Beginning by Michael Farris Smith Read Free Book Online

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