Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  I nodded hard to indicate that I knew my history well. (Please! Ladies and gentlemen of the mainland, I cleaned the history, I dusted dead mosquitoes off the history on summer mornings.)

  “Sure, I know all about that. My grandfather survived the Labor Day hurricane. He took photographs of all the bodies.”

  Black laborers had drowned by the thousands in the vegetable fields, and, because they were black, the laborers’ deaths never got recorded in the official tallies. Few tourists lingered over the framed pictures of their bloated bodies in Taylor Slough, 1935, that floated on our museum wall, preferring instead the photos Mom had taken of obese baby Kiwi in his water wings.

  Most mainlanders hear “homeschooled” and they get the wrong impression. There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, “disappeared” boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the “official, historical” Florida records we found in books. “Prejudice,” as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic—a “damn fool math”—in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery on Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.

  At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. Grandpa ate rat snakes and alligator meat even after grocery stores made frozen dinners available; he bit that one guy, Mr. Arkansas; but I don’t think these facts disqualify him from being a true historian, a true egalitarian. Tragedies, too, struck blindly and you had to count everyone. Grandpa taught us more than any LCPS Teach Your Child …! book about Florida hurricanes, Florida wars. From his stories we learned as children how to fire our astonishment at death into a bright outrage.

  After the carnage in the marshlands, the federal government took over the Swamp Reclamation project: its new stated mission was “flood control.” Nobody was trying to drain the swamp anymore, although the Army Corps’ new system of hydrological controls seemed just as shortsighted and failure-prone as their original plans. We had an exhibit in the Family Museum called The Era of Swamp Reclamation, which seemed to give strangers the impression that this era was over—as if the Army Corps weren’t still turning those faucets on and off, sponging phosphorous for Big Sugar, opening the canal locks for the farmers in October and telling the water where to go.

  “It’s a wonder this bridge is still standing, isn’t it, Ava?”

  The Bird Man looked like he had just crawled out of a lake, he was sweating so badly. We leaned the skiff on the ant-covered bridge supports while he toweled water from his brow.

  “I guess.” I was proud of myself for feeling no surprise—I’d been instructed by the Chief to think of mercy as “the wind’s oversight” and miraculous survivals as “a lucky malfunction; a fluke in the weather system.” Streamers of pale marine grass had swallowed the trestles.

  “Did the cotton pickers know they were in hell?” I huffed. It was close to five o’clock now, and sweat trickled down my hairline; I could feel a splinter worming inside my palm. The sky above us was a pure and cloudless blue.

  “Oh,” the Bird Man said. “I imagine so.”

  Forty minutes later we were back on the water, poling around the glacial spires of a long oyster bed. At first I didn’t hear anything; the Bird Man flinched before I did. He whipped around with his burnished eyes dimming. “Go flat,” he hissed, and then he was pushing me down.

  After a moment I heard the buzz of an approaching outboard. A beige-and-black Park Services boat pulled around the grass-fringed slough, water spudding off the boat’s rigging, and then abruptly the engine cut out. When I saw who it was, I nearly shouted at the happy shock of a familiar face: Whip Jeters, a park ranger who often patrolled the waters around Swamplandia!, was standing in the stern with his hand on the sputtering Evinrude. Whip Jeters was a tall, once-fat man who wore his uniform khakis in a size that swallowed his new frame. He had a painful sunburn, and when he removed his sunglasses I saw a raccoon pallor ringing both eyes. Then I felt hands on my shoulders and my eyes were level with the tackle box, my cheekbone pushed against the wood.

  The Bird Man, still seated in the stern, turned and waved. “Howdy, friend!” His voice was unrecognizable. “How’s the fishing over yonder?”

