Cohen sighed. He already understands, he thought. “You ever drink beer before?” Cohen asked him.
“Not more than one.”
“So how many is that?”
“Two.”
A few minutes later, Evan got up and went off to his trailer, leaving Cohen alone. He kept on drinking. Kept on thinking about what had been and what was to come. Thought about this ragtag band of refugees. Thought about walking over and killing Aggie just to see what it was going to feel like to kill another man. Because he had the feeling that he would have to do it before this was all over.
LATER IN THE NIGHT KRIS felt a sharp pain in her back and she shifted around, tried to get comfortable, but no matter how she turned the pain remained and she finally woke up Nadine, who slept on the other side with the baby in the middle.
“I’m dying,” Kris said.
Nadine sat up on the mattress, rubbed at her face. “What?”
“My back feels like a big cramp and it’s moving around my sides,” she said and she was breathing big breaths.
Nadine got up off the mattress and walked around and took Kris’s hands. She helped her to her feet and she moaned going up. The baby was bundled and didn’t wake and Nadine helped Kris to the door and out of the trailer. When they were outside, Kris let out some loud groans and then she doubled over. “At least it’s quit raining for a damn second,” Nadine said. She got a chair and Kris sat down carefully with her legs straight out and she held both hands on the sides of her stomach.
“Shit,” Nadine said. She wanted to do something but didn’t know what, so she paced back and forth in front of Kris as if to distract her. She rubbed her hands together and looked around at the defeated fire and she stopped pacing and jumped up and down a little.
“Ooooohhh, God,” Kris moaned again and her thick head of hair blew around with the wind.
“What is it? Where is it?” Nadine asked and she knelt at Kris’s feet.
“It’s all around me like somebody’s squeezing a belt. Oh shit.”
“Hold my hands.”
“Oh shit.”
They joined their four cold hands and Kris squeezed like hell, grimacing and grunting. Her round face twisted and she showed her teeth when she moaned. Her short legs lifted slightly off the ground when she squeezed hands and her bushy, matted hair fell around her head like some wild woman’s.
“Hold on, honey,” Nadine said and she kept talking, kept urging her to hang on but she didn’t know what she was telling her to hang on for. Kris squeezed harder and harder and she seemed gripped all over, and she let out a long, extended moan like an animal dying in the woods. Nadine begged her to hold on, held her hands, let go and went behind her and rubbed her shoulders but Kris reached up and took her hands again and squeezed her fingers together tightly. Nadine let her hold on. Several more minutes like this, but then whatever it was began to ease some and the moaning eased, and then whatever it was had gone.
“Oh God,” Kris said. Exasperated.
Nadine let go of her hands and pushed Kris’s hair back from her face. Her forehead was damp with sweat. “You need to let me cut this wild stuff,” she said.
Kris shook her head. Slowed her breathing. “And look like you? You got a worse haircut than Brisco.”
Behind them a trailer door opened and Cohen came out. He was pulling on his coat and holding a flashlight and the beam shined on the two women. He walked over and said, “What’s going on?”
Nadine said, “She’s hurtin.”
“How so?”
Nadine shrugged. “Bad.”
Cohen then asked Kris.
“I don’t know,” she said. She was trying to sit up straight in the folded chair and Nadine helped her up. “Got these cramps or something. Started in my back like somebody had elbows all across and then it moved all around.”
Cohen looked back at Nadine, who looked at him, and they both waited for the other to say something that would help. Neither did.
Finally Cohen said, “First time?”
Kris nodded.
“We gotta get the hell outta here,” Nadine said.
“Is it stopped all over?” Cohen asked.
Kris nodded again.
From the trailer, the baby cried.
“I’ll get him,” Nadine said and she left them and went to the infant.
“There’s a bottle in there somewhere,” Kris called.
Cohen took a cigarette out of his coat pocket and lit it and then he walked back to his trailer and came back with a bottle of water. He gave it to Kris and she seemed okay for now. Cohen smoked and she drank the water and they listened to the crying baby and the faint hiss of the few remaining embers.
“You want something else?” Cohen asked.
“Nah. Just to sit still.”
Cohen finished and tossed his cigarette and he moved over to the fire pit and tossed a couple of branches on the coals. They watched for several minutes but nothing happened except a little smoke.
“What was her name?” Kris asked.
Cohen looked to her. He cleared his throat and spit. Didn’t answer.
“Most people have names,” Kris said.
“There were two. Elisa and Rivers.”
“Rivers was a little one?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like a little one. How’d you pick that name?”
Cohen rocked back and forth a little. “We went to Venice one time. Biggest thing we ever did. She loved it there and liked calling it the city of rivers. Took her about nine seconds to name the baby Rivers when we found out it was a girl.”
They were silent again. Nadine had found the bottle and the crying had stopped. The fire snapped.
“Mariposa said something about your stuff. That’s why I was asking,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
“You was still in your house?”
“Yeah. Was.”
“That’s a little bit remarkable.”
“Not as remarkable as all this shit,” he said and he motioned around the circle of trailers strapped to the ground with ropes and spikes.
