River Rats

The riverrats along bankside of the Missouri river went spared of the flooding that submermed the levies bordering the farms on the other side of the river. The Company hired an investigator to detect insurance fraud. Racoons crawl uphill to steal bird feeders from the houses drag them  back into the drainage swamps. He hurdled the blockades, crept through the adjacent park to reach them.

The gravel road submerged into the mud. From the mud rose flowers of burs. Between the trees grew thick bushes broken by fallen trunks sawed into sections and left to rot.  The investigator came to the fire pit, limestone blocks arranged in a circle. Within grew more weeds, but the ashes at the bottom would fill a bath. The investigator found a trashed tent under vampire vines. Brown water spilled. It came out in pieces. Shoe prints marked its walls. A rabbit escaped from the path. Down which he found a soiled blanket and a nike shoe. He turned it over but saw use smoothed the tread of the soles. He left the shoes where he found it and went back to trouble the locals.

Already crews labored over broken homes. Bald pieces of hilltop baited them. Three already fell, and balls of dirt rolled from the houses in line. The investigator only saw the backs, flat, big windows, small houses on a lane not lit by city lights.

The investigator watched one riverrat worked on spinach leafs in a garden spanning his yard. He rested his wristed on the fence, and wanted to ask, because someone on death row told him long ago that the park he crossed was the last place he saw a lost runaway. A wood sing on the fence read “Dieter”, the same name he thought  the doomed man might have mentioned to him before they banned the death penalty, than reinstated it, then banned it again. Instead he asked him about the vegetation.

“If I don’t get it all up today it bolts.”

“What?”

“Gets bitter. I don’t know why the houses are falling. Sorry.”

The riverrat spent his whole life in one state. He never felt threatened by past accusations. He managed the entire  garden by himself. His marigold’s won state fair medals, and he gave them each names, that he refused to tell the man at his fence.  The food he grew fed him all summer, and in the winter he stored tomatoes and beans in cans. For every other meal he went to Burger King. He saved every plastic cup, every day for thirty years, and kept them in his garage.

He liked it more when the rest of town kept away from them. After the first house fell, people from the state showed up to inspect the hills. Despite their forecasts to the contrary more homes dropped onto the riverrats.

Dieter knew where the fourth house might fall next. Right on his house. He stayed in his from his kitchen window, from his garden every tine he glace outwauds he saw the looming back plate windows. He went into his garage to get out of the rain where he kept his utility vehicles.  He climbed onto one, and thought about the The first time he took his friends with a stolen bottle of glittering liquid that reeked of petroluem. They ditributed its contents among themselves, pulling straight shots from the bottle, except for Walden. He remained sober, and carried them all back to the campfire when they would drink more, and go off to vomit or to grab more wood to torch in the pit.  

When all three ran off together, Walden left his post around the fire to drag them all back. From beneath swooping branches he pulled them from the dark of the trees into the open space, and up slope towards their light source.  His girlfriend clutched dry sticks to her chest. Walden held her wrist. In the summer night her flesh prickled and shivered. The pleasing smell of cooking sugar lingered. Before the fire the shadow of someone they did not invite roasted a marshmallow over their fire. He reached to the ground, and pulled a it from the dirt. With a long, sharp switch, he impaled  it. He leaned his knee on the pit stones, and twirled the candy over the heat waves. It didn’t look like the synthetic marshmallows they knew from the Walmart. The size of a baseball, it smelled of egg, and the heat did not shrink it as the corn starch browned.

She dropped the firewood and called on them all to go back while the others adjusted they eyes to the dark. The interloper dressed in a fur vest but wore leather work boots. Soft fuzz sprouted under his chin. His eyes focused on the fire without distraction. His pupils concentrated on each roasting grain. The teenagers whispered. Only Walden soberly insisted the shadow before the fire  was no drunken illusion. They all watched in uncertainty.

Dieter hushed, “We can't go home, our parents will know that we’re drunk.”

“But we can’t stay here.” Walden whispered.

Dieter put his firewood down and held his nearly empty bottle. The clear glass still contained enough for two cocktails. A beetle kicked to escape. “Lets offer him a drink.”

Dieter stumbled away from his friends, and unplugged the cap. He no longer smelled the alcohol. The stranger kept cooking the marshmallow, even after coated in chared strips, he twirled it until sufficiently blackened. He tested it once to see if it's sufficiently burned to the core, than held the switch over his mouth, and lowered the tip into his mouth, and kept sliding it down until his fist touched his mouth, than he pulled the switch out and impaled another marshmallow. Walden pulled his belt and pushed him in line with his friends, but already he saw enough to swallow the rest of the vodka, and walk shoulder to shoulder toeghet the whole way  home and spent the night together.

