Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  Louis disembarked in Titusville and signed a six-month contract with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He wrote his name out LOUIS THANKSGIVING, dropped the Auschenbliss, and then looked up and down the dusty street as if he’d just gotten away with a crime. Why did anybody fool with guns, he wondered, when he had just dispatched Mr. Auschenbliss and the cat-eyed Mrs. Auschenbliss with one bloodless swipe?

  “There’s Indians, but they got their own camp,” the recruiter told him in a patient voice, as if this were a concern he frequently allayed. “There’s coloreds here, though, we haven’t segregated your camp yet …” He glanced up from Louis’s paperwork to see if this would be a problem. Louis stared incredulously back at him. He wanted to tell the man that he had spent the last sixteen years living with animals and a pack of brothers whose great entertainment on the Iowa weekends was to devise practical jokes with bulls and farm machinery that had nearly killed Louis in the fields. Louis had no problems with any man alive, black, white, or Indian, so long as his surname was not Auschenbliss.

  On his first stint he got deployed with fifteen other men, who were introduced to him by their professions (“This here is the cook, the cap, the civil engineer, the lieutenant, the scout …”). He was now part of a government team surveying the woods around Ocala. Thirty dollars a month for income and try as you might, you couldn’t spend more than five dollars of that unless you were a serious and self-hating gambler—what could you buy on the swamp besides cigarettes, penny stamps, camp equipment? Louis bought a mess kit for fifteen cents. He slept in a tent with five other men, their legs tangled together, the odor of sweat and cigarettes percolating inside the tent’s bubble. Outside their tent, rising out of the scraped stone like the earth’s own exhalation, came the odor of peat, a great seawall of it, nothing so subtle or evanescent as a fragrance—no, this was stuff with a true stink. In open sunlight the peat became an olfactory roar that recalled to Louis Thanksgiving the feculence that hung over Clarinda. Cow pies, Louis T. thought, wrinkling his nose, farm perfume; but out here the air was salted, the feculence quadrupled. He complained about it good-naturedly, happy to have something to say to the other men at night. Our legs are tangled, he realized that first night and every night thereafter, saying nothing and moving not one inch once he found his bedroll, the tent humid with the other men’s careful closeness. Every man had to maintain his fixed position; you had to train your body until even in sleep it remained a tethered boat that wouldn’t rock. There was news that a surveyor for the train company had been beaten to death south of Tallahassee after climbing into another man’s bedroll stark naked—a fairy, a funny one, the men hissed.

  Nights came and the moon was so bright that it penetrated the tent cloth. Louis was often awake until the filmy predawn, listening to the hum of the mosquitoes as if even this were something holy. He was in love with everybody, with the heat and the stink and the foul teakettle dredge that had cut a channel so far from his childhood. He was in love with the crushed oyster beds and the uprooted trees. He was smart enough, too, to keep these feelings to himself. Osceola described the way that Louis liked to hoard a hairy kiwi all day and then waited until the other laborers were snoring to open it. He’d pushed a thumb through the furry skin and released the kiwi’s subliminal perfume through the tent. The first time Louis had done this, he’d watched as the men smiled in their sleep; after that he did it nightly, smiling himself as he imagined pleasant dreams wafting over them. His good mood spilled over into the mornings, and a few of the more taciturn crewmen grumbled that this farm kid must have a screw loose—who woke up whistling in 102-degree heat? What sort of special asshole kept right on beaming at you when his cheeks were flecked with dead mosquitoes and his own pink blood?

  “Look who’s grinning like an imbecile in the dead heat of noon,” the lieutenant said, shaking his head. “You are the most good-natured boy I have ever met, Louis—honestly, it’s a little worrisome. You just better not snap and kill us in our sleep! I could tell you stories. Strange things happen to personalities this far out, you know.”

