Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  The Bird Man brought the coffee over; he motioned for me to sit, like we were going to have breakfast together. Black feathers sprayed around the orange handle of Mom’s mug. The kitchen was already hot and I could smell that coat today, the oily feathers trapping an unplaceable aroma. He poured us both cups of coffee and milk and his voice was very calm, as if we were discussing a misplaced key.

  “You say the whole machine is gone?”

  “The dredge barge.”

  “And somebody is with her? Her, ah, her fiancé?”

  I stared at him for a moment. “I don’t think anybody is with her right now, actually. I mean … I think she’s the only body on board. She makes stuff up. We don’t think she really has a boyfriend.”

  “Okay. And does your sister know anything about engineering? Would she know how to pilot a dredge like that by herself?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.” My face felt hot and huge. “I don’t think so. But the dredge must be running again, right?”

  “How do you figure? Your sister—”

  “Because it’s gone, Bird Man.”

  “I see. Your sister. How old is she?”

  “Sixteen. She’s not an alligator wrestler like the rest of us, though—she’s not real strong or anything. Could she have gotten the dredge down the canal on her own, is that possible?”

  The Bird Man frowned, which turned his long nose into a blade. “It’s possible. The dredge was in the water already, correct? So if she carried an old outboard to the ditch, got a rope around it, and hooked it onto the back …” He shrugged. “It’s possible. But would she know to do that, do you think?”

  I felt my teeth part around a “no,” then paused. We underestimated Osceola. Just when you thought she was a lost cause she’d surprise you with a funny proficiency. And we girls were always underfoot when the Chief did repair work on motorboats, airboats, the Pit plumbing …

  “She might know how,” I amended. “She’s been carting all kinds of stuff out there.”

  You track the buzzards. Do you know, I almost asked him, have you heard and do you believe in a story called the Dredgeman’s Revelation?

  I’d assumed the bags Ossie had toted out to the ditch were full of flowers and candles, her séance stuff. But the Chief kept all kinds of old equipment in the museum. We had electrical relics piled up to the roof: spark plugs and the gouged eyes of Chevy headlights; a box of gold grommets that the Chief and Mom used to collect like metal seashells after hurricanes. Glass chutes, fire wheels, daisy-shaped gears. Antique tubing. Red and orange wires kelped in boxes. All these parts might mean something to a ghost mechanic like Louis.

  “Plus she had help.”

  “Help?”

  “The ghost is helping her. Her boyfriend. His name is Louis Thanksgiving”—I felt my cheeks heat up, hearing how this sounded—“and he used to operate that dredge. He’s seventeen, or at least he was on the day that he died.”

  “He’s a dead kid. Your sister’s helper.”

  “My sister can talk to them.”

  “To ghosts …”

  I stared down at my coffee. “My dad says that she’s going through something. A phase …”

  “Okay. And you don’t think she had someone real to help her, kid? Someone besides this … Louis?”

  “No,” I said, startled by the force of my voice. “No, it’s Louis who’s behind all this.”

  Somehow it was easier for me to imagine a secret wind unbending the pins of an engine than any tanned and red-blooded helper, some local boy or fisherman fixing up the dredge and piloting her away. Who besides us had even set foot in the dredge? Who alive would know how to run it?

  So I did believe, finally, in the ghost of Louis Thanksgiving. I believed, in a waterfall rush, in the world of the ghosts. An underworld—I pictured blue mist, rocks so huge the dredge barge rolled between them like a marble.

  “I know where the ghost is taking her, too!” I blurted out. “The Calusa shell mounds. The Eye of the Needle. That’s how she says you can get to the underworld—you go between those shell islands.”

  The Bird Man got a funny smile on his face. “Right. The underworld.”

  “Stop that,” I said angrily, surprising myself again. “What I’m telling you is real.”

  But the Bird Man didn’t say—as I’d expected him to—“That’s ridiculous. Your sister is lying to you, or else she’s crazy.” He didn’t tell me what I’d been secretly hoping to hear: “I believe in ghosts.” Instead he ground a pale fleck of butter into a piece of burned toast and smiled sadly at me. Belief didn’t even come up.