  “Kid.” Without looking my way, he murmured in a cold monotone, “If you tell this man where we are going he will take you away from me. He could arrest me—he has the grounds to do that. We are almost to the Eye of the Needle, but this man will not believe you if you tell him the truth about what we are doing. We need to be smart about this …”

  Whip began to motor over; above me, the Bird Man put on a big grin that made his face unrecognizable to me. It rejiggered his features so that they were at their most ordinary; even his eyes seemed pale and normal. Who had I been traveling with this great while? How could you change so completely when another person showed up, like a chameleon shifting trees? I was impressed. I didn’t want to be the one who screwed this up.

  “Who’s hiding down there? You running aliens, sir? Illegals?”

  “This is my young cousin.” He touched my back with the butt of his oar. “We are on a fishing trip.”

  “I’d like to see your permit for that. Your cousin, huh? Well what’s wrong with her? She sick or something?”

  “She’s taking a nap,” the Bird Man said in an avuncular voice I barely recognized, patting my knotty hair.

  “I’m taking a nap,” I confirmed, sitting up.

  “Why, you’re one of the Chief’s! One of the Bigtree kids!”

  I am, I am! I nodded so hard my teeth hit. Hearing my tribe’s name spoken out here felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket. Mr. Jeters had known me since birth, he had been a childhood friend of the Chief’s, and I think he would have been shocked to know how grateful I felt at that moment. Just his friendly gaze was clothing me.

  “I hear from Gus that your brother’s living on the mainland now? You believe that?” He shook his head with mock amazement, and I loved him for making Kiwi’s defection sound dumb and temporary. “I bet the Chief said jack-crap to that. And how’s he liking it, your brother?”

  “I don’t know, Warden Jeters. He doesn’t call us.”

  “Well, that’ll change. What is he now, seventeen? He’s probably too proud to call, wants to wait until he’s got something good to report. Listen, hon,” Whip said, his voice still casual but his eyes cutting over at the Bird Man, “it’s a funny question, I know, but I got to ask: is this guy your for-real cousin?”

  I followed Whip’s gaze to the Bird Man and of course I understood why he had asked. Black feathers shirred along the ruff of his coat and he licked a long finger to tamp them. Behind him the slough had turned the same mix of iron and wine purple as the sky and the wind was blowing the plants apart. “Storm’s coming,” the Bird Man said politely, picking at his teeth.

  I nodded. “He is, Whip. The Chief thought it would be good for me to get off the island. We’ve had a tough summer over there.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “My mother’s,” I said.

  “Her father’s,” said the Bird Man. We all looked at one another. “The Chief’s,” I corrected myself. “Sorry, I got confused, I’ve been thinking about Mom a lot today …”

  The warden said nothing but let his eyes roll over the length of our skiff.

  “No offense to you, sir, but you’re an odd sight on the water …”

  Whip Jeters was some intermediary age between the Chief and Grandpa Sawtooth, and he had been a friend of our family’s for so long that there was a picture of him on our museum wall under the heading Honorary Bigtrees. It’s really him, it’s Whip Jeters, I kept thinking. I smiled at the zippered life jacket he was wearing—we’d been forced to pole our way f
or half a mile because the water was only three feet deep. I was so grateful to see his big ears and red bulbous nose that I worried I might start crying. Whip, misinterpreting my look, rubbed at the floury stripe around his eyes. “Yes, well, I guess I had a little accident involving a nap and the sun. But it doesn’t hurt nearly so bad as it looks, although that’s not saying much, is it? Ha-ha …”

  Whip patted the seam of his mouth with his checkered collar. He politely squelched a burp.

  “Pardon me.” He gave me a wink and a slightly goofy grin, and I realized with a pang that he was embarrassed. “Say, why don’t you come over here for a minute, Ava, stretch your legs on my boat?” The Bird Man gave me a curt nod and so I stood, placing my hands on Whip’s broad shoulders and letting him swing me on board. We were floating beneath black clouds shaped like anvils and I hoped the rain would hold.

  “Have you folks eaten?” Whip offered me a red canister of a mainland brand of crackers. He bit into a cheddar round. He chewed into the terrible quiet between our boats.