  Every so often, the captain passed around a flask of purple apple moonshine, joking that he hoped it didn’t blind the men. Louis thought the captain’s hooch tasted like a mixture of Christmas cider and gasoline—it didn’t make his personality any stranger or corrupt his vision, but his smile shrank, and often he had to excuse himself very politely to run and puke over the stern. Louis still had a kid’s broad face, a farm face, but with a sharp nascent handsomeness lurking around his cheekbones—he had what you’ll hear described as a “lantern jawline,” with its presidential thrust, its hint of bedroom avarice. It would have been irresistible to a woman, had there been any such creature in the general environs. The last one Louis T. had seen was the cook’s wife, who had a tall and mannish figure with a dishlike face and mean little eyes, a dirty cloud of yellow hair. That must be the cook’s older brother, Louis T. had thought as he watched them embrace at Fort Watson. Why is the cook’s older brother wearing a dress?

  “She’s stately, you bastards,” the cook had said, correcting for gossip.

  So there was no woman around to tell Louis T. that he had become, quite suddenly, a handsome man. This had not been a foregone conclusion: in childhood, in Clarinda, he had been a bland, doughy creature. The only things that had foreshadowed this turn were Louis’s hazel eyes and the promising size of him. Louis T. wouldn’t know that he was in possession of this beauty until after his death, when he first appeared to my sister inside a pool of water and she told him so.

  The dredge clanked downstream with the dipper handle swinging. For the first time in his short life, Louis had real friends, all sorts walking alongside him into the long glade—calm men, family men, bachelors, ex-preachers, hellions, white men, black men, the childen of Indians and freed slaves; Adams, who had kicked a coral snake away from Louis’s naked big toe and saved his life with a casual grunt; ex-army boys who followed the deer into damp hammocks; drunks who took potshots at the queer golden cats that stalked the perimeter of their camp, and missed; gamblers who took all of Louis’s money with a pair of jacks and then gave (some of) it back to him at the day’s end; all of them, every man was Louis’s friend. When there was light in the sky they waded forward. They surveyed the old section lines of the national forest during the workweek, and during the weekends they “rambled,” as LaVerl, the buck sergeant said: shooting, fishing, sometimes even gator hunting along the nests that filled the unused railway bed. The cook told Louis to collect two dozen leathery eggs from these alligator nests, and then he made the whole crew a dinner of fishy-tasting omelettes.

  When the light expired, they slept. White-tailed deer sprinted like loosed hallucinations between the tree islands. Sometimes Louis fell asleep watching them from the deck and it worried him that he couldn’t pinpoint when the dream began: deer rent the mist with their tiny hooves, a spotted contagion of dreams galloping inside Louis. There were bad fires that blurred the world; in the summer months you could see smoke rising almost daily, wherever lightning struck the pure peat beds.

  Louis heard from the other surveyors that men all over the country were “hunting a week for one day’s work.” Sometimes when he thought about this he felt so lucky that it almost made him sick to his stomach. Happiness could be felt as a pressure, too, Louis realized, more hard-edged and solid than longing, even. In Clarinda he had yearned for better in a formless way, desire like a gray milk churn; in fact he’d been so poor in Iowa that he couldn’t settle on one concrete noun to wish for—a real father? A girl in town? A thousand acres? A single friend? In contrast, this new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it. Well, Louis Thanksgiving determined that he was not going to lose it, and he was never going back. The Depression was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He had a crisp stack of dollars, a uniform with his initials stitched in raspberry thread on the pocket, pig and grits in his belly.

  El
ated, wanting never to leave, he signed another contract, this time to dredge a canal clear across the swamp to the Gulf Coast for the Model Land Company. They were going to drain the swamp and develop and sell it, and they needed a team of skilled muck rats to do it.

  But nobody had explained to Louis just how deep into the swamp they would have to go now, and how quickly their bosses at the Model Land headquarters in St. Augustine, Florida, would expect the crew to drain the floodplains with a single bucket arm—a Herculean task for any machine, especially for the ancient and fumey Model Land dredge, which made the government vessel look like some futuristic spaceship by comparison.

