“Did the Chief call you to get rid of them?”
“No. What’s your name?”
“Ava.”
“Ava.” He shook my hand. “Can you keep a secret?” He reached his gloved hand out and pressed two fingers against my lips. “Listen to this.”
The first three sounds he made were familiar to me. A green-backed heron, a feral peacock, a bevy of coots. Then he made another, much deeper noise, as close to an alligator bellow as I have heard a human make but not quite that, exactly. It flew up octaves into an otherworldly keen. A braided sound, a rainbow sound. I stepped closer, and closer still, in spite of myself. I tried to imagine what species of bird could make a sound like that. A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning.
“What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer.
The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth.
“You.”
The Bird Man told me that he’d be leaving our island in the morning, now that the buzzards were cleared. “I saw that you folks could use some help,” he said, his feathered shoulders heaving up and down in a shrug. That was how he operated these days, he explained. He wasn’t one for drawing up contracts.
“You’re welcome to stay the night at our house,” I heard myself tell him. “At the moment we have plenty of room.”
I was an alligator wrestler, accustomed to bold movements. On the walk back I took this Bird Man’s hand in my own without looking up at his face and was shocked and pleased when he didn’t release me. Now we are friends, I thought hopefully as we slid sideways over the muck-soils. My roof was a stern-looking triangle above the trees. I’d left every upstairs light on; behind the palm trees our house looked like a fat man taking little yellow breaths in the dark. The Bird Man let me squeeze the empty thumbtip of his leather glove. He’d heard about our shows, he said. The Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular, Swimming with the Seths. I had to explain to him about Mom’s death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.
“I’m very sorry about your mother. What is your performance like without her?”
“Oh, we haven’t been wrestling much lately,” I said. “Our show is really famous, though. It’s gotten written up in a bunch of newspapers and we were on the seven o’clock news once, the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular …”
The Bird Man soared vertically above me, taller than the Chief, six three or six four, and thin as a scarecrow, and walking next to him I felt like a yapping dog, each of my stories about my family and the Seths like a tug at the stranger’s trouser cuff. He didn’t ask many questions, but he slowed down so that I could keep up with him and he smiled as I babbled about the Seth of Seths, my grandparents, my favorite alligator-wrestling victories. He was such an interested listener that I wondered if it was possible that this Bird Man had been lonely, too.
We were a quarter mile from the house when the Bird Man asked to see my show. To see me, specifically, wrestle an alligator.
“Oh! Sure! You mean … now?”
With my ears buzzing, I led the Bird Man (a tourist!) toward the Gator Pit. When we reached the stadium, I showed the Bird Man to an orange seat in one of the middle rows. Out of habit I began to set up as usual but my heart was thumping. I didn’t know how to work the follow spot or start the music; I was too short to reach the rack of gator nooses. I turned the popcorn machine on. I pulled on a wrinkled brown bathing suit I found backstage, its leg holes very loose on me, the material shivery and dank, and then I climbed the ladder to the diving board. I did not tell the Bird Man that while I had watched Hilola Bigtree’s Swimming with the Seths act hundreds of times, and even practiced swimming in the Pit with her, tonight was going to be my first dive. I stared at my bare feet on the stenciled stars and took a jittery breath.
I peered down into the water—I couldn’t see any of the alligators. I’d figured out how to work the control panel for the auxiliary lamps that glowed along the edges of the Gator Pit and lit the stairs up the stadium rows, but backstage the follow spot sat lidded and dark.
I took a final breath and I was flying. Water flooded my nostrils. When I opened my eyes, I could see the Seths’ dim shapes from below, their great bellies that look like prehistoric pinecones and their dinosaur feet. I could see the glint of a Seth’s claws, curled motionless at the mountains of its sides—an alligator’s tail does all the work of swimming. Little starbursts of teeth, pebbles over lips. A three- or four-hundred-pound Seth sailed over my head, and I watched a thin jet of bubbles rising from my own nostrils. Far above me peach ovals opened on the water—a column of milky illumination from the stadium lamps. They seemed to gasp back their light as I swam for them, like good dreams on waking.
