Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  “Right … I know.” I took the Bird Man’s hand. I was close enough to see the red canoes above his eyelids, the hazel lines that shot through his gray irises. You could stand this close to a Bird Man, or any man, I thought with wonderment, and still not guess what was in his mind.

  While we were talking I let my fingers slide through his fingers, not really thinking about what I was doing, and he relaxed his own long fingers, squeezed down. The knit of our hands on his lap looked so distant from either of us, like a sculpture we’d made. My small fingers pushed inside the pallid roses of his knuckles. One knuckle had a raised scar on it, nasty as a tattoo; I saw older scars, too, from beaks or maybe talons. I figured this for evidence that the Bird Man was a powerful fighter, like my father and my mother and my grandmother and my grandfather, and hopefully, one day, myself.

  “You’ve got a wrestler’s grip there, kid,” he said, smiling down at our fist. “Look, Ava—”

  He jabbed a thumb up, and I started at the chaotic movement of our map. Three buzzards were crashing around on the wind a little ways behind us.

  “You think Search and Rescue can find the back entrance of the underworld? You think Mr. Jeters can read a map like that? You’re on the edge of the universe, kid, and you don’t even know it.”

  We rounded a bend and I groaned inwardly. The wind tilled the saw grass for miles and miles in every useless direction. We were going to have to carry the skiff for another long, mucky stretch. “The edge of the universe,” I repeated, and picked up the dripping handle of my oars.

  Another portage of a quarter mile, and hard rain when we got back on the water. We both had pulled our slickers on—it was strange to see the Bird Man’s feathers pasted below the yellow plastic. He kept scratching his head, and he seemed more genuinely agitated now than I’d seen him at any point on this trip. It was a little frightening. He’d scratched his thin hair into a pompadour—it looked as though every wire were coming disconnected in his brain. I thought about making a joke about it (we used to tease Kiwi when he woke up with Amadeus Mozart hair, for example), but the Bird Man’s eyes warned me away from doing so. They mirrored the storm.

  And then my breath caught, because we had arrived. Two great humps rose in the rain before us. I could see the gigantic swells of them not fifty yards away.

  “We made it? That’s the Eye?”

  The Eye had been described to me as a kind of Calusa Scylla and Charybdis, and I’d seen Grandpa’s grainy photograph, but I hadn’t been prepared for the overwhelming strangeness of seeing the mounds’ weird, pyramidal shapes up close. They rose out of the river like twin volcano peaks. They were perfectly denuded of trees or any green growth, fogged over by the rainstorm and made of what looked like lunar cement, whelk, and conch. The two middens that formed the Eye were a kissing cousins’ distance from each other. A tall man could have easily jumped from one mound to its neighbor. Water cut between them in a perfectly straight gray line; the channel couldn’t have been much more than four feet at its widest point. It was going to be a squeeze for us; no way could an entire dredge barge pass through the Eye; if Ossie and Louis had come this way, they would have had to abandon the barge somewhere and use the dredge scow, a tiny red canoe hung over the barge’s stern like a wooden eyebrow. The scow didn’t have a motor; she and Louis would have had to paddle hard. Which was exactly what the Bird Man wanted me to do now, apparently—to push our skiff into the portal.

  “Come on, kid, put some real muscle into it.”

  The Bird Man’s hair was hanging in his eyes and I didn’t understand the expression on his face. Maybe he’s scared, or angry? Because he’s been this way before, I thought, because he knows … but I couldn’t begin to imagine what he might know. We paddled hard against the wind and current and yet we weren’t making any progress; it felt as if our skiff were pinned beneath the wind’s great thumb.

  “You think we can get through that?” I shouted. “Shouldn’t we find a place to wait this out?”

  We paddled into the chop with spray flying at our faces. An easterly knocked us sideways and we aimed our bow for a blue breath between the rocks that I did not think we could make.

  “This is our window, kid.”

