Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  The woods were all sound. It was too black to see anything from where I was squatting but I heard a barred owl singing its whereabouts to a phantom mate until I longed for Grandpa’s shotgun, to silence its relentless romancing. Didn’t the barred owl know who might be out here with us? Mostly I heard the mosquitoes. A soupy splashing somewhere far behind me that I thought might be an alligator. A branch fell, sending up a lot of froggy chirruping like a little sonic dust.

  Every year Search and Rescue saved a dozen novice fishermen, kayakers, and canoers from the carnival halls of the mangrove tunnels not four miles off the Loomis coast. Water made endless mirrors and the small islands repeated themselves like a bad stutter, confusing the fishermen. These “terrestrial echoes” were the “swamp’s echolalia,” according to Kiwi, who liked to make geography as pretentious as possible. “The Ten Thousand Islands” pretty nearly described their number. Park Services marks the touristed canoe and kayak trails with white skunk lines on the shoreline pines; in that alphabet of ranger paint, every turn is spelled out for you. If you deviate from these popular loops, the stern rangers warn, and try to chart your own course through the labyrinth, you are entering a kind of Death Lottery. Kiwi called this claim “administrative hyperbole.” The Chief said we kids better stay on the goddamn trail and travel in a pack or he would kill us, guaranteed, no lottery required.

  “You’ll have to be very brave, kid,” the Bird Man had said when we rounded the first blue bend, gesturing at all the humming greenery that ringed our stern. He’d made this same emptiness seem so exciting, like a field for real magic. I bit my lip and I thought about how good it had been that first day, back when I was separated from Ossie by twelve hours, tops. Just one meridian, really, one sunless wedge of time. Who knew how many hours separated us now?

  One excellent luckiness was the moon. It was full and enormous, and without it, I doubt I could have made it even half a mile through the swamp that night. Water the color of hard cider slid between the trees and everywhere I looked I saw schools of tiny red and black fishes. I’d never seen fish like this before (although they looked very ordinary, it’s not as if they had coals for eyes or anything) and I didn’t know any of their names. Linty flowers covered the floating twigs. The air was smelling saltier to me; perhaps I was nearing the Gulf.

  By this point I had given my sister up. Not for dead—I don’t mean that—but I’d given up on the idea that I was going to find and save her. I had failed her so completely that my mind would not permit me to think about it. I kept sticking my finger into the bib pocket where my red Seth had been, wiggling it around the way you do when you’ve misplaced your house keys and you keep checking the same four places with compulsive hopefulness. Where was she, my alligator? The Bird Man had killed her, I thought, kicking a rock and unearthing a squeal of ants. Even if she’d gotten away from him the prognostications were grim—alligators with unusual pigmentation can’t camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That’s why you don’t see albino Seths in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man, but during the first few years of a hatchling’s life it has to worry about predation by pretty much everything: wading birds, buzzards, garfish, raccoons, snakes, the cannibal kings in our Pit.

  I myself felt naked without her, as if I’d been wearing an armor composed of one scale and I’d thrown it away.

  Ossie, I’d think in spasms, I’m coming, but these promises were like mental hiccups. Just thoughts, mindnoises, because I didn’t feel strong enough to voice a promise. Sometimes I’d stumble on the rocky glade and not really want to get up, and then I figured out how to use the promises like poles or crampons. Just the name “Ossie” could hook me up.

  The moon moved so slowly through the clouds above me, high and white, with a frightening grace, and I wondered how we’d never recognized the terror of the moon before, this big thing that you couldn’t alter or ever reach. If I lived I was going to alert my brother and my sister to this interesting feature of the moon. Kiwi used to come running for us beneath the Perseid shower: “You are missing it, everybody!” he’d flail evangelically. “The end has already begun!”

  Something caught at my shoelace, and when I looked down I was startled to find the dirty bowl of my face reflected on the water. My eyes rippled up at me. I didn’t look anything like an alligator wrestler, I didn’t even feel so much like a girl anymore.