Dieter still went to the park and searched for the strange visitor. Because its the last place he saw Walden. Now adult, but scraggly, fat, and reeking of whiskey. Deiter ran after him, and tried to reunite, but the veins in his eyes and the veins popping in his neck slowed him. The nearer he came the stronger the smell of unwashed hound became. Walden still wore pajama pants and and a stocking cap neon orange so not to be shot by hunters. Their gunshots from the other side of the bluff cracked at sunrise, He found litter, plastic hot dog packets, empty lighter fluid bottles from the riverrats, and the charred remains of the fallen lumber.

Walden took Dieter by the collar. His breath reeked of mulch, and he knew his appearance did not convince onlookers of his authenticity. He said it only once. “Do not take anything the vagabond offers you- of you will be trapped instead of him.” then he walked backwards into the swamp fog.

Dieter drove his atv through the sunken paths. Deer ran away from the engine roar. His tires tilled the earth. Branches swept low and scraped the visor of his helmet, but scraped his arms. He drove where he didn’t go often because of the flooding, But in recesses he found narrow bulges between the still water. From these lanes he propolled deeper, where he found the old stairs built by great depression laborers now coated in the syrup of rotting leafs. He went down these limestone steps, haunched to steer the machine, with each step he lifted into the air and slammed against the seat. The surface of grass and fallen branches sank from his vision, and he only saw the exposed roots reaching down the eroded slope.  He rode under a stone bridge with drainage pipes obstructed by roots drooping down towards the mud bottom. Still puddles remained of the last flood, and when the fun of riding through them faded, he tried again and to drive it out out from under the creek bridge, but the more he tried the more resolved the mud turned until it convinced him to leave it behind. He took his helmet off, and tried pushing it out. Then with heavy breath he examined the slopes to find a safe passage for his truck. Wads of dirt and slime seeped down and settled at his shoes. The saplings he balanced himself with as he struggled to climb uprooted. When it rains again, he knew, he would lose his machine. He dug his fingers into the mud. A good time for gardening, as he pulled himself up, he thought himself a tuber growing up from the ground to peek from the mud.

He smelled smoke of the fire, and assumed some neighbors liked the moisture as much as he, but by the time he reached the top of the slope the rain started again. He worried for his atv, but as he trampled the bush, the tinder smell worried him. He had no umbrellas, and so he stood under a tree. The fire in the pit stood higher than any person, a pyre of railroad tie skeletons burned beneath. The stranger sat there twirling his marshmallow.

Dieter watched from the tree. The rain pressed the tree limbs to the high grasses. The fire only strengthened. It warmed his cheeks from the distance he waited rfom. A stiff weight dropped in his pocket and he thought he dropped something. When he reached in his thoughts concerned his phone, his keys, his pocket knife, but instead found the glass bottle  reeking of rotten potato juice, with few drinks left inside. It even had the same drowned beetle floating at the bottom from where he dropped it. Once he uncapped it, the rain stopped. The wood and the fire shrunk, and unfurling canopies of smoke replaced them as the wind carried the smoke across the park. It didn’t smell like burning wood, not like the forest at all- but rather pastry ingredients baking in the oven. Dieter approached and sat near the vagabond turning his marshmallow. He offered the bottle to him, but the vagabond didn’t listen. His attention gripped the turning marshmallow like a watchmaker sealing  tiny gears with scopic vision. So he pried the cap off and poured in onto the vagabond. One eye crept to the corner of its socket. Vodka evaporated as it touched his body and the steam funneled into the smoke. Without speaking, he reached one claw into the ground, and pulled out a marshmallow already piked on a long stick.

“I don’t take things I didn’t ask for.”

“Your quadrobile doesn’t look safe.”

“If I can get my truck over here, I can pull it out. Just call the city and let them know I need the gate unlocked.”

“They are illegal to ride on city property. You will be fined, and the gate will remain locked.”

“Then I’ll drive around the gate.”

“You’ll lose your truck.” He tossed the stick for Dieter into the fire. “There’s no hurry. It won’t flood again until next fall.”

“My friend told me not to take anything from you.”

“And what does he know? I’ve been down here longer than the stonework,” What he held over the fire roasted black. He drew it from the fire. To check it thoroughly cooked, he pressed two fingers into the husk, and in static pried open two eyelids. He looked closely. One socket cooked. “Longer than the trees themselves.”

The Vagabond sighed. A bronzed eyeball glanced at him. He cussed in whispers and spun it over the fire. Dieter looked down since he still had daylight. The vagabond did not pull them out from the dirt. He took them from a leather sack.

“There was a massacre here long ago. Did you ever read about it?”

“In what?”

The vagabond sighed again. This time  deeper,rattling his throat, he broke his concentration to bow his head into the shade. He rose it again but looked past the fire at houses along top of the bluff.

“I barely remember it myself, most times. You can have your fourwheeler back...”

