Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  Can he see me? Do I want him to? Kiwi blinked out of the shadows, mere feet from the seething lights of the casino floor. The walls smelled of old seediness, throw-up, and wood pulp. Behind him he heard a wine-red laugh and the tinsely clatter of forks and knives falling off a buffet table.

  “Pick a direction, fuckface.” Someone shoved past Kiwi on the stairs, a blur of pale skin and tattoos flickering on a bicep.

  “Sorry, sir, excuse me …” He felt seasick from the billiard greens and neons shooting out at him from every angle of the room. The roulette wheel turned its tiny spikes. Kiwi’s back was drenched in sweat that turned freezing in the air-conditioning. The Chief had switched on the microphone:

  “Get your ballots out, folks, because this is going to be one stiff competition, har har …”

  The Chief’s laughter burst from the speakers like brown water from spigots. Apparently a “beauty pageant” was about to take place; men were using squabby pencils to fill out a voter’s card. How depressing! The Chief’s gaze crossed Kiwi’s square of carpet twice—three times! four times!—before settling on the stage again. Behind his large glasses, Chief Bigtree’s eyes were lost in the neon snow of the show.

  “Well, don’t just stand there, folks,” the Chief growled. “Look alive! How are you going to judge a beauty pageant with your eyes shut?”

  This was how Dad was raising money for Carnival Darwinism?

  The humans who answered his dad’s summons were sad quarry, Kiwi thought—pervy-looking old guys or catatonic gamblers, men with nothing else to lose tonight. The faces he saw under the lights were grim with an insuperable boredom, or in a kind of dreamy agony. One man with a tight, bloated face kept shuffling at his crotch in full sight of everyone.

  Vijay and Leo did not join the huddle. They were busy chatting up two old women, two gargoyles in flowery pantsuits near the roulette wheel, hoping to find “female patrons” to support their gambling. They had a little routine, which they’d explained to Kiwi in the car. “The pitch.” It didn’t sound particularly sophisticated. The plan seemed to involve (1) talking to older ladies, (2) listening to older ladies, (3) asking older ladies for one hundred dollars. In denominations of twenty, if possible.

  Vijay and Leo were working hard; Leo had a grin stuccoed to his face, and Vijay kept throwing his head back in a spectacularly phony laugh. Neither of them seemed to have noticed the white man behind the microphone. An aging Bigtree Indian with knotty hands and purple bags beneath his eyes whose face looked—if you really looked—exactly like the face of their friend Kiwi.

  What were these women—strippers? dancers? Kiwi wasn’t sure what to call them but they seemed underwardrobed for air-conditioning. They were all lined up for the pageant. They scintillated in a sort of depressing, fish-market way. A brunette with a jowly, friendly face walked out first. Bouncing Bella. She guffawed for some reason when the Chief called her onto the stage, as if her name were a complicated joke that she had at last understood. A redhead in a padded bra that looked like it was made from an extinct species of hot-pink Texan snake kept sneezing. The Chief held the microphone in his huge grip and ladled his compliments over each of them, as if he were trying to clothe them in words.

  Easily it was the saddest pageant that Kiwi had ever seen.

  “Okay!” The Chief cleared his throat. “Let’s get those ballots in, gentlemen …”

  Does my dad do this every night? Kiwi wondered. Only Tuesdays? The Chief was the proudest man who Kiwi had ever met. How had he survived a job, any Loomis job, for so long?

  The Chief started using phrases Kiwi recognized from Hilola Bigtree’s show:

  “Did you forget that they made women like this, folks …?”

  “Now, believe me, this girl has got more talent in her pinkie finger …”

  A few things were making sense now, in the scarlet hue of this event. It would appear—it would make sense, timewise—that Kiwi’s dad had been working two jobs for quite some time. Years, possibly. Which life did the Chief keep a secret from whom? Kiwi wondered. It seemed unlikely that these mainlanders knew his father as Chief Bigtree of Swamplandia! For a second, trying to assimilate this fact, Kiwi felt his whole childhood turn translucent.

  So: the Chief’s “business trips” had been to this casino, or perhaps to equally shitty places of employ in Loomis County.

  Kiwi’s mother used to describe the business trips to her children as “Sam’s ventures” in respectful, careful tones. Dark and sparkling tones—that was Hilola Bigtree, monologuing about her husband. Whenever one parent talked to him about the other one, Kiwi got the uneasy feeling that he didn’t know either person at all.

