Beginning (5 page)

2

IT HAD BEEN
613 days since the declaration of the Line, a geographical boundary drawn ninety miles north of the coastline from the Texas-Louisiana border across the Mississippi coast to Alabama. A geographical boundary that said, We give up. The storms can have it. No more rebuilding and no more reconstruction. The declaration came after several years of catastrophic hurricanes and a climate shift suggested that there was an infinite trail of storms to come and the Line said we give up. During those 613 days, there had been no letup in the consistency and ferocity of the storms. Recent months had seen a turn for the worse, something few thought possible.

Those that decided to stay had decided to stay at their own risk. There was no law. No service. No offering. No protection. Residents had been given a month's notice that the Line was coming and a mandatory evacuation order had been decreed and help was offered until the deadline and then you were on your own if you stayed behind. The Line had been drawn and everything below was considered primitive until the hurricanes stopped and no one knew if that day was ever coming.

Left to itself, the region below the Line had become like some untamed natural world of an undiscovered land. The animals roamed without fear. Armies of red and gray squirrels and choruses of birds. Deer grazing in the interstate medians and packs of raccoons and possums living in garages until they were blown away, then moving on to another dwelling that was now welcome to them. Honeysuckle vines bunched together and azaleas bloomed like pink jungles with the warmer temperatures of the spring. The lemony scent of the sprawling magnolias wafted in the air like perfume.

The kudzu had begun to creep like some green, smothering carpet, taking over roads and bridges. Finding its way up and around chimneys and covering rail lines. Swallowing barns and houses. Sneaking across parking lots and wrapping itself around the trunks of trees and covering road signs. The constant flooding and drying out and temperature swings had split the asphalt of parking lots and roadways, the separations becoming the refuge of rats and skinny dogs. Chunks of beach had disappeared as if scooped out by a giant spoon, leaving the flat waters of a lagoon where people used to sit with their feet in the sand and drink beer from cold glasses and eat shrimp from a bed of ice served in a silver bowl.

This was Cohen's world as he navigated the Jeep carefully through the rain and the debris.

He came to where the highway met the interstate, and standing on the side of the road were a teenage boy and girl. A thin white boy, his hair wet and stuck to his head, and a dark-skinned girl with long black hair under a baseball hat. The boy wore a letter jacket with an
LB
on the chest and the girl wore a tan overcoat much too long and dragging the ground. They were soaked. She had her arm around the back of his neck and she limped along with his support. Cohen moved over to the side of the road opposite them and he watched them as he passed but he didn't slow down as the boy called out to him. Hey or Help or Stop. He didn't make it out and he looked in the mirror and they turned and watched him driving away and the boy raised his hand and motioned for Cohen to come back.

He drove along the ragged remains of Highway 90. Keeping it slow. A sign read Gulfport 5. The once busy highway now littered with sand and driftwood and much closer to the water than it used to be. Along the highway, the antebellum homes were long gone, the first to go in the earliest and most violent of the storms, and splintered marinas floated in the water like broken toys. A pier where he had stood in a black suit with Elisa in her white dress, holding her white flowers, was nothing but a random cluster of stumps sticking out of the water. Some lampposts stood and some leaned and some lay across the interstate and he bounced over these as if they were dead logs. He looked out onto the beach and noticed tire tracks in the wet sand and he reached over and took the shotgun and held it in his lap.

A few miles on and he saw what he had hoped for. Despite the rain, the U-Haul truck was there, off the interstate and in the parking lot next to the charred remains of the Grand Casino that was still standing, though crippled. Black streaks stretched out of the window frames and stained the orange stucco. The roof gone and the floors caved in. A small gathering of people stood at the back end of the truck, half with their shoulders slumped and jackets pulled over their heads. The other half simply took it.