  The humps of broken shells rose around us. We had to pull ourselves through the passage with our hands—if the bow had twisted a few inches to the right or left we would have gotten hung up. The Bird Man put on his helmet and switched on the headlamp, it had gotten that dark. Shells glittered on either side of us like defunct treasure, washed a pearly rose and dish blue that glowed against the sky. The water was as narrow as a hallway, lapping the tall white walls of shells, and the green column of air on the other side of the tunnel stood open like a door. The underworld is coming next, I thought, and the muscles in my stomach tensed the way they did before a show. “Where is my SISTER?” I moaned through my teeth, too tired now for real hysteria but more determined than I’d ever been to find her.

  Probably if I had waited even a few seconds longer to glance at the sky, I wouldn’t have seen her ribbon: a flag of purple snagged amid the toothy piles of whelk. “Ossie!” I shouted out loud, but the Bird Man didn’t hear me over the wind. I imagined the ribbon catching there as she tried to squeeze through, her hair flying out in a white fan around her face. I stood up, keeping my arms on the shell mound so that I didn’t overturn the skiff, and I reached onto my toes to grab it; in the process I nearly fell out of the shallow hull, and the Bird Man had to grab my waist and jerk me down again.

  “Have you gone crazy? Sit down, sit down!”

  I gaped up at him.

  “I said sit,” he screamed over the wind. “This is nowhere to capsize!”

  “I just wanted a souvenir,” I called, and showed him the opal fragments of shell that I’d dislodged into my palm when I went for the ribbon. The ribbon itself I stuffed quickly into my pocket and didn’t explain. I still don’t know why I did this; somehow it seemed a smart secret to keep for the moment. I thought this ribbon must be a message from Ossie and I wanted time to puzzle it out on my own—it could be an arrow pointing me toward her, I thought. Or a new kind of map. It didn’t occur to me then that there might be a darker explanation for my discovery.

  “Ava! Ship your paddle, kid, use your hands …”

  He seemed angry with me but there was no time for a lecture: we were midway through the Eye. There was no space to row anymore so we were pushing our way forward with our palms on the brittle sides of the middens. Behind me I could hear the Bird Man’s pole striking shell. The air gushing into my throat felt hot as exhaust, and it was all I could do to keep my hands moving along the walls.

  The rain stopped as suddenly as it began. After five minutes we were totally clear of it. In the clarifying light that spilled between the live oaks I looked for proof that we had arrived in the underworld.

  “I keep telling you, kid, this is the shallow end.” The Bird Man rubbed at the creases on his forehead. Why did adults always do that? I wondered. What if a face really worked like that, like rumpled trousers, and you could smooth out your bad thoughts from the outside in? I had thought he might share my happiness—we had made it through, and now we could find Ossie! Wasn’t that right? I crumpled a little; we’d arrived but there was no celebration or encouragement in his pale eyes.

  “I got cut really bad,” I said, to say something. “On my hands.” Wordlessly he tipped a few drops from his bottle of green medicine onto our deepest cuts and we watched the white bubbles open like a million tiny mouths. This time I did not say one word about love.

  “The freak show happens inside the circus tent, kid; we’re just at the entrance to the fairgrounds. No ghosts, not yet. Does that hurt you?”

  I shook my head. He petted my hair and I smiled back at him helplessly, Ossie momentarily forgotten. With a twinge of shame I mussed up my hair again, hoping he’d lean in once more and smooth it. But the Bird Man did not touch or look at me again; he stretched the knit of his fingers and r
eturned to his poling platform. I placed the red Seth on my lap and let her sun, soothed by her small weight there. Her sides collapsed dramatically with each exhalation and her belly felt cool and dry.

  Already I had seen a few gars in the water, and tiny green herons. They had all looked conventionally alive to me, although who knew what the rules of this underworld were? I’d expected the weather to be icy, or at least a few degrees colder. I touched my hand to the rocky beach where we were resting and let a golden bug crawl onto my thumb. Dozens of legs combed up my bare arm, and for a second I felt almost joyful.

  “Ossie!” I called. “Ossie?”

  You be alive, too, I told her. I looked down until my vision blurred and watched the beetle crawling onto my shoulder.

  “Do you think we’ll run into the rest of the dredge crew out here?” I asked. I had just seen something squatting on all fours behind the cabbage palms. A crocodile, I thought. You can tell from the teeth.

