Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  “Unh.” Vijay nodded sleepily, his head wobbling unsteadily on his neck. The road itself seemed to hiccup as he drove. In the backseat Leonard was already snoring.

  One Cyclops eye burned in the rearview mirror: the prison watch-tower. Kiwi felt really sick now. Behind the prison, the swamp flew outward in every direction. It occurred to Kiwi that at this moment, he and his father were both within twelve nautical miles of Swamplandia!

  Turn around, he considered saying.

  Turn the car around, please.

  Turn the car around now. Oh guys, my dad is in trouble back there.

  A light rain patterned itself on the Volvo’s hood.

  “Tomorrow, okay?”

  Kiwi could hear his promises to himself becoming vaguer.

  Had his father recognized him? Would his father come looking for him? In the backseat, Leo was snoring heavily; in a trough between snores, with a shocking tenderness, Leo mumbled the name of a girl whom Kiwi had never heard him mention before. Amy? Annie? So everybody in this car had a stowaway.

  “Wake up!” he shouted into the backseat. Vijay turned to stare at him.

  Kiwi buckled his seat belt, shocked into old habit. In the rearview mirror the casino blew backward into darkness, and the white candle of the security tower got snuffed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Silently Screaming World

  As I’ve mentioned, the Loomis County Public Schools used to mail us workbooks and videotapes. The year that Kiwi would have entered high school as a freshman we received a brand-new slide projector, a Kodak Ektagraphic III Carousel. It looked a lot like the old slide projector, only free-er. I don’t know if some gentleman altruist was donating this equipment to us or if it was a state-sponsored thing—or if the Chief and Mom paid for it; I suppose that’s not impossible—but the packages showed up every September via Gus’s ferry, addressed to our parents. Once, on a rainy day in Grandpa’s shack, Kiwi and Ossie and I watched a 1950s nature slide show called The Silently Screaming World. White letters scrolled across a black screen: “When the world screams in its sleep, we rarely hear it. Sheets of lightning fall across the empty prairies. Earthquakes echo at depths that would burst a human eardrum. High on the Altiplano, canyons cave inward like mouths.”

  The footage was grainy, and the black-and-white palette gave the slides an eerie, immutable feel: a wall of solid flame in the Andes, Alaskan glacial collisions, the great thumbprint of an old comet in the Yucatán. What frightened me more than the images was the silence that accompanied the jumpy stills. Kiwi made us after-hours caramel popcorn and we screened these cataclysms on the hairy tiki walls of the Swamp Café, the three of us crunching loudly.

  “Lie down, Ava,” this man said, spreading a green tarp for us, and I did.

  Lying flat, I could see plants with leaves that flared outward like living Victrolas. Their throats were a pale green that winnowed into organlike tubes and disappeared. Ants crawled out of the throats of these plants. At first there were just two or three of them, dotting the broad leaves.

  Then ants came streaming onto the leaves in the black millions. A hard root was poking into the top of my spine. I closed my eyes, and waited, and when I opened them again the man was still on top of me. I couldn’t speak. I blinked my eyes and the ants streamed wetly, then spiraled into a black kaleidoscope. Above me the yellow moon kept traveling behind clouds, and the mosquitoes filled the clearing with their static. Leaves lost their transparency for whole minutes. I stiffened and my eyes flew open and when the pressure eased I could hear my breath again. The man cupped a dry hand under my neck and said something that I didn’t understand. I stared up at him; my fingers fidgeted, my wrestling hand cramping nervously, filtering dirt on the other side of the tarp. He smiled at me, pushing the hair from my face, and automatically I smiled back.

  Even after I realized what was happening, I held very still. Oh, this, I thought, and got a counterfeit déjà vu from the stories I had read and overheard. He pulled me forward along the crackling plastic, sliding the birds of his hands under my back. You could get my type of coveralls off by unhooking the two bottom snaps and sliding the straps down, but I was too embarrassed to tell the man this and so I watched as he popped all of them, even the useless little latches. Then I kicked when he needed me to help again.