  Right at daybreak I started drinking the water. I’d stood sweating in the dome all night, until my thoughts shriveled up and I was just one feeling at a time: COLD or SORE or HUNGRY. All the cypress trunks were sopping up the limited sun and blushing against a gray sky. I crawled forward and bent like an animal over my own dumbstruck face, washing and cupping my hands in the shallows between the roots. The stick-and-needle-flickered brown water floated around the trees, and I drank and drank. This particular cypress dome was huge: I’d covered at least a mile of it and still it pulsed outward, the goliath trees ceding to six-foot dwarf cypress stumps at the perimeter. Skylight poured through the trees and reappeared in the cup of my hands as I crouched in the water. I drank in hot, foul gulps. One day without water should have been easy to tolerate; the torture part was thinking about the future of my thirst. It would grow and grow and do what with me? Thirst was bad, but the idea of night falling on me out here a second time was worse.

  I have to get to higher ground, I decided.

  “Think!” I commanded my brain. But my brain was a roaring liquid between my eardrums—“thinking” felt like trying to get a river to flex. This I guessed was panic. Pounding everywhere, timpani to bridge a waterfall. A headache throbbed from my temples to my earlobes. I’d never felt this way during a wrestling show; I’d never realized how much the tourists were helping me, just by holding down those chairs. Fear onstage was a thrilling feeling—often it was the prelude to a Bigtree victory. Fear out here was a new species. The sky above me got torn to small crystals by the cypress leaves and as the sun rose it went blue and deeper; some creature shouted kee-ow, kee-ow in the middle distance. I did and did not want to be found by the Bird Man. You couldn’t fool yourself into thinking a discovery like that would be a rescue. But who else knew to look for me, or where? I peered into the thick brush and got angry at the future: it seemed there was not one good thing left to hope for.

  Okay-okay-okay, my mind kept chattering. Why was my mind feasting on the worst pictures? I saw the dredge hung up on rocks and my sister’s body inside it, as quiet as a sleeper, her purple skirt draped over the railing. I saw the red Seth floating belly-up on a nameless slough. Every time I heard a stick snap I knew it was the Bird Man. Fear kept making itself inside me. Certain feelings kept making themselves inside me, the way that blood rises to a tiny bead. But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

  I did more mental math. I recited primes, which my brother had taught me were the strong, indivisible numbers. 1, 3, 7, 11 … I counted, wrestling off a shoe. I stood on my left leg in the dark water and struggled to pull the soaking shoelace out of its tabs. I was alone, but maybe not for long.

  Because the vast floodplain from Okeechobee flows in a southwesterly direction, you can use the swamp water as a compass. I undid the laces from my left sneaker and tied them to a cypress knee. Water in the limestone depression of a dome only appears to be stagnant, you just have to watch it to give the lie to that. After five minutes of storky balancing on one leg, I had my answer. Bingo! The shoelace pointed southwest, toward the Gulf. I relaced. I had a strong itch to run, which would have been a very stupid relief to seek—already I’d found one sinkhole with my stick. A scarlet king snake slithered over a stump, its fantastic licorice colors glowing against the blacky green resurrection ferns.

  Although the underworld had been a big hoax, the black raptors continued to map the sky. The buzzards from Ohio had migrated here, too. Turning circle
s, as docile as party ponies around a mainland carousel. Then they fell, one by one, like little black razors, into the paurotis palms. And it was hard to see this and not to think of carnage. A line of birds falling in a row. Red clouds massed in the southeast and it looked like the sky was getting its stitches out after an operation.

  It had been so good for a little bit, to picture my mom out here. To think that I was on my way to meet her, in the blue mists of the underworld. Why had I ever believed the book? Quick as fire on peat, my mists were gone. Now instead of adventuring into an underworld I found myself in the most treacherous part of the swamp.

  Seas of saw grass flooded into other, larger seas. No boats and no houses, no smoke rising on the mirror-flat horizon.

