“Grandpa Sawtooth, it’s me, Kiwi.”
Not a flicker.
“Like a fruit.” Grandpa Sawtooth smiled evilly. “That’s a damn fool name.”
Kiwi moved into the shade of the cabin’s roof and took a breath. Behind his grandfather’s head, he could see to where the seawall curved and enclosed the entire marina. He didn’t know how the residents of Out to Sea could bear to look at it—the future closing its circle on them and the sun dribbling down into the sea behind it.
“So. I saw Dad two days ago.”
Kiwi sat down in one of the blue deck chairs and his grandfather followed.
“Grandpa!” Kiwi looked to see if anyone was listening; there were a few dark clouds and one enormous gull leisurely devouring sea bugs on the boom. “Grandpa, the Chief is working at a casino. The one they call the Jesus in the Temple Casino, over by the new penitentiary. Did you know that? I bet you knew that, huh?”
“Look at that big sucker.” His grunt sounded satisfied. He was pointing at the feasting gull on the ropes. “Hungry.”
“Grandpa, can you tell me, has the Chief been working at the casino for a long time? Has he had other jobs? Did you know about his other jobs?” He paused. “Did Mom know?”
Sawtooth was watching the ocean. Wave after wave covered the sandy bottom of the marina. Jade squiggles alternated with blue and black inky ones wherever the sun hit depth. Something about watching this made Kiwi feel for an instant that he was staring into his grandfather’s mind: memories like these bright schools of mullet, abandoning his grandfather in leaps.
“Why did you guys hide it from us, Grandpa? Is the Chief angry that he has to do it? Is it our fault—I mean, the money part?”
Sawtooth was still frowning into the ocean, as if something magnificent were about to occur there. All those small flickers dispersing, unschooling.
“Okay. Fine. Can I please tell you something?” Kiwi’s voice tapered to a point. “Can I tell you something? Your daughter-in-law, Hilola?”
At Out to Sea, Sawtooth’s lifelong tan had faded to the color of creamed corn. He regarded his grandson warily, as if he were about to lose a privilege. Kiwi imagined that typically if a stranger came to talk to you at Out to Sea, this could portend nothing good.
“I am so sorry to be the one …” Kiwi cleared his throat. In a quieter voice, he told Sawtooth what had happened to Hilola Bigtree.
“Dead,” Sawtooth croaked. “Hah.”
The word had a dull thwack to it, like a fat raindrop hitting tarp. The drop rolled away and vanished. Nothing at all registered on his grandfather’s face.
“Mom died a whole year ago, Grandpa. More, now.”
For some reason he told him the exact date in a whisper. He could hear Harold coughing up banana inside the cabin; another resident was cycling through her television channels.
“We didn’t tell you, I don’t know, we didn’t want to …”
Sawtooth smoothed a finger over his otterish whiskers. He met Kiwi’s gaze with bald, staring eyes, the same depth and shape as the Chief’s eyes, Kiwi’s own eyes. The family had heard from Robina that Sawtooth suffered crying spells, at night—“like a schoolchild!” This was impossible for Kiwi to imagine, his granddad weeping; on Swamplandia! Sawtooth would pry the Mesozoic splinters of an alligator’s teeth from his skin with black doll’s eyes, unblinking, glassy with pain.
Well, he sure wasn’t crying over Mom. His eyes were perfectly calm. Sea light pulsed in them.
“Dead,” he repeated. A whisper, conspiratorial. “Huh. Did you tell Robina? Dead is bad, boy. You could get in trouble.”
Behind Kiwi’s head, a TV audience broke into raucous laughter and applause. Kiwi leaned in until his long nose was almost touching Grandpa Sawtooth. He moved forward, scooting to the edge of the blue-and-white deck chair, until their foreheads were touching. He dunked his own dim form into Sawtooth’s pupils and waited for a “Hello, Kiwi.” Sawtooth held his gaze patiently. Sawtooth Bigtree’s hands looked big as lobster claws on his meager thighs; all of the man’s ligaments looked to be in some state of bad flux, bulging or withering on the vine. “Normal aging” the textbooks would say, but “normal” seemed an injustice when it described this. Sawtooth’s wrists were the width of a child’s again. Kiwi took a breath.
