Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  “Ava? Ahh, chickee, why are you knocking on your sneakers?” Ossie was standing in the door frame. “You are such a weirdo.”

  “That’s not what I was doing.” I pretended to do a sit-up. “See? I was exercising.”

  My sister wrinkled her nose at me, amused. For a second I was happy, because it looked like my stupidity had knocked her back into being regular old Ossie again.

  “Hey, Ossie? Have you heard from Mom yet?”

  “No, Ava. I haven’t heard anything.” She smiled an old, brave smile at me. “I’m looking.”

  Somehow I had worked it out in my mind to where I could believe in our mother without having to believe in ghosts exactly. In fact, I was discovering all sorts of beliefs and skepticisms turning like opposite gears inside me, and little drawers of hopes and fears I had forgotten to clean out. Sometimes while wandering around the park I’d still catch myself praying in an automatic way, like a sneeze, that my dead mom’s blood test results would come back okay.

  * * *

  After the Chief unrolled his Carnival Darwinism scheme, I tried to speed my own evolution into a world-acclaimed wrestler. The Chief did rehearsals with me, and I got him to let me try Mom’s old routines, which I ran so repetitively that I felt like my muscles were becoming hers. I held the tape loop under my right arm, like she did; I timed myself against Mom’s best times. Once, with only a minimum of help from my dad, I got a Seth’s jaws taped shut in four minutes and twenty-two seconds. (Hilola Bigtree could win a match in thirty seconds flat.) The Chief wouldn’t let me climb up her diving board—he said I wasn’t a strong enough swimmer yet—but I kept pleading my case. Pretty soon, if my plan succeeded, I’d be performing the Silent Night and possibly even Swimming with the Seths for a lot of people.

  One morning on my way home from wrestling practice in the Pit, I saw my sister sitting at one of the picnic tables outside the Swamp Café. Her hair was a weird and glittery beacon viewed through the dense brush at the end of the wood-chip trail. I stared across the outdoor seating area: a sea of empty tables, several studded with blackbirds nibbing around for crumbs. Ossie was slumped over with her head on the table, eyes closed, the heavy clouds pushing seaward above her.

  “Ossie,” I hissed through my teeth. “Ossie, wake up! Nobody thinks that’s funny but you.”

  Two tables over a cormorant was pecking at a dessicated potato chip, its head as glossy as a seal’s; then it hopped onto Ossie’s pile of books and began to stab its beak serenely near my sister’s frozen face. I screamed. Ossie’s nose twitched but her eyes stayed shut. I screamed but I couldn’t get her eyes to open, I couldn’t even startle the cormorant; it cocked its head at me impassively and then continued to nick at the table.

  “OSSIE, WAKE UP!”

  Ossie opened her eyes, three strands of pale hair striping her face. The bird flew off. My sister looked truly surprised to see me, and maybe a little scared.

  “Ava? How long have I been out here? I was holding a séance …”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said happily. “You were just playing a trick on me.”

  “Sure. Gotcha.” She smiled back at me but her eyes looked clouded, like agitated water after a Seth’s roll. Ossie had been doing some serious reading, I saw. The black spell book was quilled with crimson bookmarks.

  That night, Osceola didn’t come home at all. I woke up and saw her comforter doubled under the pillow. Guilt made my logic run backward: I decided that I had to find my sister before I could tell anybody she was missing. At sunrise I tiptoed downstairs to look for her; by dumb luck I decided to check the Gator Pit first. Ossie was asleep in the middle bleachers in her dirty beige pajamas. Little strings of brown blood marked where she had been scratching bug bites in her sleep.

  “She needs medicine,” Kiwi said grimly when I told him where I’d found her. “She’s not well …” He tapped his skull with his pencil. “She needs a mainland psychiatrist. Maybe she’s sleepwalking.”

  “Nah, Kiwi. She’s okay.” I wished now that I’d kept Ossie’s activities to myself. “She’s just playing.” But, so far as I could tell, it hadn’t been a game for months. What sort of game made you blind and quiet?

  Kiwi and I found the Chief in the kitchen, drawing his fork through an aluminum tin of melted cheese. Tiny broccoli florets floated in the gluey cheese like a forest consumed by lava.