  I said my little continual prayer that Ossie be alive and dry and far, far, far, far behind me. I tried not to think about the bad possibilities of just where she might be, or who was with her (such thoughts as: What if the Bird Man has found her?) and especially to never think about the ending of the Dredgeman’s Revelation.

  Okay. Okay. I had to move now. There was an orange light thinking its way across the darkness over the swamp and that was the sun.

  At the dome’s edge, two black branches spooned out of the same wide trunk. They looked like mirror images, these branches, thin and papery and perfectly cupped, blue sky shining behind them, and an egret sat on the scooped air like a pearl earring. I squeezed through the left opening and scraped sooty bark all over my arms. At one point, I went sloshing into an old hole up to my chest; lily pads and mosquito larvae swarmed in front of my eyes. Accidentally I choked more water down. The Chief would have been proud—at last I’d turned the color of a real Indian. My neck and arms and legs were dyed a black-maroon from the tannins and I itched everywhere, as if my whole body was developing a rash. I wrung out my Swamplandia! T-shirt and continued walking. You could barely read the letters on it now. After a while the forest started to change.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Out to Sea

  Two days had passed since Kiwi had seen the Chief and he still hadn’t made a move to contact him. But he would! Today maybe. He’d mentally scripted the whole encounter—first he would reveal his many mainland accomplishments to his dad. He was a local Loomis hero, surely the Chief had heard something about that? He had saved a girl’s life inside the Leviathan, wasn’t that something? He’d earned one of four positions in the World of Darkness as an Apocalyptic Pilot; in September he would get his GED.

  In Kiwi’s fantasy of this meeting, the Chief didn’t say much. Really, he didn’t say anything—maybe he would be overcome and just sort of paternally beam? Conveniently choked by pride, or joy? Or, failing those ambitious emotions, perhaps they could at least achieve a food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions? Kiwi prayed that was how it would go down, anyway, because when he tried to imagine having an actual conversation in the English language with his father in that casino: that was the end of the tape.

  Okay, new version: the Chief doesn’t say anything, but he takes Kiwi upstairs and they eat everything that isn’t nailed down in the All U Can Eat Buffet. They shovel it in. At the end of the meal, they plunge their Bigtree fists into the tank and tear apart and eat that final lobster. It would be a moment of savage forgiveness. No words required. It would be barbaric and a little gross, eating that lobster, but it would have the transformative effect of a new ritual on them. After the meal, they would be reconciled. They would make plans to return to Ava and Ossie and Swamplandia! They would bring Grandpa Sawtooth home, possibly they would go downstairs and gamble together, and win.

  Kiwi didn’t go back to the casino. He didn’t look up any bus routes. He didn’t call the listed number for Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming and ask for Sam. He didn’t ask Vijay for a ride to Pa-Hay-Okee, or thumb up the number in the Loomis Yellow Pages. Kiwi’s best conjecture was that the Chief had rented a room at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, as he always did on his Loomis trips. (THE BOWL-A-BED! WEEKLY RATES. MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED, YOUR PRIVACY=RESPECTED!!)

  But he didn’t call there.

  Instead, he used the bag of change to dial the house at Swamplandia! on his breaks. The phone buzzed and buzzed, a noise that was starting to really frighten him. Were the girls in Loomis County, too?

  I have to go back there today, Kiwi thought. I have to talk to the Chief. When he picked up the telephone, he fully intended to ask Vijay to drive him back to the casino. On the second ring, the third ring, this remained his intention.

  Vijay wanted to know why he was dropping Kiwi off at a fucking marina. On Hangover Sunday, no less. Why he was awake at all before dusk—Kiwi had once overheard Vijay having a screaming argument with his mother in which he claimed that getting up before noon made him feel dizzy. Vijay was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses and eating Advil in Halloween fistfuls.

  “I’ll put the mace into your face, bitch!” he sang along with the radio.

  They pulled into a space between two whiskery palms, both boys shading their eyes from the sun’s rays off the white quartzite. Dirty water lapped at a honeycomb of rock; beyond this, the listing masts of all the junker ships at anchor here made the ocean look like a blue pincushion.