  “Oh, your father is meeting with the investors, honey. ‘Investors’ are mainlanders who pay us more money than any one tourist. They are big fans of our show.”

  As Kiwi got older and angrier, his mother would reveal a little more: “Your father is doing hard work for us on the mainland. He gets lonely in that hotel room. He wishes he were here on the island, believe me. I know you miss him, Kiwi,” she’d add. “I know you love your father.”

  By the end, she seemed to say “I know you …” out of a deep anxiety for the future that she wouldn’t get to oversee, the same way she begged: “I know you’re wearing deodorant” or “I know you’re practicing with the Seths” or “I know you’ll take good care of your sisters, Kiwi.”

  “Brush your teeth, son!” she’d screamed at him once from her hospital bed, nine days before her death. “You’re not brushing, are you …?” and the pleading and suspicion in her voice belied the stupidity of this accusation. She was all doped with morphine.

  “Mom, I’m seventeen,” he’d said quietly. And then, when he saw what her face did, “Thank you for reminding me, Ma. I’ll keep brushing.”

  All his mom’s requests had become huge and tragic at the end of her life, like magnificent tropical flowers at the suicidal peak of their blooming. Kiwi was studying them, the angiosperms of tropical systems, for a future test that Kiwi planned to give and take. Perhaps he would be a horticulturist. As a genius, your career options abounded, and with his background he was set: horticulture, herpetology, oncology, radiology, the mortuary arts, museum sciences, he pretty much had his pick.

  After her cancer was diagnosed, all business trips had stopped.

  Always Kiwi had viewed his parents as coconspirators, confabulators. But Kiwi had assumed the conspiracy part was Swamplandia!—all that bullshit about the island and the Seths and their “Bigtree tribe.” He hadn’t guessed that a bigger, sadder secret existed on the shore, a backstage to their family’s story way out here in Loomis County. Carnival Darwinism seemed more impossible than ever before, now that Kiwi understood how the Chief had planned to fund it.

  Onstage, the Chief was handing the Queen of Beauty a metal crown and a fountain of white carnations. His bum leg stuttered on the carpet.

  “Another winner!”

  “Another winner!”

  “Another winner!”

  A golden-toned computerized voice announced this good tiding over and over while somewhere nearby metal rained into a pan.

  “Hey, Bigtree!”

  Kiwi started. Leo showed up swinging a bottle of beer in each hand.

  “There you are, bro … Are you watching this? Fucking unbelievable, right?”

  He rolled his eyes toward the stage. There was something puppyish about the conflict on Leo’s face. He was clearly torn between his first impulse toward wonderment, a panting and ignorant enjoyment, and his obedience to their pack of three. You weren’t supposed to enjoy a spectacle like this.

  “What I mean is, it’s sort of gross. Pathetic. These bitches are old. The whole thing’s retarded. What if that was, like, your mom?”

  Then Leo made a joke about Vijay’s mother, an analogy that compared her to the Lucky-U-Can’t-Lose Slot Machine. Leo’s mother’s vagina was alleged by Vijay to be wide as a bus. Punching commenced.

  “You guys? You’re g
oing to get us kicked out of here,” Kiwi mumbled. Across the room his dad had started to cough. The Chief had an instinct for professionalism: when his coughing fit began he switched off the microphone. From the shadows, Kiwi watched his father’s silent convulsions.

  A thickset man in jeans and a knotted red bandanna was approaching his dad’s table; he leaned in and thumped the Chief between his shoulder bones—too hard, Kiwi thought. The man had a skinny ponytail that jumped against the small of his back with each step, as if this guy thought he was a mobile rodeo. My dad’s boss, Kiwi realized with something like horror. He watched his father’s head tilt forward a fraction of an inch, as if in prayer. This was a humility that Kiwi had become familiar with, via Carl.

  So that guy is my dad’s employer.

  “Sammy!” It was an angry summons. The boss had a voice that carried crystalline across a room. The Chief listened with an odd smile. The Chief is going to destroy you, guy. Once, when Grandpa Sawtooth made some snide remark about his son, the Chief had bodily lifted the old man and chucked him into the slough. He waited for his father to throw the first punch. What the heck kind of wrestling move was this? Kiwi wondered, watching the Chief’s palms lift and separate. Some kung fu trick?

