Become River

When it left, it left as it had come, through the same breach in the same levee, though weary now and sluggish from its rampage. It left like the marauding creature they now knew it had been all along, left silent slow and sure to lie again in slumber, far between the fields. It had devoured everything it could and splintered what it could not swallow, had with its belly scoured this place of life and left behind, reeking and dungcolored, offal in the form of their former lives. The people watched it where it lay and did not dare go near enough to stab it with the daggers they carried for it in their hearts.

The father shoulders the front door open on the third try. Turning to the boy, he speaks only once, says:

"Don't touch nothin."

The boy is ten. They step inside.

A greybrown sludge covers everything, stains the carpet that had floated free to smash the furniture against the ceiling. Houseplants and photographs and sofa cushions dimple the sludge without logic and the boy watches his father touch them all one by one for them, his father pausing again and again to grind the dirt off his hands and into the blackening thighs of his jeans.

In the kitchen, his father opens the oven. The refrigerator. The cupboards. The thin fine mud everywhere inside like the satin sheets of water sprites. To them the father says, What did we do to anger you? The boy says the words for him in his head.

They move on. Through the rooms without words, father and young son. In their eyes they share a paleness. Pale not in color but in the quality of looking at the world. Something indistinct and distant, a quality in the looking half of their faces like the thin high clouds of a coming bleak day, though the boy's eyes have not yet gone weary, not yet unkind, not yet with the weak noise of unfulfilled expectations. Not yet signaling to the world what in the father the boy knows only enough to intuit as a crouched indiscriminate temper.

In the hallway, catfish rot along the baseboards. So, the boy thinks, It is a dream.

His father says nothing. But with the slur of his boots on mud and the set of his mouth beneath tired eyes and the troubled touch of his hands, he speaks the only way he knows how to say things he does not have words for. Frail things that to him sound foolish, so he presses his thumb into the sodden moldspotted drywall, heart level. Stands. And says nothing.

Out the window, the boy sees his mother and two younger sisters standing upright beside their mailbox that leans as if by a gust that has forgotten them. No sound. Lean, the boy thinks, Why won't they lean?

The boy looks down at his feet. "Fish," he says.

His father looks at him, empty.

Further along the hallway, the door to the cellar waits open. There is only one stair down before black water, like a beckoning fingertip crooked up out of this captive remnant of the river. His father shuts the door.

They head upstairs. There they find it, finally. The skirt of slime, the mud line that says for them, Here, no further. His father says:

"Get your mother and your sisters."

The boy goes downstairs and out the front door. The yard appears before him, silent and barren, and the boy steps into it. He begins to forget things about his life, thinking, I must have been very young at the time, the drought that ruined our valley, my village, the fierce dry winds that bent us and swept us from our homes and wrapped our world in brown.

Then he sees what he had not seen before. Sound returns to the world. The gap draws closed. The boy runs back into the house. He finds his father upstairs tossing dead fish out an open window. The boy says:

"Daddy. Daddy."

Outside, they gather around it. Stripped of leaves to the watermark and scarved with mud, the young maple tree has hung on. The bicycle is still lashed to it by a chain, its steel links sleeved in transparent blue vinyl. The bike is twisted upside down, mudswathed, handlebars wrenched as if at the last violent instant it had tried to turn from an impact that proved inevitable. Twigs and plastic bags and cornhusks tangle in it. The boy wipes a finger along the crossbar, revealing the metallic copper color he had spraypainted it the summer before. The youngest girl, too young to know otherwise, turns away to watch a National Guard truck lumber up the street.

Together the boy and his father pluck debris from the gears, pull branches from the spokes. His father walks around the backside of the tree, tugs on the chain that cinches the bike to it. The sun is dull in the dull afternoon. His father comes back around the tree. He rights the bike. He says:

"It's locked."

The boy looks away toward the house, then back at his father.

