Pouring

Jolene Reed

The Flood had happened three months ago and water levels were still at eight feet when Rick stopped coming to work. We gave it a few days and old Rick the benefit of the doubt before we went out looking for him, all piling into a U-boat of a canoe on what used to be Connally Street. It was the stillest hour of the dawn, when the water is as smooth as seaglass. Just last year, people would have called it beautiful or peaceful. We know better now. Like a predator, the water waits, unmoving and alive, to claim its prey—but when you try to look it in the eye, all you see is yourself.

The three of us rowed in silence for a while, gliding smooth as a shark fin between the dark-windowed gazes of downtown, each building up to its eyes in muddy water. We heard birdsong but saw no flocks cutting across our sky. If they knew what was best for them, they would have migrated as soon as the rains started.

Bobby Dwayne chewed tobacco at the front of the canoe. His muscles rippled through his shirt as he rowed, the fabric already clinging to the damp of his neck.

“How do you think we’ll find him?” he asked.

Margaret shrugged. As the only woman of our fleet, she got center-canoe rights, sitting pretty and side-saddle between Bobby Dwayne and I. Her end of the stick would never be the short one—not at work, anyway. Life was another story.

“His canoe might have gotten stolen. You never know these days.”

“Then he should have sent a telegram,” Bobby Dwayne grunted.

“Maybe the telegram got stolen too. Or lost.”

The possibility was so absurd that Bobby Dwayne twisted around just to glare at it. Our canoe quivered with the movement, jostling three dozen glass bottles of milk. They sounded like chattering teeth in their crates, just as cold as they were afraid.

“Now what in God’s name would someone want with Rick Abernathy’s telegram?” Bobby Dwayne asked, lip curled and showing teeth. His canines winked gold in the sun, threatening to bite the head off another harebrained answer.

“He did use to be special ops in the war. Don’t forget that,” I reminded him.

Bobby Dwayne rolled his eyes so hard the canoe rocked with the movement. He turned back around. “He couldn’t have done anything that serious if he wound up as a goddamn milkman. People don’t go from killing Krauts to delivering milk,” he scoffed.

Bobby Dwayne himself used to be a factory worker. He and two hundred other fellas made Thomas’ English Muffins out on the edge of town, thousands and thousands a week. Bobby Dwayne got so sick and tired of breakfast he not only became a milkman, but swore off eating three meals a day for the rest of his life.

“I used to just be a housewife,” Margaret said.

Another eye roll.

“Yeah, then half our damned fleet drowned. Felt like a Jehovah’s witness, going door-to-door like that.” Bobby Dwayne spat into the water. “Go figure.”

Seymore hadn’t been the only town forced to accept women into its fleet. The Flood, after all, had raged far and wide, washing away all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and ravaging the rest of the South. People tried to evacuate on the third day of rain, but by then, it was too late for anyone south of Oklahoma. Eisenhower said we would likely never know exactly how many Americans had drowned. The damage was too great and the waters too high to discern much of anything from devastation. The death toll must have been in the thousands, but no one had the heart to look into it very deeply. A few weeks ago, Cronkite relayed predictions of dropping water levels. He said if we were lucky, the Gulf might straighten itself back out in two and a half years time.

The water had risen another four inches since then, and now Rick was most certainly dead.

“I don’t know what will be worse—finding Rick dead or having to put him on corrective action,” I thought aloud. Management was worse these days than ever before, though they weren’t unreasonable. The Flood had dirtied most water with its silt and salt, then poisoned it with the gasoline of our own automobiles. Milkmen of the South were no longer important to their communities, but essential to them. Uncle Sam himself provided us our fleet of canoes, each one chalk-white and streaked with cobalt. I dipped my oar back into the water, relished the slight ache of my shoulders as I pulled us farther from the heart of Seymore.

“Oh, I hope we don’t have to put Rick on corrective action. I hate scolding people. When my boys were little, it always broke my heart to spank ‘em. Of course, if I didn’t, Harry would take care of them himself, and that was…worse, most of the time,” Margaret said. 