  “What is this place? Is it a junkyard for boats?”

  “And people. Hey, thanks for the ride. I can get the bus back.”

  “For real? You sure you want to dip into your savings account for that? I think the fare is, like, a whole dollar.”

  “Shut up.”

  Vijay’s voice brightened theatrically: “Or maybe you want to have your rich girlfriend come get you? You can, like, save her from the ocean this time?”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend, V. Emily Barton is not my girlfriend.”

  “Is that you telling me in your moon language that you’re, like, still a virgin?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Nice, son. You’re getting so much quicker at the trigger! Smoother, too,” he added generously.

  Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he’d called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak. Now he could tell any man in the World to go fuck himself with a baseball bat. Progress was being made, he guessed.

  “Thanks. I try.”

  Kiwi had arrived at the Out to Sea Retirement Community eleven minutes early. Through the Out to Sea portholes, Kiwi could hear TV laughter and silence.

  At four, Kiwi walked the gangplank to his grandfather’s boat. A translucent glass-blue crab went skittering behind one of the bolts. Possibly-Robina was sitting there in her civilian clothes—a striped T-shirt with a cartoon cat in a top hat on it, shiny purple leggings. She was watching a soap opera on the boat’s biggest television. All around her the elderly residents were involved in their own dramas: smaller televisions glowed and crackled along the rows of portholes.

  “Howdy, ma’am … okay to visit with Sawtooth Bigtree?”

  “Mmh.” Robina’s chin was sunk behind her big fists. Kiwi bent and scribbled his name on the blank clipboard.

  “Good show, huh?”

  Possibly-Robina sucked a diet soda through a straw.

  Kiwi had to flip back two weeks to find the name he was looking for: Samuel Bigtree. The Chief had last been here two weeks ago. Was the Chief planning to visit today? Kiwi wondered. He thought about erasing his signature from the sheet, then decided to leave it there.

  Everyone besides Robina was asleep, or tortoised deeply into their own world; one Russian man with burning cerulean eyes was leaning in to watch an infomercial, his great knuckles bunched like red grape skins on his slacks. On the TV screen, a woman smeared pink jelly on her crow’s-feet and became young. “Miracle formula: Mariana diatoms. $69.99 in three payments!” a voiceover announced.

  “What she saying?” the Russian man kept repeating. “What she doing? Wheel me cl
oser!”

  Soledad, a ninety-something Cuban woman with moist eyes, started screaming at Kiwi in Spanish. She had been Grandpa Sawtooth’s friend on the last visit, but maybe Grandpa had bitten her since then.

  “Your grandfather is never going to be the prom king of Out to Sea, okay?” Robina had informed them when they’d first moved Sawtooth in. “You guys better give up that dream. He is not a people person.”

  “Hiya, Soledad. How’s my grandpa? What’s news?”

  Possibly this was an insensitive question. “News” for these retirees no longer meant “events” but instead seemed to describe the lisping voices of the tides. From every corner of the schooner patients blinked down at him, quietly magnetized to the boat’s surfaces. Like the swamp’s red-toed lizards, they seemed stuck to their bed rails and their chairs’ handlebars by the pads of their fingers.

  Kiwi walked into the galley. “Hi, Harold.”

  Harold no longer remembered him. He was sitting on one of a dozen plastic stools, eating a banana very, very slowly in a pair of new pajamas. White ducklings marched up the pant legs on an alarming voyage toward Harold’s crotch. A patch was affixed to his chest and he kept scratching at it.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” he asked Kiwi. “I could really use a cigarette.” When Kiwi did not answer he returned to his contemplation of the banana.

  “Harold, have you seen my grandfather?”

  “I’m right here, you damn fool!” came a familiar croak from the deck outside the central cabin. Kiwi moved through a blinding square of sun and found his grandfather out on the starboard deck, barefoot in a puddle of the filtered seawater. His feet were bloated and shiny as custard, with curled, wintry toenails.

  “Hi, Grandpa.”

  His face was stubbornly set in its Bigtree crags.