“I’m sorry?”
“Sorry,” Kiwi mumbled, which was the usual volley. “Thought you looked familiar …” Really, Kiwi had hoped that his face would look familiar to this Denny. On those rare occasions when Kiwi found a mainlander who knew about Swamplandia!, even secondhand, he went after their memories like a magpie tugging at bright string. He’d strike up conversations with the Lost Souls in the Leviathan and engineer an opportunity to ask them, Say, have you ever visited Swamplandia!? A few days ago he’d met a couple from Sarasota, Florida, who began nodding immediately when he mentioned the Bigtrees.
“Oh, right, those alligator people,” the wife had laughed. “I remember that place. Swampy Land. That woman alligator wrestler, Don, what was her name, we used to pass her billboard on the way to your sister’s …?”
Hilola!
Whenever tourists remembered her name, men with beards included, Kiwi wanted to passionately kiss them. Her name in a stranger’s mouth was a resurrection: however briefly, she was alive with him again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb. On those rare and wonderful occasions when he found an entire mainland family who had seen his mother’s show, Kiwi could watch the strangers’ eyes brighten with recognition and picture a tiny Hilola Bigtree climbing a tiny ladder in each of their brains, walking out to the edge of the green diving board.
Dennis Pelkis coughed once and resumed a rolling discourse about the World of Darkness floatplanes versus “terra firma” aircraft. He punctuated his major points by jabbing a lit cigarette at the sun.
“Soon it will be time to fly,” he concluded. This was also the title of the 630-page flight instruction manual that he handed over to Kiwi. Kiwi had a polynomials test this week in Miss Arenas’s class and he was picking up shifts for Yvans; lately Kiwi felt like an understudy in his own life on the mainland, stumbling over his lines and missing important cues and waiting with less and less patience for the real actor to show up.
“I can’t wait,” Kiwi said sincerely. He was thinking about money. From Denny’s explanation of the pilot licensing requirements, it sounded like he and this cheerful and alarming man were going to spend forty hours together in the plane and twenty more in ground school—four months.
“Longer than a Vegas marriage,” he grinned, and Kiwi let out an accidental whimper. The kind of grief that shows up at a Halloween party with its costume in tatters, swears “I’m a chuckle!” What if Swamplandia! went into foreclosure before he got his license, his pay raise?
“Ha-ha! Four months does sound like a long time. And there’s no way to, ah, expedite the process?”
“Ex-speed-ite.” Denny frowned. “You sure that’s how it’s pronounced? We can’t speed anything, Bigtree. Same FAA rules apply for heroes.”
Kiwi frowned down at his fingernails. “Your hands are damn pretty,” Sawtooth used to say accusingly. Like most alligator wrestlers, Sawtooth Bigtree had lost substantial chunks of several fingers. Part of his thumb was somewhere in the Gator Pit, remaindered by one of the Seths. Even Ossie boasted scars from an accident that took place when she was four years old and a juvenile alligator had snapped at her hand while she was pulling up weeds along a riverbank. Kiwi was the only Bigtree with zero injuries—no stitches, no scars. He’d once cut his pointer finger opening a can of cherry soda after a wrestling match. He tried to imagine his ladylike hands throttling up inside a floatplane.
“Do you happen to know, sir, what my ranking is going to be? Second? Third?”
“Huh? That ain’t how the check ride gets scored.”
Kiwi nodded. “I recognize that I probably won’t rank as the First Pilot of the Apocalypse, given that I am an airplane greenhorn. But do I necessarily have to be the last one?”
Denny exhaled two cool gusts of smoke through his nostrils and stared at him.
“You’re a funny young man, Kiwi.”
On Thursday, Kiwi found himself ducking the crack in the break room door, where he got a brief glimpse of a bunch of flame-clad staffers watching TV, and then he was pinball-whizzing out of the World: upstairs, downstairs, through staff-only hallways. There was an empire of supplies down here: pyramids of toilet paper (single ply; this was Hell), boxes of BrimStones that spilled over the cardboard like collapsed speech bubbles, devil horn hatbands and devilish ribbons for the ladies. Finally he exploded through the same small service hole that spat out garbage. Yvans was standing right there by the Dumpster, waving at him.
“Where you going, Kiwi?”
