Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  “What are you talking about?” Who could he mean, “they”? The skanks?

  Vijay blew hair out of his left eye and looked at Kiwi darkly. “Everybody. The people who hear you talk.”

  “Oh.”

  Kiwi pushed greasy hair out of his own eyes—he couldn’t afford a haircut at the moment, either. On Swamplandia! Ossie had taken this duty over from his mother, surprising the other Bigtrees with the steadiness of her hands. Their compliments had irritated her—“Well, I’m not a chimpanzee, you guys. I can use scissors. I can cut in a straight line.” Now Kiwi had hanks of red hair that crimped in the heat like sea serpents.

  Yvans had offered to shave Kiwi’s skull bald for him (“For free, Margaret!”), but that seemed to Kiwi like a move of premature despair. Possibly he would bleed to death from lacerations on his head, or more likely he would be exposed to the cruel hail of female mockery. Also Yvans had more than once confessed to suffering weird ailments like “the shakes,” which didn’t seem, as the girls of the World would say, so super compatible with a razor.

  “Do you know any way I could, uh, supplement my income?” Kiwi asked. I’m going to save the park, he beamed out across the parking lot toward his sisters, in a direction that he believed led to their water—he could see one small bird rowing its wings into the sun over the interstate, centered up there like the face on a coin.

  Vijay was staring at him. “Are you asking me to rob a bank with you? Maybe you want me to pimp you out as an erotic dancer by the airport?”

  “Exotic.”

  “Erotic. Whatever, bro. Same thing.”

  Was it? Vijay lifted his shirt and rippled his abdomen like a belly dancer. Kiwi watched Vijay’s belly button pinch inward and roll sinuously back into existence, which was mesmerizing.

  “Quit acting gay, Vijay,” said Kiwi. “I’m serious here. I’m in trouble.”

  “How much do you think I could make, Marge? With moves like this?”

  “Zero dollars and zero cents.” (Bro! Kiwi remembered, too late now.) “Hey, I really don’t think you should be touching your abdomen to this roof like that? Because you will notice there is glass everywhere and you’re putting yourself at risk for tetanus …?”

  A seaplane made a noisy loop above them, fangs painted on its black nose in a simulacrum of an alligator’s grin. Don’t scream, he heard in Ava’s small growl. For a moment they were in the shadow of its wings, the roar of engines sucking their speech upward.

  “What is that?” he managed.

  “New ride. You didn’t hear about it?”

  Kiwi’s heart was in his throat—the seaplane was landing on the moat that surrounded the World, coming in so close that Kiwi thought its propeller would crash through the Leviathan windows. He dropped his head in anticipation of a phantom shower of glass, but when he looked again, the seaplane was skimming the surface of the moat. A heavy spray exploded around the seaplane’s fixed wings. Something about the way it landed, floats first, gave Kiwi the impression of teeth entering the water, the jet floats biting into the red-dyed water like two bright fangs. Probably just the effect the World of D. is going for here, Kiwi thought. Part of the grand theme.

  The seaplane blew red jets of foam across the water for another hundred yards or so, stopped with the whiskers of its propellers trembling near the Leviathan.

  “Oh my God,” said Kiwi.

  “Right? Say. You know who makes bank, Marge? Those pilots.”

  The World of Darkness had its own flight school, Vijay said. The managers were recruiting from inside the World, instead of doing outside hiring, because then they could pay the pilots less—$45,000 a year, said Vijay. Kiwi would have to sell his greenhorn sperm and platelets for a decade to make anywhere near that.

  “It’s not even that hard, supposedly. It’s like driving a bus of the sky.”

  As far as driving was concerned, Kiwi had once driven the tram into the side of Grandpa Sawtooth’s house. Sky-wise, he’d fallen out of Ava’s kapok tree house at age ten and broken both arms.

  “Huh. Forty-five thousand dollars. And how does one enroll in the, uh, the flight school?”

