***"I'll tell you something, sir. That property probably isn't worth more than the deed it's printed. Not in Devonshire. Second, there is nothing out here but loose dirt and dogs so if you do find yourself owning something that is not one or the other, I suggest you let the Chesapeake lay her claim, cause she is going to claim these parts eventually." The truck hurdled earth mound and fallen branch alike in comparative silence for the next few miles. "Just, my suggestion is all," the cabbie qualified with a stiff tip of his woven straw hat. He leaned his head out of the window, ignorant of the thick clouds of mayflys and gnats that hovered in pockets thick enough to cut with a blade to spit his cheek full of chewing tobacco into the low brush. "See if you feel like honoring rain checks after a 43 year long whipping," he laughed as he handled the pickup with his left hand and placed more tobacco in his bottom lip with his right.***
"43 years is what it took to reclaim Devonshire. 43 years and enough bad weather to make every nanny with a bad knee wish she were an out and out paraplegic." Domenic usually preferred to drive himself, but Devonshire was not a location appropriate for low slung rental fleet Chevy sedans. "43 years and you know what, I saw it in their eyes. If you took even a minute to lock eyes with any woodland creature back in '89 you woulda seen it too. They knew it was coming back then an all we had to do was ask them. Now we're stuck with more hurricanes than we can think of vaginas to name them after and quit frankly, between you and me, I have still been done wrong by more vaginas than hurricanes." Domenic also preferred to take cab rides with cabbies who kept to themselves. "Even so. Devonshire hasn't been a part of Maryland proper since oh-30 and I should know. There hasn't been a piece in Devonshire worth the drive back, between you and me." The concrete that used to be Church road, a road not wide enough for two trucks, was a mud slog that alternately suckled the off road tires and spat them free, like some priest of an evangelical super church suck the gorged wallets of Devonshire's faithful until they were free of upper middle class sin and large denomination bills. More than once his head smacked off of the passenger side window that refused to roll down in the thick Maryland heat.
"Nope. Not a thing in Devonshire these days," the cabbie spun the wheel to its counter clockwise lock and then halfway back to neutral as the road took on a mean left hand slant thanks to several thick deciduous tree trunks that simply let go of the loose swamp soil and fell alongside the road in one of hundreds of clay and mulch landslides through the years. The pickup swayed and gunned its way along the gully of Church road, riding the trench like a cable car. The embankments were so severely swollen as to nearly scrape against the truck's body as they rolled. "You got some kind of claim out there or something?"
"Yeah. A friend of mine. Left me some property." The trucks chassis groaned as the rear axle slipped sidelong and then regained itself, swinging the tailgate wide left to hook and tear a thicket of loosely wound vines free from a nest of more tenacious growth wrapped tightly about a slanted telephone pole.
"I'll tell you something, sir. That property probably isn't worth more than the deed it's printed. Not in Devonshire. Second, there is nothing out here but loose dirt and dogs so if you do find yourself owning something that is not one or the other, I suggest you let the Chesapeake lay her claim, cause she is going to claim these parts eventually." The truck hurdled earth mound and fallen branch alike in comparative silence for the next few miles. "Just, my suggestion is all," the cabbie qualified with a stiff tip of his woven straw hat. He leaned his head out of the window, ignorant of the thick clouds of mayflys and gnats that hovered in pockets thick enough to cut with a blade to spit his cheek full of chewing tobacco into the low brush. "See if you feel like honoring rain checks after a 43 year long whipping," he laughed as he handled the pickup with his left hand and placed more tobacco in his bottom lip with his right.
The road ahead narrowed. The 40 and 50 foot tall Oaks, Gum, and Elms tented together under the weight of creeping ivy and monkey tails and dappled what sunlight could reach the reddish mounds of clay and fallen decay that made up what was left of the passable and rutted road. The cabbie chattered on sporadically, but Domenic was deaf to most of it until the pickup turned a sharp right and began to climb a long, steeply inclined, path. Sharp embankments gave way to flat earth as the trees gave way to gray saturated sky. "We're here," he pronounced.