  “Oh, I know it is, Ava. I know it’s real. It’s just that your sister is pretty young to make that trip.”

  Then the Bird Man sipped cold coffee and told me that there was a real underworld.

  “This whole swamp is haunted, kid.”

  I felt my mouth go slack as a fish. “Haunted? Really?”

  “Sure. Your sister is right. I’m sure you folks have sensed it yourselves, wrestling the alligators, living way out. And there are thousands of openings in the limestone and the eastern mangrove tunnels. What the old gator hunters and plumers called the Black Woods.”

  I nodded reflexively. We called these tunnels the Mangle or the Walking Woods. Far south of our island the mangroves grew in impenetrable tangles. Their prop roots lifted balletically out of the mud, as if each tree were about to take a step forward into the water.

  “Way out there, that’s where you’ll find those shell islands. Most people go from one side to the other and they never get to the underworld. If you’re a first-timer—if you’re alive—and if you want to make the return trip, well, kid, you need a guide.”

  I looked down and saw that I was holding on to our kitchen table with my strongest wrestling grip. I nearly gagged at the sight of milk clouding the coffee cup. The whole world was funneling through a crack and reconstituting itself: this ghost was real, my sister had vanished with him, there was an underworld, just like Ossie’s book had claimed—and this stranger knew how to get there. Was it possible for girls like us to get there? Living people? I remembered the map that my sister and I had pasted to the dredge porthole: a wide empty southwest. The sun splashed through a blank grid. But maybe a Bird Man had a special gift for reading blanks? If he could understand the birds’ silence, maybe he could find a country in that emptiness.

  The Bird Man had turned to face our door. Was he going to leave soon? I couldn’t let him do that. I couldn’t tell the telephone what I’d done—losing Ossie to an invisible kidnapper, losing her when I was supposed to be the boss of Swamplandia! I felt a grogginess and a terrible, terrible lightness, as if I might let go of the table’s edge and blow away. The clock and the telephone stared at each other from their opposite walls, like parents who refused to advise me. To teach me a lesson. To make me decide this for myself.

  “We should call someone?” I pointed at the phone, in case a Bird Man was not familiar with house technology. “I have Chief Bigtree’s number here. Or Gus Waddell, he could search from the ferry. Park Services …”

  I frowned down at my fingers. I didn’t want to call them.

  “Yes, you can call the mainlanders. Your decision …” His forehead creased beneath his hood. He reached into the feathers and produced a brown cigarette, lit it. “What I’m afraid of, kid … Well, look, they are not going to believe you. Not Park Services, not anybody who you contact on the mainland. And their technologies aren’t going to find her, either.” He ashed into his coffee with the serene sadness of a man accustomed to the worst news. “Not if she is heading to the underworld with this ghost.”

  “Louis.”

  “With this Louis.”

  What would the Chief say, if he could hear me now? What would my brother do? Kiwi would be on the phone to the ranger Whip Jeters and Park Services, using Latin words to describe the crisis. (But Kiwi hadn’t heard this Bird Man calling to me in the woods, I thought, and just the memory of that sound c
aused many bright fibers I had not known existed inside me to tighten.)

  “So she won’t be found, you mean?”

  “Oh, they might find her. Of course they might find her.”

  The Bird Man’s voice got too gentle. He sounded genuinely sorry for me, like our tourists used to when I explained about my mom. “I can’t tell the future. But if they do find her, well … I might worry about that, too. I might prefer to find her myself if I were you.”

  The Bird Man explained to me that mainland authorities remove children from their families—that this was not uncommon. If the family or the child was deemed “unstable.” (He hissed this word like a buzzard, like the wind in feathers.) “Eloping” would be a red flag for the government agents, he said, and “eloping with a ghost” sounded much, much worse. The Bird Man gave me a look of odd complicity above his feathered collar.

  “Ask Chief Bigtree. Your father can tell you: the mainland authorities are no friends of ours. Swamp people are this country’s last outlaws, kid. We have to stick together.”

  I grinned back at him, happy in spite of everything to be bundled into the word “we.”