Kris held out her hand and Cohen took it and helped her to her feet. She was a little round thing in all the bundles of clothes covering her growing stomach. She pushed her hair away from her face, then put her hands on her back and stretched. She edged toward the fire. Cohen lit another cigarette.
Behind them a door opened and Mariposa came out. She tied a scarf around her head to hold back her hair and she stood up a cinder block and sat on it. “You okay?” Mariposa said.
“For this second,” Kris answered. She arched her back again. Looked off into the dark. “He killed my husband,” she continued. “Right out there somewhere. Just walked him out and killed him after pretending he was gonna take us up to the Line. We got stuck down here trying to come back for some of our stuff. It was so stupid and we knew it was but he had some tractors that was worth something and it seemed like money if we could somehow get a couple up. Soon as we got back down we got caught in a bad one. Him and Joe fished us out and brought us out here. I took one look at it and knew something wasn’t right and I told Billy but he shrugged it off. I told him about thirty seconds after we got here, we gotta go. Let’s just go. Next day Aggie walked him out there and he killed him. And then he locked me up with the other two or three and then found some more and locked them up and then they stuck this in me.” She pointed at her stomach and then she bent over and put her hands over her face and started to cry. She bounced and cried and looked like she might go to her knees but Cohen grabbed the chair and stuck it under her and Mariposa hurried up and helped ease her down. They stepped back from her and she cried and cried and for some reason that Cohen couldn’t explain he felt like a fool.
He kept on smoking and Mariposa paced back and forth. Kris cried and then she wiped her eyes. Sniffed. Got it together.
“What about her?” Cohen asked and pointed toward the trailer where Nadine had gone.
“I don’t know much. She was here when I got here. You, too?”
Mariposa nodded.
“Think she’s been here a long time. She don’t say much about it. I know I saw her take a swing at Aggie one day and him and Joe put down that revolution real quick. Think that might’ve happened a few times.”
“At least a few,” Mariposa said.
“Did you know them other ones that run off already?” Cohen asked.
Kris shook her head. “Not so much.”
“Me neither,” Mariposa added.
Cohen flicked away the cigarette. Random raindrops tapped in the red mud.
“It ain’t never gonna end,” Kris said. She held her hand out toward Mariposa, who took it and pulled her up from the chair. A little more rain came on as Mariposa helped her to her trailer and inside.
COHEN DRANK ONE MORE AND then he took one of the pistols out of his pocket and stood. A little drunk. He limped away from the fire and out into the dark where Aggie was tied to the trailer.
“You want to live or die?” Cohen asked him, but he couldn’t see his eyes and didn’t know if he was asleep or awake. So he asked again but this time he pointed the pistol at him.
Aggie didn’t answer. Didn’t move. The wind had picked up and lightning cracked to the south. Aggie’s body hung limply against the trailer, lifeless and broken. His head forward and heavy. If cut free, it seemed as if he would flop to the earth and never rise again.
Cohen lowered the pistol. Watched for a moment. Then as he turned to walk away, Aggie raised his head and said in a low voice, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
Cohen stopped and looked back at him.
In the dark, Aggie spoke. “Probably ten, fifteen years ago, we was going real strong one night. Summer night. Hot as hell and then some.” His voice was low but strong, like a quiet engine. “I had this rattlesnake burning me up, biggest damn one I think I ever had. Sliding all over me. Organ playing loud and people hollering and jumping and Amen this and God Almighty that and then from the back this man got up. Him and his boy. I hadn’t even noticed them there. They got up and come right between the chairs, right up front. Man was carrying the boy. Maybe eight, nine years old. Didn’t say a word, neither one. Just stood right in front of me until I noticed and quit, and then the organ quit and all the hollering and dancing quit and everybody just stood there, waiting on them to say something. And then when he finally said something, you know what he said, don’t you?”
Cohen said, “Yeah. I know.”
“Yeah. I knew. We all knew what was coming. He said fix my boy. Lay your hands on his legs. They ain’t never worked right. Doctor says ain’t never gonna, but lay your hands on him and let the good Lord fix him. Let the good Lord make him right. Lay your hands on him.”
Aggie paused. Coughed some. Cohen waited.
“It got so quiet. I swear I heard sweat hitting the floor. I’d done a lot of shit. A lot. But I’ll be goddamned I wasn’t claiming to be no healer. Never did mess with it. Didn’t want to. And here he was in front of all my people asking me to lay my hands on that boy. Let the power of God come through me and rise him up, fix his legs.”
He stopped. His head dropped.
“So?” Cohen said.
Aggie raised his head. “So I set that rattlesnake in its box. I told the organ to play soft. I told everybody to raise their hands to the ceiling and pray for this boy and then I took off my shirt and wiped my face and acted like I was gathering up the Holy Ghost from some deep, dark well and I held that boy’s legs and prayed like some lunatic until I didn’t have no more gas. And then I let go. Looked at his daddy and looked at the boy and I turned around and ran out the back. Ran out and kept on running till I was at least a couple of miles gone and then I wandered in some shithole bar and drank Jack Daniel’s until they laid me out back with the garbage.”
When he was done, Aggie let out a heavy sigh. Cohen looked around in the dark. Moved the pistol back and forth in his hands. The wind was against his face and pushed his hair back and the rain washed over his cheeks and eyes.