  Kiwi should have guessed that some new ride was under way. For weeks he’d heard the ear-splitting construction on the northern lot. From the roof he’d seen Caterpillars pushing the moat into an artificial harbor, the crews installing a slate dock on floating supports that looked like huge gray boxing gloves. The attraction was called the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse: a play on the Bible’s book of Revelations, of course, but also an allusion to a real event. In the 1940s, the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse were heralded as Loomis County heroes. They were young men, out-of-work supply pilots contracted by a private millionaire who had purchased great tracts of swamp from Henry Disston, the potbellied Florida land baron, whose baronial hairstyle was as black and wavy as charred bacon. The Four Pilots carried the granules of their particular plague in restaurant salt and pepper shakers. They dumped thousands of Australian melaleuca seeds from the windows of low-flying Cessnas, shaking them all over the salt marshes and the saw-grass prairies and the tree islands. Would-be farmers dreamed of nights lit by fragrant globes of citrus, yellow fields of corn, and Angus cattle black as jackboots, the worthless saw grass vanquished, the alligators dead, the water drained.

  Then in 1981, at the crest of a fitful wave of public interest in the swamp, the famous late-night talk-show host J. P. Twomey had done a series called The Four Pilots of the Apocalypse about the unwitting villains who had planted the seeds of the swamp’s destruction. It still got screened on channel 2, Loomis’s “cultural” station. J. P. Twomey had interviewed the surviving pilot, Mickey Hotchkiss, now a white-haired man with a voice as small as Michael Jackson’s wearing what appeared to be women’s palazzo pants. Mickey Hotchkiss was no longer entirely with it, was the implication of his wardrobe choices. He seemed shy but also happy to be on TV. After denouncing him for nixing a unique ecosystem—“putting the whammy on the wetlands,” as Twomey put it—J.P. forced Mickey to look at photographs of the melaleuca’s conquest. A haunting slide show commenced: acres and acres of new forests composed of a single multiplying tree, the melaleuca; fires burning on the drained land in northern Florida, where blue-green sheets of water used to flow from Lake Okeechobee all the way to the Gulf of Mexico; a final grim view of the swamp from above, silver corridors of melaleucas flattening whole islands into one color like a trick involving mirrors. Mickey’s smile faltered but remained in place. Once or twice the old pilot had clucked politely, as if he were being shown photographs of grandchildren whose names he had forgotten.

  “I did this?” he’d asked in a sly, guilty voice, like a child trying to figure out why he was about to get punished. “When?”

  Kiwi had watched the Four Pilots program with his dad twice. The Chief had railed against the advance of the melaleuca woods the entire time, even during commercials, but he wasn’t angry at this pilot. They’d agreed (Kiwi and his father could sometimes meet at the intersection of their two angers, like neighbors drawing up to the barbed stars of a fence) that the old guy looked like the original scapegoat, Grecian almost, with his wispy beard and baffled ovine eyes.

  Vijay explained that the new ride was a tour of ecological devastation. You could take aerial pictures, with a fancy rental camera, of “the Floridian Styx.” You could murmur over the gray blight and eat a sack lunch. You could ache for lost species of flowers and trees for twenty minutes and touch your forehead to the cockpit window’s glass to find “Swamp Acheron” and “New Lethe,” and then fly back.

  “That’s my home,” Kiwi mumbled. “That’s where I grew up.”

  “Yeah, right?” Vijay sighed and rolled over on his side. “That ride sounds pretty fucking lame to me, but Carl says the Carpathian Corporation is ‘capitalizing on a local fear’ or some dumb shit. Same stuff they make us watch the videos about. They’re only running the Four Pilots tours in Loomis, though. Like a test run.” Vijay was lying half in shadow wi
th the sun on his chin and his eyes shut. His chest rose and fell like an old cat’s. Even stoned and half-asleep, Vijay could somehow roll sideways and, like a bird-shit clairvoyant, avoid getting bombed by the pigeons.

  “If it goes good they’re going to do one in Fairbanks. Bush pilots are going to fly Lost Souls to the melting ice caps, so they can, like, cry like babies and get competitive about how sad they are and shit. Get photos of those snow bears. Be like, ‘Hey, bear! Sorry we fucked up your summer, bro!’ ”

  “You mean polar bears,” Kiwi corrected automatically. “Or possibly the Kodiak bear. Ursus arctos middendorffi. Hey, how come you know about this ride already?”

  “You didn’t get the memos? Look around your locker,” Vijay told him. (Kiwi had been avoiding his locker, where ASSFUCKER still glowed lithium white against the metal.)

  “Oh, okay. Right-o.”

  Vijay cracked one reddened eye at him.

  “Right-o? Are you Sherlock Holmes? Have I taught you nothing?”