  The Bird Man coughed once and I felt a wetness on my cheeks. His wrist bone was level with my eye. I had never seen his arms naked from wrist to shoulder before; they looked like anybody’s arms. His undershirt smelled like deep July. Little belly hairs crushed into the sweat on my belly. Now the Bird Man was breathing funny. He wouldn’t look at me at all, not at my face, and this made me feel a little lonely, as if we were rooms away from one another. All I could see was the gray slice of one cheek.

  My eyes rolled toward the blank sockets of the plants. Inside they were washed green, so pale, I thought, too pale to really qualify as a color. Blind light, luminous. Tiny blind bulbs at the funnel’s end. Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this pain but somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness. How strange, I thought, frowning into the plants. Once I saw a police car in Loomis with the sound cut and this feeling was like that, just a sweep over the grass: blue-red, red-blue, a mute bleat.

  And then I did hear it, then the sound exploded. The man pushed harder and got inside of me. This pain was dazzling. He grunted and he pushed into me again, he pushed again, he pushed on, until I understood that the pain was going to continue happening. I thought: Oh, my sister doesn’t know a thing about this. Now I knew deep in my gut what my sister didn’t. Ossie’s ghosts, her love possessions, those had to be something else. This part had never been what she was talking about.

  I closed my eyes then and tried to breathe through my nose only. Dimly I was aware of cold air on my belly; a little shiver of disgust drifted up between my legs. My neck kept getting ground against the hard knot of a root and all my embarrassment seemed to concentrate and grow acutest in that one spot: he would know now that I didn’t shave my legs, that I didn’t even wear a bra yet. Your legs are still hairy, he’ll think you’re a kid.

  “I’d like to go back now,” I said. “Please.”

  We walked back from the hammock in silence. We passed the same trees and their same orbiting bulbs, the same white flowers, the same sour, creamy ponds, but everything looked changed to me now. The moon had a bad charge. I followed the Bird Man’s feathers through the trees, staring over his left shoulder to the gray sea glint. A small alligator curled like dried spittle in the radish-colored reeds. As I walked I held a punch against my abdomen, wishing that I could throw up. My big toe pressed up in a hole in my left sneaker and I watched this, fascinated. With each step the toe dilated the mesh. It was like watching the movements of an alien organism. My sneaker laces were still undone. When I bent to tie up, red threads of pain went whooshing through me. I pushed my knuckles angrily against my crotch—somehow I wasn’t adding up right anymore. My parts weren’t summing into myself.

  Why didn’t it occur to my body to run then? My body’s best idea was to stare at the ground. At no point had I tried to fight this person. Less than two hours ago, when we were poling through the dusklight, I had boasted to him that I, Ava Bigtree of the Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty, could defeat a thousand-pound alligator. Instead I trailed his elbow. I talked nervously, like a tourist girl; I remember noticing out loud that the stars on this island were very very white.

  I won’t tell Ossie, I decided with a sudden viciousness. I don’t have to tell anybody about it. “It” was this bloat. Already the thing had somehow grown so big and slippery inside me that I didn’t see how I could get it to adhere to any story. Anyhow, I didn’t think that Os would understand what I had done with the Bird Man. Way deep in my gut I hoped she wouldn’t, and deeper than that I hoped or wondered if she maybe could. Her Spiritist possessions—the ones that I had seen in our bedroom, anyhow—they looked clean and solitary. I pictured ghosts coili
ng in a glittering and spacious place inside Osceola, ghosts rolling through my sister like a fog and then lifting again, no harm done. (While dressing I’d touched the sweat on my legs and found a salmon-colored film that I’d mopped up with one pant leg, my face hot, as quick as I undid or hid messes in the Pit. I’d pocketed the red Seth, who had been dozing under the leaves.) I knew now that I didn’t know anything. Those nights with the ghosts belonged to my sister so completely that I couldn’t guess at them, I realized, the way that this thing was going to be mine.

  No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.

  “Ava, come here,” the man said to me again—shouted, really—in his new voice.

  In the history of sound, nobody has ever said a girl’s name that way before. Like it was a string you could pluck. “A-va.”