  “You know, these things are delicious? The wife made me switch over from the potato chips, for my cholesterol, but now I actually prefer them. You want to try one, Ava? Sir? Cracker?” He was staring at the Bird Man’s greatcoat.

  Whip, I’d noticed, was sidling around the Bird Man with a strange formality, and when he addressed my “cousin” his voice shot an octave higher than his usual genial baritone. After a few minutes I put together that this stiffness was not the product of Mr. Jeters’s natural awkwardness. He was jumpy around me, too, and when his pant leg snagged on his engine he let out a little yelp. He was very polite—I guess he saw no cause to deviate from marine etiquette—but I could tell that something about this encounter had him miserably flustered. He listened to me talk with his knuckles pressed into his red cheek, and when he removed them I saw they’d left a pale indent.

  The Bird Man was watching us talk from the skiff, mining his grimace with a toothpick with his legs flat in front of him. At one point he raised an eyebrow in my direction and clicked his teeth against the tiny splinter of wood—He wants you to be quiet, I understood. The buzzards hung in such eerie patterns in the thermals that I felt as if they had paused, too, waiting to see what would happen next. I heard myself telling Whip about Carnival Darwinism and Grandpa Sawtooth’s new home and the Chief’s departure.

  “Say,” said Whip. When he spoke his tone was very studiously nonchalant despite the fact that he’d just interrupted me midsentence. “Just curious, where do you and your cousin keep all your fishing poles and whatnot?”

  “At our fishing camp,” the Bird Man snapped from the stern of our skiff. He had drifted maybe twenty feet from us. “Been in the family for years. You know Mammoth Key?”

  “Sure.” Whip scratched dead skin from one wrinkled knuckle.

  “Want some cortisone? Some aloe vera?” I heard myself offer in a stranger’s hospitality voice.

  “Nah, honey, thank you. So your cousin here has got a camp over on Mammoth! I haven’t been out there in five years. Good bass fishing over there.”

  We all watched as single droplets of rain hit the water. Duckweed dragged like a wedding train behind our transom. I had seen a small alligator following us earlier, I told Whip, just half a snout and the olive bumps of her eyes visible, but she had disappeared.

  “They’re a lot more skittish out here than your folks’ gators, that’s for sure.” Whip coughed. The Bird Man was plucking white bits of down from his coat sleeves and flicking them onto the water—He was bullying Whip! I realized. He had picked up on his fear and now he was tailoring the show for him. “My cousin has been telling me stories about her mother. I never knew her, regrettably—wrong side of the family,” the Bird Man said.

  Whip shot me a look. “Your mama was a great woman, honey. It’s a terrible, terrible shame what happened …”

  What happened, Whip? Even the few facts I did have about her last weeks tended to float away from me like shining leaves on water the more I tried to get a picture together.

  “We’re doing okay. We want to get the show up and running again next month, with that cannon. The Juggernaut. Did the Chief show you our cannon?”

  “Not yet. Looking forward to seeing it.” Whip gave me what I guess you’d call a rueful smile, which I understood as a kid to be a smile without joy. A smile with a pretty bad joy:knowledge ratio.

  The Bird Man was rustling behind me. His black coat went huge on a sudden gust of wind, and the feathered sleeves swelled big as balloons around his stringy, freckled arms in a way that might have seemed silly on anybody else, almost clownish. Whip’s face was very still.

  “What in the hell is wrong with your cousin, honey?” Whip mumbled, almost to himself. “He thinks it’s Halloween or something? That’s some coat he’s got.” He munched another tiny cracker. I said nothing but crowded so closely to Whip’s elbow that the boat rocked. The Bird Man and I locked eyes across the channel. We both knew that it would take one sentence now to end our trip to the underworld. I felt suddenly powerful—I could say the Bird Man was my kidnapper, or worse, and I would be believed. Whip Jeters would take me home on his patrol boat. But none of that would help my sister.

