Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  Through the holes in the trees, I saw something flashing. Long and scythe-bright: knives. Handles that connected to fists. Two men were cutting at something splayed on the ground that I couldn’t see, a radio bleating fuzzily behind them. I rotated by careful half degrees in the skiff. I didn’t want to upset our equilibrium—who knew the rules of this place?—but if there were other living people in this underworld I wanted to know if they’d seen Ossie. And these guys seemed like happy drunks, not ghosts.

  “No,” the Bird Man said before I could ask. “Better keep your mouth shut. Those men are dead, kid.”

  Dead? “Are you sure?” Already the river was hurrying us away from them. “They looked just like ordinary people. Like any hunters.” My voice broke into agitation like a rash. “They’ve got a radio …,” I whined.

  “Do they?” the Bird Man hissed. “Did you see if they had knives, also? Did you see, with your superior vision, what they were skinning behind the trees?”

  “Alligators.” My voice sounded faint.

  The Bird Man sped us downriver. But I could still hear the chorus of the radio song and the men’s cheerful voices shouting the lyrics above it, sloppy with drink:

  “… and them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singin’, ‘This’ll be the day that I dieee, this’ll be the day …’ ”

  “Sit tight. Don’t mess this up now, Ava. This is the dangerous stretch. We’ll tie off soon. We’ll get there before midnight.”

  I swam my oar head through the river and watched a fist of brown moss dimple and sink. We were already in the underworld, right? So his promise didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Where would we be before midnight? But I saw the Bird Man’s face and knew better than to ask. For what felt like a long time I could hear the perfect radio version and also the drunk overlay of the hunters’ voices, and I could see it, the dry levee, and for some reason the picture made me very afraid for my sister. Those men are alive, Ava. I heard the stern, tiny rudder of her voice, my mother’s voice. You know they are.

  “Help!” I hollered, scaring myself worse with my own screaming. “Help, can you hear me? If you’re real, come help me! We’re over here on the water …”

  I was fumbling for the cooler and trying to get the red Seth inside my bib pocket; I wasn’t going to jump without her. Then the Bird Man was covering my mouth.

  “Oh shut up, shut up,” he groaned. “Now why would you do that?” His glove tasted like sour fur.

  He clamped hard against my mouth to smother my second scream and I thought dizzily that this was how our Seths felt. Like a Seth I was too weak to do anything, to bite down or force my jaws open. When it was clear that the men weren’t coming he loosened his grip. His eyes were full of a funny sadness, like a disgust—disappointment. I couldn’t slow my breaths enough to get air down. Air looped shallowly through my nostrils. My vision darkened. For just a second, black snow shook across the sun, and I thought with a misled excitement about the painting Winter on the River Styx.

  “If I let go,” he said directly into my ear, “can I trust you to keep your mouth shut? Please, I am trying to help you here. Jesus H. You cannot go screaming around the underworld, kid.”

  This felt like one of Kiwi’s English tests: was the Bird Man scared of me or for me?

  If it was the first one I knew that I should probably bite down or scream again. If it was the second one I needed to stay quiet. Oh but Kiwi, I can’t guess the answer from his voice.

  “Kid, pull another stunt like that one and you will get yourself killed.”

  I nodded my chin into his hand. For an alligator wrestler this posture is very humiliating. It didn’t seem like I should move though, or really even could have.

  “You’re going to get the both of us killed …,” he pretended to repeat, but I knew this was different from what he’d said the first time. The first time, I was alone in the sentence.

  I sat in the boat, mouth shut now, and balanced the oar on my knees as he poled us toward a soft little piney key. The mud was a loamy red-violet color. Pines and magnolias waved their flags at an elevation of six or seven feet. We flipped and dragged the boat onto the deep beach, our feet sinking a few inches. I got out the taped-up alligator and I was holding her with her claws scrabbling on my shoulder, all twelve inches of her fighting toward the floor of the skiff. She flipped and clawed and twisted redly, almost slipping out of my grip as she dug heavily into my knees, but I nabbed her. As if my heart had sprouted claws and was trying to escape my body. I pocketed her. Right next to my heart, the poor Seth kept it company while it boomed.

  The Bird Man squatted and asked if I was okay.