So much for the secret mission.
“Nowhere,” he said, hurrying past Yvans. Really, he had no time today to listen to Yvans complain about the complaints of his wife. Kiwi’s secret destination was the gas station. You couldn’t really skulk there, you had to walk across the highway. Kiwi walked through four lanes of stalled traffic. A knotted sock of quarters bulged in his pocket. The pay phone was at the end of the candy aisle. It was the nearest semiprivate phone that Kiwi knew about. He hunched between the black- and yellow-jacketed candy bars and the gigantic freezer. For twenty minutes Kiwi kept plunking the same quarter in the phone and dialing Swamplandia!
“Answer,” he commanded the receiver. “Pick up.”
The phone was busy. Busy! Busy! Busy! Busy! it told his ear in black starbursts.
Weird, Kiwi thought, which became:
Bad.
Wrong.
Really fucking worrisome, as a mainland kid would say.
The busy signal whammed into his head in a series of right hooks. He rolled his quarter out, dialed again. “Ava. Ossie. Chief,” he said between teeth. After a while he switched the speed and order: “Chief-Ossie-Ava. Ossie-Ava-Chief. Pick. Up.”
The owner dropped his newspaper and stood. He was an older Afro-Cuban man with powdery hair and eyes like acetone. He didn’t like Kiwi—he’d sell Black and Mild cigarettes to Leo and Vijay but never to Kiwi. The cigarettes cost one dollar and came in two flavors: wine and apple. The last time Kiwi had tried to buy a pack with his fake Kiwi Beamtray ID, the owner had shouted at him to get out of the store. A curtain of pink and green lottery tickets hung level with his forehead, which gave him an exotic, Scheherazade look.
“Hey! In the back!” He unlatched the little gate to the register. “¿Qué haces?”
“Hey, sir!” said Kiwi. “Good afternoon?” Maybe he thinks I’m making sex calls, Kiwi thought, his ear smashed and rubbery against the receiver. Masturbating into the CLOSET OF ICE!
He dropped another quarter into the slot, watched his fingers hopscotch across the dial pad onto his home numbers. Last try. Okay, no, this is the last try—he began threatening the receiver, trying to bluff the universe into giving him an answer.
“Hang up the phone, maricón!”
“I’m not doing anything wrong here. I’m a hero, sir. Hell’s Angel. Don’t you watch TV?”
Kiwi hung up the phone. He tried to mad-dog the owner and then gave up, felt his face tremble and collapse. On the way out he knocked over a display of gummies.
“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his cheeks with his fists, a teenage mantis. “God, sir, I’m really sorry.”
The owner held the door for him. He patted Kiwi’s left shoulder.
All that day and into the next his head felt clouded. Where was everybody? Were they visiting Grandpa or something? Had the Chief instructed the girls not to answer the telephone—were they avoiding the creditors? Probably he was overreacting? Kiwi pictured all ninety-eight Seths in the pit lifting their great warblers’ chins at the sun while just inside the screen door the telephone rang and rang and rang.
Kiwi Bigtree, Hell’s Angel, got a leather jacket from the World of Darkness management with his new epithet emblazoned on it. He got a free Friday. He stood in his jacket and waved sightlessly into the lanes of traffic until a green Toyota that was batwinged with dents on its left side honked at him, screeched to a halt well before the intersection.
“Hello again, Mr. Pelkis.”
“Oh My Christ Son the
Light Is Green Get in the Car!”
Kiwi was relieved when Dennis Pelkis told him that they were just going to eyeball the plane. He drove Kiwi to the papaya-colored seaplane hangar off Route 302 where the flight school conducted their lessons. He taught Kiwi how the water rudder and the floats worked and walked him through a preflight checklist. It took Kiwi two tries and a rump-assist from Denny to scrabble over the gap between the dock and the plane and get inside the cockpit.
Later Dennis drove Kiwi to his house in the Coconut Creek development, in a suburb of Loomis, so that Denny could have black coffee and a roast beef sandwich that was hemorrhaging horseradish, treat a corn on his big right toe, watch the ball game; and also so that Kiwi could take a test on the pitot-static instrument family. Kiwi felt sort of forgotten about. Kiwi pictured his existence in the mind of Dennis Pelkis: a tiny Kiwi politely letting Dennis’s other concerns cut in front of him in line at the register until he was the last priority, the afterthought.