Silence settled like steady rain over the canoe. Margaret’s entire family—her husband Harry, her three teenage boys, and even their dog, Biddy—had drowned in the early days of the Flood, when the water once rose four feet overnight and carried half the rooms of their house away. These days, working a job was the one thing keeping her afloat (for lack of a better phrase). Sometimes, our delivery canoes would pass each other in the shallow-watered streets of an older neighborhood. As she waved, the sunlight often struck her tears into diamonds. We were all rich with grief in Mississippi, water and casualties rising higher by the day.

“I hope he’s dead. Lord knows he’s been miserable enough,” Bobby Dwane said.

I couldn’t decide if he was being cruel or merciful, so I said nothing, surrendering all judgement to the Lord.

We kept on rowing as the sun yawned and stretched its rays over Seymore. Our eyes raked the sky for storm clouds as it turned from blush pink to baby blue. It was a cotton-candy morning, a rare treat since the Flood, and we couldn’t even enjoy it—little tasted sweet with death on the tongue. We passed by three of the junior high’s canoes, each one numbered and painted schoolbus-yellow in an attempt at normalcy. They tottered dangerously along the roads, loaded with more children than they could safely carry. I waved to them and thought of my own daughter.

When we made it to Rick’s house, there were no obvious signs of life to be found—no candles lit in its second-story windows, no picnic blanket on the roof. Rick’s canoe was still tied to a tree, knocking tiredly against its trunk like a disheartened hand on a door. There was not a ripple nor sound from the house. Up to its eaves in water, it was part-shipwreck, part-island, home to one survivor. Rick stared hard at me from the back of my mind, his brown eyes blank and deep. Clouded, muddy, like a river, their bottoms lined with heirlooms and bones. My heart wrung its hands and hoped he was still alive. My head prayed the water had risen over his.

Margaret retrieved a bottle of milk from the floorboards of our canoe and clutched it to her chest, fingers pale as their bones.

“It looks…”

“How does corrective action sound now?” Bobby Dwayne asked shrewdly. Margaret hung her head in shame, whispered something to the milk bottle that could have been equal part prayer or apology. I swallowed around the lump in my throat, trying not to imagine what Rick’s body would look like bloated with water.

“I’ll go look,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Margaret asked, her grip so tight on the glass I feared it would shatter. If we didn’t find Rick in the house—alive—the milk would become his memorial, poured into the water for his soul to find and taste. No bottle of milk could ever amount to a man, but it was all we knew to do. There were no more funerals in Seymore and no ground for our dead to be buried in, only eight feet of water that went on forever and ever, world without end. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be…

“Of course. He’s my friend,” I said.

Like a soldier to the battlefield, I donned my life vest carefully, slowly, suddenly aware of every beat of my heart and breath of my lungs. It was a real stickler of a thing, so stiff and bulky and goddamn uncomfortable I could understand why so many people decided to just get it over with and drown. The vest always made me feel (and look) like a manatee with leprosy, its foam peeling in more places than not. It reeked of dead fish, but unless I wanted to be the next missing man of Seymore, Mississippi, I’d wear it.

A shudder arched my back as I started to swim, the April water biting my body with cold, needled maws. I gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering and kicked on, over Rick’s lawn and to his open kitchen window. It was no front door but it was the best he could do these days. I gripped the sill and pushed myself inside. Water rippled through the house with a sound akin to breaking glass.

“Rick?” I called. The surface carried his name through the half-drowned house and brought nothing back to me. I was reminded of swimming underneath a boat dock as a boy, everything slimy and wet and smelly, my pocket of air no more than two feet high. I was smaller then, as was my world, even when it stood on solid ground.