  “Chief, you need to help Ossie. She’s experiencing delusions. Hallucinations. Ava says she was pretending, at first, but now she thinks she has real powers. She’s reading this thing—” Kiwi dropped that book onto the table and stepped back, as if expecting a bomb to go off.

  “Goddamn, what is this?”

  The Chief’s brows plummeted. He’d found the pictures in the appendix. Over his shoulder I saw a scary one: a devil squatted on the apron of a Spiritist’s dress, wrinkling puddles into her skirt with its little hooves. It looked both lamblike and lascivious. The devil smiled shyly out at us. Spikes of hair covered its body.

  “She doesn’t date those things,” I said hurriedly. “Only ghosts.”

  The Chief removed his reading glasses, shut the book.

  “Kiwi, son, you two can’t find something else for her to read on that Library Boat? Something that’s not total bullcrap?”

  My heart quickened in triumph—he saw. “We told you so! You have to stop her now, okay?”

  “Christ, Ava, what do you want me to do?” The Chief looked up at me with a terrible blank expression. “She’s going through something. She needs a distraction. We used to have a word for your sister: boy-crazy. It could be worse: at least she’s not dating some mainland jackass with a motorcycle, huh?” He laughed his onstage laugh, ha-ha-har, the big seal bark in triplicate for an audience. “Some loser with an earring!”

  “Could it not perhaps be better, Dad?” asked Kiwi. “That’s the bright side here, that the dead man does not have a piercing?”

  The Chief blinked and blinked, as if he had momentarily blinded himself with his own silver lining. There was no coffee left in his mug but he kept touching the chipped green rim to his lips. “Hell, who knows? Do you know, son? Ava? I guess I’m no longer the expert on Better versus Worse.”

  You could hear the serious effort of his laughter. I pictured my dad trapped inside Ossie’s painting of the underworld, chipping away at the enormous rocks. His little Dule screwdriver producing sparks, flakes …

  “Dad, I just …”

  “Listen: your sis has a bad case of lovesickness. For a girl her age, that’s like the common cold. A case of the sniffles.” As if to prove his point, he made a gulping noise in his own throat. I noticed that our dad wasn’t looking at us. “It’ll pass.”

  “Lovesickness?” Now it was my turn to gape at him.

  “Sure,” the Chief said. “Puppy love. You’re both readers, eh? Study up on Romeo. You can’t forbid love to anybody. Forbidding is just stoking the flames. You can’t boss love, kids.”

  The Chief pushed away from the table; I think he was trying his best not to yell at us. He put his fiery heron headdress on the countertop, next to the blue box of corn cereal; he opened the two faucets. Then he dropped to his knees under the twin gushers to fix the kitchen plumbing. We stayed to watch. Just a bad leak, he grunted. When the cabinet doors opened, we could actually smell the rank, strawberry-colored puddles of water. We could see around the Chief’s head to tiny cairns of mouse turds.

  “How’s that look up there, Ava?”

  Some of the pipes had turned iron red and his voice sounded hollow in that cavity. Kiwi gave it a last shot:

  “Chief? Did you hear us, Dad? These guys she’s dating—they’re dead.”

  “Yes,” the Chief sighed. “Yes, I’ll admit, that is a little peculiar.”

  * * *

  The Chief’s efforts at normalcy began to make me feel many inexplicable things, like anger and sorrow and a peculiar self-loathing. Shame on me, I mean really on top of me, as slick and endless as a sweat. This shame was a
weird alloy, but after a while I didn’t even mind it—it was like a sword I’d made, glinting and strong. If I didn’t hate myself, I had a feeling that I’d start hating him, my dad. Whenever I came across the Chief mucking out the Gator Pit, holding the little accordion trunk of the submersible pump above the algae, all alone, without Grandpa or Mom or help of any kind, my whole belly tightened.

  Once I asked my father, “Chief, why are you hosing the stage when the stadium is empty? Why bother getting dressed at all, for nobody?”

  “Well, my kids are hardly ‘nobodies,’ Ava,” he’d chuckled, like we were this great comedy team. “My kids are not some mainland twerps—they are the finest wrestlers in America!” It was a scary comedy. Sometimes we’d try to clown around in the old way and I’d get a feeling like invisible pies dripping down both our faces.

