Michael Smith - Rivers

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.”

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.