Vijay was not Kiwi Bigtree’s only teacher. Kiwi received many complimentary tutorials from his other colleagues those first weeks. When he’d used the word “pulchritude”—a compliment! he insisted—in unwitting reference to another janitor’s girlfriend; he later found condoms full of pudding in his work locker and a new phrase to dissect in his Field Notes, GAYASS ASSFUCKER, etched with a cafeteria knife above the locker gills. When he recited “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” hoping to impress Nina Suárez, who was wiping cigarette butts out of the whale ashtrays with a rag, Ephraim Lipmann happened to overhear him and told everybody on the Leviathan crew that Margaret Mead was definitely gay.
“No, no, I was seducing Nina!” If people believed that he was sexually attracted to woolly, goony Ephraim—if people believed that Kiwi desired to see big-eared Ephraim naked, in any context—his life in the World of Darkness would be over. What was wrong with these philistines? “I read it to her because I like women! It’s a poem about love!”
Then Nina herself got wind of this—that skinny Margaret Mead was hitting on her?—and now all of Nina’s friends who worked in the Flippers were boycotting Kiwi, a political strike against his nerdly advances that took the form of girls rolling their exquisitely lashed eyes at Kiwi in the Leviathan. They touched the hair frizzed above their ears as they passed him as if radioing their disgust to some central intelligence.
To bribe Ephraim Lipmann into reversing his river of calumny, Kiwi offered to work overtime for him. Then he started to recite Keats’s “Ode” to Ephraim, believing that the beauty of the poem would be self-evident and exonerate him.
“Fuck, Margaret!” Ephraim said. His reedy voice was loud enough to echo throughout the Coils, the purple foyer to the whale’s belly. A few young mothers pushing their whale-fluked rental strollers looked over disapprovingly. “I do not want to sleep with you, dude! God, leave me alone!” He gave Kiwi a little push, hard enough to cause Kiwi to fall backward against a mesh trash can.
“Guys, come quick, Margaret Mead wants to butt-rape me in the Flukes …”
Every day, Kiwi’s colleagues taught him what you could and could not say to another person here on the mainland. This was a little like having snipers tutor you on the limits of the prison yard.
“My colleagues,” you were encouraged to call your fellow stoned, moose-eyed teenage workers. “My colleagues,” to sixteen-year-old Nina, who wore her jeans so tight around the plush heart of her ass that sometimes Kiwi had to walk behind the cardboard flames to compose himself. This egalitarian recommendation did not apply to the management, Kiwi discovered—Carl Jenks could call his staffers anything he liked. Carl’s “colleagues” were mysterious people to whom he communicated via yellow sticky memos and the telephone. Carl Jenks had a habit of referring to all his teenage employees as “new hires” until such time as he had to fire them. Yes, it makes sense, Carl Jenks joked. Oh, it makes perfect sense that Hell is staffed by teenagers! If there is a hell, I know it’s a NASA space station manned by monkeys your age.
Kiwi wondered how things had gone for Carl Jenks in high school. His hypothesis was: Siberian bad. On-the-deck-of-the-Titanic bad. On par with Kiwi’s early weeks in the World.
After his first disastrous lunches in the staff cafeteria, Kiwi began to eat alone. He brought his pimiento-and-cheese sandwiches into the last stall of the men’s bathroom, his back against its broken door. The World entrées each had some stupid name, Hellspawn Hoagie or Faustian Bargain Fish Tacos. Kiwi marveled at his lunch—how could a hoagie be soggy and incendiary at the same time? His eyes watered in the bathroom mirror. The whole theme park was like a joke that someone had taken too far! The water fountains didn’t even work here—Vijay had warned him on his first day. They piped in a manufactured salt water.
“Get it, bro? ’Cause it’s Hell.”
“Yeah, right, I got it.” Kiwi’s throat burned from getting that particular joke. Why weren’t natal dolphins swimming around in the salt water? Why weren’t hospitals using the saline solution to save a baby’s life or something?
