“No bags?” the bellhop asked us with a practiced little smirk. His big shoes waggled on the desk.
“Fuck you, clown,” said my brother with astonishing ease. Ossie and I exchanged glances; he’d lost his accent. “Tell us where Samuel Bigtree is staying.”
The Chief was in room 11, just behind the last gutter-ball alley. This would have warranted a joke at some earlier Bigtree epoch but we were BE now, Beyond Exhaustion, and I just wanted to see my dad. The stunned bellhop had given Kiwi a little key, which he turned in the pale blue door to room 11 with a just-audible click.
“Stee-rike!” Kiwi whispered. Then he called out, “Dad. It’s us.”
On the car ride over, Kiwi had told me in a slow and urgent voice that he was sure the park would go into foreclosure. We would lose our home, the Seths. But it was going to be okay, he kept saying, it would really be okay, because he was almost a pilot and the Chief had a job and we would find an apartment on the mainland …
My father’s face filled the door frame and his shock was a wonderful thing to behold. The whole hotel was filled with bowlers’ thunder at that hour. Pins were falling everywhere around us and I watched my dad’s eyes widen to take us in. When my father stepped forward it didn’t matter that we were nowhere near our island. All of us, the four of us—the five of us if you counted Mom inside us—we were home. We were a family again, a love that made the roomiest privacy that I have ever occupied.
“Good night, Ossie.”
“Good night, Ava.”
After a little while I could hear my sister breathing beside me. My father and my brother were snoring in a duel or a duet on the other side of the wall. There had been, as you might imagine, quite a scene between them. Kiwi told us that he’d been working at the World of Darkness for two months and this fact didn’t make a dent. The Chief, holding Osceola, had thanked and thanked my brother for finding her until Kiwi grew embarrassed. He pretended to hawk up a wad of phlegm so that he had an excuse to grab tissues for his eyes.
I’d told the Chief about a dream I’d had on Swamplandia!—a great tree had swallowed him, his knuckles sunk into the tree bark—and he listened with such a frightened, pained expression that I stopped talking. So I didn’t tell my dad about the Bird Man, or Louis Thanksgiving, or the red Seth, or Mama Weeds. What we did talk about was Mom: “I found her dress out there, Dad. I found it, but I lost it again. I think Mom was with me when I battled the Seth …”
The Chief gave me an anguished look. His hand gripped my forearm too tightly, as if he were afraid that any one of us might flash without warning from the room.
“That’s okay. That’s okay, Ava. They found you, your brother found your sister, that’s much better than an old dress, I’m sure.”
But that night the Chief wasn’t in a talking mood. He looked huge and sad on the horned edge of the hotel bed, which had that goofy look of all “fancy” motel furnishings, cheap wood with stupid designs. The wallpaper nudged its quiet spirals upward toward the ceiling fan. We all looked caged in that hotel room. We watched a sitcom on TV and whenever the canned laughter tumbled into the silence of the room, I wanted to roar. Turn it off, I thought, but we were all a little afraid to. We watched the TV family speak their lines to one another as if we were trying to remember how to do it, talk. One on one we probably could have spoken, but the four of us together went mute.
“Did you want to go bowling, girls?” the Chief said at one point, his voice unnaturally loud and cheerful. “Ten free frames. There’s a coupon for a game on the desk, comes with the room …”
“No thanks,” we said in one voice. Ossie didn’t have a change of clothes, she said.
“Where’s your purple skirt?” I asked, gulping against an icy vision of the clothesline. “Where’s Louis’s jacket?”
“I don’t know.” She looked at me strangely. “Back in the swamp, I guess—I lost a bag overboard on the second day.” I started to tell her about Mama Weeds, stopped. Now that I was fed and watered and sitting on bedsheets, that whole part of my journey seemed filmy, impossible. Already I’d lost my pet alligator, Louis’s jacket, Ossie’s ribbon, Mom’s dress; I was afraid that if I shared this out loud I’d lose even the story.
The Chief made many weary, angry phone calls about the day’s events to “straighten these mainlanders out.” News stations were desperate to talk to my brother, Dennis Pelkis said on the telephone—“Hell’s Angel strikes again!”—but Dennis reported proudly that he wasn’t giving them our number. Then the Chief had to set up a meeting with the ranger who found me and a social worker for Monday, at some foreboding address inside the cold stones of downtown Loomis.
No, it turned out the Chief wasn’t angry at me at all. Not for a second, he said, not even when I lowered my voice and explained to him that I had lost Ossie. When I asked him about Swamplandia! and foreclosure and the Seths and his mainland job, he didn’t exactly answer. He was very proud of us, was his reply, the tribe of us. “We are going to the island tomorrow,” he promised. “We’ll put everything in order.”
The Chief borrowed forty dollars from Kiwi and rented an adjacent room for me and Ossie, lucky 13, where we were supposed to shower and then sleep, impossibly, in beds. An hour after we turned out the lights, I woke myself up. I stared around the featureless space with my heartbeat stinging me and tried to figure out where I was. I watched a body stand and raise one curtain to half-mast, so that the dark rolled out of the room. The curtains turned the color of weak tea, one droning hallway bulb behind them. My sister! I couldn’t quit rubbing at my eyes.