I swam as smoothly as I could for the edge of the Pit. My palms scooped through little nets of algae and something thicker. (Don’t look, don’t look, cautioned my mother’s voice inside me—often during shows I could hear her in my mind’s ear, directing me. She’d scream at you good if you goofed a move; she got protective at odd moments. Our mom was her most conventionally maternal when she was watching one of us fight the gators.) A Seth floated above me as serenely as a souring iceberg, its huge legs contracting. Bubbles fell like crystals of salt from its thrashing tail. I surfaced as far as I could get from the Seths and scrambled up the ladder rungs. “Ta-da!” I said lamely. Without the Chief to hit the switch, the end of the show was harder to pinpoint. I caught my breath, my hands on my knees; then I walked around the Gator Pit fence to find the Bird Man in the stadium. He was standing up in the middle row, giving me a kind ovation.
“Beautiful, kid.” The Bird Man clapped his gloves together as I shook the water from my hair and grinned.
I had a feeling like I was still moving, still flying up and up toward the next surface. The stars greeted me like a second challenge. After months of the bad feeling—months of the sensation that I was evaporating, of practicing for wrestling shows we were never going to perform again—I could taste the old Bigtree victory. Suddenly I remembered: I am an alligator wrestler. This Bird Man’s eyes were like new lamps for the old performance. He kept smiling and smiling at me, and when his gaze rolled over my skinny legs, the pins of my knees became twin suns.
The Bird Man waited for me to finish drying off with one of the grungy towels we kept slung over the pine railing.
“That was really something, kid. You say you learned that from your mother?”
“Yup.” I smiled happily and squeezed my toes against the pool ledge, feeling suddenly shy. I got dizzy looking into the pure whites of his eyes. The alligators slid through the murk beyond the railing: lamplight opened there in soft petals between the black water and the alligators’ sand mounds. I switched the lights off; I knelt and checked the temperature of the Pit water with one finger. Then I led my new friend to our house.
This Bird Man was not what I’d expected a Bird Man to be; for starters, he was very kind. He did not conform to any of the common stereotypes of his profession: redneck exterminators, mangrove gypsies, backwoods ornithologists, black magicians, feathered druids, scam artists. This Bird Man volunteered very little about himself, his age or where he came from, but he told me that he’d been working hard all spring on account of the unusual migration. I wanted to ask, but did not: You do kill them, right? Or is that a rumor? And if you don’t kill the buzzards, where do you take them?
“Want to see something else?” I asked him as we walked down the wood-chip trail and turned at the shed. “It’s a real miracle.”
My flashlight found her first, its beam falling through the crepe of the palmetto straw. At her new length of twelve inches, the red Seth was almost too big for the tank now. She twisted her head and let out a dry hiss in the light.
“Beautiful,” the Bird Man said. He said it exactly r
ight, with the whistling wonder that I had dreamed the red Seth would elicit from a tourist. I thumbed her jaws open and flipped her over to display her checkering of belly scales, which tapered to the single row of scales down her tail (which was still fully half the length of her) as proud of her as if she were my own design.
“See? This is her palatal valve, the same fire-type color, pretty impressive, right? And these are her dorsal scutes …”
“Well,” he smiled, “I’ve never seen anything like her.”
He thanked me; he still hadn’t mentioned the money we Bigtrees owed to him for his avian removal services. This made me feel grateful and a little nervous. We couldn’t pay him, obviously. I was embarrassed, imagining handing him my dad’s voice on the phone. The Chief would offer him coupons instead of cash.
When we got to the house it was very quiet—Ossie hadn’t come home yet. I didn’t think she would tonight.
“I haven’t slept indoors in such a while,” the Bird Man told me absently from the bottom step. He touched our wall the way a child might touch the flesh of a strange animal, flattening his hand against the polished grain of the wood and frowning at it for a moment. The indoors was exotic to folks from the remote swamp, I guessed.