  “I meant, right on. I mean, thank you.” He kept his eyes on the sun. “Really.” A cloud moved and light poured over them. It suddenly occurred to Kiwi that he and Vijay both looked bronzed and goofy, sitting up here in their Thinking Man poses. Like statue rejects that some sculptor had in a paroxysm of shame hidden on the roof.

  “No problem, Margie. I hope you get it.” Vijay waggled his bare toes at Kiwi in farewell, one arm flung across his face. Break had ended fifteen minutes ago. He giggled into the crook of one elbow: “Take it to the skies, Margaret!”

  Kiwi stood. He spent a final minute staring at the black seaplanes with their torpid propellers, now drowsing like huge dragonflies on the bloodshot moat. Time to go find Carl before he could second-guess himself. His body prickled with dull anticipation, cell memory—it would be freezing on the stairwell. Often Kiwi felt like he was eavesdropping on the conversations of his own body, committee meetings of muscles and ligaments that didn’t seem to include him. Whenever he’d gone onstage to wrestle the alligators, he’d always felt like the last to know about his own terror. It was a disorienting lag. Even the behatted, popcorn-munching tourists in the stadium got the scoop on him. His parents, his grandfather, his sisters, the alligators, his own deep tissues—everybody had him figured for a coward, but Kiwi wouldn’t catch on until he heard his own scream.

  Kiwi stood for a moment longer outside the cherry-red door that led back into the World of Darkness, enjoying the feeling of the warm outside air against his back. The outermost rail of the overpass glowed in a thin gold parabola at this hour, like some interplanetary racetrack. Somewhere our Seths are clawing onto their rocks, he thought, staring out across lanes of Loomis traffic.

  “Hey, don’t puss out, Marge!” Vijay called. “Threaten him! Tell Carl that if he doesn’t let you fly the plane, you’ll quit and leave for the Burger Burger.”

  Kiwi found Carl Jenks spinning on his office chair. He frowned at the tiny cactus plant on his desk as Kiwi spoke.

  “And I have excellent hand-eye coordination, sir,” he coughed, “and a good foundation in aeronautics, physics …”

  Carl pressed his lips to near invisibility. Possibly Carl Jenks had at one time wanted to be a kind man, a decent and charitable man; and then puberty had come along and slapped this almost translucent blond mustache across his face. The mustache was Carl’s most distinctive feature—the hairs grew in achromatic and already bristling.

  Kiwi heard himself speaking faster and faster; he resisted the urge to lean in and do spontaneous calculus for Carl on his clipboard.

  “Are you crazy?” Carl said when he’d finished. “Two weeks ago you broke the vacuum. Nina Suárez complains that you’re sexually harassing her. Ephraim Lipmann says that you’re sexually harassing him. Every time I turn around you’re tripping over something, or coming down from the roof stoned out of your gourd. Shut up, Bigtree, I don’t want to hear it.”

  Carl Jenks, who had started this disquisition in his usual wry tone, was suddenly breaking on his vowels. His voice shook. He seemed to have accidentally stirred himself to real fury, as if Kiwi’s request were the last in a long string of impossible ideas, inappropriate and painful ideas, that Carl Jenks been asked to entertain in his lifetime.

  Carl said, “Scout, our payroll manager—”

  “Scott.”

  “Scotty tells me that you do not understand numbers. That you cannot do basic arithmetic. And we’re going to train you to fly a plane?”

  “Yes?” said Kiwi.

  “Tell you what, Bigtree. We’ll train you on the chair and see how that goes.”

  “The electric chair?” Kiwi was picturing spikes, white forks of summer lightning running through a tin cap.

  “The lifeguard chair. Down in the Lake of Fire.”

  Carl Jenks sighed and reversed the direction of his chair-spins. He had an office chair, Kiwi noted, with cushy armrests to prevent strain and fatigue.

  “Dale Bonilla is our lifeguard now, but I’m moving him. Tell me, Kiwi, can you lifeguard effectively if you are reading pornography? Can you safeguard the lives of preadolescent children if you are busy shooting half-human, half-tiger monsters in an imaginary jungle on your portable video console?”

  Kiwi had played that game in the dormitory: Were-Cats Attack IV. The bad guys had tiger paws for running and human thumbs for guns. Kiwi made it to level 7 with Leonard one Tuesday morning in the dormitory, where they’d been defeated at last in an interspecies massacre outside the gray digitized ruins, ambushed by a roaring horde of bipedal tigers with machine guns and big clawed feet bursting out of their khaki pants. Silence on this topic seemed prudent.

