Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  “Turn the light off please, Ava,” she whispered, and I remember her breath hot and rummy on our cheeks. To this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult’s breath turned the big world as small and dark as a boat hold. Our mother took each of us by the hand and we shuffled awkwardly forward. Then she did a strange thing. She led us to the exhibit my father had made of their wedding day. Her dress, a long, simple gown in a mollusk shade of old lace, was behind glass. Her orchid headpiece, too, a ring of tiny, silvery blooms that looked like a halo with all the light crushed out of it. She made my sister and me put our palms on the glass, and then she made us each promise to wait until we were thirty years old to marry, if we married … We had both nodded very somberly. Mom was twenty-nine that year. In seven years she would be dead. We were six and nine at the time. I used to think the promise would make more sense when I got older, but I was thirteen now and that night in the museum seemed even more mysterious to me with each passing year, a memory too baffling to even broach with my sister. If we ever did succeed at locating Mom on the Ouija board, I thought, I had a list of important questions for her.

  Where was the contest held? How did you enter? I didn’t know. When I asked Grandpa Sawtooth about it, he’d raised an eyebrow at my father and squinted down at me for a long minute; then he snorted and told me that the contest was held in a top-secret location, where the judges threw you into seven feet of water, and you had thirty seconds to pull your alligator ashore and tape her jaws up. Bleeding too much disqualified you. Plenty of contestants died every year. A pipsqueak like me shouldn’t enter, he said; I’d be gone in two bites.

  I researched the Kentucky Derby on the Library Boat—the purse was one million dollars! And those leprechauns were only riding horses. Obviously my mother had not been a millionaire. My heroic logic was as follows: if I was the champion, like her, our fame would be a perennial draw.

  You had to be eighteen to compete—that’s what my mother told me at nine when I begged to be a contender. So in a typewritten letter that took me three drafts to compose, I asked the commission to make an exception and allow me to wrestle at age thirteen. I explained about my mother’s cancer and Swamplandia!’s many troubles. My own feats with the Seths I tried to describe modestly but candidly. I didn’t brag exactly, but I made sure the commissioners understood that I was the real deal; I wasn’t some unserious church girl from Nebraska who had only ever handled pet-store geckos, or some inlander, “Rebecca” or “Mary,” a pigtailed zoo volunteer. The kind of girl who liked to do those drugstore paint-by-number watercolors of horses. Shetland ponies. Palominos. I bet the Marys were really excellent at that.

  “I am a Bigtree wrestler” was the first line of my letter, and as insurance I’d enclosed a famous key-chain picture of my mother. It sold for $4.99 in the gift shop, and you could also get it on a cozy or a magnet. My mother looks a little older than Osceola, maybe eighteen or nineteen, her hair is shining like mahogany; she’s sort of studious-looking in thick eyeglasses (contact lenses and chaste emerald bathing suits came later, as a concession to our modern tourists); she’s got an eight-foot alligator’s jaws in her bare hands. HILOLA BIGTREE AND HER SETH I wrote carefully on the bottom, and added in parentheses (MY MOTHER).

  My best guess was that these individuals were based in America’s capital, Washington, D.C., but I hadn’t yet been able to locate an exact street address. Gus Waddell claimed never to have heard of them. Well, Gus was really more of a nautical man, a very nice man but not exactly what you’d call educated when it came to herpetological sports.

  I wasn’t going to risk a no by involving the Chief and Kiwi prematurely. I wasn’t going to tell my sister, either—Ossie was like an aquarium when it came to other people’s secrets. I sent this letter to the Smithsonian, the state universities, the Florida Wildlife and Gaming Commission, along with a flap note: “Sir or madam, please do me the great favor of forwarding this letter to the correct bureau(s). Thank you!!!”

  If they accepted me, I figured that I would be the youngest person, boy or girl, ever to compete at the national level. Five years younger than my mother, even.

  That same month, a remarkable thing happened on our island: a miracle, a freak rainstorm of luck during a time of cash and tourist droughts. I got to watch this miracle unfold inside a glass case—not in our museum but in one of the reptile incubators. On Swamplandia! we hatched baby alligators under heat lamps, dozens a year, using incubators that the Chief got on the cheap from a bankrupt chicken-farming family in Ocala. We restocked the Pit with the largest and the hardiest of the alligators, and the rest we sold to St. Augustine reptile farms in north Florida or released. Thermostats controlled the gender of the future alligators in their eggs, and the incubator I was polishing was set to 84 degrees Fahrenheit—a female brood. I breathed a tiny porthole onto the incubator glass and peered in.