  “Hey, Whip?” I said, lowering my voice. “You haven’t seen anybody else out here, have you? Or a funny-looking boat?”

  “Nope, I haven’t seen a soul. Funny how?”

  “Just funny-looking. Almost like one of those old dredges from the 1930s …”

  “A dredge! You’re more likely to see a Chinese junk in these flats than a dredge launch. Those old jalopies would have to be fifty, sixty years old now … Where’d you get it in your head you saw a thing like that out here?” Now he sounded worried. “Because a suspicious-looking vessel this far from Loomis don’t portend one good thing. It’s drugs or poachers would be my guess, human smugglers coming up from Cuba …”

  “The Chief says I have a wild imagination, Mr. Jeters,” I babbled. “Poor eyesight. I wouldn’t worry, it was probably nothing.” I leaned in and touched his elbow. “But if you see a dredge scow, Mr. Jeters, will you stop it? Will you … will you grab whoever you find on it?”

  “I will, I will do that. Believe me, if there’s a dredge out here that’s still seaworthy I will have some questions for its operators.” He made a noise in his throat, laughter or disbelief. “I’ll put out a call on our station. You have a good fishing trip with your cousin, Miss Bigtree,” he said with a wink. He winked again, like a friendly tic he couldn’t control. He didn’t look at the Bird Man again, and I got the sense that Whip didn’t want to see anything that would hinder his exit. He had decided to believe me, I guess, but I think it must have been the sort of believing that requires a special paradox, a vigilant blindness. Whip Jeters wouldn’t look at my face, and he quit sneaking glances at my “cousin” in the glade skiff. Behind him, the Bird Man lifted his chin at me. Now his eyes were shining in the familiar way but I don’t think Whip could see this.

  The rain was coming on fast. Whip switched on the flashlight at his belt loop and flashed the beam of light rapidly, twice, onto the stern. He paused, and then lit it once more. The yellow circle of light covered my sneakers and shut again for good. I don’t know if this was just Whip fumbling with the flashlight or if he was trying to get a message to me. There was no time to ask him; the Bird Man had already rowed over to receive me.

  (I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none. So who knows what sense Whip made of the pair of us? It’s just as likely that his blinking flashlight was a malfunction, an unlucky one, and not a signal I missed.)

  Whip Jeters swung me back over to the Bird Man’s skiff, and my fingers sank into the oily feathers on his shoulders. The Bird Man got me settled in the bow seat with my paddle.

  “Good-bye,” said Mr. Jeters, no longer disguising his desire to get away.

  “Good-bye,” we sang out together, the Bird Man�
�s voice a gravelly accompaniment to my high whine. Rain had started blowing in from the east, and I wondered if we’d paddle through the afternoon showers or hunch in one of the little coves around the mangroves and wait them out.

  I didn’t tell the Bird Man what Whip had said to me as we parted ways. Before he’d returned me to the Bird Man, Whip Jeters had done a curious thing. He’d leaned in and let his dry lips brush my cheek. It felt stiff and formal, less like a kiss than some strange benediction. He’d put a warm palm on my shoulder and gotten close enough to whisper:

  “Be safe, Ava.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Kiwi Bigtree, World Hero

  The reporters talked him into hair and makeup. Some TV crew assistant had deflated his water-logged trunks by pounding on Kiwi’s actual ass, cheerfully conversant as he did this—as if Kiwi were somehow not attached to it, the ass. Great tinfoil sheets and lunar caps of light went up around the lifeguard station. The World of Darkness had closed an hour before and without the crowds the Lake of Fire felt newly eerie, water jetting from its sides in bruise-colored clouds. Kiwi flinched; a short, ebullient male stylist from the Loomis Register was combing the snarls from his hair. His mother used to powder his cheeks by the Gator Pit, using some sort of drugstore magic to transform her acned son into a wrestler of Seths. This is fraudulent, Mom! This is a dubious project. He’d pumped up his anger with big language like a bicycle tire.