Heady with the heavy humidity of Maryland air Domenic opened the passenger side door as far as it would go and squeezed his way out. His boots, bought at a fishing pro shop at the airport in Baltimore, sank two inches into red and tan muck as he walked in sucking steps to the driver side of the weather beaten pickup.
Fishing in his carpenter jeans pocket he found a sweaty wad of fives and placed them all in the cracked black hand of the cabbie. "Be here tomorrow," he half commanded, half questioned, unsure if the cabbie would bother making a return trip so soon and he turned and began to walk uncertain and uncaring as to how the man, several years his senior, would maneuver the iron grill of the pickup truck back the way he came.
The sun was still high overhead as he walked along the narrow road. To his right he recognized the partially collapsed and buried red plank work of the barn his school bus drove past on a regular basis decades before. Where the empty field was once dotted with the soiled cotton balls of sheep there was only a small pack of equally filthy german Shepards, all swirling and playing and attempting to command control of a brown and tan rabbit carcass.
Hours fell away before he passed a home on a hill, tucked between trees in the process of crushing it back into the steep leafy hillside from which it blossomed. A light was on. The climb was unforgiving and strewn with the bricks and timbers of what only could have been a less fortunate, less weatherproof, hovel that stood beneath it. Sweat streaked and breathless he rapped on the frame of the blank faced and sun cracked paint of the screen door.
A pair of Sheltys, angry but cautious ambled down from farther up the slope and stood watch, their beady brown eyes wondering whether he would fall down dead or offer them a meal of his own free will with equal earnest. "Yes?" The woman who answered the door was nearly as black as the unlit room behind her. Her frock was loose and airy, colored a pale yellow with faded green daffodils printed with little more intent than a spilled vase. Her arms were folded tightly against her swollen stomach, her breasts falling matronly over her forearms. "You need help, son?"
Words escaped Domenic momentarily. The pair of black and white Shelty's were joined by a much larger Doberman that circled them and then sat to take in the transaction unfolding before them. She pushed the screen door ajar and peeked her head, wrapped tightly in a vertigo inducing purple and orange paisley scarf, through the crack. "Can I help you, son?" She asked again. Every tree for yards around seemed to sigh beneath the weight of silence as the Doberman was joined by a gnarled and ill kept gray poodle. Its left ear and eye were both missing.
"I'm looking for 771 Oak Road," he took his eyes from the gathering pack and met the bright whites set in the sunken black sockets of the woman. "A friend asked me to come, and I'm not very familiar with the area these days."
"The weather changed a lot of things."
"I know."
"There ain't much out there, son."
"I know. It's important that I get there today." he added. His eyes drifted from the dark lines of her black face to a mold eaten blue tarp peeking from behind the front corner of the fallen gray green slat work of the home's face.
"That car doesn't run anymore."
"I wasn't thinking about asking you to-"
"You'll have to walk on down that way." She pointed a straight index finger with swollen knuckles back toward the shoulder of the mud ridden road he climbed from. "Down that way and follow it till you get to a broken fence." She tucked her head backward behind the screen to release a hacking cough. Deeper within the home fighting itself to remain upright a child moaned and began to cry and was quickly silenced by a rasping voice shushing it in earnest. "Keep on down that way. You can't miss it," she finished from behind the screen. He thanked her and glancing farther up the slope he saw the dogs were no longer watching. The space of tumbled branches and fallen leaves and tar tiles was entirely vacant. "Don't mind them." He wasn't sure if she laughed or coughed again. Carefully he turned himself back toward the road and began to trudge his way down the hill. "You won't miss it," she called after him, "it's the only one left around that way."
He trudged along Oak road and eventually gave up on avoiding the hanging clouds of insects. After a time he ceased batting them from before his eyes and only made an effort to close them and avoid the thread legged things from sticking to the pink corners of his eyelids. Sweat rimmed his collared shirt long before he reached the fence and as he tallied what felt like his second mile, sweat soaked through his underpants and stained the seat of his jeans. He licked at the salt creeping into the corner of his mouth disgustedly.
Glancing backward he realized the black shadow at the corner of his eye was not one but two black poodles. They were much larger than the fare he was familiar with. The curly fur about their mouths was matted with black moisture. Blood crossed his mind, but he banished the thought though it remained in his belly, gnawing at his nerve.