  The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, and spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through twenty-four feet of peat before hitting stabilizing rock.

  And the crew had changed, too—none of the CCC boys had signed on with him. LaVerl was going back to his family’s horse farm in Savannah, and the lone Indian on the crew, Euphon Tigertail, who had survived subhuman conditions while working on the Panama Canal, decided that he couldn’t work in the swamp any longer. He’d been undone by minuscule foes, the chizzywinks, and the deer flies. “You sure you want to be a dredgeman for this outfit, Lou?” Euphon had whispered, both of them staring at the hulk of the dredge. Its digger arm was as tall as a house and sunk deep into a quagmire. A pair of enormous cast-steel feet gave the contraption a drunken, donkey-legged appearance. The stack slumped toward the saw-grass prairie, which looked like a drowned and shimmering field of wheat. For a second Louis thought of the distant Auschenbliss pastures and shuddered.

  “You’d be better off gum tapping in the turpentine woods. It’s all soup doodly in those prairies, it ain’t like the pine rocklands. There’s nothing piney about it. No elevation, Lou. No lakes or trees or breaks. It’s just saw grass till you want to scream. You won’t have a dry day again for months. You’ll go in there and never come out.”

  How could you make a mistake when you had one option? Louis felt that his hellish past exempted him from all regrets. But he was humbled by his friends’ defection—and a little shocked, hearing their complaints about the last months. Ultimately, Louis felt an almost romantic embarrassment, listening to the grizzled guys talk—it turned out that the same nights and routes that he recalled as heavenly had been, to the other CCC men, “godawful months, a nightmare” and “the valley of the shadow—only full of mosquitoes!” When the dredge anchor hit at Chokoloskee their whole CCC fraternity came loose like a knot, and he and Euphon and LaVerl all parted at the dock like strangers.

  His first job on the dredge was described by the splinter-toothed captain as “involved”: he had to dive overboard with a knife clenched in his teeth and cut the slimy ropes of cattails away from the dredge’s wheel and shaft. “Removing detritus” was what the captain called this labor, which tasted like brine and sour blood. Dee-tree-tus. A name from a book, Louis T. figured as he removed the knife from his mouth and spit copper. He had split his lower lip. Five times his first day he’d had to jump overboard into that stinking gator marinade and hack at the weedy ropes.

  “What do I do if there’s a gator?” Louis asked the first night at supper.

  “You put that knife between the blamed scaly-back’s eyes, he’ll lay offa you. Or get the base of his neck, sever his spinal cord.” Ferguson, one of the cranemen, had gone gator hunting with some white glade crackers once and now claimed to be the crocodile expert.

  “Don’tcha go for the eyes themselves, though. The crocs can retract those.”

  He held up two gnarled fingers and jerked them back into his fist.

  “Thanks for the advice,” said Louis. He imagined screaming underwater and the tiny needles of salt against his gums and eyeballs. Louis, curiously modest, refused to strip before diving. He jumped in with his pants and cotton underwear on and kicked beneath the dross of slimy marine plants. His legs floated like two planks behind him, every muscle tensed, ready to jerk away from an alligator’s teeth.

  The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through twenty-four feet of peat before hitting stabilizing rock!

  Louis T. wasn’t a particularly quick learner, but he was strong and docile and within one month he was doing all sorts of jobs on the dredge: trimming greenish fat off the pork in the cookhouse, helping the sweating firemen to keep up steam. The men looked like beekeepers in their cotton gloves and mosquito veils, their lungs filling with black mangrove smoke from the smudge fires they burned constantly to keep the insects away.

  “Line up, boys! Take your medicine,” the cap said, pressing indigo flecks of charcoal and sulfur into Louis’s cupped hands. Every time you asked what they were for you got a different answer: ear infections, hay fever, styes, skin lesions. Gideon Tom said the pills were placebos, although Louis noticed that he still queued up to receive them like a good Catholic boy in line for communion.

