Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  Ossie didn’t seem to notice them; she was intent on reaching the boat. She took the first-moon-man leap over the canal and I followed. The deck was a dull, uneven black. Slick. We got the cuddy cabin door to open, which took a lot of one-two-three!ing and team wrenching. When the door came loose, colors flooded over us. I screamed, too, and covered my face with my arms, and if Ossie hadn’t caught me I might have fallen into the wedge of canal between the shoreline and the boat. In that second I knew that I’d been wrong this whole time: that my sister was psychic, that the whole world was haunted, and now a ghost was tuning itself like a luminous string above me. Then the ghost broke into particulates of wings.

  “Calm down, dummy, it’s just a bunch of moths.”

  Moths jumbled tunelessly above our heads, kaleidoscoping in this way that looked like visible music to me—something that would be immediately audible to an alligator or a raccoon but that we human Bigtrees couldn’t hear. Could my sister hear them? I wondered. She was picking a wedgie on the deck.

  “Hear what, Ava?” She freed a tiny, beating moth from my bangs. Moths kept coming at us in unbelievable numbers. “My God,” she whispered, “there must be thousands of them in here!”

  “More than that.”

  “You heard somebody in the boat, Ava?”

  “No, that’s why I was asking. I don’t hear anything.”

  The cloud of moths drew their darker blues across the pale egg of the sky. Now I felt stupid. Nothing about these cake-icing blues suggested ghosts or monsters.

  “Well, only one way to know for sure. Ready, Ava?”

  “You bet I’m ready.” Wings painted our faces. “For what?”

  Ossie yanked me into the cabin, sunlight flashing everywhere as we pulled at the door; a second later the moths were outside a dark porthole, and we were inside the machine.

  Inside the cabin of the dredge barge we found:

  Flaking metal everywhere in these fantastic reds and greens;

  The staring socket of a pole sticking straight out of the floor;

  A box of lemon candies called Miss Callie’s Pixie Dust, which looked like the flavors of spinsterdom, yellow and soda brown;

  A man’s work shirt, size medium, long sleeves and white-and-canary checks;

  A mosquito veil;

  A dingy WPA jacket;

  A cypress workbench, rotted through, its surface slimed with various life-forms;

  A rag beneath this that looked as powdery and dry as the last century, something the last century had used to wipe its lips; it smelled wheaty and sicksweet, like beer, and it stuck to the floor;

  A skeeter bar bleached the lunar blue of salt;

  A four- or five-gallon bucket with the initials “L.T.” scratched in these somehow polite letters onto the side;

  Tools I didn’t recognize inlaid on hooks along the walls, fishermen’s swords, I thought: something like a spear with an antlered tip;

  A mucky key—I wiped it golden again on my shirt hem and bit its teeth straight;

  A map.

  We smoothed the scrolled things: illegible mechanical diagrams, the map and the veil. The wavy mosquito netting was made of an amazingly old and weird material that couldn’t be straightened; I tied it over my face like a surgeon and it kept crimping at my nose. I sneezed into its tiny squares. Haunted, a frantic voice in me said, haunted, but my hands disagreed with this hysterical lady: everything I touched here confirmed itself as solidly cloth or wood or rope.

  “Be careful with that stuff, Ossie! The Chief might want it, for the museum …”

  Ossie was climbing into the galley. I saw cabinets furry with damp greenery, an accordion pump, a sink with a pox of rust around a black faucet. The sink was still full of tiny copper forks and spoons and a squat thermos that for some reason made my heart constrict. I wished we’d thought to bring flashlights. We’d only been inside the dredge cabin for a few minutes but I half-expected to see a moon outside, stars the color of blood, a totally changed world. I peered through a porthole: there was the sun, beaming down at us like a dim-witted aunt. There were the same oblivious trees.

  I ducked my head back inside the dredge; Ossie was taking swimmer’s breaths with her eyes closed. She was sitting on the floor between puddles of water and clotted oil, the Ouija board on her lap. She tugged her skirt over her dirty knees and blinked up at me like some waylaid picnicker.

