out and pushed the hood from his head. He looked at the place. The beige brick stained and molded. The front doors gone. He walked up closer and saw the wet black ashes from a fire on the concrete porch. He poked at them with his foot and then he walked over and stood in the doorway. The fallen tree splitting the roof of the sanctuary and its moss hanging down across the pews. The stained glass in shards below the windows. He looked for the pew where they had sat. Listened for his mother telling him to sit still. Wondered what she would say if she knew what he had become a part of. He stood in the doorway and smoked. Thought of what he’d say in his own defense.
It’s a different world, he thought. And he could think of no more explanation.
He walked back outside and around the side of the church. Thought he’d take a look in the back. See if there was anything worth having. At one of the windows he knelt down and picked through the broken stained glass that sat at the bottom of a puddle. He fished the pieces out. The purples and blues and reds. He held several together in his palm and admired the purity of color. Imagined the sunlight against them. The illusion of something brighter and better.
And this would be the last memory that he would have as he lay dying. The memory of kneeling there, in this place where he had been a boy with a mother, with the pieces of the holy glass in his hands. Not the realizations of what he had done, the flesh and blood that he had claimed along with Aggie, the women he had corralled and made his own, their bodies and their minds and maybe even their hearts and souls, unlocking the doors when he wanted and feeding them when he wanted and doing what he wanted when he felt the urge. For what other reason was there to keep them? He didn’t think of them or the men he had separated them from. The blood on his hands and the filth on his fingertips. He didn’t think of the man that he was and the power he had grasped and he didn’t sing for forgiveness or call out for redemption. In the next hour, as he lay dying, he thought only of that moment of serenity, kneeling next to the church where he had been a boy before he had grown into a man and realized the clarity of strength, his knees damp in the wet ground and in his palm the blue and red and purple glass. As he lay dying, his flesh ripped like fabric, his blood flowing freely like the rain that came so often, he thought only of those beautiful shards of glass and the weight that they carried, and he found it difficult to comprehend that while he held those small holy things, how something so big and so powerful and so violent could have be
en so silent as it crept up behind him.
COHEN DIDN’T WAIT FOR THE dog to reappear and he went as quickly as he could along the gravel road because he thought the sound of the Jeep had quit. Not disappeared far down the road and out of distance but quit as if whoever was driving it had stopped and the only place close by to stop was the church. He hurried on, pulling at his pants pockets as if to drag himself. When the church was in sight he saw the Jeep parked in front of it and he stopped running and he moved over to the edge of the road, closer to the tree line, to keep out of sight.
He didn’t see the man who had been driving and it occurred to him to make a run for it. The rain would muffle his steps and the keys would be in the ignition and just go, take off, don’t slow down. Go as hard as you can.
But then his thoughts were interrupted by the high-pitched howls and screams of he didn’t know what. Something awful and horrific and acute slicing through the hazy morning. He kept on, walking faster now, breaking into a light run and then he was at the church and next to the Jeep and then he saw that the terrible sound, the howling and screaming, was coming from a tangle of man and panther at the side of the church and the panther was winning.
Cohen looked over into the Jeep and saw his sawed-off shotgun and some shells on the passenger seat. He took it out and loaded it and put some shells in his pocket, keeping one eye on the panther and the man. He tugged at the backseat as if to lift it but it didn’t move. The man shrieked as the panther had him pinned and was tearing at him with its mouth and claws. Cohen walked over very carefully, staying behind them so that the panther wouldn’t perhaps turn and rush him, and ten feet away he aimed the shotgun and fired and the panther jumped and twisted and cried out. Cohen fired again and the panther jumped again but there was no more crying and it fell dead next to the ripped, screaming man.
Cohen moved closer and looked down. Half the man’s face was red and torn and there were gashes across his throat and on his head and down his chest and arms. A bad tear in his rib cage. He was breathing in a terrified, irregular rhythm and his eyes were wide and sharp against the red surrounding them. He held his arm up to Cohen and tried to say something but only a shaky grunt came out. Cohen didn’t reach for him but he knelt a few feet away. The rain washed the blood as quickly as it came out of him.
The man’s grunting kept on and Cohen watched him for a minute and then he held the shotgun out toward him. “Where’d you get this?” he asked. Then he turned and pointed at the Jeep and asked the same thing. “All of it’s mine. Mine. Where’s them two that jumped me out there on the road?”
The man turned on his side and coughed out blood and he acted as if he were trying to get up. Cohen moved back. The man seemed to be trying to say something but Cohen didn’t know what, so he asked again. “Where are they? If you want anything else from me, you better speak up.”
The man got over on his belly and began to crawl toward him. Bleeding from everywhere and his face like some horror film and he moved himself forward on the ground inches at a time, reaching for Cohen. He kept coughing and spitting and coughing and spitting, the bloody mess like the trail of a slug across the ground as he inched forward and Cohen kept moving back.
Cohen then lay down on his stomach, eye to eye with the man, and said again, “Where the hell are them little shits? I ain’t asking you again. You want help, speak up.”
The man dropped his head and cleared his throat, then spit up again like a sick baby. Then he tried to say something. “Umrow,” he said.
Cohen leaned in and said, “Huh?”
“Umrow.”
“Calm down. Speak up.”
The man extended his arm and pointed awkwardly as if trying to give directions. Then he said, “Him. Himmel.”
“Himmel?”
He nodded his red head. “Row,” he said.
“Road?”
He nodded again.
“Himmel Road,” Cohen said. “Himmel Road out there past Crawfield. That old plantation?”