When he was brave, Kiwi ate his lunch on the deep end of the Jaws. He sat on one of the whale’s rock-size plaster molars, a place where any of his colleagues could have approached him (they didn’t), but more often Kiwi slid between the teeth. He slumped as far down as he could go on the spongy mauve rubber mats. The gums were always filling up with rogue bits of trash that the Lost Souls dropped as they stepped into the Leviathan: cigarette butts and foldout park maps, doughnut holes grouped like tiny Stonehenges, pretzel paper—once, horrifyingly, a squidlike blue condom that got pasted to Kiwi’s elbow. (Not used? Kiwi prayed. Used! Yvans!)
Kiwi sat like that, a toothpick speck in the whale’s smile, and pretended to read Plato’s Republic until his lunch hour was up.
Kiwi often had to remind himself that no matter how badly a day could go at work, this present situation was in every way an improvement over his first week on the mainland. He had food now, access to clean toilets; he had money, a dormitory, a few embryonic friendships. At night sometimes he would sit alone in the dorm kitchen and microwave a frozen cheese pizza that he’d purchased at the nearby gas station, with his own income. He’d count down the beeps with a meditative fervor—if anybody had wandered in and seen Kiwi’s face in the microwave glass, they would have thought he was having a numinous experience. He ate the gas station pepperoni prayerfully, peeled the mozzarella off in slow ribbons, tore off warm gluey bites of crust that he swallowed like an animal in the dark. He’d drink a vending machine soda and think to himself, I’ve done it! and feel a twinge of uneasiness—because what had he done really? Used the Chief’s cash to make a purchase? And what was he doing here? Helping, he thought vaguely. He backed away from this thought and let it hang there, a Monet picture, beautifully out of focus. The colors of it were right; the shapes could sharpen and emerge later. He tried not to think too hard about the Chief, the girls. The ninety-eight Seths becoming anonymous in their Pit because the tourists had lost interest in that particular story. Kiwi had come prepared to disguise his identity, but nobody here ever mentioned the Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty or Swamplandia! Already everybody had forgotten the origins of the joke about him; they thought his real surname was Mead. Anonymity was a very easy goal to achieve in the Leviathan.
On weeknights, he could hear fat Leonard’s heavy breath coming from a dormitory off the kitchen. His snores came in fusillades, once causing Kiwi to jump up and ding his head on the microwave door, and yet Kiwi felt grateful for even this noise, and for all the small and tolerable irritations of dorm living. Leonard Harlblower was a park greeter, a loud, obnoxious young man who would probably go through life disliked by everyone he met and never know it. Sometimes Kiwi would look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror they shared and think: Oh my God, I pray that I am not a Leo. Large Leonard, via some athletic self-deception, believed himself to be the most popular employee in the World. He read everyone’s behavior backward to fit this thesis: Carl Jenks’s open contempt for him became a convivial respect, Kiwi’s queasy dislike was shy sycophancy, Yvans’s insults became “Caribbean banter,” and Nina Suárez and her girlfriends’ eye-rolling avoidance of him was just “those bitches playing hard to get.” “Ladies love Leo” was his auxiliary hypothesis.
Even Chief Bigtree—an “indigenous swamp dweller” who was actually a white guy descended from a coal miner in small-town Ohio, a man who sat on lizards in a feathered headdress—even the Chief seemed like a genius of self-awareness next to this kid Leonard. Leonard Harlblower was always slapping Kiwi too hard on the back and demanding to be called “Leo Nard-on” and cracking up at his own misogynist puns, many of which Kiwi would later hear repeated on TV reruns of the canceled sitcom It’s a Man’s Grand World.
Oh my God, you are not even an original asshole! You are a plagiarist of assholes.
Kiwi thought Leonard had the worst job in the World—he had to dress up in a whale suit in hundred-degree weather and shake the
small children’s hands with his flippers, which were made of a hard bubbly plastic and about the size of car doors; the whale head alone must have weighed ten pounds. (The irony here was that Leo’s real-life head was also huge, the size of a moai; Vijay sniggered that the foam domehead was probably a snug fit.) You half-expected sweat to come pouring out of the whale’s eyeholes.
Kiwi had a PO box now, a mainland address, and he sent away for brochures from the northern colleges. He began to receive pamphlets in the mail with fall leaves and brunettes in toothpaste-colored turtlenecks, modest castles behind them. These were the New England colleges where he could get a liberal arts education. He had taken the number 23 bus to the public library a few times and checked out a stack of outdated books about the college application process. He’d left a message for a woman named Jennifer Davies at the LCPS about enrolling for the fall, and written out a short autobiography that he planned to read to her when she called him back on the World of Darkness pay-phone number.