  Some team! The Chief was doing so many jobs alone. I’d fix on the Chief’s raw, rope-burned palms or all the gray hairs collected in his sink, and I’d suffer this terrible side pain that Kiwi said was probably an ulcer and Ossie diagnosed as lovesickness. Or rather a nausea produced by the “black fruit” of love—a terror that sprouted out of your love for someone like rotting oranges on a tree branch. Osceola knew all about this black fruit, she said, because she’d grown it for our mother, our father, Grandpa Sawtooth, even me and Kiwi. Loving a ghost was different, she explained—that kind of love was a bare branch. I pictured this branch curving inside my sister: something leafless and complete, elephantine, like a white tusk. No rot, she was saying, no fruit. You couldn’t lose a ghost to death.

  She showed me a diagram in The Spiritist’s Telegraph, part of a chapter entitled “The Corporeal Orchard.” I’ve never forgotten it. It had a punctilious, surgical level of detail, like one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches—only in this drawing the aortas and ventricles of a human heart burst into flowering trees.

  “Gross, Os. You think there’s a rotten fruit stuck inside me?” I touched a rib, horrified but also filling with a sort of dark self-regard.

  “Not exactly. You’re scared. See? You’re angry because you think the Chief is going to die, too.”

  “Huh? No I don’t!”

  “You’re angry at him but it’s too early, Ava.”

  “Never mind.” I frowned. Ossie thought she was so smart now that she’d read one book. Black fruit, how stupid can you get! “You know what, I think Kiwi is right.” I lifted the dirty stripes of my Swamplandia! T-shirt and scowled at my belly. “It feels more like an ulcer.”

  But I couldn’t shake the image, crates and crates of sunken black oranges. My heart gone wormy and rotten with fear. I thought of the corporeal orchard whenever I saw the Chief’s face.

  It was around this time that I developed a weird fascination with the tiny cockroaches that had overtaken our café. I’d see them marching around the perimeter and I’d feel a little twinge; I imagined a weird kinship between us. Their skeletons were flipped outward into hard mirrors, but inside, all jelly. They tapped and tapped at each other’s backs. I’d get unaccountably sad some nights, just watching this little blind ballet go tickling up the walls. Kiwi noticed my creepy new interest and tried to encourage it with a book he’d found on the Library Boat called Why Insects Amaze Us.

  On Saturdays the Chief continued to hold rehearsals for the two of us. This was a gift from my father to me, probably one of the most magnificent I will ever receive in this lifetime, although when I was thirteen I just thought of it as “a morning.” Very extraordinarily ordinary.

  “Wake up, Ava,” he’d say into my dim room, beautiful words.

  Ossie, meanwhile, continued to break curfew with impunity, to date the dead, to wear very unflattering homemade turbans. If the Chief couldn’t fix Ossie, he still tried to stay active. He banished not ghost men but material things: six-pack plastics, empty tubs of Delacroix gator chow, paper plates, rotten eggs, dock flotsam—whatever trash we could produce in a day. Each night he burned our garbage in a ditch behind the coop. This was one of the last Bigtree routines to go. Columns of thick smoke rose behind the red wall at dusk, and frantic clucks rose from the chicken coop like rainfall reversing itself, spraying up into the cumulus puffs in the night sky. From the kitchen window, I would watch the Chief build his midweek pyre: leftovers and little bones and milk cartons, eggshells and newspapers, a grab bag of detritus. Whatever we couldn’t use or sell before nightfall, our chieftain struck a match against and sent to the stars.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ava the Champion

  One Monday in early May I sailed into the kitchen and snatched an envelope out of the Chief’s blunt fingers—he held on to it for an extra beat out of a wrestler’s instinct, his square nails raking scum across the envelope. He chewed his breakfast cigarette and regarded me with deadened amusement.

  “Somebody has a pen pal?”

  The Chief had put on his humongous bifocals to go through our mailbag, specs which made him look a little like Elvis Presley or an erudite bear. They were tinted dark yellow on the bottom. He hated to wear these glasses in front of us and he never wore them in front of our tourists. They were part of his accounting costume—glasses and red pens for sorting our bills.