  I was.

  Was I going to scream like that again?

  I was not.

  He sighed heavily and told me to relax and get myself together, that he was going to take a piss. Re-lax, Ava, he said, watching me struggle with the writhing alligator. He hung his hat and his coat on a pronged branch—both of us were sweating hard. The whistle dropped from the branch’s spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around. I thought, Make my call again, be the Bird Man. If he repeated the call from our first meeting, I knew I could get back into the boat.

  But if I observed my friend and ferryman from a different perch in my brain, I saw that the Bird Man could be an anybody. He could blend quite easily into the crowd of panhandlers and businessmen on the streets of Loomis: a tanned, middle-aged man with a few scars on his knuckles. Just a fleck of foam on that sea, as my dad would say. My dad would want me to get a good description of him. I sat on a rock and watched him remove his coat behind the saw palmetto. Okay: How would he look to a ranger, or a mainland person? Okay: he weighed a skinny number like my brother’s, whatever that might be. He had brown hair with gunmetal streaks in it. Scars on his palms and arms. A thin outdoorsman’s face. “Off the grid,” my dad might have added with his chieftain’s squint—because there was in fact something unwashed and wobbly about the Bird Man when you got up close.

  “Ava,” the Bird Man barked—to let me know he could see me, I thought with a little shiver. “Keep an eye out. Stay with the skiff.”

  The Bird Man was a bone-thin shape behind the willow head. His magic dulled and swirled beyond my ability to recall it, like an island that shrinks to a point behind your boat. All of a sudden the dimensions of my problems changed on me, like rocks coming out of the darkness: Now I was lost. Now I hoped that my sister would find me. Mentally I called out to her: Ossie? Louis? Help me.

  Why, there isn’t any ghost of Louis, the frank adult voice informed me. This voice was very primitive. It was some amalgam of the Chief and my mom and a much, much older creature. A dry rasp like a fingernail, a scale. You are both alone out here, you and Osceola, if your sister is alive out here.

  I stared down at the purple ribbon and felt a sour rise in my throat.

  I could hear the Bird Man zipping up behind the leaves maybe fifty yards from where I was sitting. I walked over to the tree where the whistle was swinging. I caught it, held it to my own lips, winced in preparation for the shattering sound. I’m not sure what I was expecting to summon—a gale of birds, an army of birds. I could see one great blue heron watching me from the river with her slate feathers blown smooth. I inhaled hard, I emptied my lungs into the whistle. Not a sound came out of it.

  Oh no, I thought in a tiny voice. Oh-oh.

  When the man returned he stooped and peeled a tiny stray feather off my collarbone. He was smiling at me—his grin was very gentle, wide enough to frighten. His eyes reminded me of two sweating water glasses. I pictured a stalk of cold water running from the burgundy toes of his boots to his scalp. Then his gaze deadened on me—like he could still see me but he wasn’t really looking anymore, some plug knocked loose—and his new eyes went rummaging around the green corridor behind me, where saw palmettos squeaked along the water.

  “Don’t sulk,” he said, and there was an elastic snap in hi
s voice as his mood turned on me. “You’ve been a good sport this whole trip, why ruin it?”

  His voice surprised me. Inside it I could hear a wounded note, like a dog’s keen, almost, but not only hurt. Something else in it, too. Our dog Yallo used to howl when it got its big paw caught in our doorjamb, and you could hear his feelings waffle: rage-pain-rage. But I didn’t understand what doorjamb the Bird Man could be caught in—we were safe now, weren’t we? Those men weren’t coming.

  “Why would you do that to me?” he mumbled. “Aw, kid, you’re going to screw it all up. Do you know what I’m risking here? For you. Ava. Do you know what could happen to me, if they find me with you …?” His voice was half a growl now. “Do you have any idea?”

  I was thinking that those hunters had been real and that we might have missed our chance to save my sister. I was really quaking with anger now, gathering breath—and then I saw his eyes and immediately shut up my face. Something bad here, I thought. Something going awry. The air between us felt like dry powder.

  “Come on, kid,” he said, and his voice had changed completely; it was charged with something that was almost kindness, that quivered like a finger of syrup. “I sure wish you had not done that. Do you want to find your sister or not? Come on. We’re wasting time.”