  “What are you doing? What—you think there are ghosts here?” I tried to use Kiwi’s roller-coaster intonations on her (I’d seen his sarcasm work like an ax to break her milder possessions). “Tell the ghost it smells like farts in here. Ask the ghost if I can have one of his lemon candies.”

  One eye snapped open. “Gross, Ava. Let me concentrate, okay? Please don’t eat the candies from the thirties. Remember how sick you got from the candy corns, and that stuff wasn’t even six months old!”

  Ossie smoothed the work shirt that we’d found and put it in her duffel. She was always muling around this duffel now, which must have weighed a ton—it contained The Spiritist’s Telegraph, apple snacks, and her bath-towel turban and various occult supplies.

  “Why do you get to have that? What if I wanted the map?”

  “You can have the hammer. And maybe the rag.”

  “Oh, gee, thanks …” I stared into the crowd of shadows toward the barge’s stern. The buzzards had all vanished from the railings. The hull was rocking slightly.

  “We should go pretty soon, Ossie. We should probably go now.”

  But we stayed, opening the years-glued cabinets.

  I kept returning to the map, which we’d weighted with a rock on the wormy workbench. The map had the greenish tint of great age and drew a world I didn’t recognize: MODEL LAND COMPANY/DREDGING OBJECTIVE read the insignia on the bottom, each word boxed together in gray and red lines like a locomotive car. The initials “L.T.” in the left-hand corner again, that same well-mannered handwriting. L.T. had added a date this time: December 12, 1936. Above this inscription, a filigree of golden hairs with tiny numbers (A-7, A-8 …) cut through the grid. Water was blue, that was easy to figure out. Also you could see the black powder kegs of the pinelands, and teak shadings that seemed to correspond to the saw-grass prairies. Other lines were drawn in golden pen, each one numbered and lettered—were these supposed to be rivers? A system of canals?

  “Ossie! Do you know how to read this thing?”

  I pinned the map against the starboard dredge window with my thumb so that sunlight filtered through its onionskin of colors. We crowded in and touched the parchment in the same nervous way, pinching our elbows back in wonderment, because lookit, Osceola said: the bottom half of the map was totally empty, just pleated space.

  “I wonder why these guys never made it to the Gulf?” Ossie traced the green spindle of our panhandle, letting one long fingernail trail all the way down to the colored line between our swamp and nowhere. “Ava, see that? The map just stopped.”

  “Ossie! That sounds like a question from a scary movie. Now watch, here comes the part in the movie where a monster bursts out and eats us!”

  “You’re right. He’s been hiding here all this time!” She made claws with her hands and rose onto her toes, pretending to menace me. “Blah!”

  We giggled for too long; then we turned to stare at a padlocked hatch door in the center of the cabin. It was stained the thin green of bread mold and wouldn’t open. I thought about the silhouette of a man that I had seen or imagined. I could guess what the Chief would say: Girls, that dredge crew just ran out of money. The Gulf route got cut short because this Model Land Company couldn’t finance it. Nothing supernatural about that fate.

  When no monsters materialized, we went back to looking at the map.

  Ossie pointed to faint shadings that we thought might be Mahogany Hammock, West Lake, the Wet Lungs, but we couldn’t be sure because the map didn’t have a key. The names that did appear—Syrup Kettle, Snake Bight, Poor Ashley’s Island, Dead Pecker Slough—were differen
t from the ones people used now. Some of the hammocks and camps didn’t exist anymore, if they ever had. We marveled that the mapmaker wrote in a lovely cursive, just like our mom. This amazed us, that a muck rat had looped his p’s and q’s during the Great Depression (as if cursive were somehow our mom’s invention). This map was like unfinished homework. Whoever drew it up had missed dozens of tree islands that we had personally explored.

  “Eew, Ava, look!” Ossie kicked backward and nearly knocked me over. In the corner a mullet screwed its eye at the low roof, still scaled in gel and gloom.

