Floodmarkers

by Nic Brown

  Evelyn ran to her front yard and slid on the grass. She landed on her hip, and water immediately soaked through her pants from the grass. After a moment of panic, she got back up and limped into Van’s yard, through the opening in the wall. The dog had turned and was facing her now, still doing the same thing with his mouth.

  She grabbed his upper jaw with one hand, then stuck the other into his mouth. She felt the teeth and the sharp ridges on the roof of his mouth as her hand slid into his throat. She could get her middle finger and thumb deep in there, but she couldn’t find anything. The dog sat down and Evelyn pulled her hand out. He collapsed onto his front paws and Evelyn knelt in the grass. Mud and water coated almost every inch of her pants now. She pried his jaws open again. He was completely docile, almost unconscious. She looked into his mouth, but there was nothing she could see. She didn’t know if the Heimlich maneuver would work on a dog, but it was the only thing she even remotely knew how to do in this situation. She felt silly as she got around the back of the dog and put her hands under his rib cage and yanked.

  The piece of steak landed in the grass and the dog burst into a spasm of coughing. Evelyn kept her arms around his torso and held him as he began to retch. Frothy yellow bile poured onto the dog’s front legs and into the wet grass. She could feel him breathing now, jagged short breaths that shook his torso. The sensation of another life in her arms seemed suddenly profound and rare, and she did not want it to end. The thought then occurred to her that he might again become aggressive—he might not understand that she was trying to help. This was when he turned his dogface to her, strings of drool and rain dangling off his jowls. She held on to him, though, looking him in the face, unsure of what might happen next, feeling his heart beat like a trapped hummingbird, fluttering small and furious.

  thawing

  Cliff and Matthew had come for the dough.

  “I’ll go in,” Matthew said. “But when I yell, open up. We can’t leave it open or else all the cold air will come out.”

  He opened the door to the walk-in freezer and cold air swelled over Cliff, making his damp suit suddenly heavy and sharp. It smelled like flour and apricots. Matthew’s flashlight cut across the inside of the freezer, lighting sheet pans with rows of cookie dough mounds, blue plastic buckets on the floor, cardboard boxes, and a three-tier yellow wedding cake with white flowers. The thick metal door then squeezed the light into a sliver before closing it in with the cold.

  “Wait. Hey!” Matthew yelled, muffled through the freezer door. Cliff pulled on the handle, but the door would not open.

  “It’s locked!”

  “It’s not locked! Pull!”

  “I am!”

  “Pull hard!” Matthew yelled. Cliff could barely hear him. “It seals up!”

  Cliff pulled as hard as he could and the door finally released with a loud and low suck. Matthew stood with the flashlight beam on the top of his Adidas.

  “Come in here real quick.”

  Cliff stepped inside.

  “Let it close.”

  The door made its soft connection behind him, a solid, airtight seal. It was so cold Cliff felt his heart might stop. The flashlight beam reflected upwards from the floor, making Matthew’s thin neck glow under the dark point of his chin. His moustache cast a strange shadow upwards that made it appear much thicker, as if it were growing up and into his nostrils.

  “Birdie come in?” Matthew said.

  Birdie, Cliff thought. Her name. He said, “She’s still in the truck.”

  “You get in there?”

  “In the truck?”

  “No, in Birdie.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Birdie managed this bakery. She was the girl Cliff had met at Tanfastic. When Matthew had offered to drive her home, she had asked if they would help her save her dough instead. Without electricity at the bakery, it was going to rise.

  “She get you to use one of those ribbed condoms?” Matthew said. “Don’t hold out on me, cuz. She loves those things, right?”

  Cliff said, “Yeah.” But he didn’t know.

  “That’s what I thought,” Matthew said, nodding. “We used to date. A couple, three, four years ago. Here.” He handed Cliff a box of dough. “She’s always been into those.”

  Cliff loaded four cardboard boxes of frozen cinnamon rolls into the camper top of Matthew’s pickup. Birdie was in the cab of the truck, the back of her head a dark outline against the light. The thought that she had used a ribbed condom with Matthew was almost unbearable. Matthew was thirty and married. Had been for years. Birdie turned and smiled through the steamy glass. Cliff could hardly believe she had allowed him to touch her.