His father stands before the tree. He braces a hand on the trunk. In his other hand he takes the chain, draws firm back on it, and for a moment stands quivering in the pose of an archer. He stops. He joins his other fist around the throat of the chain. He heels his boots into the mud and then leans his shoulders back, hard, reining back with his full weight. Nothing. He stops.

His father drops the chain, wipes his hands dry on his shirt. Again he squares himself to the tree, takes the chain in both fists. He leans back, lifts a boot to lever it waist high on the trunk. Then the other boot beside the first, and he leans further back, his spine now horizontal, shoving with both legs, heaving himself away from the tree, straining, his face full of red and some high sound from the tightened strings along his neck. The chain bites into the blackwet bark.

His father stops. He stands again on the muddy ground and drops the chain. He does not shift his eyes to look at them. Sweat on his forehead like sawdust from glass timber.

The sun slides behind the clouds. The boy feels a chill move under his shirt. His father turns away; he heads up the walk and up the steps and into the house.

They wait. Soon I will know, thinks the boy. His father is not a large man, but large to him and large in the silence he leaves behind.

As soon as they see him emerge from the house they know. They are struck with what they know without the comfort of corroboration (because he never speaks it) of the love he has in his heart for them, but also with what they do not know and he could never begin to tell them. Of what the coming of this water could do to a man and husband and father and forever will leave marked upon him minus whatever small and brutal gesture such as this he can hurl in the face of fate and misfortune. The mother's gasp is small. She wraps her arms around the shoulders of the girls and draws them close.

His father does not look at them as he approaches, as he confronts the knot of tree and bike. He is soaked to the skin, crown to toe, his clothing brownstained and opaque and spotted with the things dead and black that float on the plane of life he had violated. An ax from the tool rack in the flooded cellar hangs at the end of his arm. He squares his shoulders, blocks his feet into the mud. The air above him is empty for one last moment.

There is no flashing in the light, no wail of reckoning. Just the curt grunts of exertion and the abrupt chunk of each slash of the ax. Water trickles from swinging strands of his father’s hair.

chunk chunk chunk and the young maple halves, crumples upon itself. His father lifts the chain off the stump, the little bike like a bauble dangling from it. He sets the bike down, upright on its tires. The chain hangs limply from its frame.

Now I begin to cry, thinks the boy. His body begins to shake.

His father lays the bike at his feet and stands with one boot upon it, clamping it hard to the earth. Grabbing one grip of the handlebar in his left hand, the rim of the front wheel in the fist of his other, his father wrenches with utter vengeance. The gnarled bike breaks free of itself, the handlebars straightened.

In some small way it seems over now. His father without looking at them says it: "There." A layman’s amen.

Then they see his right hand. And what drips from it. His mother lunges at his father's wrist and turns his hand to the sun. Again her gasp is small. The waxy white cord of ligaments where flesh has torn open on his palm.

"Madam," the clerk of the convenience store says. "Madam."

The pulsing chop of a military helicopter increases overhead. The woman raises her voice above it, says:

"Well can't you at least check in back? Can't you at least do that for me?"

"Madam, I assure you," says the clerk, "I have, in back, no more." A small and balding man, the clerk most resembles a thumb rolled lightly around its tip in black cinders. His words seem unaccustomed to his mouth or the weight of the black mustache above it. He puts his hands flat on the counter before him, the deck of this pool that surrounds him. He waits.

In the pause between words and from out of the diminishing sound of the helicopter, the clerk hears rising behind him the music he had turned down moments before, a courtesy, when the woman stepped into the store.

The woman looks at him. Wearing willed leisure in the form of a lime exercise suit, she is as silkily husked as the fruit of the nightshade. She cocks her head to the music, to her ears haphazard and tinny, like children plucking on the remaining strings of an ill-tuned aluminum guitar. The clerk warms with unease.