“After Mom died, we lost most of the tourists …”
Kiwi had a sudden urge to topple his grandfather, to dump the elder overboard—maybe that would shake something loose in there or reconnect a wire. What was the point of growing so aged and limp that your mind couldn’t make a fist around a name? He wanted Sawtooth Bigtree to hurt, to ache, to mourn, to howl, to push with the cooling poker of his mind into the old ash heap of what he had lost and scrape bottom. He wanted the old man to be depleted to that limit. Like the rest of us, Kiwi thought angrily. Like family.
“I’m a traitor, Grandpa. Think Benedict Arnold. I’m working at the World of Darkness. You know I’ve been away from home for months now, Grandpa,” he heard himself saying. “Not quite as long as you’ve been away, but a long time. So I don’t have any news to share about your GRANDDAUGHTERS, AVA or OSCEOLA.”
“What the Christ are you shouting for, son? People are trying to catch fish out here. You’re going to scare all the damn fish away.”
Grandpa’s jaw muscles sagged and twitched. His eyes were lively, but it was like the empty animation of a fireplace. “I’m hot. I don’t like your tone. I’m going inside.”
“Mom’s dead. Our park is bankrupt. Your son works in a casino now. Ossie went batshit this summer, and I’m pretty sure she thinks she’s having sex with ghosts. Ava is alone with her on the island. Do you like that?”
With a look of infantile craftiness, Grandpa Sawtooth reared back and spit in his face.
Sawtooth swung first. Kiwi was still wiping the foamy spittle from his face with his shirt hem when his head snapped back, the old man punching his left cheek. Later, Kiwi would tell Robina and the Loomis EMT that he had provoked his grandfather—which might have even been true. Maybe the pitch of Kiwi’s voice tripped an old wire of antagonism in Grandpa Sawtooth’s brain, his outburst a limbic accident. Whatever the case, both men threw themselves into the fight. The deck chairs clattered as they fell away from them. Kiwi’s eyes widened: He’s choking me. The moment arrived when he would have killed his grandfather if he could have. He couldn’t break the hold, though, and his grandfather tightened his grip around Kiwi’s windpipe. With an obscene clarity of mind Kiwi recognized what Sawtooth was doing: this was a Bigtree maneuver, a way to get a Seth to open its jaws.
“You damn fool,” he muttered. Kiwi had no air to respond.
They crashed against the railing on the starboard side of the boat; Kiwi’s head got swung into the porthole; someone’s wrinkled face floated into view there, disappeared. A carousel of faces passed by, deathpale and unfamiliar faces. It was just the other residents. Seniors with no clue what was going on outside the cabin. An anhinga that had been drying its wings on a mile marker shot into the sky. Kiwi was trying to steer his grandfather toward a coil of heavy rope that he hoped the old man might trip on.
“Jaw up,” Grandpa Sawtooth used to shout at Kiwi on the Pit stage when he was five, eight, eleven. “Step up. Man up.”
Kiwi shut his eyes then. Felt his grandfather’s thick hands around his throat. He saw colors and they were slow and round as bubbles: black as bad purpose. Red as purpose (his fists were flailing now, falling down on Sawtooth, he could hear the old man cry out in pain). Blood trickled into his mouth from a cut on his upper lip. Kiwi opened his eyes and he didn’t know what he was doing, the whole stereoscopic world having flattened into brilliance. All he knew for certain was that he was fighting back. He could breathe again. He could scream again. He swiped at the old man’s wet shirt and closed on a handle of skin. His left hand squeezed down, and Sawtooth screamed with pain. Kiwi banged into a deck chair, howling, and he grabbed at whatever he could and he twisted. Both men looked down
at Kiwi’s hands around the base of Sawtooth’s neck, as if equally surprised to find them there.
“Huh!” gargled his grandfather.
Kiwi could feel the man’s birdy veins. His fingers were long enough to stitch a mitt around his grandfather’s throat. His grandfather was hissing now, a coarse, inhuman sound. So this was the only answer the old man could give him, the only explanation—a nonsense hiss. The Seths know more about our family than you do, Kiwi thought furiously. He squeezed. Instinct drove him forward like a nail and he kept squeezing.
You are squeezing too hard, a small, milk-neutral voice inside Kiwi noted. You might actually kill him. The voice didn’t have the shrillness of a conscience; it was bored and old, content to let Death happen.
Kiwi let go.