The test was easy. Kiwi had retained most of the colorful facts from the textbook:
A white arc indicates the arc in which it is safe to use flaps.
The green arc is the normal operating range of the aircraft.
The yellow arc is the caution range for the airplane.
“More apple juice, Kee-wee?” asked Denny’s dotty wife, whose hostessing strategy was to remove each item from her refrigerator—a carton of juice, a pie slice with lime green filling, a single egg—and offer it to Kiwi. She did this with the serene efficiency of a crazy person; was this a custom of the suburbs?
“No thank you, ma’am.”
“Too bad they don’t make kiwi juice, right?”
“Ha-ha, right. Thanks, Mrs. Pelkis.”
I am going to be a pilot, you bitch! Kiwi thought. His rage felt wonderful, like cake icing in his mouth. Pure lipids dissolving onto his taste buds. Kiwi didn’t care for middle-aged women. He found them all to be ugly, flighty, soft. Their wrinkles enraged him. Their dyed or graying hair. All the obvious, dimpled evidence that they had enjoyed years and years of life.
Coming into the kitchen, Denny rolled his eyes at Kiwi and barked at his wife: “Kid has to take a test, Nancy.”
Now that Kiwi had at last made it to a suburb it was easy to want the swamp. What was this fresh hell? The World of Darkness seemed like a cozy and benign place compared to the sprawl of these stucco boxes, these single-family houses. Kiwi saw no coconuts and no creeks. The Pelkises had a poinciana tree dragging magenta combs over the grass and a bunch of rusting croquet wickets in the yard. Inside, they had a Wurlitzer piano and a mantel covered in what appeared to be hundreds of tiny porcelain cats. The Pelkises’ decor was such a clean and pleasant variation on the Bigtrees’ cabinets of gin and lizards that Kiwi found himself holding tightly to the edge of the Pelkises’ Lysoled table, as if these shiny surfaces were trying to buck him. Instead of a Juggernaut Human Cannon, they had a green Toyota. Instead of a Gator Pit, their backyard had a shrunken plastic house that contained an animate cotton ball that turned out to be a dog.
“That’s the wife’s Pomeranian,” Denny said, following Kiwi’s gaze. “Vol de Nuit. She gave him a French name. Do I look like I speak French, son? The wife does a lot of things that just mystify me. Totally worthless animal.”
My dad would feed your dog to the Seth of Seths.
“How we doing?” Denny asked forty minutes later. He was on his fourth plain doughnut and listening to baseball on the radio. He looked over the page in front of Kiwi.
“Well! You must have memorized that whole dang chapter.” He planted the doughnut into milk. “But you know, son, this test, strictly speaking, doesn’t count for anything? These are for practice. It’s the FAA written exam you gotta pass. And then you gotta actually fly the damn plane.”
Kiwi nodded. “Right.” He covered his test with his palm and slid it toward his edge of the table.
“See you next Friday. We’ll see what happens when we get you airborne.”
The Jaws were terrifying at night. Something gaseous seemed to shimmer around them, a trick of the weak lighting and the ventilation. The molars shone like huge basalt blocks and everything looked suddenly, impressively real to Kiwi, the giant cave of the maw arching forty feet above him, the web of puce and ruby mesh shot through with dangling yellowish gray threads on the roof. A luxury of being the only rider in the Leviathan was that you could drift for hours. You could let the current conduct you. Also it was a good study break, Kiwi thought.
At two o’clock, after finishing the last of his homework, Kiwi stripped to his boxer shorts and climbed the frozen escalator up the Tongue. He crossed his arms in the SAFEST POSTURE depicted on the sign and he flew down the slide into the first of a seemingly infinite number of brachiating chambers—caves of water, some neck-deep and others shallow as dishes. The Leviathan felt bigger than he had ever imagined, impossibly big. The white points of his knees looked like distant buoys in the darkness. Kiwi’s mouth slammed shut and his teeth hit together as he flew around a bend in the Esophagus, and then he was submerged in deep water, his feet cycling and touching nothing.