  The Bird Man pulled his hat down. “It’s possible, kid. Stranger things have happened.”

  “Do you think we might run into my mother?”

  I picked up a clot of moss with my paddle, dunked it. I hated how little my voice sounded when I asked the question.

  The Bird Man gave me a look I couldn’t read and then nodded once, quickly. “I told you, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. Right now we’re only in the shallows of the underworld, the threshold …”

  After that we didn’t speak again for a long time. The underworld was unbelievably fecund. I saw snail kites, which I hadn’t seen in such numbers since I was nine or ten, and a virgin stand of mahogany. Wood storks’ heads appeared like ancient doorknobs along the branches. We are in the underworld now, I thought, kneeing forward in the skiff and looking around. We have crossed over; we could at any moment find my sister! But the pink sun was so hot here, and this landscape was not the landscape promised in the book. This landscape looked like our backyard. I saw lonely pine keys, cormorants, broken rock.

  We stopped in a brush-filled cove, drank from the canteens. A Seth blinked incuriously at us, curled on the dark sand amid the palmetto fronds.

  You could become a fossil in your lifetime, I’d discovered. I’d seen the eerie correspondence between the living Seths in our Pit and their taxidermied brothers in our museum. The Chief could achieve an ossified quality, too, with his headdress skeletally flattened against the sofa back, drunk and asleep.

  “Is that one alive or dead, Bird Man?”

  He was busy with the baling bucket and he didn’t hear me, or maybe chose to ignore me. I threaded all my fingers through the wooden holes in the crate carrier; the red Seth regarded me from a triangle of shadow. The wedge of our bow pushed into a dark spot on the water, where rain came shaking off the trees. I’d tied Osceola’s purple ribbon around my wrist—so tightly, the Bird Man grumbled, that it looked like a tourniquet. I waited for him to ask where the ribbon had come from but he seemed to think it was one of mine, original to our journey.

  Somewhere, possibly just a few hundred yards to the east or the west of us on one of these tree islands, Ossie’s hair was blowing in this same wind that rippled the water at our bow. The Land of the Dead was windier than I had expected and as flat as a cracker and I had so many bug bites on my shins that the bumps overlapped. Mosquitoes were just as vicious here. I’d have to remember to tell that to my brother, I thought dizzily … I stared at the black mush on my ruby bruise where I’d slapped one and felt myself beginning to be sick. Kiwi would be taking assiduous Field Notes on the shallows of the underworld. He’d be skimming specimens off the water, or sketching the wings of undead mosquitoes. But why were the mosquitoes in the Land of the Dead so thirsty and noisy? Why did the fish jump just as high here as they did anywhere?

  “Everything is alive here, Bird Man,” I whispered, not wanting to offend anyone—it seemed a funny thing to mention if there were ghosts around.

  “So far. Watch out that we don’t get hung up on that—” The Bird Man pushed his pole against a submerged rock. “You’ll find a mix of the living and the dead in the shallows.”

  “Oh. Right. That makes sense.”

  There are estuaries near Swamplandia! where salt water and freshwater mingle, and it’s a crazy party down there: manatees and ten-foot saltwater crocodiles and freshwater alligators, bottlenose dolphins and bluegill, soft-shell turtles.

  “Hey, do you want to play twenty questions or something?” I called over my shoulder. At this point we were twenty minutes beyond the Eye. “Do you want to, uh, to talk?”

  The Bird Man shook his head and held the thick finger of his falconer’s glove to his lips. He seemed jumpy to me. Once I turned to look at him: we were paddling in a deep lake into fierce open sun, and sweat slid down the closed window of his face.

  I am almost there, Osceola, I thought, as the little waves imploded. Keep breathing.

  Five o’clock and we were still on the river. Now the Caloosahatchee had become the Styx. The water here was clear as a blue lozenge. Large, brilliantly winged moths trailed our oar handles for a mile. We moved through a labyrinth of canals that felt identical to the route we’d taken yesterday, just as shallow and confusing, just as chokingly hot. Occasionally you would see something new: on one tree island, for example, hundreds of cabbage palms felled by a storm covered the ground. Ferns had swallowed the stumps: resurrection ferns and saw palmettos, hundreds upon hundreds of waxy blooms with a brilliant red center. I told the Bird Man they looked like dwarfs in tuxedos and he smiled. Then I thought I saw a shape moving behind a screen of vines—it was two-legged, short but humanoid—and I hollered at the Bird Man to stop our boat.