  “You scared me, Ossie! What’s wrong with you? It’s just a dead fish. You act like some Loomis girl …”

  A foamy urine-yellow liquid came sloshing out of the galley hole, our movements having caused the great barge to rock on its keel, and we screamed with laughter and disgust as we scrambled up onto the workbench. Perhaps we’d jostled or reanimated something? Because just then the death stink, which I’d barely noticed until now, became overpowering. I hid my nose and mouth under my T-shirt collar and breathed in my mother’s perfume. For a moment I pretended to feel a wonderful guilt, like Mom will hate that we are out here. When she finds out she will punish us for sure. Our mother had that maternal sixth sense for when her kids were up to stupid or dangerous things. For a second I could really see our mother sitting in her wicker chair, humming one of her tuneless songs—in addition to being the world’s worst chef our mom was cheerfully tone-deaf. I knew this vision wasn’t anything like Ossie’s possessions—it was just a stupid, lucid daydream—but with my face inside my orange T-shirt I breathed Mom’s smell in the weave of my clothes and I just pretended. Mom was angry, not worried yet. She was drafting punishments. Her brown foot in a lake of sun on our porch, tapping at air, waiting on us …

  I shivered and heard my breathing getting shallow. The dredge felt like a plummeting submarine to me, even though the portholes were level with the shining leaves.

  “Give me that key, Ava.”

  “What? No! Why?” This was the one item I wanted to keep. I tossed the bag of ossified lemon drops at her instead.

  “Hey, I dare you to eat one of Miss Callie’s Grossest Candies. I’ll give you a dollar.”

  “Where’s the key, Ava?”

  “You don’t even know what it’s the key to,” I whined. “One more minute …”

  Ossie returned to the galley with her Ouija board in tow and let me fool with the key for a little longer. When I next looked up, a dark blue had wrapped around the portholes. Outside I saw clouds rising like bread; one of these turned out to be the moon. A storm was coming, then—on a clear night on Swamplandia! we could see millions of stars. “We should go, we should go,” I kept saying, trying the key in various metallic fissures, bouncing on my sneaker rubber to make the barge jump. I touched the puckered rag, my share of the treasure. I was going to leave that candy. I’d read enough myths and fairy tales to know how eating some deadman’s candies would end. Most likely they were poisonous or carried some bad enchantment.

  “Ossie, hurry up. It’s late and I’m starving. If we wait any longer we’re going to be like those Donners …”

  Then I regretted bringing this up. Ossie, to the best of my knowledge, had not yet dated a Donner.

  “You go. They’re not finished with me yet.”

  Ossie was hunched over her Ouija board, which she’d spread onto the grouty galley counter, where dead mosquitoes turned on little black puddles.

  I returned uneasily to our damp treasure: I squeezed a candy and discovered that it was uncrushable; I mopped my sweat up with the elderly rag; I ran the bitter green teeth of the key up and down my underarm. The odd key didn’t fit into any slot or box on the boat. When nothing happened I ran the key along my collarbone. I tried again. I could hear my sister humming one of her pig-Latin-sounding spells in the galley. The key bit into the flesh of my neck, two dots of blood appearing. Turn, turn, turn. Come on. Do something. I glanced over at Ossie and placed it on my tongue; it tasted like a soda tab. I put the key under my right armpit like Mom’s thermometer and I waited.

  Nothing flew open in my heart or brain. I didn’t start speaking in tongues or brim to fullness with some spirit. No hinge swung. So my body was not a keyhole after all.

  Then my whole face felt hot and tight as a mask and I realized that I’d been hoping for real sorcery. The Spiritist’s Pathetic Black Telegraph! It was an embarrassing hope; I hadn’t conjured anything but a ragged red scratch up to my armpit, where I’d pushed up my shirtsleeve and tractored over my skin with the key. Disappointment had introduced us, me and the hope—it took the key’s failure to teach me what I was doing with the key.

  Once Mom and Ossie and I spent an afternoon alone together in her hospital room. We were watching the small TV above her bed politely, as if the TV were a foreign dignitary giving an unintelligible lecture, and waiting for any news from Dr. Gautman. As if on cue, that lame movie from the sixties started playing, Ladies in Waiting. A quintet of actresses haunt the punch bowl—they are supposed to be spinster sisters or spinster best friends, or maybe just ugly and needy acquaintances—anyhow, these pink chameleons, voiceless in their party chignons, they stand around the back of a ballroom having flashbacks for most of the movie, regretting older events in their minds, ladling cups of glowing punch from a big bowl, and only after the dying violin note of the final song do they at last step away from the wall. “Oh, but we did want to dance!” the actresses cry at the end of the scene, their faces changing almost totally. All these angry multiplying women.

