“Flood coming!” he cried. “Run to the mounds! Run now!”
A few people stopped and stared. “Run now!” the Sun Man screamed. “Run to the mounds! Grandfather River is flooding!”
The people seemed to be conferring. Only a few began to move toward the earthen mounds.
“Run! Run! Grandfather River is flooding!”
The river’s foaming front poured into the southern reaches of the city, sweeping broken houses before it. The river was full of wreckage, entire uprooted trees standing in the flood like fangs. A few people looked south in alarm, but they were on the flat ground, lines of sight broken by mounds and wreckage and smoke, and they could see nothing.
“Run! Run!”
And then the river burst through the broken stockade, rolling the shattered logs of the wall before it like a row of pinecones. The people below stiffened in horror, and then, too late, began to run. The Sun Man’s words dried up on his tongue as the river ran through his city, sweeping away the shattered lodges, carrying the straw roofs and wicker walls along on the white-toothed tide. He saw dozens of people madly trying to swim, others clinging to wreckage and crying for help. Only a few dozen managed to stagger up the Temple Mound’s earthen ramp, or climb its steep sides. Others scrambled up conical burial mounds, or clustered on the flat-topped mounds the nobles used for their lodges.
The Sun Man collapsed, wailing. Earth Woman had made war on him, and his divine brother the Sun had abandoned his people.
He would die, he thought. He would refuse food and water, and he would perish along with his nation. He sat down on the Temple Mound, crossed his legs, and began to sing a song of death. His people, cowed by the world’s inexplicable fury, did not dare to approach him. Within a few hours the river’s level had dropped, and the survivors gazed down to a mass of wreckage that littered a steaming swamp.
Other than the rubbish that floated in the still water, and the mounds with their clusters of stunned, homeless refugees, nothing remained of the greatest city that had ever been raised on the continent of North America.
PART ONE
M1
It is a remarkable fact, that there is a chain of low, level and marshy lands, commencing at the City of Cape Girardeau, in Missouri, and extending to the Gulf of Mexico; and between these two points there is not a rock landing except at the small town of Commerce, on the west side of the Mississippi River; there is, furthermore, only one ridge of high land from Commerce to be met with on the west side of said river, which is at Helena, in Arkansas.
ONE
The horizon immediately after the undulation of the earth had ceased, presented a most gloomy and dreadful appearance; the black clouds, which had settled around it, were illuminated as if the whole country to the westward was in flames and for fifteen or twenty minutes, a continued roar of distant, but distinct thunder, added to the solemnity of the scene. A storm of wind and rain succeeded, which continued until about six o’clock, when a vivid flash of lightning was instantaneously followed by a loud peal of thunder; several gentlemen who were in the market at the time distinctly perceived a blaze of fire which fell between the centre and south range of the market.
The sound of drumming and chanting rolled down from the old Indian mound as the school bus came to a halt. Jason Adams wanted to sink into his seat and die, but instead he stood, put his book bag on one shoulder, his skates on the other, and began his walk down the aisle. He could see the smirks on the faces of the other students as he headed for the door.
He swung out of the bus onto the dirt road. Heat blazed in his cheeks.
“Wooh!” one of the kids called out the window as the bus pulled away. “I can feel my chakras being actualized!”
“Your mama’s going to Hell,” another boy remarked with satisfaction. Jason looked after the bus as it lurched down the dirt road, thick tires splashing in puddles left by last night’s rain.
Another few weeks, he thought, and he wouldn’t have to put up with them anymore. Not for the length of the summer, anyway.
The drumming thudded down from the old overgrown mound. Jason winced. Aunt Lucy must have let his mother off work early. There wasn’t going to be a lot of business at the greenhouse till Memorial Day. It was bad enough that his mom was a loon. She had to drum and chant and advertise she was a loon. Jason hitched the book bag to a more comfortable position on his shoulder and began the short walk home.
Green shoots poked from the cotton field to the north of the road. The furrows between the green rows were glassy with standing water. Swampeast, they called this part of Missouri, and the name was accurate.
The inline skates dangled uselessly off Jason’s shoulder. Gravel crunched under his shoes. He could put up with the drumming, he thought, if only he were back in L.A. Drumming was even sort of normal there—well, not normal exactly, but there were other people who did it, and most other people didn’t make a point of telling you that it qualified you for eternal damnation.
Jason passed by the Regan house, a new brick place on the lot next to where Jason lived with his mom. Mr. Regan was as usual puttering around Retired and Gone Fishin’, his bass boat parked inside his carport. So far as Jason could tell, Mr. Regan spent more time polishing and tinkering with his bass boat than he did actually fishing. The old man straightened and waved at Jason.
“Hi.” Jason waved back.
“Found a place to skate yet?” Mr. Regan asked.
“No.” Other than the outdoor basketball court at the high school, which was usually full of kids playing basketball.
Mr. Regan tilted his baseball cap back on his bald head. “Maybe you should take up fishin’,” he said. Jason could think of many things he’d rather do with his life than sit in a boat and wait for hours in hopes of hauling a wet, scaly, smelly, thrashing animal into the boat with him. He really didn’t even care for fish when they were cooked and on a plate.
“Maybe,” he said.
“I could give you some lessons,” Regan said, a bit hopefully.
Regan had made this offer before. Jason supposed that he sympathized with his neighbor’s being retired and maybe a bit lonely, but that didn’t mean he had to assist him in his rustic amusements.
“Maybe after school’s out,” Jason said.
After he finally went crazy from living in the Swampeast, he thought, sitting in a boat next to a stack of dead fish might not seem so bad.
The drum boomed down from the mound behind the houses. Jason waved to Mr. Regan again and cut across the soggy lawn to the old house where he and his mother lived. Batman, the dog that belonged to the Huntleys on the other side of his house, ran barking toward Jason in order to warn him off. Jason, as usual, ignored the dog as he walked toward his front porch.
Jason’s house was very different from the four modern brick homes that shared its short dirt road. A dozen or so years ago, when the farmer who owned this area decided to retire, he sold the cotton fields to the north of the dirt road and created a small development south of it—two new brick homes built on either side of his own house, four altogether. When his widow died, Jason’s mother had bought the old farmhouse, and when Jason first saw it, four months ago, he thought it looked like the house that Dorothy lived in before she went to Oz. It was a turn-of-the-century frame farmhouse, large and spacious, painted white. There were a lot of things that Jason liked about the house: the funky old light switches, which had pushbuttons instead of toggles. The crystal doorknobs and the old locks on all the bedroom doors, some of which still had their skeleton keys. He liked the sashes that made a rustling sound inside the window frames when he lifted the windows, and he liked the screened-in front porch with its creaking floorboards. He liked the tall windows with the old, original window glass that had run slightly—he remembered his science teacher telling him that glass was really a liquid, just a very slow liquid—and which gave a slightly distorted, yellowish view of the world. He liked the extra room, because the house was intended for a much bigger family than the two people who lived in it now, and he liked having more space than he’d had in L.A., and having a room up on the second floor with a view. But the view was of the wrong part of the world, and that was what spoiled everything. Jason bounded across the porch, unlocked the front door with its fan-shaped window, and dumped his book bag on the table in the foyer. The house welcomed him with the smell of fresh-cut flowers that his mom brought home from Aunt Lucy’s greenhouse. He passed through the dining room—Austrian crystals hung in the window, spreading rainbows on the wallpaper—and into the small, old kitchen that his mother was always complaining about. More crystals dangled in the windows there. Jason opened the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of water from the plastic jug, careful not to pour out the large quartz crystal that his mother had placed in the jug.