In the loud and deliberate phrasings with which Americans confront foreign accents, the husked woman resumes:

"How can you not have any batteries in the middle of . . . this?" She makes the most encompassing gesture. Her hair is grey but not allowed to show it and tied back harshly to prove the point. She says:

"Is it that you decline to do business with me?" Then something occurs to her. She withdraws slightly. "Sir, have I done something to offend you?"

"Madam, please,” says the clerk. “I sympathize with you. We are simply sold out."

"You don't understand what we've been going through," the husked woman says, her voice beginning to break.

Late afternoon. In hopes of even a sewerly breeze, the doors of the convenience store stand open. Two doors, side and front to flush out the heat, heavy with humidity. It is through the front door that the family now shuffles in, silently, without expression, eclipsing the light in augmenting succession: a little girl, another, the mother, the father. The boy waits outside, hazed and depthless in the dull sun and straddling a small bike the color of tarnished pennies. The boy leans over the handlebars, lifts the dangling chainlock out of the way to rub mud from the chrome of the front fender.

The rest of the family approaches the counter. The clerk turns to watch. They all wear the familiar mark of the river, on the little girls and their mother the brown hem at their shins and brown dappling above. The father is soaked to the skin, head to toe, and spattered with debris. Strangling one palm with the other, he clutches his hands at his chest like a monk. Blood trickles down his forearms.

The mother says something to the clerk, words, but too quiet. The clerk turns an ear, leans closer across the counter. The mother says it again. The clerk points down an aisle. The mother follows his finger and steps into the aisle. The rest of the family stays put, mute as reeds. The two little girls, thigh-high at best, one diminished like an echo of the other, look at nothing. They share it in the looking part of their faces, the girls and the boy and their father, leached and brittle where the world goes in.

"Sir?" the husked woman says beside them.

The mother returns to the counter with a box of gauze. She pays with government vouchers. She opens the box, begins to wrap the gauze around the father's palm, firm and without hurry, as from practice. The clerk watches. The bandage whispers in the mother’s fingers.

"Sir," the husked woman says again. "Sir, we have no electricity at our house!"

Calmly and not sharp and without looking up, the clerk says to her:

"Yes, madam." He says: "In your home. I understand."

 The husked woman stares at him. She stands at the end of the counter with her arms dead at her sides, her mouth making space. She turns to the family, met by no eye. The family turns away. They step back outside into the light.

The husked woman looks at the clerk for another moment. Then she wheels and stalks out in the wake of the family. Through the open door, the clerk hears what is said to no one but meant for him:

"Muslims," the husked woman says, and leaves it at that.

The clerk stifles the music, puts his spine against the shelves behind him. He crosses his arms against his chest, hard, to stanch the feeling.

The next day, the family stops the strand of their walking to stand again in front of their house. Now it could be said that they have come daily since the leaving of the flood. And will come again tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, though they do not yet know it or believe they are capable of it, so they cannot yet say it to themselves. They will simply find themselves walking into thought out of thoughtless walking, arriving almost as if out of sleep, rousing abruptly into disbelief, standing once more before what the prod of memory's finger into this sopping humped ruin seething with stink and rot and without life except for the audible whirl of insects insists is their home.

Flatbottomed boats no longer push wakes over the yard and across the threshold and into the living room. Still, thinking cannot reconcile what the past is saying with what the present sees. The family moves through the unbroken brown of the yard and toward the house. With each step the mud gives off a slurping sound like gloating.

Halfway across the yard, the boy balks.

"Come inside and help," his mother says to him, gently.

Inside, his mother and father and the little girls take again to work. The pile grows along the curb. Algae-rimed sofa cushions, and carpet, and sodden lumps of pink insulation coughed from gagging walls like gargantuan bubble gum. There is no talking, little thought. There is just the grind and stoop of labor. In this there is something of the grace of shared effort.

In the distance, deep in its muddy trough, the river chuckles at their folly.