The man nodded and grunted and he began to push himself up from the ground. Cohen stayed back. “You sure?” he asked.
But the man didn’t answer and he managed to get himself to his knees. Moaning and crying out but his voice feeble. Cohen got to his feet and stood back and he saw that the man was reaching behind him for something. Cohen raised the gun on him but the man only went into his back pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. He dropped it on the ground in front of him and then fell on his side. Cohen stepped over and picked it up and he looked at it. He read his own note. And then he said, “I told you.”
The man was on his back now and he reached his arm up. Tried to talk again but couldn’t, but he formed an imaginary pistol with his thumb and index finger and he held it to his head and pulled the trigger. When Cohen only looked at him, he slapped his hand on the ground and grunted and did it again. Still Cohen only looked at him.
“If you wanted something from me, you should have thought about it before,” he said and he tossed the note aside. Then he walked on away from the dying man and the dead panther, toward the back of the church, out of the rain, where he found his food and his water and he sat down and tried to make himself better.
AFTER HE ATE, HE CHANGED into the dry clothes he had left behind and then he fell into an exhausted sleep, lying in the middle of the purple choir robes. He dreamed of a backyard with thick green grass and pinks and whites in the flower boxes and a clothesline. A wooden picnic table in the middle of the yard, surrounded by people he had known. Uncles and high school friends and Mom and strange faces from random moments in his life. On the table were plates of food. Fried chicken and hamburger steaks and mashed potatoes and biscuits and sliced watermelon. Everyone ate and ate but the food from the plates never seemed to diminish, yet every time he tried to fill his own plate, someone pushed him aside to talk or took him out front to show him a new car or something. He kept trying to eat and they kept distracting him and when he had the grease of the fried chicken on his fingertips, he woke with his fingers in his mouth.
He shook free from the dream and sat up. He was sweating and this seemed a good sign. The day was nearly gone and the rain had let up. He got up and walked outside and he dragged the dead man and the dead panther out into the woods, laying them next to each other like ill-fated lovers. He then went to the Jeep and looked under the seats and in the glove box. Under the seat he found a hatchet and a half box of shotgun shells and in the glove box there was a flashlight and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
Over the next few days he went through the rest of the food and water, and the empty tin cans and water bottles were scattered across the floor of the back room of the church. He ate and slept, ate and slept. Between sleeping he would walk up and down the road looking for the dog but he stayed off his feet mostly, knew that he needed to get his strength back as soon as possible because there was a journey ahead.
The rain and wind came and went. At night the wind howled as it whipped through the church roof and windows and the water dripped from everywhere. In the day he sat out by the road and imagined a sun sitting in the sky, the sky open and pale and the chill gone from the air for a little while. In the field across the road, a quarter mile away, he saw two black cows meandering about, seemingly unaffected. Heavy, rippled clouds covered it all. Sometimes when the rain and wind eased, there were birds and armadillos and deer.
His fever remained but he felt it beginning to break. At night he listened to the symphony of Mother Nature and smoked the cigarettes. Possums and raccoons visited the church in the darkness and he wondered if they knew about the panther so he told them about it. Pointed out toward the woods where its body lay if they wanted to see for themselves. Each night they came and went as he sat on the front porch next to a small fire reading one of the left-behind paperbacks and each night he spoke to them about the panther or the weather or the advantages of being nocturnal.
When he slept his dreams were less the nightmare and more the comfort o
f a life that used to be, but when he woke he never hurt any less from having seen the faces of those he missed.
He had options. He could drive to Gulfport, to the casino parking lot, and hope for Charlie. He could get enough gas and supplies to make it to the Line and go from there. But he couldn’t be sure that Charlie would appear, or if he had already come and gone. The last hurricane had seemed stronger and more bitter than the recent ones and there could have been roads and bridges washed away, keeping Charlie from making it to the coastline.
Or he could go out on Himmel Road, find the Crawfield Plantation, and find those two who had jumped him. He believed that where he found them, he would find his gas cans, his .22, probably some food and other supplies. Didn’t know what else or who else he’d find. But it seemed worth pursuing because he also knew he’d find the things that belonged to Elisa, that belonged to their life together, that belonged to him.
And then after that, he would go for the Line.
He tried for days to talk himself out of caring about those things and that shoe box. It was only tiny bands of silver or gold, only a small diamond, only dainty things that went in your earlobe or hung around your neck, rhinestones and rubies, and all of it together didn’t add up to much. Only pieces of paper that didn’t prove anything. Only silly little mementos of years long gone. They’re not worth anything, he’d think. They won’t do no good. Let it go like you should have already. Let it go.
Even in the moments when he had convinced himself that finding Charlie and getting out was the safest, easiest plan, somewhere beneath it all where there was the truth he knew that he was going to find that girl and that boy and get back those small, precious things. Because it was her and because she didn’t belong with them and if he was leaving, he was going to leave the way he wanted to leave. He had his Jeep. He had his shotgun. He was finding his strength, invigorated by hope. On the morning of the fourth day, as a steady, drifting rain crossed the land, he loaded the shotgun, draped a robe across his shoulders and head, lit a cigarette, and sat down in the Jeep. He sat and smoked, talking to himself. Telling himself that he was ready for anything. When he finished the cigarette he flicked it out and then adjusted the rearview mirror and looked at himself. It was the first time he had looked at himself in weeks. He noticed his cheekbones and he put his fingers to them, more round and pronounced than they had been. Then he touched the healing line around his neck. He leaned closer to the mirror and looked at his eyes. Thought they had changed color. Or maybe it was the skin and face around them that was so different and made them strange. He leaned back. Huffed.
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