  Hopes were like these ladies, Mom told us. Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart. Our mom had become agitated as the movie credits rolled: There had never been a chance for them! What stupid women. That day we watched TV with her until the hospital began to empty, until the lights went white as a screech and the room grew so quiet …

  Mom said that she was meeting all her pink ladies in the hospital. She had been hoping for the craziest things! For another baby. For your father to … well. For you girls … (and in her silence you could hear at least a thousand verbs). She’d touched her IV bag and sighed to us that a wallflower in bloom was very very angry, very scary.

  “Okay,” Ossie called from the galley hole, packing up the Ouija. “I’m ready to go.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  My sister reached a hand up to fix my hair, her palm stained a deep maroon from touching the old gaffs. They did not really look like gaffs though. Not in that half-light. They hung flat against the aft wall like long red and black piano keys, or farm tools for the harvest of an unimaginable crop.

  “Nobody. Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Nothing. Ava, I think we’d better go now.”

  “Hey, are you lonely here, Ossie?”

  We were back in our room, dozing in that span of light-headed, hungry time that comes before dinner. “Dinner” didn’t really happen anymore—we were defrosters of burgers and Pick Up Club meals—but for some reason we still rolled down the stairwell every night at seven o’clock. In the old days, good smells filled the kitchen (misleading smells, since our mom’s cooking strategy was to throw a couple of raw things into a greased pan and wait to see what happened, like watching strangers on a date). Two voices, the Indian braid of our parents’ voices, called up to us.

  “No.” Ossie frowned without looking up at me. “I’m busy, chickee. If you’re lonely, go watch TV.”

  “I don’t mean here, like in this room. I mean here-here. Where we live. Are you lonely on the island? Do you wish we could, I dunno, live on the mainland? Go to high school, like Mom did?”

  Ossie rolled over and stared at me thoughtfully. She stood and walked to the windowsill, hugged the raw pillow to her chest—I’d been pretending not t
o know where all of Risa’s daisy pillowcases had gone, making noises of annoyance along with her for weeks, encouraging my sister to blame the phantom of Millard Fillmore, when in fact I had used all the pillowcases in the house to make a carrier for my pet alligator, who was now eleven inches—almost a full foot! I was going to tell my sister about her when she hit a foot for sure. My sewing was bogus and the carrier looked like a Franken-quilt of weird linens. To be honest, I think the red Seth was a little embarrassed to ride around in it.

  “The mainland. You’re asking me if I’m a Kiwi? If I want to leave home for Loomis County?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want to go there. You neither, right? I mean, I bet Kiwi likes it. I think it could be okay to go visit him. Remember when we stayed on the mainland during the hurricane? At the Bowl-a-Bed hotel? That wasn’t so bad.”

  Pins clattering in the lobby even after the storm began—that’s what I remembered—gutter balls and the occasional strike still audible over the rising wind. Cold sodas and nuclear-orange crackers you could get for a quarter from a vending machine. We’d all piled into a single room. The Chief and Grandpa Sawtooth had climbed onto the balcony during the eye of the storm to smoke half a pack of cigarettes, and eleven-year-old Kiwi had followed to inform them about lung disease. At eight o’clock the power went out. Mom had read the TV Guide to us by candlelight.

  “Yeah, that time was okay,” said Ossie. “I liked the shower cap, remember that?”

  “The shower cap! Mom said we looked like actresses in it!”

  (To be clear, we were talking about plastic hats. Disposable bath hats, used, with black curls of stranger hair in them. My sister and I dug into those jeweled soaps and shrink-wrapped bath hats as if we’d found a sultan’s treasures next to the minty hotel crapper.)

  “That was fun. And all the mainlanders got so grumpy when they didn’t have hot water, and the Chief said that a Bigtree could shower in a Seth’s spit, remember? How hard he made Mom laugh?”