Out in the yard, the boy dawdles in the mud. He stabs at frogs with a stick. His mother steps from the house, carrying a rolled rug under her arm. She stops where the sidewalk must have been. She says, more urgent this time but still quiet:

"Please go inside and help your father.” She pauses. “We’ll get your bike back,” she says.

She sends a glance back toward the house. Inside, his father shovels sludge from the kitchen floor, scrapes on the tile. The older daughter comes out of the front door and past them, dragging a garbage bag. The girl drags the bag to the pile at the curb and returns to the house, passing her younger sister who like a ripple of reverberation struggles with a garbage bag too heavy for her.

His mother tosses the rug onto the pile and heads back to the house. The boy wanders in the mud. "Bugs," he says.

His mother stops again on her return to the curb, in her hands a toaster stuffed with silt and dried sedge. She says the boy's name beside him, quietly, afraid of the small fear that comes of saying it, and so holds it against both of them, husband and son, resenting the kind of love that makes her speak but speak as if she is not.

She drops the toaster on the pile and says the boy's name once more. This time mutely to herself.

When she turns back from the pile, the gasp is in her stopping. The boy turns to look, has to, the presence he can feel behind him. His father stands on the porch, hands on his hips, sweating, filthy as a gravedigger.

He glares at the boy.

The boy turns away. He drives the stick into the mud. It snaps in his hands. He drops it and turns and walks across the yard and back into the house. His father comes in behind him. The girls are in the kitchen. The older girl bends to crate plates from the cupboard. The younger girl does not look away. A few minutes later, his mother steps into the kitchen, gnawing the inside of her cheek.

Together they lift the reclining chair to the street, a dribbling trail. They empty drenched cardboard boxes from the pantry. They bring twisted picture frames to the pile. They gather dislocated table legs. The television is ruined. Again the shovel scrapes and scrapes.

It is the scream that brings them running.

They find her upstairs, the youngest girl, backed against her bedroom wall. With as much to her that is far away in a room this small, she stands wringing her hands beneath her chin, her arms tight against her body, shaking. At her feet lies the blanket she has half-pulled from her bed. On the bed, the sheets writhe.

His mother goes quickly to the girl and puts her arms around her. Behind them a voice hisses and they turn:

"They're just stupid worms," says the boy, standing in the doorway.

His mother says his name. She does not look up. She is chanting softly, over and over, It's all right, It's okay, stroking the hair of the little girl, holding her close. They stand there, above the bed, silent, almost calm, as if this now is the end of it. Or finally just too much. A thousand vile fingers tickle the silt-ridden sheets. There is the smell of dead water. His mother says, It's all right. It's okay.

The girl is making a hiccoughing sound, somewhere between weeping and a choke.

The boy watches his mother’s tender hands moving on his sister's head. He feels a sadness he cannot make words for, does not know to call it self-pity, though it wells up inside of him, he gags on it. He does not understand that even a whimper would be enough and so he gulps that down hard, and in the heavy air of the bedroom it hardens in his gut, and the heat of the room hardens what is pale and shapeless in his eyes, and he glares at the tears and snot that move on his little sister's face with the same foul languor of the bedsheets, the gasps of crying she cannot even get right, and he cries What about me! with words that come out as:

"You goddamn baby!"

Suddenly he feels no floor. He is suspended before them, like on that carnival ride that spins and spins and the floor drops out and time waits because with no floor beneath you it has to. Some unseen force pins you to the wall you know is there but cannot turn to see or really feel, and you cannot move so wait. In this swirling suspension the boy senses but cannot see what he knows is there, first the pause of his father’s mute outrage, and then the bandage-flashing blow. The boy tastes blood, feels the pulsing swell at his mouth. He puts his fingers to his lip.

There is to the air a quality of withdrawal, of pause, like the covers of a heavy book poised for slamming shut.

In one violent motion void of thought, the boy jumps to the bed. Grabbing into the sheets, he spins and hurls a handful of writhing filth. He flees before his sister's shrieks can find him, before the worms and the mud strike her open sobbing mouth and body, some tumbling to the floor.