  “Okay,” I told the Bird Man. “When the mainlanders ask me why my sister ran, I’ll lie. I won’t mention Louis. I won’t breathe a word about the underworld.”

  I wasn’t going to lose Ossie a second time. Not to a government agency. On the Library Boat, Kiwi once showed me a mustard-yellow tome, Child Psychiatric Medicine, Vol. A-4. What struck me was a black-and-white photograph of a teenage girl in an asylum, bare-kneed in a claw-footed tub with her hair in a kind of translucent cap, like a shower cap but tight to her scalp. She had unblemished skin and these wafer-light eyes. You could see her blond hair through the cap, wrapped around metal curlers like waves of leashed, disciplined thoughts. The scary part was that you couldn’t tell, from this girl’s scrubbed and ordinary face, that anything was the matter with her. “That place is an asylum, Ava,” Kiwi had told me, explaining the word’s several contrary-seeming definitions. And now this Bird Man told me such prisons for girls still existed: There is a place on the mainland where they hide girls like your sister.

  “Well,” he said, following my gaze to the phone. “The thing about that plan, you see …”

  His voice took on that cushiony layer that adults use to pad the worst news, a kind of sonic insulation, as if they are afraid their words might otherwise electrocute a child. “The problem, Ava, is that if your sister has already crossed over to the underworld, they won’t find her.” He coughed amiably, continued. “Park Services will be useless to your sister. None of their dogs and helicopters can track a ghost.”

  “Why can’t we help them find her? Can’t we show them how to get there?”

  “Who? The rangers? The dogs, maybe.” He laughed. “You think we can direct the Coast Guard’s ships to the underworld? No, kid. That’s impossible.”

  “But you said you did know how to find it once …?” My cheeks felt feverish. “You could draw those guys a map …”

  “But I can’t—kid, the paths are always changing. Even if I could help them, it wouldn’t make any difference. Nobody at Search and Rescue is going to listen to a Bird Man’s directions to the underworld—they’d probably drag me to the loony bin. They’d take you with me, kid.”

  “That wouldn’t happen. I’m an alligator wrestler,” I explained. “I would fight them.”

  “And then who’s left to find your sister? Do you think that Search and Rescue is going to believe either of us about your sister and her … companion?” Golden crumbs were suspended on his feathers. Incredibly, he was buttering another slice of toast—Gus Waddell had brought us a fresh loaf of white bread with our groceries that Saturday. “Would even your father believe us?”

  “Oh, my dad?” My eyes fell. “No. Probably not.” The Chief would not understand the Dredgeman’s Revelation. Our dad would look for Ossie elsewhere, drowned or on the broken rocks of Gallinule Key. I did not think his heart could take a search like that.

  “If Ossie and Louis make it between the Eye, can we get her back again?”

  “Who knows, kid? This is a problem. I deal with the migrations of birds, not people.”

  “You could go after her. We could go.”

  The Bird Man steepled his long fingers. His whole face puckered up inside his hood, as if he were weighing something—me, I realized. Calculating if I’d be strong enough to make the trip. I tightened my grip on the table and flexed my wrestling muscles.

  “It’s a difficult journey. We’d have to take my skiff. No engines. You have to use the old Calusa waterways—way too narrow out there for an airboat. We’ll be extraordinarily lucky if we can pole it this time of year.”

  “I’ll help out. A lot. You saw me last night—”

  “Alligators aren’t the fauna we’ll be dealing with down there.” He shook his head. “No, look, you’re years too young for this. You’d be the youngest passenger I’ve ever taken …”

  “I can wrestle the biggest Seth in the Pit. My grandfather says I can wrestle better than an adult man. I’m strong and I don’t get scared. We’ll pay you,” I added quickly. “How much do you want? I can pay you. When the Chief gets back …”