Kiwi’s plans to save the park—or at least to forestall bankruptcy, to keep the family afloat until August or even September—these plans were off to a sluggish start. He had an envelope of twenties, but it wasn’t his salary—he had stolen this money from the Chief. This theft had been easy to justify: as an investment, or an early draw on his inheritance, or as his salary for years of unpaid tribal labor. Rationalizations buzzed inside him as he slid the bills out. Owed me, these shrill voices in Kiwi droned on and on, bees swaying in columns in the dark room, until he’d pocketed even the change. Pennies. A lintlike currency, value that collected in corners. He swabbed pennies out of the Chief’s wallet and trouser pockets. People thought the worst robbers stole the most, whole vaults. But it was the smallest denomination that you stole, he wrote later in the Field Notes, that was the real measure of your greed.
Kiwi shook out the envelope: $22.12 now. His thumbs found and pressed the two pennies; for some reason this action made him think of Ava and Ossie. One, two. He wanted to save for the girls’ college tuition. A doctor or a psychiatrist or something for Ossie. He had drawn up a budget to address the Chief’s deficits; Ossie would of course get priority. But given that he had a job flossing a whale’s teeth with a sudsy rope and the lowest salary allowed by law, things were not looking inspiring. Kiwi took out the repayment calendar he had drawn up on Swamplandia! and flipped through the weeks ahead of him, erasing the naive numbers, subtracting his state taxes, making adjustments based on phantom increases that he planned to receive to his tiny salary.
So he hadn’t sent any checks home yet, but he had swiped a stack of greeting cards from the World of Darkness gift store. “I’m Having a Whale of a Time!” read one: a bug-eyed black woman in her seventies or eighties was caught on camera sliding into the Leviathan, her blue wig a full inch above her head. “It’s Hell Without You!” read another, this one of a very confused-looking girl in a cherry-pink party dress descending into a hole.
Dear Ava—
Dear Ossie—
He went on accumulating beginnings.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Dredge Appears
Now that the Chief was gone on his business trip and we’d temporarily closed Swamplandia!, we girls were the queens of the island. The Seths followed the sun around the Pit, the moon continued to whir. I could sleep into the deep yolk of any afternoon, wear my dirty pajamas to the Pit, stow away on the Library Boat and read murder mysteries until four in the morning. I could watch the World of Darkness commercials with the volume cranked. All this possibility made me dizzy with a strange kind of grief. I wasn’t sleeping right. On the nights that Ossie didn’t come home, I dragged a blanket down to the sofa and left our whole house lit up like a ship.
One Saturday, four or five days after the Chief’s depature, in the late red light of June, a black shape appeared on the westernmost edge of our park. At first it was just a mote that I glimpsed between the bayhead hammocks, floating in the blue eye of the island like a speck in jelly. I blinked and rubbed my eyes and the blot stayed put. Then Ossie said that she could see the blot, too.
Ossie and I were a mile from the house, walking the limits of the touristed park. After the Last Ditch the trail became impenetrable palmetto scrub. All day we had been hunting for melaleuca saplings.
Water once flowed out of Lake Okeechobee without interruption, or interference from men. Aspiring farmers wanted to challenge her blue hegemony. All that rich peat beneath the lakes was going to waste! Melaleuca quinquenervia was an exotic invasive, an Australian tree imported to suck the Florida swamp dry. If you were a swamp kid, you were weaned on the story of the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse, these men who had flown over the swamp in tiny Cessnas and sprinkled melaleuca seeds out of restaurant salt and pepper shakers. Exotic invasives, the “strangler species” threatened our family long before the World of Darkness. The Army Corps of Engineers had planted thousands of melaleuca trees in the 1940s as part of their Drainage Project, back when the government thought it was possible to turn our tree islands into a pleated yellowland of crops. I was raised to be suspicious of the Army Corps of Engineers, with good reason. The dikes and levees that the Army Corps had recommended for flood control had turned the last virgin mahogany stands into dust bowls; in other places, wildfire burned the peat beds down to witchy fingers of lime.