The clerk stands behind the counter, his back to the front door. Tapping each package with a pen, he counts in the racks above him. He writes a number on the clipboard. He flips to the next page.

Like toys pulled on a string, the quiet family files in from the late afternoon sunlight. The two girls, the mother, the father. A moment later, the son. Lifting his feet as with effort, the son scrapes one shoe, then the other, on the doorstep, deliberately and as if with deep interest. As little as any of them look at anything they would likely swear, or rather the mother—who alone among them the clerk has heard speak, meekly at that—would swear on their behalf, that they have never before set foot in this store.

Without word or signal they turn and move toward the tall freezers at the back, the frozen treats.

"Lanny!" says a voice. It is a boy's voice, hushed and urgent with alarm and from behind a shelf where the clerk had not known anyone to be. The clerk turns. Behind the shelf there is the sound of an elbow into ribs and then abruptly no sound, and then a boy of perhaps twelve, older than the urgent voice, walks briskly but with no apparent alarm from out of the aisle of bread.

The boy wears baggy cargo shorts, a dirty and misshapen t-shirt. He is preceded by two front teeth that protrude from his upper lip like shutters ajar in hot weather. With a quick glance toward the quiet family fogging behind the open freezer doors, the bucktoothed boy moves swiftly to the side exit. Goes out. The clerk now spots the younger boy peering at the quiet family from behind the bread, animal-eyed and poorly concealed and with, though more mildly perverse, the profile only brothers could share.

The clerk hears a scraping outside, first from behind the bushes against the front wall of the store, then in the bushes against the side. Then silence.

The family without words is moving now toward the register. The son lingers behind them in the aisle, sullen, watching his shoes.

At the counter, the mother paws through her purse. The family waits. The father stands mutely above them, scratching at the bandage on his hand. Behind him in the aisle, the son plucks the rubber band on a plastic package of cushioned insoles. Once. Twice. A louder smack the third time. The father spins, spits the boy’s name. The son startles, looks up.

His upper lip is swollen, wounded.

The mother pays for the ice cream bars and passes one to each in turn. Only the eyes of the littlest girl bounce at what the others long ago learned to accept dutifully in return for their silence. Then, as one, the family moves to the front door. There they notch the light in tandem, the boy bringing up the rear, and are gone.

Immediately the bucktoothed boy slips back in through the open side door. He puts a sideways glance at the sides of the eyes of the clerk who does not see him and disappears down an aisle.

The clerk picks up the clipboard, flips through to the right page. He taps packages above his head. He writes something on the clipboard.

A moment later, two dogs blink across the bright sun at the front door, trot-flickered silhouettes. This draws the clerk's attention to the door at precisely the moment the bucktoothed boy least wants it there. The boy is moving quickly past the newspapers, toward the door, stiffgaited. He is right on the heels of his younger brother, who moves with haste too but shorter strides, and something of less conviction in the haste, and bulges in his pants pockets stiffening his gait, too, and so slowing them both down.

Just as the younger boy punches into the light at the door, the clerk's thinking latches onto his seeing. He bolts from behind the counter. The boys take off.

 The clerk, dashing through the front door, draws up short. The sun spanks his eyes. Across the street, the younger boy is running between two buildings, shoes slapping the pavement, and disappears.

Out of this sound comes a rustling in the bushes behind the clerk, from the side of the building. The clerk whirls. Just as he does, the bucktoothed boy bursts from the alley on that side of the store, off balance on the bike too small for him, swatting his feet frantically at the whirring pedals, futile.

The clerk lunges. He catches the boy at the elbow, grabs him to a stop. The bike topples to the ground. It is the copper-colored bike the clerk had seen the quiet boy on the day before, the dangling chainlock. The clerk looks only once at it, fast, then back at the bucktoothed boy stilled in his fist.