Cohen drove up and stopped the Jeep and the back of the U-Haul was open and Charlie was standing in the back pointing out something to a heavyset man wearing a flannel shirt that was too small and revealed the beginnings of his belly. Outside of the truck stood Charlie's muscle—four broad-shouldered guys in black hats and black pants and black jackets with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. If they knew it was raining, they didn't acknowledge it as they stood like watchdogs. While Charlie bartered with the man in the back of the U-Haul, the muscle watched those who were waiting their turn as if they were capable of an overthrow. But of the twenty or so gathered, none of them appeared capable of much more than hopefully getting back to wherever it was they came from. All men. Unshaved and dirty and with sunken faces but not the menacing faces of power. Some stood with bicycles. One had a warped guitar on his back. A few more stood in a circle and tried to light cigarettes while pointing at an old Chevrolet truck that must have belonged to one of them. A couple of other trucks off to the side. Another man, an older, hunched man, stood a few feet away from the back of the U-Haul, next in line, and he wore a sign draped around his neck made of plywood that read
THE END IS NEAR
. But
NEAR
had been crossed out, and written underneath was
HERE
and all the words were streaked.

Cohen put the shotgun back underneath the seat as it wasn't allowed. He then got out of the Jeep and pushed back his hood, took off his sock hat and left it on the seat. He rubbed at the hair stuck down on his head and then took the empty gas cans from the backseat and he walked over to where the other men stood in a staggered line.

He watched Charlie. The same old Charlie. Much had changed but not him. He was the cow trader, the horse trader, the guy who sold used cars and used tractors or whatever else he could scare up right out in his front yard. No wife to complain about killing the grass. Just Charlie and his land and his barn and his storage shed and his knack for hustling a dollar. Cohen had sat between his father and Charlie on the bench seat of the truck. Both windows cracked. His father driving and smoking with his left hand. Charlie's arm propped on the door and smoking with his right hand. This was how they rode up to Wiggins to the sale, the trailer hitched to the pickup, sometimes getting rid of cows, sometimes buying. Sometimes bringing home a horse. Always looking for something better than what they already had, the haggle the most anticipated moment of the day. They would ride up to Wiggins and pull into the big gravel parking lot filled with more trucks and more trailers, and his father and Charlie would toss their cigarettes and tuck their pants in their boots and tug at their belts and light another cigarette. Let me have one, Cohen would say each time. Hell no, his father would say. Let him have one, Charlie would argue. He ain't but ten, Charlie. And the next year his father's answer would be, He ain't but eleven, Charlie. And so on until Cohen was big enough to find his own cigarettes elsewhere but it was still fun to ask. He would walk with the men across the parking lot toward the giant metal-roof building, his father and Charlie waving and making small talk to the other men who all seemed to walk at the same lethargic pace, as if they were in slow motion or maybe some type of pain. They walked slowly and kinda crooked, smoked slowly, spoke to one another in half sentences. Cohen watched and listened and sometimes felt like he was in one of those black-and-white westerns his father used to watch as he mingled with the rough-faced cow traders of southeast Mississippi.

He watched Charlie now. His pants still tucked in his boots. Still hustling for a dollar. Still the man you needed to see.

“I told you, I ain't got no power cords today. You gonna have to wait till next time,” Charlie was saying to the heavyset man, who looked at him dumbfounded. Charlie wore his glasses on top of his head, and his face had the wear of a man who had worked outside his entire life.

“What about right back there in that box?” the large man asked and pointed.

“Are you goddamn deaf?”

“Naw I ain't deaf but I know you got some. You got some every time.”

“I got some every time when I leave out, but this ain't the only place I stop. I had em when I left out this time but sold em all before I got here. Hell, it's a wonder I got anything by the time I get way down here. You understand that?”

The man shook his head. Tugged at the bottom of his shirt.

“You want something else?” Charlie asked, poking his head toward the man.

“Gimme some of them lanterns and some of them batteries.”

“What is some?”

“Three.”

“Three lanterns or three batteries?”

“Three lanterns and enough batteries for all of them and then some more. Come on, Charlie.”

“Don't come on me. It ain't that hard to tell me exactly what you want the first time. I ain't got all day.”