  On this shoreline I couldn’t hear any voices but ours. No radio song. All the little umbilicals to the world collapsed.

  “Let’s get you dried.”

  I was crying now. I stared down at the purple ribbon on my wrist, all that I had to show for two days on the water.

  The Bird Man’s hat hung from the branch above him, swinging slightly on the breeze; beneath it the coat opened its magnanimous arms. Feathers swirled out of its plumy mat. Black sleeves hung unwizardly almost a head above me, ballooning with wind. Birds moved above it by their own power. Nobody was controlling them.

  This coat was just a rag, I realized. My heart froze. A crazy person’s disguise.

  “You were lying to me,” I said dully. “There isn’t any such thing as the underworld, is there? This is just the ordinary swamp.”

  “Aw, kid, don’t say that.” The man shocked me by pouting, his face bunching into a childish purse. When it smoothed I was scared worse than before. “Don’t be ungrateful. Didn’t I get you through the Eye? Aren’t we having a little adventure? We can even keep looking for your sister if you want, why not?”

  He took a step toward me and I watched his hand swing through space and come to rest on my shoulder. He crouched low and his pale lips sprouted teeth and I couldn’t remember how to see this face as friendly.

  Who are you?

  Somebody was grinning at me. I could hear the wind fluttering his empty sleeves.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Kiwi Rolls the Dice

  Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming was a forty-minute drive from downtown Loomis. The casino’s glowing sign marked the periphery between the city and the undeveloped swampland that stretched forty miles to Chokoloskee Bay. Gus Waddell’s ferry departed from a marina just a few minutes down the road, hidden from the two-lane highway by a large commercial strawberry and tomato farm. This was the closest Kiwi had been to his family’s island since his trip to the ferry docks. Proximity to the park made Kiwi feel like he was snorkeling, getting air from a winnowing tube. Night fell around the car like a lake. If only he could lift his head, he would see what he was so afraid of. Home, he thought, peering suspiciously through the windshield.

  “Would you calm the fuck down?” Vijay asked. “You’re breathing like a drunk. You’re breathing like a sumo when the elevator’s out.” Vijay grinned at the rearview mirror, pleased with this last one.

  “You’re breathing like me, bro!” fat Leo wheezed from the backseat.

  Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming was the southernmost Seminole casino. Sawtooth and the Chief had come out here once or twice, but Kiwi had been too young and too haughty to join them—too afraid of losing, really, in front of the tough public of his dad and his grandfather. His mom had come here as a kid, she’d told them. When she lived on the mainland as Hilola Owens. No photographs existed from that period in the Bigtree Family Musuem. (It was all BS, the Chief joked—Before Swamplandia!) His mom said that Loomis teens used to haunt Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming before the Sunrise mall and multiplex opened in the seventies. Hilola and her girlfriends would walk around the perimeter of the casino like it was the deck of a luxury ship. They’d get the bouncer to bring them champagne flutes and narrow cans of Hula-Hula pineapple juice from inside.

  “Are you sure we can get in?” A part of him wanted to travel the weeds outside, to do a little pilgrimage. He pictured his mom as a skinny girl his age drinking her Hula-Hula juice with no idea of the havoc that her death was going to cause, the violent way her death would rip through space. What a weird future awaited her in the past! (Or: what a weird future had survived her?) Alligators, his sisters, his father. Ninety pounds of her was going to sink an island.

  “They’ll serve us beer in there, no problem,” Vijay was saying. “You brought your fake, Kiwi Beamtray?”

  The Volvo was one of two dozen cars in the casino lot. A busy night.

  Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming supplied the only legal gambling available in Loomis County. A few wiseacres called it the Jesus in the Temple Casino, because the main building used to be a Catholic Church. In 1947, the Seminole tribe had bought the ruins of the church, which had been blown to large bits by Hurricane King. Thirty years later the Seminole transformed the former rubble into a gambling hall.

  Once inside, Kiwi pulled a lever arm on one of the slots and won three dollars in quarters.

  “See that?” said Vijay. “You’re on a roll this week, bro.”

  Two slots over, Kiwi watched a man in a wheelchair win ten dollars in nickels.