"Stealing! Stealing!" the clerk yells, shrill as if he’d spotted some beast creeping out of the jungle. He glares into the bucktoothed boy's face, the boy's eyes narrowing but not with fear. Which makes the clerk shake the boy more vigorously, rifling as he does with his free hand through the boy's shorts pockets, then holding a fistful of candy at the boy's nose like before a misbehaved hound, the tendons on the clerk's neck taut as slingshots, the clerk hissing now.

“Stealing,” he says.

For a moment, the bucktoothed boy looks at the clerk. Then his eyes slip away, without fear or hurry, turning profile, slowly almost, catching sight of something and only now taking on bite, a look scant in duration but with absolute contempt. His teeth expel a shard of bitter air.

The clerk turns. Across the street stands the younger boy, panting in perplexed impotence. The clerk drags the bucktoothed boy through the front door and into the store.

"Mister. Wait."

The bucktoothed boy says this, thickly, his cheek pinned to the counter. He crosseyes the confiscated pile of candy at the end of his nose. The clerk holds the phone in his free hand, poking numbers with his thumb. "Mister. Wait," says the boy again. This time almost halfheartedly, with the tepid concern of someone waking in an unfamiliar room.

The clerk stops dialing. In that instant of pause the bucktoothed boy's eyes sharpen further, taking interest in his chances but not much, and he says, almost drowsily:

"We're hungry, mister, that's all. We lost everything in the flood. Tell him, Derek."

The clerk turns.

Behind him the younger boy stands framed in the open doorway. There is a riffle of confusion across the boy’s face. And then you see it, the understanding, the saying of it inside a mind that gets it, behind a face that does not know how to pull it off:

He wants me to lie.

The bucktoothed boy continues. "We lost everything. We got no insurance, and our grandma can't get food stamps cause she's not our legal guardian. We haven't seen our dad since I was four. Ain't that right, Derek?"

The younger boy stands stiff. The air withdraws like a gut sucked tight, waiting for the blow.

The younger boy mumbles something. It would mean nothing without the nod that accompanies it. The clerk stops. He ends the call. T-shirt puckers in his fist. The clerk says:

"Wait here. If you are hungry, you do not need candy bars." He lets go of the t-shirt, puts an upraised index finger where the bucktoothed boy can see it, sidelong, still folded face-first onto the counter.

"Wait," says the clerk, and hurries into the back room.

The bucktoothed boy shoots his brother a look to freeze him. There are noises from the back. The bucktoothed boy straightens himself, snatches a porn magazine from the rack behind him, stuffs it down the front of his shorts. Standing behind the counter, beside the register, he gets the joke, smirks at his brother. They wait. There is silence for a long moment. Then from the back a curious metal complaint as of an ungreased door hinge. Then more noises.

The clerk returns to the front counter, carrying a plastic grocery bag. He opens it. He pulls a cantaloupe from within, shows it to the boys, puts it back in the bag. Then two oranges. Then a peach. Some tomatoes. More is in the bag. The clerk ties the bag shut. He says:

"Take these to your family." He hands the bag to the bucktoothed boy.

The boy looks at him. Brushing roughly past his younger brother, he moves quickly to the front door and out.

The younger boy stands for a moment at the counter. He looks at the clerk as if at a word he hasn't learned to read. The clerk says:

"Sometimes God gets even in the nicest ways."

The younger boy turns and walks out. Through the open front door, the clerk hears the bucktoothed boy's shout, pitched and violent:

"Someone stole my fuckin' bike!"

That evening, men and boys stand in the shower tent at dusk, heads bowed, each hung upon his post of water. Stripped and weary, every spike of spray digs a wound in aching muscles, pricks the fresh sores of tetanus shots. There is mostly silence, a word or two above the hiss of mud-marbling water. A shroud of steam.