Deiter looked behind them. Beyond the clouds of pollen and steam he saw the gulch light up. A roar rung from the bottom. The lights swing around, and the haze absorbed them. The engine revved and bounced up the stairs, and ran over bushes and small trunks, and when it stopped just outside of the fire light, he saw the gray fur of a forest animal grilled  to the front fence.

Disfigured foliage beared its wheel wells. A frog sat on the seat but once its eyes went back into its head it found no flies and leapt away to rejoin the shallow beings.  Yet something remained on the seat. Dieter gasped. His prized marigolds ripped from the earth, their hair thin roots dangled over the seat.

“But you will return, eventually.”

Deiter touched the handle bars, the undercarriage still dripped with clumps of mud. When he got on he couldn’t find the key, but the engine ignited and the heat comforted his soaking arms, that he let it carry him out from the park, and back into his garage.

He already watched the first house break from its foundation and luge downhill between two houses, crashing into  doghouses, and cars. That night he jumped from bed and started sifting through wreckage. He found one dog and helped it out. Then he went back in to search for people. By then the flashing emergency lights lit up the bluff.

The second house broke open first, and all their furniture fell out. Then the washing machines and the stove. Pipes broke and rained water. Then the furnace blew up, and the house fell down in shambles upon the trailer of an old lady while she stalked dieter’s garden in solemn joy at the debasement of his marigold plot.

The third house fell and crushed the old lady  as she lay in bed of her grandson’s trailer.

A head on a pole appeard on the weather vane of the house over his place. It looked over the river and the bluff side.

Dieter tried to save his plastic cups by storing them in trash bags and keeping the bags in the swamp. The house stood there, and head did too. He got in his car and drove up. A song he liked started on the radio but before his favorite part he reached the top of the hill and stopped his car by the overlooking pavilion. Without the houses or trees nothing broke the tide of air charging between the bluffs. The few branches left on the remaining trees looked like forceps brushing the arcana of dark and white cloud layers driving over them.

Before the houses of the street stood a red pillar stack of three small rocks attacking a leather turnequette holding a broken bone attached to the spine of a horned anima. , with an inscription on the back bearing the names the like of Vukan, Uros, Belos, Desa, Tihomir.

The houses on the safe side of the street leaned towards the descent. Porches collapsed and muted their homes. Empty driveways covered in leaves in front of the garage. Heavy boxes piled against the windows from inside to cover them. Signs before closed curtains reading, “trespassers will be shot, on oxygen dont smoke”. On the other side, five houses left dangling before the cauldron of brown mist over the river, and the fogs rising over the distant , flooded farmlands, leaving the beaten shingles of barn roofs and brick stack chimneys stabbing over the veils of vapor.

The gravel of the road flooded over the curb and flowed down slope. Four of them he found abandoned. The last house leered over his garden, garage, and home. Dark windows, no light pressed through. He took the handle, found it unlocked, and when it opened he saw one last of his marigolds in a pot on a window sill. The window slid open. The earth outside tipped and the window spun, his steps became faster in fear of the pot tipping out the window but he caught it before it suffered the consequence. He faced the door and one step in he smelled the fire from below, and a cannon cracked beneath the house. Splinters broke through the floor, and tore parts of the wall away, and the entirety of the solar system crashed through the window, hurled him to the ground, shattered the flower. The house stopped and he lay still shaking as the collapse of the house resonated in his perceptions.

The floorboards waned and bent under his stomach. The walls around him ticked, hives of beetles escaped from the walls and some over his hand, and up his sock and up his thigh. He grabbed for the flower. He took it by the stem and checked to see if the florets protected the seeds. He staggered back to balance, when the first garbage bag dripping with swamp water dropped on his chest, and he stumbles catching it, dropping his cups, as the second and third bag hit him. Than the fourth and fifth. After the sixth bag, the bags didn’t contain his plastic cups, what the heads, feet, hands, scalps of the men and women he buried under his garden.

The riverrats watched the house collapse, but to their astonishment, it didn’t roll right down, but hit a stone staircase they lost to the overgrowth of ivy and thorn bushes and tree cover, and it railed towards the park where it bore into the ground and broke in half. The splintering claspe shook the ground.

The investigator didn’t come to an answer to why the houses kept falling. All his reports said the homes didn’t even exist. He made something up, the whole time watching the sun rise over the flood plains. They glittered in different colors as the clouds changed and the sun gained dynasty.  He listened to hunters salute with their shotguns. He concluded, the houses were made by the same faulty material, built by the same company, which no longer is in business and because of decrepitude conditions, were abandoned. He took photograph of the darkness entrenching the street as the day night fell the night before. He thought he saw all kinds of people coming and going through the closed park road, some waking past his car into town. Anyone that lost property or loved ones received checks from the Company.