I moved through the kitchen cautiously, taking care not to bruise my foot on a countertop or cabinet. The wallpaper bloomed with algae. It watched me with roses like eyes and vines that shrugged like shoulders, apologetic and answerless. I ran my hand along its fur and its slime, guiding myself out into the hallway. Rick’s ceiling was lower here, the water nearly kissing the uvula of his fake chandelier. All else—grandfather clock, family photographs, record player and rugs—had been completely submerged. The water was colder in here without the sun. I shivered and straightened my back.

“Rick? Rick! Are you in here?” I asked. My voice echoed and danced through the house, syllables skipping over the water with dragonfly feet. I began to feel around the water for a body, dread’s fingers clawing deeper down my back.

I turned a corner. Up ahead, a staircase emerged from the water and swerved sharply up to the second floor. Daylight trickled down its banisters like liquid gold. Something inside me flapped its feathered wings. Perhaps he is up there, I dared to think. Perhaps he is only asleep.

I swam faster, eager to shed my life vest and wring my soggy clothes. I listened for breathing and heard it all around me—my own air, trapped, circling back and back and back. The stench of rot pinched my nose and stung my eyes. The lapping of the water sounded like whispering. I wondered what it was talking about, wondered what it knew, wondered if—before the Flood—God had warned some poor Southerner to build a ship but not been listened to, if these waters were indeed holy or purely hellish, complete coincidence or simply inevitable.

A hand closed over my ankle like a pair of jaws.

I kicked and thrashed and gasped against the water and the hand. Together, it played tug- of-war against my life vest, each side yanking me in opposite directions—surface and underneath, life and death.

My mouth filled with water. It tasted like driving my Ford to work before the Flood, down roads riddled with potholes but home to the faces of friends. I remembered my daughter as a toddler, how I would hold her upside-down by the ankles and shake her until she shrieked with laughter. Through the water came my evening walks, morning runs, and the close pull of a sock over my ankle, the city streets of Jackson at night and their carnival colors, the park during the 4th of July, the white, delicate ankles of my wife, the neck of a milk bottle, broken as the ankle, as the hand pulling me down, down into the depths.

A second hand clamped over my mouth and dunked me backwards. If I weren’t so afraid, it might have felt like being baptized. The water was dark as the end of the world and twice as cold. I couldn’t tell the ceiling from the floor. My life vest snapped clean off, damning me to the deep. I screamed salt water, unable to breathe or see, and flailed as helplessly as a fish on a hook. The hand moved from my mouth to my cheek, its touch worryingly gentle.

Rick patted my face.

“Be still. Let those lungs breathe, for God’s sake.” His words crossed the water so clearly I couldn’t help but stare. Rick sounded and looked the same, no more dead or alive than yesterday. He wasn’t dressed in our uniform, but in a flannel shirt and jeans. Rick blinked like any breathing man, red hair floating around his face in a halo. It stirred gently, as if from a slight breeze. He was so calm. He couldn’t possibly be alive.

“We thought you were dead,” I said before I could think to stop myself, and although the words escaped in a fresh stream of bubbles, I felt no more breathless than before.

Rick nodded. “I think I am. It’s hard to tell down here,” he said, glancing around his aquarium hall. All was as it had been before. Despite the aggression of the Flood, its waters had not knocked a single photograph from the wall or even upset the rug. An Al Bowlly record played on Rick’s turntable, the music slightly muffled but otherwise the same as above. I drifted across the hall like a ghost and lifted its needle. The song stopped. I frowned.

“You stopped coming to work.”

“My bedroom floor caved in as I slept. I got trapped beneath the ceiling of my parlor. I figured you would understand,” Rick told me, so apologetic it was as if his death had been intentional. I turned to face the parlor and there was his bed, its metal frame settled onto the floor like the ribcage of some Seymore leviathan. Rick’s mattress floated innocently along the ceiling, bulky and shadowed as a boat. It must have been a lonely death.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Rick waved my condolences away. “Don’t be. There are so many more of us left down here than there are above.”

I squinted at Rick through the murk and green.

“What do you mean?”