A stranger enters the tent. He strips and steps under a shower. There are glances from beneath brows or not at all and nothing of furtiveness in the glancing. The man nearest the stranger nods. When the stranger nods back without recognition, the other man pauses, then says:

"We walked the levee watch together. You're from that TV station."

The reporter says: "Ah. I didn't recognize you without your umbrella."

The other man chuckles once, brief. There is the sound moving water, of spray sparking on the planked flooring. Then the man speaks again, out of fatigue, with measured tones. He says:

"I guess it never really hits home until it hits home. But I guess it's better here than elsewhere."

"No," says the reporter. "I've seen elsewhere. It's worse here."

"I meant it's best the worst hit here," says the man.

The reporter turns to look at the man. The man waits, says:

"This is the kind of town where a fifty-year-old man is still his father's son. Everyone knows everyone else. Everyone sticks together. Nothing like you see on TV, looting and all that. We'll all get through this together, and we'll all be here after it."

The reporter is a man in his middle thirties, with something small and broken in him that he masks with an ornamental indifference, and thinks of this as worldliness, or something simulating worldliness. He wears it like a bowler hat, this indifference, until his emphatic opinions can take no more and knock it to the floor.

"It didn't have to happen here at all," the reporter says. "Straitjacket the river to protect the big cities above and below this town, all so tourists can spend their money at the casinos and new restaurants along the so-called urban waterfront, and the river has no choice. Then you folks end up shoveling Mother Nature out of your living rooms. And taking it all philosophically."

"Living along the river has always been a gamble," says the man.

"See what I mean?" says the reporter. The man looks at him. The reporter says:

"It's not even the game of chance you think it is. I've heard more than one story about levee busters from the farms across the river. Talk of someone ramming a boat into the sandbags where the water crevassed in."

The man says: "Well. This flood—not the river—broke our hearts, but it didn't break our spirits, and neither will talk like that."

"Back in 1927, they lined up with shotguns along the levees to protect their hearts,” says the reporter. “I've seen photos."

The man says: "Back then, the flood came in two waves. First the water, then the hate. Back then, Black men were forced to work the levees at gunpoint and washed away in droves when the crest came through. Now we have a Black mayor. Now we work together.”

The man pauses. “Like everyone else,” he says. “I went back to my home for the first time yesterday. I saw neighbors sitting together on their porches as soon as the water was low enough. I saw a woman carrying portraits of Jesus and her parents back into her house. We have not lost anything that really counts."

"Is it true that people above the floodline have been ignoring water rationing?" says the reporter, with not much of a question in it.

The man shuts his shower. He says:

"Look. This has been hard on all of us, this whole town and beyond. We're doing as best we can. Families spend all day filling water jugs and applying for food vouchers and salvaging what they can from their homes, then they have to come back to these hot tents at night and sleep on top of each other. But even that's not enough to do them in. No sir. So I'll tell you what I've been saving until now, what most of all needs remembering."

There is that moment of detachment, the marshalling of memory. Then the man says:

“Yesterday. When by seeing it with our own eyes we finally lost what the river had already taken. You could tell by the faces, the long stare in a short room. I suppose you're looking at the same thing now."

The reporter watches the man's eyes. The man stands naked, forgetting his nakedness. In the mist of the showers, the others assume the attitudes of listening without apparent change. They are good at this, good with the practice of untalkative men. The man says:

"I walked back here alone, just before dark, and saw them. They were out back of the Red Cross tent, gathered in a circle. One quick yelp caught my attention, else I don't think I would've even seen them at all. They were real quiet like kids get when they vanish into something they don't want adults to see, knowing enough about some things to keep quiet about it."

As he talks, the man's eyes move now and then, quickly, to a boy standing naked beneath a shower. The boy stands under the water, hands cupped over his groin in embarrassment. He has a busted lip. The man says:

"More than anything they looked like adults in kidsuits, something old in their eyes, a look you don't ever want to see on anyone so young. Something old that scares you a little, cause you believe surely they haven't learned enough of life to wear that look. A look like you see on children only in photographs from a hundred years ago, posed outside a mineshaft, or at a public hanging.”