  “No, Chief. It’s not a pen pal I’m writing to.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. It’s like a contest? For money? A lot of money, Chief.” Lying to the Chief like this felt like freezing a lake into ice and skating quickly over it. “I probably won’t win, but if I do I am going to donate it all to your Carnival Darwinism.”

  “Well. That’s …” The Chief stared at me in a peculiar way, as if he were about to sneeze, and then the muscles in his face relaxed again. His voice sounded offstage, tired: “Just don’t send these guys any of your own money, Ava. Don’t get scammed.” He patted my back. “You know the real contests happen in the Pit with your Seth, right, champ?”

  I nodded. The fan was blowing at the Chief’s headdress, flattening every feather so that they waved in place, like a school of fishes needling into a strong current. Something lunged in me then, receded. A giggle or a sob. A noise. I thought: You look very stupid, Dad.

  “You’d better not let me catch you writing to any grown assholes in jail, kid. Or dead guys.” The smile crumpled on his face. “Please.”

  My still-secret plan was to enter and win the same national championship that Miss Hilola Bigtree swept before she was a mother or even a newlywed, when she was eighteen years old and had first started dating my father. I loved staring at the bend of my own shadowy features in Mom’s trophies, and this was the largest one: NATIONAL CHAMPION, 1971. AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF ALLIGATOR WRESTLERS. This trophy even looked a little like my mom to me: a busty golden lady with skinny arms and fists on hips.

  “How come you never got to be the national champion again?” I asked my mother once when I was nine or ten. She’d won the other trophies here, on our island—the Chief had given them to her. This was still impressive to me. But I wondered: why didn’t she want to beat the Seminole wrestlers, to show the Miccosukee alligator handlers what we Bigtrees were made of? We were pinning up laundry on the clothesline near the dandelion wash, and she’d laughed at me from behind a wailing wall of bedsheets. Only a square of forehead and her dark eyes were visible:

  “Because I am your mother now, Ava. Because I have important things to do right here, on our island. Honey, did I leave that box of clothespins over by you? This wind!”

  That day a category 2 hurricane was coming; truly, it was a strange time to try to pin up laundry, with the swamp wind whipping our hair at each other across the clothesline like a weird game of tennis. We had the same kind of hair, a black coffee shade with ruddy glinting, thick and ursine like Judy the bear’s fur—a big point of pride for me.

  Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a co
nversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she’d have to “take a rest” in the house, but she’d always emerge from these spells with a smile for us. Until she got sick, I can’t remember our mother ever missing a show.

  “Honestly, can you imagine me without your father!” She used to say this all the time. With a sort of vacant, sticky violence, she’d kiss the forehead of whichever of her children was nearest.

  Even as a kid I understood that she was kissing us to answer some question that she was putting to herself. Was she happy? we wondered. Were we the right answer? My mother married the Chief and gave birth to Kiwi at age nineteen; she started her career as an alligator wrestler that same year.

  “She married him too young,” Kiwi told me once in a sad, knowing voice. But when I told Mom what he’d said, she laughed herself dizzy. Then she repeated it to the Chief and they both roared.

  “Listen: your brother is an unkissed thirteen, Ava,” she told me. “He is just a boy. His judgments are like green fruit. He doesn’t have any idea about that stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Well, love!” she said, exasperated but not with me, I didn’t think. “Your father and I were sweethearts, you tell me what’s too ‘too’ about that! Without Sam I’d still be on the mainland!”

  But one night, the eve of their tenth wedding anniversary, she woke my sister and I and made us come out to the museum. It was very late at night—she’d been drinking rum and soda with the Chief and some of our neighbors. Nobody looked up from the porch as we crossed the lawn. Her palms were damp and she was a little wobbly on her feet, giggling like a girl herself as she let us guide her through the wet grass. We entered the main room of the museum holding hands. “Shh,” she said. “No lights. We don’t want your father coming out here, this is just girls.” I held the flashlight and let the light settle on one of her posters. In it, she wore her shrug of a smile and her dark hair in a bun. Half her body was submerged in the lake; behind her you could see the orange sun on the Seths’ back plates.