Robina tried to get him to go to the emergency room but he refused; he watched with fascination as welts rose in archipelagos on his skin. Kiwi touched one gingerly and winced, blinked tears back into his eyes. Robina was asking him in a worried hiss if he was going to press charges; she didn’t specify who these charges would be pressed against, Sawtooth Bigtree or Out to Sea or her personally, and for a disorienting moment Kiwi thought she was asking him to turn himself in to the police.
“What? Criminal charges? No, I don’t think that’s necessary, okay? I just want to go. I’m really sorry …”
He’d left Grandpa Sawtooth watching Cheers reruns with Harold, both men sipping at Vital Light shakes that looked like peed-on snow. The “Heeeere’s … Cliffy!” episode was on. Grandpa Sawtooth had just two bruises that Kiwi could see—the dark blue-red stain of hemoglobin into bilirubin on his shrunken biceps, and a purpling of ruptured vessels on his cheek. The EMT had given him a clean bill of health.
“You got off extremely lucky,” the EMT had told him with relish. “He’s an old man”—the EMT kept repeating this to Kiwi, as if it were a controversial diagnosis. “An old, old man. You could have suffocated him. How would you like that, huh? How would you like to do jail time for killing your own grandfather?”
Kiwi shook his head, to indicate that he would probably not like that.
“You got off lucky this time, but I wouldn’t bet on it again.”
Now Kiwi nodded. He was afraid to talk. Two violet thumbprints were darkening at the front of his neck, a tier of ghostly fingerprints at the nape.
When Kiwi returned to the World dormitories, the elevator doors opened on faint sniggering, the TV screen drumming softly with pale light—the lounge was empty, but somebody was inside his dorm room. The Chief! Kiwi thought for a crazy moment. Then he heard the phlegmy rocket of Leo’s guffaw.
Leo and Vijay were standing in the middle of his room, wearing big shit-eating grins from ear to ear. They both had frozen, red-handed postures.
“What are you dudes doing in here?” Kiwi hated the pitch of his voice.
“Vijay says you’re broke, Bigtree,” Leo said. “So we decided to get you a little something. Think of it as an early birthday present, like …”
He swung the closet door open and Kiwi’s heart stopped.
The boys had put up a poster: a shiny centerfold from a porn magazine. Her face was an absolute blank but Kiwi returned the gaze of her enormous brown nipples, which seemed somehow sorrowful and frank, alert to a great sadness behind the pornographer’s camera, while the boys smirked.
“Look, he loves it!”
“Ha-ha,” Kiwi heard himself say. “Thanks, guys.”
Next followed innuendo of the conventionally scatalogical variety and Saturday insults, “cocksuckers” and “pussylickers” raining down on him like blows, and each time Kiwi spoke a word it felt like raising an arm to cover his face: “Fuck you, fuck you, shut up.”
Kiwi elbowed past them and tried to shut the closet door with a growl of laughter. Then he saw what they had done to the poster of his mother.
“Oh, sorry, bro.” Leo let out a buzzy laugh but then changed tone when he saw Kiwi’s face, pinching at his earlobe. The mood in the room became cinder-flecked. “That was like an accident? We were trying to get that ugly one off the wall, that’s some seventies shit right there …”
They had split her down her middle. SWA and MP CENTAUR read two halves of it. Half her face regarded him with its dusk intelligence, and he pushed the scraps of her into his fists. Kiwi wanted to scream at everyone to get out of his room, to die slow and go right to hell; out loud he could hear his dull, persistent chuckle.
What he could hear as clearly as if it were still happening was the blare of the Chief’s banter through the Pit’s loudspeakers:
“Hilola Bigtree has more talent in her pinkie finger than any other wrestler on the planet!
“Hilola Bigtree can tape up a twelve-foot gator in the time it takes you mainlanders to haul your lard asses up to the fridge!”
All day long the Chief’s good publicity funneled into the blue sky inside Kiwi, scattering birds.
Patched together the poster would have read HILOLA BIGTREE, SWAMP CENTAUR. Kiwi had always been embarrassed by this particular epithet for her—more of the Chief’s lame publicity—but it was a name that his mother was growing into, apparently. Because here she was: a real centaur on the door. The closet wood showed through half a dozen rips in the poster and blanked out one cheek. You could touch the grain of the wood through her torn forehead. A crescent of her smile hung on a little fang of green paper. Death was speeding her evolution into this monster: half woman and half invention. Kiwi couldn’t remember the real color of his mother’s hair anymore, her nascent wrinkles like the first cracks in an eggshell, her voice, her beautiful scowl, because the poster had papered over her third dimension and now even it was ruined.