“Thanks again, kid.” He smiled at me. “Beds and linens. It’s like a little vacation.”
His coat made a shuffling sound against the wall of the stairwell.
“See you in the morning! The sixth step sags a little,” I called idiotically. “The towels are sort of dirty?”
I watched him disappear behind my brother’s bedroom door, trailing wispy blue-black feathers behind him. They floated on a slender flume of light from Kiwi’s bedroom, dreamy nicks suspended in the dimness, so small they seemed like molecules of night or visible scent. Should I offer him water, a toothbrush? Did he want a cookie or a sandwich before bed, like I did? For a swamp kid, a visit from a Bird Man was like a dark Christmas. I wished Mom or the Chief were there to help me work out the etiquette of the visit.
Within minutes I could hear our guest snoring behind the wall. I sank beneath a dirty cloud of sheets and lay open-eyed on the pillow. I tried to match my breaths with his snores. I had a feeling like I was dreaming although I was wide awake, staring at the beige cracks overhead and floating happily on my mattress. Maybe this was how a possession started? The Bird Man was no ghost, though, and I was grateful for his company. I had childish fantasies about this man: I wanted to hold his hand in the woods again. I wanted to put my ear on his chest, something I used to do with Mom. To listen to the thud-thud-thud of another heartbeat. For the first time in what felt like months, I slept all the way through a long furrow to dawn.
When I woke up from a dissolving dream of great happiness, Osceola was not in her bed. Light filtered through our window and when I read the clock I felt a little sick. I pulled on yesterday’s socks, my muck boots, and tied my grimy shoelaces. I tromped past the wax-fruit shine of the smaller reptiles’ plastic cage lids, still waking up. Searching for her from the crow’s nest of the kapok tree house, I felt chilled and annoyed. This time she wasn’t in the Gator Pit. I followed our old footsteps from yesterday’s trip to the ditch, which now felt like it had been a thousand years ago. Then our footsteps ran out, and fear unspooled through me as slowly as a yawn. The ditch that I returned to was empty. I remember it as being calm and wet, and very peaceful, flat as a pasture in the blue light.
As I approached the live oak in the center of the Last Ditch my heart began to pound—a glowing square was taped to peeling bark: a blank sheet of paper. No, I saw, hurrying forward, not blank, just white. There was a beautiful handwriting on it that I recognized:
Dear Ava,
I am eloping with Louis. That means we are going to the underworld to get married. Do not stay here by yourself. Get Gus to take you to the Chief. Ava I love you very much. Tell the Chief I love him too, and Grandpa and Kiwi. I will see you maybe.
—Ossie
All I could think was: Her spelling is perfect. I pictured Ossie in Kiwi’s empty room, looking up each word in his dictionary. Slowly I got up and walked to the bank of the canal, which that morning was swollen with rainwater and stained from the cypress roots. We’d checked our rivers against Louis Thanksgiving’s map, and it seemed possible that this canal in our backyard could be the very same artery that the Model Land Company dredge had dug out during the Great Depression. I peered around the river bend, saw only thin trees and moths.
Oh-no. Please-no. Mom …
Moths flapped in mute hysterics all along the canal. I counted hundreds, flying downriver like a second water.
The ditch is empty, I realized.
The dredge is gone.
CHAPTER TEN
Kiwi Climbs the Ladder
From the roof of the World, the pigeons looked like falling stars. It was a shame you couldn’t relax and enjoy the Olympic splendor of this, Kiwi thought, on account of how the pigeons kept shitting on everything. Their timing was uncanny, malevolent—the pigeons had gotten him twice this week, down his open work-shirt collar and splat across the back, and the King Suds Laundromat off I-95 was yet another mainland luxury that Kiwi couldn’t afford. Kiwi didn’t even have the bus fare to get to the King Suds Laundromat. He did not have sufficient quarters to pay tribute to King Suds, the mustachioed monarch who ran it. Instead, he took his uniform shirts and his losery boxer shorts into the dormitory showers and washed them with Leo’s dark green dandruff shampoo, which burned like acid on your skin. Somehow it had gotten onto his balls and into the webbing between his fingers and the shit just hunkered there like cold fire. He had developed a rash or a pox, something purplish and specklesome on his bony thighs that he was determined to ignore until it went away, or killed him.