  “No,” he said, poling us evenly forward.

  “What do you mean, no?” The island was curving away from us.

  “I mean no. We’re not stopping. Not there.”

  “But I saw somebody back there. What if it’s my sister?”

  “It’s not her. Pick up your paddle, Ava.”

  I caught my muscles making sly preparations to jump out and swim up current.

  “Ossie!” I yelled behind me. “Please, we have to at least check …”

  The Bird Man’s hand flew out and retreated so nimbly that at first I didn’t know what had happened; I saw colors, felt my teeth snag on my lower lip; I touched my cheek, confused; He hit you, explained the smart voice that narrates pain to your animal parts; on the platform he resumed poling forward. The skiff turned away from the tree island. He hadn’t done it to hurt me, he said angrily. The last thing he wanted was to hurt me, but what the hell was he supposed to do if he couldn’t trust me to keep quiet?

  “You better start paying attention, if you want to get out of this place alive. That wasn’t your sister, believe me. That’s not a good island to stop at. We have a very small window to find her and we can’t waste time chasing some shadow, kid.”

  “It wasn’t a shadow. What I saw—”

  “You can get stranded out here, kid. Did you know that? Did your sister’s book include a tide table for the underworld?”

  The Bird Man turned my chin to face him.

  “Look: have you ever heard of someone getting trapped on a sandbar?” I stared at him. My mouth stung. “Trust me on this one. Remember the rules? Remember what I said about the riptides?”

  I nodded. The water was five feet deep here and clear to the bottom and my muscles twitched to jump. Believe him, I thought. He’s gotten you this far. But then who was that girl? As he poled forward I craned around to watch the island recede, wanting very badly to see her shadow—but this time there was nothing. Just a wall of leaves and a cradle of water, shining. The Bird Man was struggling mightily to keep the skiff straight—it had become so narrow in the mangrove tunnel that when we got turned even a few inches sideways we hung up on the brambles. At one point a felled mahogany blocked a channel, a huge tree with shaggy roots, thirty or forty feet tall, and he had to pole us out stern first.

  “Ossie!” I scre
amed one last time at the bend in the river, and the Bird Man shot me a warning look. Two buzzards swung through the silk of the rain. It was six o’clock by my watch, the underworld becoming muggy and preternaturally dark.

  Dusk again. The pig frogs were throating their joy in the cattails. Sometimes I forgot for whole minutes what we were doing out here, who we were looking for.

  Through her cage slats the red Seth blinked up at my face with florid eyes.

  We wove through a long ridge of pinnacle rock. The sun glittered behind what sounded like the roar of the surf, as if the twisted pines hid a long seabed, a tidal hum so convincing that you could almost make out the Gulf foaming behind the trees—mosquitoes, the ocean’s tiniest mimics. I swabbed their iridescent green-and-silver corpses out of my ears and crusted nose and continued to peer into the scrub, my heart pounding.

  I was baling water in the bow seat, the Bird Man poling behind me, when I heard the crackle of a song I recognized and shot up.

  “… bye, bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry …”

  Somebody on the tree island was listening to a radio! There was no mistaking the moody AM crackle—it was a station I knew, WCAM, Glen Winter’s Golden Oldies show. Who had a radio out here? I saw tall shapes moving between the black mangroves: gator hunters. I guessed this from their canvas gear, the steaklike crimson of their faces beneath their hats. I knew a fair amount about that messy business, not from the Chief but from Grandpa Sawtooth, who used to hunt everything without discrimination before Park Services took over. I’d watched him cutting out the brain cap, salting it, stripping the skin before the scales slipped. “Hornbacking” meant taking everything, the whole hide. During the worst years of the Great Depression, hunters sold even the heads and claws to the seaside artisans who turned them into pocketbooks. “People were tacky in those days,” Grandpa Sawtooth grunted by way of explanation.