“Kiwi? Learn to take a fucking joke, bro …”
“No, it’s fine.”
He touched the paper of her face and shut the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mama Weeds
Ossie’s ribbon was still on my wrist. All it did was remind me that I had a sister somewhere, the way you’d strap a watch to your wrist to keep you in time. If the Bird Man had showed up and tried to take this cloth protection from me then, I really think I might have killed him.
This part of the swamp grew very noisy at night, growls and squelches and the infinitesimal roaring of each mosquito piling into waves. Sticks snapped and once I heard a large animal go crashing through the water; all I saw, though, were the tall gumbo-limbo trees that were like pepper shakers of moths. Probably the Bird Man was miles and miles away from me, I told myself. On his way home, back through the Eye and this phony underworld. In a way, he’d made good on his promise to me, our bargain, because I couldn’t imagine a hell that would be worse than this place where he’d left me. Overhead the sky was a fast and swallowing blue.
“Ossie?” I gulped. “Mom?”
I fixed my eyes on two palm trees at the edge of the saw-grass prairie; I was going to use them as goalposts. I started to walk. I could see little oases of thatch-palm and cabbage trees, carpets of gray sea oxeye, of red sea bight, and between these the stalks weaving, endlessly, acres and acres of this.
* * *
I walked steadily all morning. By noon I was getting really mixed up. I drank more of the silty groundwater and then threw it back up an hour later.
If I don’t find water, I thought, freshwater, rainwater, potable water, and soon …
Now I didn’t always recognize the cries of the animals; whatever adhesion in my brain connected sounds and light to the names of species was breaking down. The leaves that I had easily identified as bay or gumbo-limbo or pop ash gave way to a muted palette of foliage, a glowing russet and gray, much of it alien to me. Fewer and fewer of the plants that I tripped over or pushed through in curling curtains of vines uprooted a name in my mind. I was seeing new geometries of petals and trees, white saplings that pushed through the peat like fantailing spires of coral, big oaky trunks that went wide-arming into the woods (no melaleucas anywhere). A large egretlike bird with tr
ue fuchsia eyes and cirrusy plumage went screeching through the canopy. For some reason all the life gurgling in the anonymous hammock made me want to cry. Some underworld this turned out to be, Ossie.
I started to think it might not be a terrible thing if the Bird Man found me. A little later I began drafting my apologies to him for leaving. If he had water, I wanted him to find me now. I didn’t care at all what happened afterward …
Then I pushed through a stand of palms and saw the house. It was a one-room bungalow, the sort of dilapidated structure that swamp rats like Grandpa Sawtooth used for a fish camp or a hunting cabin. A tripod of sticks held a resin pot over a stack of pinewood; a stiller pump stood pondside. My heart leapt—my first thought was that we must have rowed to the Gulf coast, where you could find a few actual towns on the elevated pinelands. I got it in my head that I was walking toward a town. It didn’t matter that nothing else I had seen or smelled or heard in the last few hours bore this theory out: I was on the outskirts of some island community, I decided, a place with televisions, telephones, refrigerators filled with sodas and cold cuts and cans of whipped cream, paper towels, pet dogs, telephone wires—I was on a roll now, I was close to blinking back tears—generators! electric light! hot showers! toilet paper! I walked behind the first house.
“Hello?”
This first house appeared to be the only house. A live alligator was sunk into the mud behind the southernmost wall, watching me as I scouted the perimeter. Switchgrass sprayed like a little beard beneath the blue-black apples of its cheeks. Its grin upset me in a way our Seths’ musculature never did back home.
“It’s not funny,” I hissed. “You’re the clown, you stupid monster, you don’t know anything, you don’t love anyone, you can’t even imagine …”
I looked inside a begrimed window and I thought: abandoned. For sure nobody lived here. There was a straw pallet on the needle-covered floor and no furniture that I could see. Dishes on shelves, little cups. Outside its wooden walls had been completely overtaken by weeds and strangler fig, thick vines doing their weird tethered ballet when the wind blew. Water thinned to a brothlike cup between the mangroves. Oh, yes, I thought. I was going to drink all of it.
Swamplandia! Page 33