Rick took my hand, his skin strangely warm for a dead man’s. It dimly occurred to me that such naked expression of friendliness had never been his in life, as if by drowning, he had freed himself of more than the surface.

“Here, I’ll show you.”

Together we swam down the hall and to his front door. It opened with a simple push, swinging wide on silent hinges. I looked out onto a street I had not seen in months, one crowded with ruins of the Flood but revived by new and austere versions of life. Automobiles slept like shipwrecks along the street. Some were decorated with algae, flowers, and Christmas ornaments. Others had become playground to the young. The windows of most houses had been opened or removed, while the houses themselves peeled spiderwebs of paint. Fish, turtles, and snakes streaked through the water in flocks or other formations, colorful as cardinals and jaybirds. Every tree stood leafless, long since stripped by winter and riptide. Daylight danced in diamonds over Seymore. It almost made the dead look like angels. There must have been over thirty of them, walking hand-in-hand down the street or sitting on rooftops as if nothing was amiss. All was sapphire and turquoise, emerald and teal; a rare jewel of a place, a Tiffany lamp of a world. I took it in breathlessly. Above our heads, Margaret and Bobby Dwayne’s boat eclipsed the morning sun, dimming the street into dusk. It was the Atlantis of Mississippi.

“Is this heaven?” I asked Rick. A smirk played across his lips.

“It can’t be. The sheriff is here,” he said wryly, and I laughed, almost able to forget that the sheriff had been dead for a month, the old bastard.

A little girl scampered down the sidewalk, her movements eerily graceful. When she laughed, the sound skipped through the water like a stone.

“Are you happy here?” I asked Rick. He shrugged.

“I think so. There’s a lot down here you don’t have to worry about. The mud clogs everything like you wouldn’t believe, though,” he said, gaze flicking to the silt re-paving our old roads and flattening front yards. Dirt had smoothed the cracks of every sidewalk and settled into whatever nook, cranny, or corner it could find. Remaining windows were caked with mud. Tree branches wore it like fallen snow, their posture sagging underneath its weight. Mud was thicker and heavier than water, albeit slower. I wondered how much time it would take for their lungs to fill, and if they would drown here, too, each man made an hourglass by the tide.

I laid a hand on my chest and listened. There was no sound nor sign of life.

“Am I…” I trailed off, unable to say it of myself.

“You could be.”

“Could be?”

“Well, sure. If you never go back,” Rick said.

I dropped my hand nervously, quickly, as if singed by the stillness of my very own heart. Lost, I wandered away from Rick to clear my head. I walked for a few blocks, stranger to the neighborhoods of this underwater world, this drowned, gilled Seymore. It was quieter under the surface. Darker. Colder. The water was not fresh and hardly clean, yet removed the need to breathe, work, or even age. I was forty-eight and could stay that way—perhaps forever—in a world whose sky rose slowly.

I eventually made my way back to Rick’s house. He stood waiting for me in the road, inevitable as death or God itself.

“What do you want to do, Gabriel?” he asked gently. My throat tightened. I couldn’t recall the last time someone had called me by name. Did only the dead still know it? Had it, too, been lost within the very first days of rain?

Overhead, the canoe rocked and rippled like a mirage. A hand drew across the water, its shadow ribboned by the gentle wake of the morning. A tilt of a milk bottle. A quiet splash. White clouds overhead. From a few feet down, the milk might have been dogwoods in spring, their blossoms as lovely as they were brief.

A sweet, warm smile crossed Rick’s face. His hand settled onto my shoulder.

“It’s pouring,” he said. “Look around, Gabriel, it’s pouring.”

Up and down the street, people stopped to raise their heads, faces tilted and mouths open to taste the milk, the memory, so quickly dissipating into the water. It would be over soon, the sky no more sweetened by the grieving than the sugar-crusted bodies of our countless dead.

I closed my eyes, and with an open mouth, forgot I ever needed to breathe, the water sweet and the milk cold and mine, rising higher all the time.

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