“Ahh, Leo,” Kiwi moaned into the mildewed nave of the showers, “why is this shampoo so thick?”
Was Leo trying to regrow hair or something? In the break room his colleagues plugged their noses and made a big show of asking, “What smells like formaldehyde, yo?”
During their break hour, Vijay sighed and tugged at Kiwi’s slimy shirt hem. “I told you, I will lend you quarters to do your fucking laundry, you retard.”
“Laundry is my last priority right now, V.”
“Shit, I’d rethink that! Have you smelled you? I will, like, sneak your laundry into my house, bro. My mom loves doing laundry, it’s like this Immigrant Mother disorder? She uses Lluvia de las Montañas detergent—it’s so badass. You’ll smell like Costa Rica!”
The last thing Kiwi wanted was some other kid’s mother doting on him. Just the word “mom” still made his stomach flip.
“Ha-ha. Yeah. I am none to be fucked with.”
“Vijay. I need another job.”
“Yeah, I hear you.” He sighed happily and rolled his pant legs up. “Who don’t?”
The boys were sitting on the sooty edge of the roof overlooking the eastern side of the main lot, watching someone in a BMW double-park. An awesomely jawed man in chinos got out of the car, took a furtive look around, then sprinted on his loafer toes for the park entrance. Banker/lawyer, Kiwi thought, ticking down his taxonomic chart. Silk tie, comb-over, tassels. Something about his gait made the double-parker seem almost jolly; it was like watching an elf leave a Christmas surprise.
“Sing it with me now, Margie: what a d-d-douche.” Vijay was smiling his breaktime smile. You could tell time by that smile—5:45 must be just around the corner.
“D-d-d …”
Far below them, the Loomis traffic roared. A pigeon waddled along a pipe, lifting its mauve wings like an acrobat. Kiwi felt a stab of the unpredictable homesickness.
“How much do they make over there?” he asked quietly. He was pointing at the row of businesses that abutted the Leviathan hangar, which looked small as a ring of petrified rocks. As if someone had planted them around the World of Darkness, Kiwi thought, thinking for some reason of The Spiritist Telegraph. Those diagrams in the appendix of sacerdotal magi
c.
“Where? What are you talking about? The gas station? Don’t you read like every newspaper that was ever invented? Don’t you know the facts? People who work at gas stations get shot. They get capped, Marge.”
“No, no. The restaurant.” Kiwi pointed through the scrim of pigeons to a neon B.
“The Burger Burger? I would not really call that place a restaurant, bro. You can buy a cheeseburger there for a fucking quarter. You think the Burger Burger is going to pay you big money? Leo calls it the E. coli factory!”
“Leo eats there all the time.”
“They pay a dollar less than here and you smell like dead cow forever and all the girls are skanks, which is fine with me, but I swear to God they all got herpes.”
“Oh. I see.”
Kiwi wasn’t 100 percent on what that meant. What was the use of talking about anything? He needed to make a thousand dollars this month and he didn’t see how that was possible.
“Check their lips, bro.”
“Okay. I will. Poor girls.” Kiwi was sure he’d read about this ailment somewhere but he couldn’t quite recall the etiology—he would have to do some research later. Regardless of my findings, I am going to wolf like twelve of those burgers. Kiwi stared at the neon B and felt his mouth flood. Hellspawn Hoagies were eight dollars and he had thirty-two cents on his employee card.
Vijay was looking at him strangely.
“You cannot work there. Not to sound arrogant, bro? But without me around, they will destroy you.”
Swamplandia! Page 16