  When they got into the truck she said, “You guys smell like cinnamon.”

  “Yeah,” Matthew said.

  “I could just eat you up.”

  They drove away from town, water spitting onto Cliff’s face through a poor seal on the side window. The houses became more and more spread out, as if the land between each were swelling in the rain. Cliff watched Birdie for any special attention to Matthew. He exhausted all of his courage in maneuvering his hand close to hers, then finally launched it upon her tiny hand. She gripped him back and Cliff was suddenly invincible, completely satisfied and safe.

  “That dough’s Danish,” Birdie said. “But we order it from France.”

  “How do they keep it frozen from over there?” Matthew said.

  “Same as fish,” Birdie said, and looked at Cliff like he would understand. He smiled. “It’s the only dough in the bakery that I don’t make myself. It’s for cinnamon buns.”

  “Where’re we taking it?” Cliff said.

  “Oh man,” Matthew said. “Wait till you see this guy’s house.”

  “Gordon,” Birdie said.

  “He’s got a generator because he’s crazy? And only crazy people have generators?” Matthew said, messing with the windshield wipers. When he was distracted, all of his sentences sounded like questions. He couldn’t find the right speed in the variant rain. “And he’s got a deep freezer for hunting stuff ? Anyway, we always go out there during Christmas, to look at his lights. He just puts up ridiculous amounts of Christmas lights. This guy. He raised a calf inside, in his kitchen, once. He actually put hay down and closed the room off. He used to have peacocks, too. I don’t know what happened to them. You’re going to love it.”

  “I had to give him Mr. Bojangles,” Birdie said to Matthew. She turned to Cliff. “My old bloodhound.”

  “Was he a puppy?” Cliff said.

  “No. But he was eating our furniture and stuff. Rebecca even put Tabasco on the legs of the kitchen table so that he wouldn’t eat it. But he ate it. Stewart has all this land and does the fox hunt, so we gave him to him.”

  They turned onto a road straddled by wide, low tobacco fields. It was the first expansive view Cliff had had since arriving in Lystra the night before. Everywhere else was shaded by low limbs drooping under the burden of weather. Here, the sky was suddenly broad and dark over huge tobacco leaves, pressed low to the ground, swelling in waves as gusts of wind pushed across the fields. Rivulets of water ran between each row and as they drove by, the lines of crops seemed to fan out from one mysterious point on the horizon. As Matthew sped up, the rows clicked by in a blur, only the vanishing point remaining consistent beside them.

  As Cliff held Birdie’s hand, every song that played on the radio was suddenly poignant. Each had at least one verse that could have been written for them and them alone. The soft country music came in low until they reached a varied garden patch with strings of multicolored Christmas lights strung across the ground between the rows, lighting it up like a dozen miniature landing strips. After not seeing electricity for over an hour, the glow was a revelation.

  Matthew turned off the radio and said, “Guess he left them up.”

  They turned into a gravel driveway with a line of grass down the middle. Fifteen or more cars were parked along the way. A white plantation house with
a new blue tin roof stood at the end. Three windows on the first floor glowed with electric light. On the porch a hand-painted piece of scrap wood said BEWARE OF CAT! above a childlike painting of a black cat with green eyes and a yellow mouth full of bared fangs. Below the cat was the inscription MAMMA. Classical piano music issued dully through the walls.

  Matthew rang the doorbell and the door opened almost immediately. The piano overture intensified. Inside stood a woman with grey hair in a tight ponytail, wearing a crisp black skirt suit and holding a glass of red wine. Her hair was pulled so tightly across her scalp that Cliff wondered if it hurt.

  “Hi,” Matthew said. “I hope we’re not interrupting anything. Is Gordon here?”

  “Yeaaahillllshowyoo,” the woman said. She then slowly took a piece of ice out of her mouth and dropped it into the wine.

  “Matthew,” Matthew said. “Joel and Mary Anne’s son.”

  “Prissy.” Prissy didn’t look as if she had any idea who Matthew’s parents were.