The man's eyes slip to the naked boy and back, avoiding the bleak eyes of the man showering beside the boy, but moving low and not so fast as to miss the man's bandaged hand and the blood stain pushing through it. The man continues:

"I started thinking maybe we got it backwards, that maybe in some ways kids have got us fooled. I mean the way you're sometimes sure you had it more figured out when you were ten. Then you remember how you used to beat up on your little brother, and you feel a little sick. Watching them I felt that, a little lost and a little sick. Something moved among them, a little cloud of dust through their legs. A fistfight, I figured. You know, kids cracking first while their parents tried to hold it in. Just to give their parents an excuse to crack and let it out too, maybe.

"So I came up fast, until I saw it. I ducked behind the tent. A bike. A scrawny thing, too small for most of them. Old, like you see in pawnshop windows. Bent and caked in mud and with an old chainlock still dangling from it. One kid was getting off, giving it to another, who handed it like in some ceremony to a third that jumped on."

The man wraps a towel around his waist. He says: "I stood and watched. It got dark. One by one then over again they rode that thing in little circles under the pole light, around and around for a minute and then got off, gave it back to the one kid whose bike it must have been, who gave it to another, around and around, quiet and serious as church. Jeez."

The man looks down at the naked boy. Now the reporter gets it. He turns to the boy, catches his eye. There is the sound of running water. The reporter, indicating with a touch to his own mouth the pulped lip of the boy, says to him, warmly and with a smile:

"Popping wheelies?"

The boy shakes his head. He glances up at the man showering beside him, brief. The reporter sees that the man must be the boy's father. Something in the father's pale eyes or the paleness of his looking pales even further. The boy looks back at the reporter.

"No, sir," says the boy. "I just fell off."

The clerk closes up his store and swings down the iron grate and locks it. The last of the day lists on the coming shadows. The clerk begins to walk.

With the walking, the streets spoke slowly past. The clerk looks down the passing streets, to the low trough of the swollen river, the hub of his gaze. There the streets are severed by the line of the water, some houses still marooned beyond like abandoned barges, beyond that barges themselves tethered to vanished shores like balloons in a windless sky. Beyond that the reflected sky lies where once lay fields, clouds now tilling the last of the daylight into dark and furrowed water.

The clerk walks at dusk, soft sounds beneath the coming stars. Distant sounds take on the hushed tones of reverence. Or of weariness. Or of defeat. There is a train on old tracks, through the woods, far away.

The clerk walks on, alone, back to where among so many others his wife and four young daughters wait, as they long before and far away had learned to wait, and wait with many others.

White sun, dust. "You!" yelled the soldier. The zinc flash of concertina wire.

The clerk walks.

The way at first is well-marked, rind and pulp sporadic along the sidewalk, melon smashed against the curb. A tomato smeared on the brick wall of an office. Mean spoor from some unhappy fairy tale, already desiccated from the day's heat. Quickly the trail gives out, the last of it the familiar plastic grocery bag.

The clerk walks. The walking is slow and awkward, with blocks yet ahead, but no hurry, and thoughts that are elsewhere. The clerk wheels the small bike at his side. The chainlock hangs from the crossbar. It sways with the slow rhythm of his walking. Back, and forth. The clerk watches this and the shuffle of his feet beneath.

Hunched over the clucking spokes, the clerk walks. He is trying to remember which of the tents the quiet family is staying in. And what happiness looks like on the face of a young boy.

There had been no prophecies. The sky had simply come down to them, tumbled in too many coins from heaven, come down to gather and gather on the face of the earth and find its way into the bracketed river and then find its way free again, the sky become rain become river become flood. When it came, it came with the sound of barreling freight, water that punched through sandbags like the fist of god, shuffling cars.