  This was excellent timing: as I watched, a tiny caruncle punctured the eggshell. Baby alligators are born with these, the “egg tooth,” a tusk on the tip of their snout that allows them to punch through the membrane of their eggshells. A Seth’s eggs are oblong and leathery, narrower than the eggs a hen lays. Next I heard the telltale squeal, a sound that came from inside the eggs—the alligators were pipping! The fetal gators coordinate their jailbreak by making a squeaky noise at a frequency that can be heard inside the shell; now the noise had begun, and the thirty-two hatchlings in this incubator were butting and rocking against the shell membrane.

  The first alligator to hatch caused me to frown and lean in, because there was something unusual about her—the alligator’s hide appeared to be red. A tiny, fiery Seth. Her skull was the exact shape and shining hue of a large halved strawberry. At first I thought her pigmentation was a trick of the light and I was afraid even to touch her. The red on her skin seemed like a disease I could contract through my fingertips or a spell I could break, a color so pure and unreal that I thought it might rub off.

  I put her on the kitchen scale we kept next to the extra lamps. She weighed seventy grams. She was nine inches from snout to tail.

  Her claws scrabbled at the air when I picked her up. The door to the shed stood open, and her skin brightened like an ember. I half-expected her temperature to flare up, too. To burn and sizzle. But her scales were cool and damp. She curled flat against my palms, reminding me of the inlay of a dragon I’d seen once on Mrs. Gianetti’s fancy black Oriental dinette set. Her pupils were compass needles, thin and wobbly. Her camelia-pink eyes blinked and blinked, and I wondered if she was surprised to find a world outside her egg. Like any hatchling gator, her snout tapered into a look of flutey suspicion. A yawn revealed the paler watermelon chinks on her tongue, and I suppressed a laugh.

  The Chief is going to turn a backflip! I thought. This alligator could save our park! But when I thought about telling my family about her, my mouth turned to sand. I felt very certain that she was going to die. That nothing born this color could live for long in the open air. We’d hatched hundreds of broods on Swamplandia! and they grew very slowly, a foot a year. Few hatchlings made it to adulthood, even in captivity. (I still don’t know what melanistic fluke or mutation accounted for her. Her sisters were born the usual straw-yellow-banded black; they died later that same week, all thirty-one of them, of yolk sac infections.)

  We had an old forty-gallon aquarium in storage and I dragged this out and swabbed it clean for her; I hid the tank in the fenced-in shrubbery behind the shed. All day I’d invent excuses to go back there. Keep breathing, I’d command her through the glass. The rise and fall of the Seth’s belly scales could hypnotize me for an hour at a stretch.

  When a week passed and the red Seth was still crawling around in her tank, I felt a terrible hope begin to grow inside me, at pace with the alligator. Two more weeks, and then I’ll tell, I thought. Three … If you tell him now, she will die. What a dumb superstition! I knew that. When Mom was sick, I went around knocking on everything for luck, not just wood. I avoided
black and even dark brown cats, I skirted the Chief’s ladder, I carried around Grandpa’s creepy, ostensibly lucky marsh rabbit’s foot, and did any of this make a difference? My mom died. But my new superstition didn’t care to hear about the earlier failure. It told me, If you tell anyone about the red alligator, she will die or disappear.

  At first I thought this fear might be like a gut cramp that would pass. Then my throat would relax in a day or two and then I would be able to share the miracle of the red alligator with the other Bigtrees. I tried to bargain with the fear: Four more weeks, I told it. If this alligator lives another month, then it’s settled. I will definitely tell them. If I could get her to nine months, she’d be eighteen inches long and out of the danger zone of predation. I figured I just had to keep her alive for long enough to prove my fear wrong.