  He gestured to Birdie and Cliff and said, “And everyone.”

  Prissy led them into the kitchen, where an older man in a white tracksuit drank wine from a jar. A woman wearing a long tie-dyed shirt over black spandex shorts was taking pictures of him with a large camera. When they entered, she turned it on them and said, “Youth!” and the flash went off.

  “This is Matthew and everyone,” Prissy said.

  “You guys live in the red house?” said the man in the white tracksuit. He was looking at Cliff.

  “I live in Chattanooga,” Cliff said.

  The man shrugged, then held out a bedraggled, drooping cigarette.

  “It’s grown on the premises,” he said.

  Cliff didn’t smoke, but Birdie took a drag and passed it to him. He knew that people didn’t do that with actual cigarettes. He was regressing in levels of risk taking. He could still feel the cocaine. He tried to do exactly what Birdie had done, inhaled, and then coughed a little. It must have been a marijuana cigarette. Prissy then led them through a dark, narrow hallway lined with mounted deer, their sable necks reaching out from the shadowed plaster.

  The living room was filled with people, many more than Cliff would have expected even from the number of cars. Most were well dressed, men in suits, women in pearls. Cliff thought that these people must have dressed for work before learning that their places of employment were closed. For the first time in hours he felt comfortable in his own suit. A low cloud of cigarette smoke hung above twos and threes throughout the expansive room. The classical music was loudest here, a melody that Cliff recognized from a commercial for diamonds.

  A large man in a dark suit turned towards them as they entered. He wore a red tie with a white triangle in the center, and his hair, though gone on top, was pulled from the sides into a small, greasy ponytail.

  “Gents,” he said.

  “Hey, Gordon,” Matthew said. “We need to freeze some dough.”

  “You mean dough dough?”

  “Yeah, like actual dough.”

  “You know I have a deep freezer.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Splendid,” Gordon said, then seemed to notice Birdie for the first time. He pursed his lips and brought his eyebrows together. “Sweetie,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.” He grimaced.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how to say this.”

  Then he didn’t say anything. He just shook his head and continued to grimace.

  “What?” Birdie said.

  He kept shaking and grimacing. Finally he said, “Your dog is in the freezer.”

  Cliff felt like the top of his head was lifting off of his skull. He guessed the marijuana cigarette was working. He felt like he had been drugged, and then, when he thought about it further, realized that he was, in fact, drugged.

  “A man brought him to the door on Independence Day and there wasn’t a mark on him,” Gordon continued. “It looked like he’d been hit by a pillow.”

  “He’s in the freezer?” Birdie said.

  Gordon nodded. “We stuff them all.” He put his hand on Birdie’s shoulder. “Burying an animal is weird, too, if you think about it.”

  Cliff couldn’t believe what he was hearing. After a moment of stunned silence, Stewart then turned to him.

  “Young man,” he said, laying a heavy hand on Cliff’s shoulder. He bent to Cliff’s level and squinted. “I believe you’ve become a Chinaman.”

  “What?” Cliff said.

  “You can barely open your eyes.”

  Cliff tried to lift his eyelids and Gordon chuckled lightly, then began to lead them through the house. People were everywhere. One room was filled with vintage pinball machines and people activating their flippers. Lights and buzzers and bells sounded in a cacophony of carnival joy. Gordon opened a pale green umbrella before leading them to a small barn in the rear of the property. The roofline of the building was decorated in more Christmas lights and inside was one deep freezer like a large white refrigerator tipped onto its side. When Gordon lifted its lid, mist rolled out like some Halloween prop. As the mist cleared, Cliff looked down at one of the largest dogs he had ever seen. It was curled onto its side, seemingly asleep. But its dappled coat of browns was covered in a thin layer of crystalline ice, making it glimmer in the freezer light, accentuating the massive topography of muscle. This dog wasn’t waking up. There were more animals, too. Ferrets. Cats. Squirrels. One black cat was enclosed in the kind of plastic baggie that had one yellow and one blue edge so that when properly sealed, the colors combined to form a green confirmation of freshness. The green line ran across the cat’s folded ears and diagonally down its back. Cliff suddenly thought this must be Mamma, from the porch’s warning sign.