  Taped beneath the telephone was our father’s mainland telephone number. The Chief always stayed in the same room at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel in east Loomis. (I can still hear the song of the numbers that we dialed for his hotel room, although it’s been years since I could recite the numerals themselves: __ __ __-__ __ __ __.) I held the earpiece against my damp face, and I listened to the tone for too long without dialing, until my heartbeat disappeared into the telephone’s terrible hum. Dial. Dial. I dropped it onto the hook. Why call him, why risk all that fear and disappointment, when this whole situation might be resolved before noon? Why should anybody ever have to know that Osceola ran away? If I made the right choice now. If I acted fast, with the reflexive courage of a Bigtree wrestling a Seth …

  The Bird Man, meanwhile, had shifted verbs on me. He had detoured from the realm of theory and begun talking plans. “So we’re going to be discreet about this, we don’t need to attract any undue attention on the water. We’ll want to leave as soon as possible, before the tide goes out …”

  I watched my hand scratch out a note to my father, in case he got home before we did. The note was very formal. “Sincerely, Ava,” I wrote, because the Bird Man was watching me and “I love you” or even just “Love” struck me as a childish sign-off.

  Then I took the telephone off the hook. That way if the Chief called us before we got back he wouldn’t worry, he’d think we’d just been careless. So: we were going. The rose gardens on my mother’s curtains continued rippling. The lizards clung to the window screens, motionless. We left her china plates in a pretty stack.

  We packed in a hurry: cans of pork and tuna, red beans, powdered coffee and milk, dry curls of macaroni, a skillet, the Chief’s fishing knife, a package of ground hamburger, envelopes of the powdered orange drink Ossie liked. I grabbed knives and old gallon jugs. But the Bird Man said we should bring more food, more water. Nonperishables. It seemed to me like we were overpacking; how long did a trip to the underworld take?

  Two hours after I’d discovered Ossie’s note tacked to the tree, we started down the trail toward the island’s muddy shoreline.

  “I never tie off at your dock—that’s a public spot, and you’ve got that fat ferryboat captain puttering around, minding other people’s business …”

  “Gus.” I felt a little pang. “He’s nice.”

  The Bird Man’s feathers heaved up and down—he was only shrugging again.

  “I try to protect folks from their own curiosity about me. My profession. Not too many Bird Men working the islands these days. This way, kid. I’m over on the lee side.”

  In addition to food and water I had decided to bring the red Seth in her wooden carrying crate. It wasn’t a practical or a kind decision, and I whispered a little apology throug
h the breathing holes; if it was any consolation, I told her, by this time next year she would be too big and fangsome for me to carry. Her stint as my pet would be over. We would have to become rivals, I explained a little sadly, a world-famous duet of muscles and scales, we would pioneer new holds and we would invent our own championship if we had to …

  The Bird Man glanced down at me. “Who are you talking to, kid?”

  “Nobody. I’m, ah … I’m praying.”

  “Just keep that thing taped up. If you’re dead set on bringing it, which is a pretty stupid move—but I noticed that you didn’t ask my opinion.”

  My hand tightened on the carrier’s handle. We were deep into the underbrush now. He paused to make some grunting adjustment to the red cooler’s weight, sliding cans and jugs around, when a fish crow cried out, a long squawk. The Bird Man stood up.

  “Hear that? That’s our augur. Hell’s doorbell. It’s time to go.”

  “That’s it, really? That’s hell’s doorbell? A fish crow?”

  This cawing was a sound I heard and ignored a dozen times each day. I would have expected something more impressive, like Phantom of the Opera music or the boom of a chasm opening. But this crow sounded like any old crow sounds, foreboding and hoarse, like a psychic who is indifferent to your fate. We entered a stand of madeira trees. As we walked beyond the strains of the crow’s last, dry cry, the Bird Man ticked off instructions on his thumb:

  “One, keep your arms and legs inside the boat.

  “Two, keep your questions to a minimum.

  “Three: Some of the Ten Thousand Islands on the way to the underworld are inhabited.” The Bird Man’s voice seemed to issue from the pool of shadows beneath his hat. “The people who live along the Riptides of the Dead … these are not people you should trust, kid. A few of them aren’t even, to get real technical, people. Don’t get too loose and free with the details about your sister, either. Anybody asks, I’m your cousin. We’re on a fishing trip.”