  So as the World of Darkness usurped our place in the rankings, I became a hunter of minnows. I looked for life that my pet Seth could gulp: tadpoles loitering in the cattails, green anoles, clear slugs that I peeled from the trees. Later I had to raise the baby rats she ate, and why I thought one creature was my beloved pet while the other creatures were food is still a mystery to me. That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head. My pet, because she was mine, was at the top of the chain. I cared for the squirmy swamp rats in the most perfunctory way, with none of the love I felt for my red Seth. The rats and fish ate the small golden crickets, and the crickets seemed to live on air and chirpy fear, surviving for weeks on the pickleweed at the bottom of their cages, so that there was a whole food chain happening in the forty-gallon tank that culminated in my alligator, my lovely ruby girl.

  Three weeks after my red monster was born, on a warm and limpid Sunday afternoon, the Chief finally made good on his promise and took us on the ferryboat to the mainland to visit our grandfather. On the ferry ride over, I stayed on deck. I stood mute as a heron on the stern, rubbing seawater across my rashy left shin with the toe of one sneaker to create a sort of pleasant burn and staring backward at Swamplandia!, where I’d left the red Seth in her hiding spot. To even think “the red Seth” was like staring into a radiance I’d swallowed, a sun. Maybe I will tell Grandpa Sawtooth about her, just as a kind of practice. Grandpa Sawtooth would be a safe husk for that sun, a good secret-keeper, because right away the secret would go dark again. Right away he would forget her. Listen, a red alligator and I are going to save your real home, Grandpa, I wanted to promise him, but I bet that Grandpa wouldn’t even know my name this time. And Kiwi said that as soon as we stepped off the retirement boat Grandpa would lose the faces that had been talking to him.

  There had been a dramatic buildup to Grandpa Sawtooth’s eviction from Swamplandia!

  First he’d gotten confused during a tram tour and driven the whole train of eight cars in tight doughnuts around the stilted foundation of the Bigtree Swamp Café, his tramload of twelve strawberry blond Utah tourists waving at everybody in polite despair to please come help them?

  Eight days later, Grandpa bit a man. On his face and neck, mostly. Just hanging there from the screaming man’s cheek like a grinning eel until the Chief wrestled him loose. “Oh shit!” shouted the Chief. “Ossie, babe, get some napkins!”

  The bitten guy turned out to be a soupy-eyed lawyer from Arkansas. Now as a punishment for his forgetfulness Grandpa had to live at the Out to Sea Retirement Community, in a peeling umber cabin, on this refurbished and possibly haunted houseboat that he shared with a bunch of pissed-off septuagenarians. Grandpa’s bunkmate, Harold Clink, was ninety-two years old and almost entirely deaf and yet he would talk to you only in song, songs without rhythms, songs that he made up; we Bigtrees had all worried (some of us hoped!) that Grandpa would kill this person in the night. The houseboat was retired, too, at permanent anchor in the marina. The seniors got issued these pastel pajamas that made them look like Easter eggs in wheelchairs. If you went to visit, that’s what you saw: Easter eggs in these adult cribs, Easter eggs on toilets with guardrails. Black curtains closed the portholes.

  We all sat down in unison on the crinkly sofa. Flat red flowers crept up the wall. A nurse was mixing medicines in the galley, humming some jaunty tune—I could see her big brown arm stirring orange powder through a carafe. Grandpa called this woman Robina, although that didn’t necessarily mean this was her name. We liked possibly-Robina because she brought us orange juice with flexistraws and teased Grandpa with a humor that he tolerated well.

  “These your grandkids! No! You produced these beauties, Mr. Bigtree?” Robina’s laughter rose like the bubbles in the aquarium of coffee behind her, rich and automatic. “They must take after their grandmother, eh?”

  Ossie and I touched our crazy hair, flattered. Without consulting one another, we’d both worn our dresses. We smelled churchy, like Mom’s bottled roses. Kiwi did most of the talking; the Chief grew small-mouthed and uneasy on the undulating boat. It was like he’d caught Grandpa Sawtooth’s sickness—those two kept staring at each other as if they’d never before met. On our last visit to Out to Sea, the Chief hung the Seth of Seths skull on the wall, next to the steel clock, a gift that Grandpa failed to appreciate or even understand.

  “It was your first Seth, Dad!” The Chief didn’t start yelling until the second hour of our visit; you could almost watch his anger rising stealthily, like sweat stiffening on fur. “The Seth of Seths! The first alligator that you and Mama ever kept on the island. You’re going to tell me you don’t remember that?”