  With his huge palms held outward, the Chief shaped a prodigious apology on the air.

  “You fucked it up, Sammy, you really fucked it this time …,” the shorter man kept screaming. “You want to see the records? You got petty cash amnesia again? Or do you remember what you did with my two hundred dollars?”

  Kiwi didn’t hear what the Chief said after his boss exploded. Kiwi did not run, exactly. “Excuse me …,” he kept saying, pushing past low tables covered in empty pitchers.

  If anyone follows me I’ll pretend to throw up, he thought. With any luck I won’t even have to fake it.

  But no one was following him.

  A craps table got him good just above his hip bone; it was going to bruise badly. Ecchymosis, his brain helpfully reported. “Owww!” screamed Kiwi, knocking into the disgusted dealer.

  In the back lot a few motorcycles and one dust-red Chevrolet were parked beneath the lamps. The night was a bowl of heat. No moon, no stars.

  Kiwi was surprised to see the Chief working here, but it was a dull and terrible surprise. With a grim, spiderlike lacemaking Kiwi’s brain knit his surprise into a dull and terrible knowledge.

  This was not Kiwi’s first experience with the spider. That was Kiwi’s nickname for the complex neurophysics that processed your shock into horror. Spun love into fear. In January, for example, he’d seen his mother’s chart on Dr. Gautman’s wall. The spectacled doctor had entered and paused by the window. A pat of sun slid down the doctor’s biscuit-white face. He leaned by the tinted green window shades, watching Kiwi with his clipboard (“I imagine you’ll have some questions for me, Mr. Bigtree …”). But Kiwi Bigtree had turned his head quickly; nope, he didn’t have anything to say. All the questions that had gone hooking through his bloodstream abruptly straightened—aha! And: eureka! Now Kiwi understood perfectly what was happening. Okay, he blinked. Okay, sure. All right. His blood flow was red and serene. His mom was dying. In two months, if all went according to schedule, she would be dead. Like a genius he’d understood this, without any help from the doctors. A prodigy of the buzzing fluorescence. T3 c, A+!

  He read the chart through twice. Afterward, all his uncertainty about his mother’s cancer—all that optimistic darkness—drained right out of him. He didn’t tell Ava and Ossie, and when they learned it for themselves from Dr. Gautman he’d felt an evil satisfaction. He’d watched his sisters’ calm faces fall away like scabs and become something else, something more terrible than he could have imagined. Ava’s and Ossie’s mouths were perfect Os. Meanwhile the doctor had tried to hedge the word “death” for them. He made it sound like the best thing for her; anyhow, there was “nothing left to do.”

  “Imagine, children,” he’d said with a false, gentle grin, as if death itself were the miracle cure they’d all been waiting for. “At last your mother will be at total peace!”

  You thought you couldn’t stand not to know a thing until you knew it, wasn’t that right? Who had said that, the Chief? Some poet from the Library Boat, maybe.

  Knowledge at last, Kiwi’s mind recited dutifully. The fish’s living eye: glass.

  Sometimes you would prefer a mystery to remain red-gilled and buried inside you, Kiwi decided, alive and alive inside you.

  Kiwi gulped air and went back inside the casino. The scene was unchanged: stale cigarettes, the slots expulsing tokens, all these heads bent in a dying garden over the machines. The old women’s wigs looked to him like faded flowers, dull oranges and carmines and silvers. Horrifically, impossibly, the pageant had started up again. This was good news? His dad was still employed, at least. He spotted Leo and Vijay at the bar. His friends looked a little lost next to the tyrannosaurus drunks, old men whose tiny, atrophied arms curled whiskey sours against their Hawaiian shirts. The Chief’s voice swam everywhere in this nicotine aquarium:

  “Let’s all welcome lovely Bella to the stage!”

  For a second, Kiwi swore he locked eyes with the Chief. He lifted one hand in a stiff wave. The Chief, if he recognized him, didn’t wave back.

  Kiwi stared over the wide expanse of rug and strangers and machines. Why couldn’t he cross a square of carpet to get to his father?

  Kiwi counted out the money he’d brought—sixty-two bucks in pristine singles and fives. Kiwi would have ironed his salary if it were possible, he was that careful with it. He stuffed the bucks into one of the dealer’s envelopes.