Charlie reached over into a box filled with camping lanterns and he lifted out three and handed them to the man. Then he took a plastic bag from his back pocket and reached into another box and filled the bag with D batteries. He gave the man the bag and then he counted on his fingers and mumbled to himself. “Fifty dollars,” he said.

“Jesus,” said the man.

“I meant eighty.”

“Fifty's fine. Don't piss on me.”

The man set down the plastic bag and unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out two poker chips and held them out.

“What in God's lovin name is that?” Charlie said and he shook his head in frustration. “You think the damn counter is open over there for me to cash in?”

“These here are hundred dollars apiece.”

“Hundred dollars apiece in what world? Where the hell are they a hundred dollars apiece?”

The men with guns and the other men waiting began to laugh as they watched and listened.

“Take em on up to Tunica,” the man said. “You can use em there, I'm guessing.”

“Tunica? Tunica floats.”

“Vegas, then. Or somewhere.”

“Yeah. Vegas. Hell yeah, let's go to Vegas, like they're gonna give me two hundred dollars for two dirty old chips from the shithole casino in Gulfport, Mississippi. Not to mention it'd cost me how much to get to Vegas? Spend three grand to cash in two hundred damn dollars. Hell, maybe I'll just mail em to them and they can mail me back my money.”

The man put the chips back in his pocket and looked at his feet. He bit at the inside of his cheek. “I ain't got no money this time,” he said. “I ain't got nothing.”

Charlie propped his hands on his hips and walked a circle and then turned back and said, “I ain't the Red Cross and I ain't running no credit applications. You want something, you got to have money or something mighty fine to trade up. You got neither. Gimme them lanterns.” He didn't wait for the man to hold them out but reached over and took them out of his hand. Then he scooped up the bag of batteries at his feet. Charlie set two of the lanterns back in the box and he gave one back to the large man. Then he took two packs of batteries out of the plastic bag and handed them over.

“Take this shit and go on and you owe me next time. You got it?”

The man nodded and said I got it and then he turned and walked down the metal ramp that led in and out of the truck.

Charlie stepped to the edge and said, “Anybody else out there got anything other than money or trade needs to go on. I thought that was common knowledge.”

Two of the men in line stepped out and walked away.

Charlie looked to the back of the men and saw Cohen and waved at him. “Come on up here, Cohen. You ain't got to wait.”

“Hell naw,” said the old man with the sign. “You know how far I had to walk to get here?”

“Take that stupid sign off and shut up. How long you gonna wear that thing?”

“I'm gonna wear it till I want to.”

“That don't even make no sense.”

“Well, that don't matter. I'm sick of standing in this rain.”

“Then dance around.”

Cohen walked past the line and set the empty gas cans down at the back of the truck. He walked up the ramp and shook hands with Charlie. Charlie looked at him sideways and said, “I see you still cuttin your own hair.”

Cohen nodded. “My beauty parlor is on vacation.”

“Same ol shit. I try harder and harder to get down here, though. Don't never stop. Your house still standing?”

“Still standing.”

“I knew when your daddy built it that it'd take the damn apocalypse to knock it down. Me and ol Jimmy Smith stood there and made fun of him triple-stacking the frame, but he was like that third little pig, just kept on how he wanted.”

“I know it. Mom wanted it tall but he wouldn't have that either.”

“Nope. You and that dog and that house are about like cockroaches.”

“Don't jinx me.”

They stepped up into the back of the truck and Cohen looked around at the open boxes stretched across the floor, a small pathway made down the middle. At the front end of the truck was a small backhoe.

“What the hell's that?” Cohen asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Don't never know what you might need. Got a deal, anyways.”

“Don't tell me you're one of them now.”

“One of them what?”

“You know what. Treasure hunter. Tomb raider. Whatever you wanna call it.”

“I ain't no tomb raider 'cause there ain't nothing but dead shit buried in a tomb. What I'm after is alive and kickin.”