  “Ahhh,” Gideon said, extending his chaw-stained tongue.

  “Stick out your palm, you jackass, I’m not your damn mother!” the cap howled. If the pills were making a difference, it was hard to imagine how bad you could go without them. Men held their fallen orangey scabs up to the sun and cataloged them like entomologists. Week 1: Men couldn’t sleep for the bug bites; scratching at them, and fending off new ones, was an eight-hour endeavor. The insects had been a chronic irritation on the CCC barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they felt pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men’s own thirst. Their dense bodies put a fur on the steel hull of the Model Land dredge. More mosquitoes rose out of the cattails at dusk like tiny vampires. Theodore Glyde, the dredge’s dour engineer, grumbled that he was working back-to-back shifts on the dredge, quitting the deck at sundown to work a second job as a bug killer. Week 2: Everybody’s legs acquired the cracked sheen of cockroach wings. Louis, who had hosted much more colorful bruises back in Auschenbliss country, poured a little vial of alcohol over his shins and returned to work. Back on the CCC barge, they had never been more than twelve miles from a port with a doctor, but now they had entered an unmapped part of the swamp where wounds had the opportunity to fester. Week 3: Sores began to ooze. Of all the dredgemen, only Louis T. was indefatigably happy. He volunteered to haul water off-shift and shared his larded fried eggs with whomever.

  “Louis, are you on a diet or what?” Gideon Tom grumbled; he was leaning against the starboard railing next to Louis, gobbling down a plate of Louis’s eggs with a guilt-racked expression. “You should eat, kid. It’s not good to share the way you do out here. What the heck are you always staring at?”

  “The landscape.”

  “The landscape!” Gid snorted. His broad nose wrinkled as it often did when someone said something he didn’t like, as if he were trying to sniff out what was wrong with their reply. “There’s something … something womanly about watching that, Lou.”

  Louis grinned over at Gideon Tom, shrugged; even the other men’s ribbing made him happy. Daybreak, sunset: he liked to watch the red sun pour through the tiny doors of his mosquito screen until his blue eyes filled. Behind the screen he had the face of a man in church.

  “Hey, Gid?” he asked his friend when they were baling wastewater later, the sun a pinhead of color behind the green trees. “Gid … are you anxious to get back?”

  Warily his friend turned to him. “Get back where?”

  And what Louis really meant was Anywhere. Back to land. Back to themselves, back to their names without jobs, back to any motionless, dirty place—or back to either of the twin poles that the swamp road they’d been digging was meant to connect. He had heard of hydrophobes, and he wondered if there was another word like that, for him. Or for what he was becoming. Terraphobia? It was a fear of the rooted, urban world, of cars and towns and
years on calendars. He wouldn’t be the dredgeman there, that was for sure. Sometimes, at night, Louis thought in a dreamy way about becoming the dredge’s saboteur—plucking parts like flowers from the engine room. It was only a thought, and a crazy one; but the closer they got to the Gulf the sicker he felt. His sweats got worse when he pictured the dawn horizon solidifying—a sudden break in the mangroves that revealed the swallowing saltwater ocean, the big success for which the bosses of the Model Land Company had hired the dredge and her crew.

  “Jesus, Louis, you’re just like what’s-his-name? Greek guy. Narcissus! Just making puppy eyes down at your face in that bucket.”

  “Sorry. I was getting a little … homesick, I guess. So you’re excited for the end? For the Gulf side of things?”

  “Fool, of course I am!” Gideon laughed, pouring the black water over the railing onto the head of a small and outraged alligator. “Am I excited for a paycheck and a woman and a bed? Am I excited to climb out of this soggy hell and get a pair of pants that’s not infested with forty kinds of insects, and get a pair of shoes where I can’t count my toes? Goddamn, Lou, I’ll be singing ‘Ave Marias’! I’ll be diving for land!”