  When I didn’t come over right away he stood and stretched, opened his mouth in a kind of angry yawn. His smile grew larger and stranger until it was almost unbearable, at which point he began walking toward me.

  “Ava, honey …”

  I wanted to go to him then? Not all of me but the same part he’d just hurt. I don’t understand this pull, still. I think it must be a really dangerous physics, the gravity of wound to fist. You can see it happen to the other animals. When a hunter or trapper begins kicking at an alligator, its body curls to accommodate the withdrawing foot.

  Once, at Argyle Murphy’s fish camp, I watched a little Scottie dog get a Gulch bottle broken across its back and then go loping, tongue lolling, toward its owner with the man’s beer and its own blood stiffening on its fur—not to attack him, as I’d originally thought, but to lick and lick at the emerald bits lodged in his hand.

  “Ava, I need you to help me over here …” The Bird Man’s voice was full of squishy feeling that sounded to me so much like tenderness, love. Like he really did need me, too. It was a voice you could see, like green glass sparkling in a palm.

  At the same time I heard my mother telling me something I should have figured out hours and days ago, something I must have been on the brink of knowing since Stiltsville. I don’t mean that my actual mother told me this, like one of Ossie’s ghosts, but it was her voice I heard in my head:

  The Bird Man is just a man, honey. He is more lost out here than you are. The Bird Man has no idea where he’s taking you, and if he does, well that’s much worse, and you won’t find your sister anywhere near here, Ava, and I would run, honey, personally …

  What I did next was all instinct, as if my muscles were staging a coup: I felt a movement in my breast pocket, the red Seth clawing against the cotton ticking; I pulled her out and untaped her small jaws and flung her at him in one fluid motion. The Bird Man was surprised into reflex. His naked hands flew out like catcher’s mitts; I could see past him to where his falconer’s gloves were hanging off the keel. He caught the Seth hard against his chest. There was something almost funny about watching this, hysterically funny, but terrifying, too, a bad hilarity that lights up eel-bright in your belly. A hideous squeal went up through the trees but I don’t know what happened next, if the red Seth bit him or clawed at him—I was off. I disappeared between two trees and felt my upper body career forward as I slid on the deep peat beds. I caught myself, monkey-swung my way out of a liquidy nick in the limestone. I sucked air on the jumps and splashed through pools of vegetation.

  When I got up a little higher I dodged the willow heads and tried to avoid the obvious holes where female gators had piled and clubbed down brush.

  Even running, I kept waiting to feel a hand fall onto my shoulder. The only noise I heard was my own progress through the cypress dome, my breath rocket-shipping up and up through a heavy tube of sky. He is letting you go, you can stop running, but I crashed through the dim hammock. Two great white herons stood like marble statuary in a belled opening in the trees and they opened their wings and they blew away from me and oh I was running so fast their flight looked like smoke; I fell and screamed, my hands sinking into a foot of water, and it took me many many seconds to get up.

  The elevation crept up. I burst into a meadowland, reentered the woods, felt my toes curl inside the suck of deep, spongy peat. Curtains of Spanish moss caught at my hair like fishermen’s nets. The night had developed a suffocating wetness—breathing felt like drowning in a liquid you couldn’t climb out of. Collapse seemed like a wonderful option to me—to fall sideways, to curl into a ball and wait in the braiding weeds for help to come …

  Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore. Your entire brain can shrink to one pinhead of cognition, one star in a night. I was acquainted with it, this bright spot, because once or twice before it had taken over during my fiercest wrestling matches. Encapsuled in this pinhead lived a brute, a swimmer, a thirst, a hunger, a fire-hater, a grass-jumper. The same as anybody’s, probably, as any living person’s. I’m sure that yours and mine would push up for air with the same force:mass ratio. Would fin up, would open its frog mouth for air, would claw up, would gallop. This new self had all the personality of a muscle. Its haunches charged ahead of my heartbeat, leaving a wake of blood in my ears: KICK. KICK. KICK.

  I ran for what felt like miles before allowing myself to slow, first to a trot and then to a wheezing walk. My vision got squiggly, and for a bad moment I thought that I would throw up. A saw-grass prairie had speared up all around me. I’ve read stories about Midwestern farmers who became lost in their own tall crops and I can imagine what that would be like—the saw grass went on for miles in every direction. I could make out little yeasty-rises of trees, bayhead islands, but no towns and no people.