  “I believe there should be room,” Gordon said. “Just put it on top? Splendid.”

  When Cliff and Matthew returned from the truck with two boxes apiece they found Birdie alone, gazing into the open freezer. She languidly moved out of the way as they approached, as if an invisible thread had been attached to her hips and gently pulled.

  “You OK?” Matthew said, setting the dough on the ground.

  She buried her face into Matthew’s sternum and Cliff tried not to panic. He thought, I should have asked her first. Matthew patted her head and said, “He had it good out here. I mean, you see this place?” Birdie kept her face buried in his chest. “This was the good life.”

  Cliff thought again of the ribbed condom.

  “Fuck!” Birdie said, pulling her face away and wiping her eyes. “I get like this when I’m high.” Then she looked at the freezer and said, “He should at least, like, bury him. You don’t . . . You bury them!”

  “There’s nothing left but the clothes there, sweetie. Nothing but the clothes.”

  “We shouldn’t have ever ever ever let him come out here.”

  Cliff felt like he had to do something. But he could think of nothing to do except put his boxes of dough into the freezer. He gingerly placed the first box atop Bojangles, but the last one wouldn’t fit. He tried to wedge it between Mamma Cat and a ferret, but there was simply too much dough.

  “Here, cuz,” Matthew said, taking the box from Cliff.

  Cliff was glad when Matthew also failed. He placed the box on the hay-strewn floor.

  “Can we let one slide?” Matthew said.

  “That’s forty bucks,” Birdie said. She looked at Cliff expectantly, her wide-set eyes red.

  “What about the kitchen?” Matthew said.

  She raised her eyebrows and turned, then Matthew picked up the box and they jogged into the rain. Cliff stayed in the barn, paralyzed with jealousy. Finally he returned to the freezer and lifted a box of dough. Bojangles’ expansive whiskered lips still appeared damp, as if they might at any moment leak a fresh string of frothy slobber. Cliff took the other boxes out and set them on the floor.

  There had been only a few moments in Cliff’s life like this one. There w
as the first time he got the courage to climb into bed with Rebecca. The time he stole third in the county baseball playoffs. The time he wrote a love poem for Shirley Ronconi and actually gave it to her. It was suddenly clear that there had been few moments of actual courage in his young life. He leaned into the freezer in that dark and foreign barn and felt the same rush as he had when that ball had closed the void between him and the third baseman, when his flesh had stuck to Rebecca’s with aloe. The ridge of the chest was cold across his stomach as he wrapped his arms around Bojangles. The animal smelled faintly of cheese. Cliff began to drag him against the side of the freezer, pulling until the body rolled over the side. Bojangles was heavier than he had guessed, and Cliff lost control. The dog landed with one of its legs perpendicular to the floor and when it connected, it popped loudly as it broke.

  Cliff began to drag the dog across the floor. Outside, the broken leg wavered like a loose rudder across the wet gravel. Cliff struggled to lift the body into the open tailgate of Matthew’s truck. A blue tarp was wadded into the corner. Cliff tucked its sides under the dog and pushed the blue bundle far into a corner.

  When Matthew and Birdie returned, Matthew was still holding the extra box of dough. There’d been no room. He said, “We’re going to cook it.”

  Back in the truck, Cliff watched the phantom vanishing point at the back of the tobacco field as it traveled beside them again, its constant fan of tobacco rows still expanding and spinning by. He feared that Bojangles might slide into the rearview, but the trip was uneventful until they reached one plot of land near Birdie’s house that had been cleared of its crop. As they sped along its edge, a white dog suddenly appeared atop the muddy mounds of harvested earth. The animal bounded slowly and gracelessly across the stubble of stalks like a white moth staggering through a thick cloud of smoke. Cliff thought it might be a vision, some pale dog spirit trailing Bojangles. Maybe it was the marijuana cigarette. He didn’t know. It gave him chills, though, even after the field and its ghost dog disappeared as the truck hurried past more tobacco and then down Birdie’s driveway.