At the third mile, the sound of their thin aluminum name plates, long scraped and dented to obscurity jingling softly just out of his sight, he whirled about and grabbed the thickest and longest loose stick he could find, intent on winging it in their direction, but the pair was no where to be seen. Dropping his impromptu weapon he sighed, and rubbed more salted sweat from his wet and prickling brow.
The trees were growing in greater density and through the increasingly small gaps in the thick vine encrusted trunks to his right where the rolling hills of the pasture should have been were mounds of earth that seemed to rise until their faces broke free and sagged like gaping wounds on a man's stomach who simply ate until the flesh gave way in great red grass rimmed gouts.
Along the road were breaks in the trees where side streets should have been, but instead of cul de sacs and stands of miniaturized mansions and in ground pools there were only thickets of displaced land, rivulets of water skinned in half rainbowed fluids leaked from long buried suvs and luxury cars, and fallen trunks that were old enough to see everything from Klanners to the internet boom. The embankments, though lower than the road to Devonshire, were still fairly steep and dotted with the smooth black plastic of mailboxes and white plastic of glassless window frame corners. Every few yards he even had to climb the short rise of flood stripped vinyl siding to continue, but he walked on until the road came to an end.
Staring at him with the baleful eyes of a hospital patient left to die of natural and incurable disease was 771. The bough of an elm nearly 30 feet in length and 4 feet around at its torn and blackened base lay across the whole of the collapsed upper floor. A hill of land covered the majority of the front door and swallowed the carport like the beached body of a red jellyfish wrapped around a piece of milk white sea glass. A light was on, burning brighter than the one he saw at the start for the failing daylight.
"Hello?" he offered. A sound of creaking floor boards was the only answer. He drew closer. The dirt of the road stiffened from mud to soft sod and the grasses grew thicker and higher. He spat as a strand of webbing wrapped itself around his mouth and neck, but he did not paw at it with the same frantic energy he could have mustered at the start of his walk. "Hello?" he offered again and louder. A bellowing of canines answered from dozens of yards off, but the wood was far too thick to discern what kind or how many animals made the sound. Nearing the single unobstructed living room window he saw that the majority of the glass was missing.
With trek hardened resolve he allowed himself to enter with care. As his left foot and then right foot came to rest inside the dim expanse a pool of black water rose from the thick piled carpet. Several floods gently reminded him of their passage in one squishing step after another. Before him he saw the broken furniture of the living room where his mother gave him his first bicycle. The humming that came to his ears reminded him of the sound of the mountain bike tires on the fresh Devonshire asphalt years ago, but he knew it was the sound of a small generator. As he walked following the sound along the first floor he looked left and right. The walls were streaked with black and white mold in a parody of the faded vertical stripes of the roach eaten wall paper. The ceiling bowed downward at every joint and white capped tan bodied mushrooms sprang from the base boards and spaces in the ceiling where plastic chandeliers and fans used to turn. "Hello?"
"Domenic?" The voice was little more than a whisper, but a whisper was all he needed to recognize the sugar water drawl of his mother's home health aid. "Domenic?" He halted where he stood. The wild beyond the window swelled and was framed and contained in a square of green soaked dimming light behind him. The hum of the generator knocked along its way in the frame of the yellow lit doorway before him. His hand fell to the thin film of water and earth that covered the three legged living room table. "She passed away, Domenic."
"I know," he breathed, dabbing at the sweat slinking down the nape of his neck to the unreachable furrow between his shoulder blades.
"She left you everything. Why didn't you come sooner?" the woman whispered. "She wanted to see you." He turned from the yellow lit door before him toward the slashed glass of the living room window. A single animal sat in the blades of grass beyond it, its body swallowed by the tails of the budding plants. It did not move or speak. Its brown eyes, set back in hunger stricken sockets, watched him intently, retinas glimmering as they gathered the last licks of daylight and widened to pool the coming night's cloud shine. "She wanted you to have the house." He turned back to the yellow lit doorway of the dining room, taking a step closer. "She asked me to keep it for you, but she wants you to have it."
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