  “This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, Ava Bigtree.” My voice did not sound much like my mother’s. It spiked against the hum of the saw grass—on the horizon I saw a brown, serrated sea. I did not see an exit, an end to the echoing plants. If I could get back to the Calusa shell mounds, at least I’d know I was going the right way: north and east, homeward. Against the river’s grain, the blue grin of the water. “A house,” just the idea of a walled place you could enter, felt like a dream to me. I turned a circle in the tall grass, and every horizon looked like a step in the wrong direction.

  As I sloshed forward, the song that we’d heard on the hunters’ radio yesterday began to play in my head—“Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.” The singers’ cheerful voices had gone soft as wax between my ears, and I couldn’t stop the chorus from looping and looping. Those lyrics put bad pictures in me: a gushing, a cherry-red spill onto the wide reeds, a Chevy’s somber drive past the dry levee, and men inside the car, strangers crooning a farewell, their faces as mournful as blue dogs behind the dirty glass of a windshield. I pushed my face into the last dry square of my T-shirt. Ossie was dead, I was almost sure now. I felt pretty solidly that I was going to die out here. I toweled my eyes and kept walking.

  Whip Jeters had seen me the previous afternoon, outside of the Eye, I remembered with a sudden fierce relief—but he thought I was on a fishing trip. Would he maybe contact the Chief to check my story out? I did not think so. I did not think he would. Why not keep things simple, go home to his wife and his dinner and his television, believe what I had told him? Was the Bird Man, my “cousin,” looking for me? I thought about the two possibilities:

  Yes (you will be found by him).

  No (you won’t be found by him).

  Inside me these words took on the dimensions of rooms. To escape them I tried to recite multiplication tables as I walked, then weird-sounding state capitals like Bismark and Honolulu and Carson City, then my family’s birth dates, and then the galloping da-dum, ba-dum of the Tennyson and Edgar Allan Poe poems that I had once memorized to impress Kiwi (“… with a love that the winged seraphs of heaven …”), anything to keep me moving. I was wa
lking east, I thought, toward a large hammock, a place where the saw grass shuffled into a gloam of hardwood trees and boggy water. I felt the first tickle of thirst in my throat and this exploded into panic, like a germ flowering into a full-blown illness. (DRINK-DRINK-DRINK-DRINK! screamed my body at me, all sums and poems swallowed up by my thirst.) I put a palmful of rusty water into my mouth and spat it out—I wasn’t thinking clearly. I couldn’t afford to get sick, throw up, dehydrate myself further.

  Then I convinced myself that I was being followed. I hugged a crusty root and hunched in two feet of water. Something came splashing through the cypress dome and I closed my eyes, struck by the crazy idea that the flash of white gel in my eyes would give me away. What did I have to defend myself with? I did a depressing inventory: wet clothing that at this point was truly coming apart at the seams. Ossie’s ribbon. I had no food, no water. Okay. Okay. My mind chattered on, chewing through its own defenses. I had gone sprinting into the middle of the night. I had just run away from the only person who knew I was here.

  You might be surprised to learn that I didn’t know how to use a flare or start a fire. I’d lived in the swamp my whole life and I had no idea about the Essential Next Steps, what a person should do to save herself. Okay. Okay. Okay. Grandma Risa, my mother, Grandpa Sawtooth, the Chief, any one of them would be halfway home by now. Kiwi would have invented a radio with crystals from the river and made a genius escape.

  I thought that Kiwi would have done me one better. He would never have come here.

  Soon I was thirstier than I’d ever been in my life. It wasn’t the actual thirst but the imagined thirst that was killing me, the picture of myself a few days from now crawling through the mangrove woods without a water bottle. Like Bianca and Michael, I thought (or: like my sister). And whenever I thought this, for just a second I’d miss the Bird Man so badly, his weird and sanguine whistling on the poling platform, his maps and his sunbursts of kindness and especially his promises that we would soon recover Osceola.