Now the melaleucas had formed an “impermeable monoculture.” That meant a forest with just one kind of tree in it. Most of the gladesmen had long ago abandoned the dream of farming their islands. You could sum up the response of the Army Corps of Engineers and the swamp developers in one word, said our dad: “Oops!” Forest fires raged and burned the swamp down to peat. Frosts came and a man could break his knife trying to slice through a glade tomato. By 1950, the dream of drainage was largely dead. The Army Corps of Engineers changed its objective from draining the “wasteland” of the swamp islands to saving them. Unfortunately for my family, the melaleucas were still root-committed to the old plan, the drainage scheme. They swallowed fifty acres a day. Back in May, Kiwi had discovered a punky infestation behind the Gator Pit: saplings the width of mop handles. The Bigtree men swung axes into them, bled them, flooding the world with the smell of camphor. We kept cutting them down, and the earth kept raising them. It was a haywire fertility, like a body making cancer.
Why, the swamp is writing her own suicide note! A visiting botanist looked down and said this to me once on an airboat ride, running a thumb around the pinky-gold rim of his glasses as if he were extraordinarily pleased with this phrase. We’d taken a team of five Corps engineers, hydrologists, and botanists out to a hammock behind West Lake where the new forest had come in so thick that “a chubby wood rat couldn’t get through it.” The afternoon was full of these “Stanley, look!” kinds of comments from the scientists. Like our dereliction was a zoo for them.
“Fifty trees to an acre, my God” was how Stanley the stunned hydrologist summed up the problem; he’d taken a photograph for a journal article.
“Do you folks believe in God?” my dad had asked. “Because that’s who I’m praying to now. I’m through waiting on you people.” The Chief said that the Army Corps had a funny amnesia about the fact that our crises—the wildfires, the melaleuca stands, the fatal flooding in the gravity canals—had each originated as a Corps blueprint.
“Die, melaleuca!” I’d been hollering all afternoon, swinging my paintbrush. Ossie was cutting the saplings down, and I was painting herbicide onto the stumps. We were tree warriors, I told Ossie. We had come to the Last Ditch for a massacre.
“This is a pretty boring massacre,” said my sister. “When is lunch?” I was stirring the bucket of vitreous poisons when I looked up and saw the shape: something black, liquefying and resolving behind the reddish grain of the pines.
It took us five minutes to get through the scrub. Spanish moss and pineapple-like bromeliads waved in tall curtains from the bay trees. The shape kept changing dimension on us between the trunks; I thought it might
be a house of some kind. But how could a whole house wash up here?
“HELLO!” we both called into the Last Ditch.
“It’s a boat after all, Ava …,” my sister shouted, running ahead. But not a boat like we’d ever seen. It was a twenty-five- or twenty-six-foot vessel with a cuddy cabin and a maze of ropes that was in a process of solving itself, the pulleys lying on the stern where some knot had collapsed; a thin crane with rusting struts was attached to its bow. Its dipper bucket was thirty feet above us, like a dinosaur’s little yellow skull. Tall palms stretched around the latticed crane as if in competition. My sister punched straight through the willow heads and pulled me after her.
“Hello?” we asked, more quietly now.
“Ava!” said Ossie. “It’s a dredge.”
“Oh.” For some reason the word made my heart speed. Now that she’d found the name for it I saw immediately that Ossie was right—this boat had a bucket and cables and a crane arm, presumably for bringing up the crumbling muck and digging a road or canal. We had black-and-white pictures of them hanging in our museum: The Dredge and Fill Campaign, 1886–1942.
Ossie was already moving toward it. The canal had swollen to seven or eight feet and twisted and hissed now like an unbungalowed snake; the recent rains would have driven it even higher. I guessed that the dredge would have continued on, too, but it had gotten hung up in the crooked pincers of the mangroves. Something about the angle of its entry made me think of a key that had been jammed hard into the wrong lock. Several buzzards sat on the dipper bucket. Once I noticed the birds I started to see them everywhere: one was slim-winged on one of the crane’s ladders. One was eating a squirrel on the hull. There was something canny and bald about their attention, their tiny wet eyes. I felt like these buzzards had been waiting here for us, for a long time.
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