  “That sounds irresponsible, Carl. It’s against the World of Darkness policy to use personal electronics on the job.”

  Carl rolled his pale eyes. “Quit being such a shoe-licker, Bigtree. What I’m saying is, does Dale Bonilla even know how to swim? Do you think Pam in HR asks the tough questions when she does new hires? I don’t think so, Kiwi, personally, because here you stand.”

  “Okay.” Kiwi ran a hand through his hair. Violence was contemplated, then rejected by Kiwi as counterproductive to his larger financial stratagems. He thought, The Chief would have you by the neck, Carl Jenks.

  “So I’m not going to be a pilot?”

  “Nobody starts at the top, do they? You have to work your way up.” Carl was grinning now, a messy grin that spilled all over his face, his blue eyes sparkling with improved humor, as if this were a joke they could share: Kiwi climbing the ladder.

  “You’ll need to get CPR certified.” Carl actually giggled, then relaxed into silence again, as if good humor were an athletic stretch he couldn’t hold. “And you can request your Rescue Stick and your little bathing suit from HR. The ladies are in for a treat, eh?”

  At the mention of a bathing suit, Kiwi cinched Cubby’s jeans in his left hand.

  “Is this a promotion, Mr. Jenks?”

  “Sure.” Carl smiled magnanimously, swept a hand over his moon-white skull. “Why not think of it that way?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ava Goes to the Underworld

  “Therefore, for your sake, I think it wise

  you follow me: I will be your guide …”

  —Dante Alighieri, The Inferno

  On the morning that my sister eloped with Louis Thanksgiving, the Bird Man gave me his own version of Virgil’s advice—a swamp aphorism, he said, a maxim commonly uttered by the moonshiners, the glade crackers, the plume and alligator hunters, by the famous bird warden Guy Bradley and the Seminole and the Miccosukee tribes alike, and he was surprised I’d never heard it:

  “Nobody can get to hell without assistance, kid.”

  When I burst into the kitchen I saw the Bird Man grinding coffee beans with Mom’s little tin mill, an artifact I had forgotten about.

  “Found this in your museum,” he said without turning. “Haven’t seen one of these in ages. Your tribe has some really interesting stuff out there. Hope
you don’t mind that I borrowed it—”

  Ossie’s note was crushed against my chest and I couldn’t get my voice to work. What I remember feeling was a kind of stage fright, as if the curtains were about to lift onto a new and never-rehearsed show.

  “Well, I guess I sure made myself at home,” he said, a red smile in his voice. “I’m making us eggs—” He turned to face me, shaking grease angrily from the spatula grill. “Jesus, kid. What happened?”

  My sister never came home.

  A ghost has kidnapped my sister.

  “Read this, please,” I managed.

  The Bird Man scowled down at the wedding notice like the Chief reviewing a bill.

  “Is this somebody you know, kid?”

  “Osceola, she’s my sister. She’s missing?” I moaned the information into a question. “She wants to marry this guy, Louis … but he’s not, ah …” I pushed a fist into one eye, tried to slow my breathing.

  “Your sister is getting married? Today?”

  “She ran away with her boyfriend. What should I do? Who do I call now?”

  I glanced at the clock: twenty-two minutes had passed since I’d found Osceola’s note.

  “Deep breaths, kid. Sit down. Nobody’s dying here. Now, let me just get my head around this …”

  The Bird Man had opened all the windows in our kitchen. Rose curlicues shivered on Mom’s brown curtains, a fabric garden, and suddenly I missed my mom again with a pain that was ferocious. She was everywhere and nowhere in the kitchen. Pale brown eggshells rocked like little cradles on her cutting board. Salt, pepper, a jar of ancient Tabasco lined her countertop—the Bird Man had even found her real china, mainland stuff from her Loomis mother, these plates that were the hard white of malt balls. It was strange to see her cup and saucer in this stranger’s hand. The Bird Man had disappeared into his odd clothes again, the long coat in the death heat of summer, his ankle-laced boots. The coat had a layered ruff of black feathers and tumbled all the way down to his boot laces, like a trench coat. The feathers put a furlike gleam on his shoulders, which hunched together each time he sipped from my mom’s cup. That coat must be so heavy! I thought. How can he stand it? But he moved through our kitchen as if he weren’t wearing anything at all, as nimbly as any animal.