“I couldn’t do nothing. No way around it. No trick. A dead end any way you went,” Aggie said. He sighed again, then his voice became sharper. “Like you. Any way you go, dead end. You just think you got plans but you don’t got any idea what you’re doing. What you think is gonna happen to you? To them? What you think is gonna happen? I know what you’re walking around with. Got the rooms boarded up like you can lock the ghosts away but they only seep under the doors. Seep between the cracks in the walls and live right there with you. I saw your place. Saw what you tried boarding up. What you think is gonna happen when you get to the Line?”
He paused, laughed a little. His voice became confident, mocking. The wind whipped around them and Aggie bound to the flatbed seemed to gather himself with the growing storm and rise up. “That is if you get there. If. You see what we got going here and all you see is the locks on the doors. That’s all you see and all they see. What you and them don’t see is you’re alive out here and you’re alive ’cause I let you be. You’re alive and you eat and sleep and you got protection and I give all that. Every one of them I give all that and I could give it to you too but you’d rather see the locks on the doors and decide that something here is wrong but there ain’t nothing here wrong. Every one of them was either alone or damn near alone without no food. No safe place. Every one of them would be dead or worse if I hadn’t brought them here and given them everything. All you see is the locks on the doors but you and them are gonna find out what’s out there and don’t none of you want to find out. I can swear to that. And here you got me crucified. The one who gave and the one who knows how to live out here and the one who created the family that not a goddamn one of them had or ever will have. So you crucify me except you ain’t even got the empathy to pierce me so that I can bleed to death. Instead you’ll leave me to starve or be devoured by God knows what and all I ever did for every one of them was give, and they’ll know it this time tomorrow.
“When it’s dark and there’s nowhere safe to lay their heads and they’ll look at you like you got some answers but you ain’t got no goddamn answers. You don’t even know how to answer yourself when you ask yourself questions. If you did you wouldn’t be living like you were living. You ain’t got no answers for yourself or for them and this time tomorrow when it’s dark and cold each of you will want for me and want for this place. You’ll want to gather and pray and eat but you won’t be able to. You’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven and you’d rather crucify than love. There’s no answers between you. None. Tomorrow you and them will set out for the end of your lives and I’ll be here. The one who gave and would keep on giving if you’d let me. But you don’t want to let me. You and them are going to walk through the valley but you’ll have no shepherd. You’ll have no answers. And you’ll kill the babies. And you’ll die. You ain’t no healer, no more than I am, but I can give more than you. So I guess if I ask whether you want to live or die, you already answered when you tied me up.”
When he was done, he turned his head away from Cohen and fell silent. As if he had been turned off. Cohen stood still and waited. Didn’t know why but he waited to see if the older man had anything else to say. And when Aggie didn’t speak again, Cohen walked back and sat down. The peaceful night had become something different.
Through the rain and wind, Aggie called out to him. “Maybe you wanna die. Then you’ll get to love your ghosts again.”
A half-empty beer sat near Cohen’s foot and he picked it up and took it all in one swig, got up, and walked over to the trailer that held the guns. Leaned against the wall was the rifle with the infrared scope, the one Aggie had used to shoot him. He picked it up, found the shells and loaded it, and then he walked out of the trailer and away from the compound. He walked until he was only a silhouette.
He looked into the sky. Clouds raced and Cohen knew how quickly it could all come on.
He lowered the rifle
and through the scope he found Aggie. Arms wide. Head down. The same pose of death as the crucified man Aggie had used for so many years to feed his wild and insatiable appetite.
Cohen lowered the rifle. Off in the night something howled, long and draining, as though it might have been a final one.
He raised the rifle and looked again through the scope and this time someone was with Aggie, kneeling and swiping at his arms and wrists and it could only be Ava, cutting at the ropes with a knife. “Son of a bitch,” Cohen said and he steadied himself. One arm came free and she moved to the other side and Cohen didn’t have time to think about it anymore. He fired and Ava reared and arched her back and then she fell across Aggie’s legs. Aggie reached and took the knife from her limp hand, but he didn’t go for the rope wrapping his other arm and hand. He simply held the knife, and he looked out toward Cohen, and it was difficult to tell, but Cohen thought he was smiling.
Cohen fired again and Aggie leaped as if receiving a severe shock. Cohen shot him once more, and seconds later, Aggie was still.
The others were out of the trailers and milling around when Cohen came walking in from the dark. With disgust he tossed the rifle on the ground. It didn’t take them long to figure out what had happened. The rain fell against their faces and they shielded their eyes and stared at Cohen. Then Nadine told them to come on, let’s go see.
“You stay here,” Evan told Brisco.
“Why?”
“Just go sit over there a minute.”
Evan, Nadine, and Kris went out toward Aggie. Mariposa picked up the rifle and she walked over to Cohen’s trailer and set it inside.
“I’m getting wet,” Brisco said and he ran back inside the trailer.
Mariposa moved over to Cohen. His head hung down.
“Don’t you wanna see?” he said without looking at her.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“Him and her. She was trying to untie him.”
Rivers: A Novel Page 16