Usually at this juncture one of the more athletic park employees would drag you up and bully you out of the pool and into another tortuous line—the Leviathan staff moved four hundred people through the ride each hour. Some kid’s feet would be punching into your back.
Kiwi shut his eyes and breathed very slowly. At night he felt less like a kid than a sick calculator. He ran the same problems and numbers in his head. What am I doing here? Kiwi wondered. Why don’t I go home? The longer he stayed in this place, the less he understood about his own motivations. But the World of Darkness gets me! Kiwi thought. The World has me gotten. The World of Darkness seemed to understand its workers the way that floating sticks got understood by a river, and studied to splinters, and undone by it.
Kiwi floated from room to room with his palms up. He got sucked beneath a grid of radiance, little stars that glowed blue and lime green above him—as if the roof of the Leviathan had suddenly opened onto the real sky! And with his own eyes filling with salt and his total spatial disorientation, the slow flow of the water, the turgor of a nonsensical hope in his body that grew and grew beneath the stars and left him airless, bewildered, so very unexpectedly happy—over the roar of his own happiness it took Kiwi a long time to understand that the blue and green galaxies spooning above him, blinking down in some holy binary, were actually banks of emergency lights.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ava’s Eclipse
There were thousands of stars above us—that much I knew from the neon hour blinking on my watchface. We couldn’t see any stars from our skiff because they were trapped behind the storm. Fifteen minutes after Whip left us, rain began to pound the slough.
“I’m sorry. I got nervous.”
“Jesus, kid.”
“I shouldn’t have told about the dredge.”
“You almost blew it for us. You almost cost us our best chance at saving your sister.”
“I know,” I said miserably.
A mosquito crawled out from the feathers at his collar. It drifted up and landed on my nose, its little wings sawing the air. My sister is alone out here, I remembered, watching it bob between my eyes.
“That was a close call.” When the Bird Man was angry, he sounded like anyone to me, like a blue-haired tourist demanding a refund. “We could have both gotten into some serious trouble. Imagine the hassle that man could have kicked up for me …”
I nodded, blinking mightily. The mosquito flew off. I was thinking that I had made a bad mistake, maybe. We were miles from any telephones, from the airboats with their UHF radios, from the city ferry. Back home, I could have placed a simple call to Search and Rescue and the whole rescue operation would have been out of my hands. I could have called my dad …
“You want to turn back?” The Bird Man peered out at me from the rain-sleeked hood of his coat. His mood was on the downswing now. L
ight caught on his whistle and in the soft, wet curls of hair around his ears, but his eyes were dull as gunmetal. “Say the word, kid.”
I took a breath. “I think I want to turn back, yes.”
“Kid, I’ve been poling for two days. We’re knocking at the door.”
“I’ll still pay you when we get home!” This came out as a cry, startling us both. I hadn’t expected my voice to sound that way. The Bird Man gave me a sidelong look of bad disappointment. For a while there was no noise from the stern beyond the air in the oarlocks, the hull’s regular lift and slap. The glade skiff nosed forward.
“I just … I’m really worried here?” I kept my gaze fixed on the blue quicks of my fingernails. “I think we made a mistake.”
“You need to be brave now, Ava,” the Bird Man told me seriously. I scooted forward a little and snuck my knee under his gloved hand. I liked the weight of the heavy metal buckle on my bare skin. When I leaned into him I was safe, I was pinned in space.
“Have you ever heard of Bianca Defiore and Michael Taylor?” the Bird Man asked quietly.
I shook my head.
“They went on their first date on Michael’s airboat, launched from Viper Bight at sunset for a little scenic tour. And then Mikey got lost.”
“Out here?”
“In a similar nowhere. He hit a tree that cut their gas line. He stranded them on the saw-grass prairie with food and water for one night. Bianca had a diabetic attack while they were waiting for Search and Rescue and she died, Ava. With all of their technology it was fourteen days before they found Mr. Michael Taylor, half-looney with his dead acquaintance in his arms.”
I shivered. “So, they goofed up one time. The swamp’s a big place …”
I got an image of Whip Jeters putzing around on his boat with his anemic flashlight.
“And don’t forget, these are people who have gotten into bad scrapes, yes, but they are here. They are in our world. They can be found by Search and Rescue,” he said slowly, checking my eyes for understanding.
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