  Possibly-Robina was waiting for us at the cabin door. She had wrapped the Seth of Seths skull in two Hefty trash bags, the twist tie done up like a bow, like this monster was her gift to us now. Robina ordered us to take the skull back home because all of a sudden it frightened Grandpa; he’d point at it and mewl, his eyes wet.

  “It’s his own damn alligator, ma’am,” the Chief sighed, accepting the trash bag. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”

  Nobody had told Grandpa Sawtooth that our mother was dead. I could feel the secret rolling between the four of us like an egg in a towel. We never talked about why we kept this a secret from him—the secret just happened. Somebody should tell him before he dies, I frowned. I pictured Grandpa meeting my mom at a red-lit intersection in the afterlife, his cry of sad surprise.

  “Why don’t you kids go wait outside?” the Chief asked. “Head over to the bus stop. I need to talk to your grandfather.”

  Kiwi raised his eyebrows at me and Ossie. He stood and pulled his ball cap down, sharked around our father, and Ossie and I scrambled after him. Sunlight burst into the gently rocking room and dazzled my pupils. We exited on the aft side of the vessel. I was happy to leave the perfume of medication and bedpans that filled the cabin. We debarked and sat on the pier, watching the ripples of our sneakers on the oily water. I was prepared for a long wait, but then fifteen minutes later we watched the Chief burst out of Sawtooth’s cabin door. He waved us toward the bus stop, looking flushed and upset.

  I didn’t try to talk to him until an hour later, when we’d boarded the ferry.

  “Chief Bigtree?” I used Dad’s formal title, hoping to make up a little bit for the indignity of his having to carry the Seth of Seths in a Hefty bag. “Gross,” Ossie had whispered on the long city bus ride to the ferry dock. “Poor Dad.” It did not even look like Robina had given us a fresh bag.

  “Ava Bigtree?” The Chief stared down at me. It was a long time before he could smile.

  “What did you want to ask Grandpa for?”

  “For money, dummy,” snickered Kiwi. “Where’s the treasure buried, Dad?”

  “For advice,” the Chief snarled, in a nastier voice than he ever used on family.

  Kiwi was still laughing softly to himself, but with these big alarmed eyes, as if only the lower half of his face were getting the joke. Then the ferryboat hit a bumpy stretch of water that splashed everybody’s faces; on the starboard side, a few little kids swallowed up to the knees by their humo
ngous orange life vests screamed in joyful terror; when Kiwi looked over at me his eyes were bulging, his cheeks wet. Over the groan of the ferry’s engine I could hear him laughing and laughing. The entire time he had not stopped laughing.

  “Dad,” he mimicked, “I need to buy these saltwater crocodiles, see, it’s for my quack business model called Carnival Darwinism …”

  The Chief leaned in and grabbed the scruff of Kiwi’s T-shirt, spoke low and close: “Don’t mouth off again, son. That’s my fatherly advice to you.” Kiwi’s mouth opened like a doll’s, exposing a white paste of chewed gum. Ossie crammed a fist into her own mouth and craned around to find me. The moment passed.

  The rest of our ferry ride home was a silent one. I remember it now as a turning point, one of our last “normal” days as a family together, and maybe the last time that we assembled as a tribe on Swamplandia!, although at the time I just wanted to get home to pee and watch TV. Ossie hid behind the trunk of children’s life vests and ate fistfuls of these golden dietetic candies that she’d stolen from the nurse’s bowl at Out to Sea. Kiwi and I played cards, Go Fish and Walla-Walla, and he let me win every game. The Chief held the black bag on his lap. As soon as we left the harbor, he lifted the Seth of Seths out of the Hefty bag, cradling the skull with an air of sorrowful apology. The Chief loved that Seth—it wasn’t part of any act.

  Two passengers from Loomis County kept staring over and whispering. The Chief was wearing his faded yellow “visiting” shirt, which was older than Kiwi, buttoned up to his collar (Why, Dad?); he had his big hands folded on the Seth of Seth’s squamosal bone. It sat on his lap like a briefcase. These Loomis men were wealthy, or wealthy to me: they wore belts with shiny buckles, and their khakied laps held fancy red double-decker tackle boxes. They were most likely on their way to play Injun for a weekend at the Red Eagle Key Fishing Camp; they didn’t know my father was a Bigtree, and you could see the sneer in their eyes.