  “Miss?”

  The woman who took the money from him was one of the Live Girls. Bouncing Bella. She stared down at the cone of twenties, and when she stared up at him her face had transformed.

  “We have a place around the back where we can go, honey, it’s real nice …”

  “Oh, no, I’m sorry …,” Kiwi yelped as if a great weight had just fallen on his toe. “Oh, my God, ma’am. You are misunderstanding me. We are having a misunderstanding.”

  Well, his dick was stirring regardless. He noted this with dismay, his penis dumb as a beagle jumping for this woman’s gartered leg. Kiwi stared down at the red nails she’d hooked through his belt loop. Fantastic. Luckily yards and yards of Cubby’s heavy denim concealed his arousal from anybody. Somewhere in the suburbs of Loomis, Kiwi imagined Cubby Wallach making his seventh ham sandwich, grabbing a pie slice, adding to his empire of girth—that friendship seemed impossibly remote to Kiwi now, impossibly childish. Bella dropped her hand and frowned at him.

  “This money isn’t for … that. I’m here to repay a loan. Miss, could you give this to that man over there?”

  “Who? Bobby?”

  “May-be …,” Kiwi said carefully. “Which one do you call Bobby?”

  “Bobby’s our boss. The floor manager. You a friend of his?”

  “No, no, the, ah … the other one. The older white man.”

  “Sammy?” Bella’s eyes regarded him milkily. “Why don’t you give it to him? You should give it to him yourself, he’s having a rough night. I’ll take you over there. He’s a nice guy, isn’t he? We all love Sammy. He makes us feel beautiful.”

  “He’s good at that,” Kiwi agreed. “Good with words.”

  “Say!” Bella said, peering in at him. “Do I know you from someplace? Are you that kid who was on TV a few weeks back, the angel?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m no angel, ha-ha.” Kiwi held his hands up. “Falsely accused.”

  Bella began to tug Kiwi across the floor.

  “Can’t do it …” Kiwi left her holding the envelope, already pushing back into the crowd. “… really busy, so … thank you!”

  No signature, no note—Kiwi didn’t see how he could write a letter to his father here, on the edge of a pool table. It was a communication so private even Kiwi wasn’t certain what he was trying to tell his father. With the money he was saying “
thank you” and “keep this job.” So far as he knew. Maybe he was saying something else entirely and they’d both have to wait to find out what. Kiwi was starting to think that certain gifts were like hieroglyphs that could take years to decipher.

  He’ll know it’s from me, at least, Kiwi thought. Who else would address Sam Bigtree as “the Chief” here? He watched the Chief accept the envelope.

  “Let’s go,” Kiwi said. He found Vijay chatting up a woman with hair like chamomile tea and pink, alcoholic eyes, who was at minimum four decades his senior. Whatever they’d been talking about was causing her eyes to water with pleasure and Vijay was laughing, too, his braying, abort-mission laughter, desperate as a fist punching the ejector button. When he saw Kiwi he rolled his eyes and grabbed him by the wrist.

  “Kiwi! Meet my lovely friend Clarisse—”

  “We’re going. Right now.”

  The Chief was on his feet, walking through the rows and rows of machines. He held one stout, hairy arm out, like a farmer dowsing for a spring. The chewed, stained fingers on the end of the arm were Kiwi’s own. Same length, same fingernails even. Their eyes met again, and this time the Chief held his son’s gaze. Or seemed to; it was difficult to tell behind the big glasses. Light filled them like drink.

  “I’m sick.” He grabbed Vijay by the elbow and swayed a little to demonstrate.

  Vijay rousted Leo from the men’s room and they were off—it was immediately clear from the colorful dribble on his chin that Leo was legitimately ill. But Kiwi pushed his way between his friends and flung his arms around them, transforming them into de facto bodyguards, his neck contracting into his shoulders like a turtle. “Go,” he hissed. The three boys passed an elderly couple on their way out, and Kiwi turned to watch the casino doors shutting on the old man’s walker, and Kiwi watched as his Jamaican caretaker stooped on the AstroTurf green rug to yell directly into his ear: “Freddy, you gotta move. Move!”

  “We’ll come back soon,” Kiwi heard himself saying as he searched for the Volvo. “Tomorrow, even. We can come back tomorrow.”