  “You jealous?” His eyes looked as gold-bitten as old Midas’s. “Take a picture, it’ll last you longer.”

  “Quit staring at people, bro,” Vijay said irritably. “You’re always staring at everybody.” He frogged out his eyes and pulled his hair up in an imitation of Kiwi.

  “Is that what I look like?” Kiwi was heartbroken. “Electrocuted?”

  Both his friends nodded. “Yup,” Leo said drolly. “You do. Maybe your brain is full of electricity. Maybe that’s why you talk so crazy sometimes.”

  He and Vijay exchanged an almost parental look, arch and dark, like this was a theory they had previously discussed.

  “There is a documented correlation between unconventional speech and genius,” he said, patting at his hair. But nobody was listening to Kiwi anymore. They went upstairs to the dining room. For $5.99 you could get a surf and turf buffet.

  ALL*U*CAN*EAT*STEAK*AND*LOSTER.

  “What’s a loster?” Kiwi asked, feeling weirdly implicated by the name on the chalkboard, a combination of “lost” and “loser.”

  “Lobster, bro.”

  The single lobster left in there looked like some kind of mystic, trailing long curls of whitish seaweed back and forth around the tank.

  “That guy looks like the last unicorn or something,” said Leo. “Where’s the beef?”

  Leo helped himself to two steak tenderloins that were globed with fat and several paper cones of ketchup. Vijay got a ladle or cut of pretty much everything but the baked scrod. Kiwi couldn’t figure out how to work the crank ice cream dispenser and returned to their table with a bowl of maraschino cherries.

  Vijay jabbed a spoon handle at Kiwi’s cherries and made some jokes about virginity.

  Leo handled the requisite surf and turd jokes.

  Ha-ha-ha-ha, was Kiwi.

  You couldn’t take jokes about your own asshole personally on the mainland, Kiwi had learned. Other dudes would rattle off “your asshole” jokes with blank faces, like cops reading you your Miranda rights—as though reciting from a script, as if legally this simply had to be done. After a minute Kiwi said, “This looks like Leo’s dick,” and held up a shriveled walnut to approving laughter. Vijay ate a baked potato. Th
ey headed back downstairs.

  Kiwi froze on the second-to-last step. “Oh wait. You dudes go ahead. I forgot something.”

  Adrenaline ate its way through Kiwi Bigtree’s body. He wanted to run but he couldn’t move. On the opposite side of the room, in a sandbar of light, a tall, bald white man wearing a bolo tie got down on his knees. He was getting a show ready; twelve LIVE GIRLS were standing in the wings. The girls looked a little less lively than advertised. They smoked cigarettes and kept listlessly touching each other’s hair. For many of them, Kiwi observed, girlhood had ended decades ago. The casino stage was shaped like a banjo, the long runway strung with rows of white and violet lights.

  The man was on his knees, hooking a microphone into an old-fashioned set of speakers. A black cord was looped around his left shoe. He stood and then the cord was underneath the sole; oh no! thought Kiwi. It was the sort of prelude to an accident that makes bystanders feel like psychics—and when the man tripped he fell hard. He had to push off on one knee before he could stand again. When he got to his feet the first thing he did was examine his own big hands. He frowned at his palms as if he were reading a newspaper, then shined his knuckles on his navy trouser knees. Even these odd gestures were familiar to Kiwi, because the man in question was his father. Chief Bigtree, disguised as an employee of the casino.

  The Chief sat down at a small table. His wrestler’s fists joined into one tremendous, pale stone under the microphone; he stared sightlessly out at the crowd of slot machines. The first thing Kiwi noticed was the complex graininess of the Chief’s skin. (Was his dad really sick or something? What on earth was he doing here?) The second thing was that the Chief was wearing his glasses.

  Oh no. Kiwi stepped backward on the stairwell, wondering if the Chief had already seen him. These glasses were a bad sign. On Swamplandia! the Chief had been contemptuous of various drugstore aids: bifocals, Ace bandages, hemorrhoid creams, luminous jellies for poison oak and bee stings; he was even a little unsettled by flavored toothpaste. Crutches were bad for business, the Chief liked to say. “Why announce your infirmities to the tourists, kids?”