The Most Amazing Smile

     I met the boy with the most amazing smile I'd ever seen in an abandoned house near the Badlands National Park in South Dakota.  The magnetic pull that led me to the wind worn structure, empty for longer than it had ever spent occupied, was perhaps the same as the spirit that brought the doomed settlers who once worked this land westward a century before. As the clapboard structure came into sight through the July haze, I eased my foot off the accelerator, eyes locked on dark, empty windows that seemed to stare right back at me in defiance.     

     

     There is something different about houses like this, houses abandoned in a land that was never really settled again. These are not like the abandoned farm houses in the mid-west, often moldering to dust a stone's throw away from the new family homestead or awaiting demolition as a crop of housing developments replaces the fields of corn and soy from the decades before. These are not the blight of abandoned row houses in the inner-city, domain of the druggie and the lost and the missing. The tar-sided cabins, soddies, and weather-silvered frame houses in places like this, like South Dakota, southern Idaho and eastern Montana are the skeletal remains of someone's dreams. And yes, they are ever defiant, standing up, decade after decade, despite the harsh elements that drove their builders away so long ago.

     The mid-summer day was hot and still, and the dust from the rutted back road settled slowly around my car as I sat for a moment, taking in this house that had already become a character in my mind.  Evidence of the roaring prairie winds could be seen in the house's slight easterly slant, one of the building's few concessions to the environment it inhabited.  The windows had long been empty of glass and the door stood ajar, a beckoning hand offered to a curious explorer.  It was two stories, and some gingerbread adorned the eaves, speaking to at least a few years of prosperity before the owner's hopes expired.  I wondered if I would find tombstones if I kicked around through the knee high, drought yellowed grasses in the yard, and if I did, whose names would be etched in the stone.  Was there sickness first, or did their efforts at cattle ranching simply dry up and blow away in the Dust Bowl's winds?  

     I didn't feel fear as I scooped my camera up in one hand, opened the car door, and stepped out into the afternoon heat.  So far from the beaten path, it seemed unlikely that I'd stumble upon a vagrant or a squatter.  I hadn't seen another car for an hour, and I doubted that any tourist would deviate this far from the beaten path to startle me as I documented my visit.  This was what I lived for, placing my hands on the threshold of the past, feeling the heartbeat of those who stood here before in the sun-warmed grain of the wood.  It was hard to sway me from entering these forgotten domains once they had captured my imagination. 

     I slipped in through the doorway and stood in the cool darkness for a moment as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. They hadn't left much behind, at least not in the front room.  Some pages from a Sears Roebuck catalog were scattered in the corner and a pile of broken wood, perhaps the remnants of a chair or small table, held court in the center of the room.  Yellowing wallpaper curled away from the walls, unadorned by patterns or flowers, unmarked by the graffiti I'd find in almost any other house in any other place.  At the heart of the house, there was a fireplace and mantle, as swept clean of the past as the rest of the room seemed to be.

     There were three paths to choose from; an open doorway, a set of stairs of questionable structural integrity, and a door, pulled shut, its brass knob tarnished to black. I opted for the open doorway first, saving the mystery of the closed room for just another moment. It led to what once was a kitchen.  A hole in the wall and floor marked where the pot-bellied stove once stood, and a window opened out onto a view of endless, desolate prairie.  There was a rough hewed table here, so lacking in value, sentimental and otherwise, that they felt it too heavy to cart along with them, I figured.  A pantry with collapsing shelves was also nearly cleared of artifacts, except for a few broken canning jars glinting dully on the floor.

     Despite the lack of personal objects left behind, the house still exuded a palpable air of melancholy.  Perhaps it was it's very bareness, as though when its occupants left, the building's soul had been pulled along with them, turning this house into the most abandoned place I'd ever been, surrounded as it was by the emptiness of a sea of grass and sky.

     I shivered with the sadness of the vast view glimpsed through the kitchen window, then turned away, my thoughts settling on what lay beyond the closed door. A few steps took me around the corner and past the stairs, and I reached out, eagerly grasping the door knob in my hand. I expected to battle a half of a century's worth of rust and rot, but the knob turned easily. The door wasn't as swollen into the frame as I expected either, and I let it swing open in anticipation. 

     It only opened about a foot, then came to a stop with a soft thud. I pushed, and it swung free, the dim light from the front door falling across dusty work boots and legs clad in a faded pair of jeans.

      I wouldn't see what he looked like whole until a few days later, when I read an article about the incident in the Mitchell Daily Republic as I sat in a hotel room, preparing to make my trip back East. What looked like a cropped portion of a high school football team picture from the year book accompanied the story: "Tourist Discovers Body of Local Teen." I sat staring at that picture for hours.

     It was hard for me to connect the shattered remains in the farmhouse with the robust smile and piercing eyes that looked back at me from the paper. In this photo, his strong, square shoulders, accentuated by their protective pads, bespoke of midwestern hardieness, the fortitude to bear up any load. With his ice blue eyes and thick, blond hair that swept across his forehead in a careless wave, he could have held the lead in any teen movie. And that smile, full to bursting here with gleaming white teeth, pulled me in and held my gaze for what seemed an eternity. I felt like I was falling in love. 

     Surely, that smile could not belong to the face I'd seen in the farmhouse, the one I knew would haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life. Surely, I could simply take home this pristine and perfect newspaper image instead and dream about the beaitiful boy I'd met in South Dakota. Deep inside, I knew that no matter how long I stared at the photo, I'd never replace what I'd found on the floor in that backroom with it, but still, I stared.

     As late afternoon wore into evening, my eyes finally wandered from his smile, that edifice of straight, white teeth and upcurved lips that seemed capable of weathering any storm, to his eyes. This picture was less than a year old, the boy in it, most likely already in the grip of whatever would lead him to place a gun in his mouth just a month after graduation. I don't know what I expected to see there. Pain, perhaps? But in its place, I found an emptiness as vast as the view from the farmhouse's kitchen window, a loneliness as solid as the souless joists and doorframes that held its walls together. 

     Just as I wasn't there a few days before, no one was there on the day this picture was taken, no one was there in the days that came between it and the end. Whether or not I could have loved him in life wasn't even a question. It was senseless to ask if I could have saved him if I had met him a month before, a week before, or during that last hour before his final decision became reality. I was never meant to save his life, but he certainly changed mine. 

     I will never look at a smile again without searching for the isolation behind it.