“You okay?” Ossie walked over to my bed. Like me, she was quilted with rashes and burn; she’d showered for close to an hour and her skin had a scoured look. She had lost weight in her arms and her cheeks, which gave her face a crop of new hollows.
“You were laughing in your sleep, Ava.”
I reached out and grabbed her warm wrist with Bigtree Wrestling Grip 7. Slowly I remembered that I wasn’t in the swamp anymore, that we had made it to the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, a place with color TVs and a confectionery of miniature, jewel-colored soaps and shampoo-plus-conditioners and comforters that smelled reassuringly of ordinary vices: old pepperoni pizza, draft beer, Vaseline, cigarettes.
“It’s okay now, Ava. I’m right here, all right?”
“Ossie?” For a second I didn’t believe it was really her. She touched my forehead. She touched me as if she were Mom, as if I were a child again back on the island and sick with fever, or even just pretending. Our mom, as stern and all-seeing as she could often seem, would do us this great favor of pretending to be credulous when we faked sick. Mom cooed sincerely over our theatrical moanings and coughs. She would push our hair back from our cool liar’s scalps and bring us noodles and icy mainland colas as if happy for an excuse to love us like this.
“Was the ghost real, Ossie?” I asked her sleepily.
“I thought so.”
“Okay. Is the ghost back, though?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she told me that night. But until we are old ladies—a cypress age, a Sawtooth age—I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.
I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, either. Not the kind from Ossie’s book. I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulable than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in The Spiritist’s Telegraph. Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.
After my mom died, I used to have these dreams where I arrived to clean out the Pit and found a stadium filled with hissing, booing tourists. Nothing was right about this show: the Seths were gone and the Pit itself had mutated into an opaque, roiling pool. I realized that I had scheduled Mom’s show and forgotten to cancel it. Now she was dead and the crowd was enraged. Some people threw bottles. With the irrefutable logic of dreams I knew that I would have to replace Mom on the board. As I climbed the ladder I had the worst case of stage fright because what was I supposed to do after diving? What would happen to
me when I followed her down the pickled stars on the green board, and jumped? The next moment was unimaginable. The water bulged beneath me and even in dreams my mind failed to tell my mind what was inside it.
Sometimes I worry that what I did with the Bird Man happened because I really wanted it to. And what if it happens forever, Ossie, I’d ask my sister, the bad laughter of that summer? Like a faucet we left running, a sound we have forgotten we are making. Sometimes I hear the crying of strange birds outside the grates of my apartment window and I wonder. Even deep inland, I still worry that he might be one empty lot over. For our first six months in Loomis County I couldn’t sleep.
“It’s over,” the Chief kept saying when we found each other in the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, his showman’s voice partially whited out by the falling pins, “period, the end.”
And on a calendar that summer really is over, I guess. Full stop. Ossie and I attended a public school in the fall where they made us wear uniforms in the dull sepias and dark crimsons of fall leaves, these colors that were nothing like the fire of my alligator’s skin. But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me. Kiwi is sympathetic, but Ossie is the only one who I can really talk to about this particular descent.
Unlike me, Osceola spent that first year on the mainland sleeping like a paralytic in our new apartment bedroom and going nowhere at night, never entertaining a single ghost. Her “powers” did not interest her anymore, because she was drugged. When we started at Rocklands High, a psychiatrist put Ossie on a variety of helpful, beekeeping-type medications, yellow and root-beer brown tablets that were supposed to thin the ghostly voices in her head to a pleasant drone. “Let’s try Osceola on this prescription,” he said confidently. “I get great results with patients I try on this medication.” And I remember that the verb “to try” in relation to my sister really bothered me, as if the psychiatrist had magical dice that he could keep rolling until we got a saner version of Ossie. I remember her doctor’s office as a logged woods of glossy oak end tables, sofas, “antique” chairs. It did not strike me or impress me in the least. Loomis was just like this. Our new apartment was carpeted and wallpapered in rusty browns, a palette that reminded me of dead squirrels. I don’t know if those pills helped my sister. Like me, I think that eventually Ossie simply figured out how to occult her own deep weirdness, to shuffle quietly down the chutes of our school hallways.
One regret that I still keep alive is that I never showed anybody the red Seth. Not even Ossie; why didn’t I tell Ossie or Kiwi about the miraculous hatchling right away? Sometimes I’ll let myself wonder: Where might she be right now, if she survived? In what cave or slough, on what grassless island? It’s an unlikely idea but it’s not impossible. Alligators in the wild can live for seventy years, and possibly even longer. By now she would have reached her full adult weight and length. Maybe she swam back to the island that we used to call Swamplandia! and is floating her scarlet eyes around our old canals. When I’m awake, I can’t seem to draw a stable picture of the red Seth in my mind’s eye anymore—it feels like trying to light a candle on a rainy night, your hands cupped and your cheeks puffed and the whole wet world conspiring to snatch the flame away from you. But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.
I think the Chief was right about one thing: the show really must go on. Our Seths are still thrashing inside us in an endless loop. I like to think our family is winning. But my brother and my sister and I rarely talk about it anymore—that would be as pointless as making a telephone call to say, “Kiwi, are you there? Listen: my blood is circulating,” or, “Howdy, Ossie, it’s today, are you breathing?” We used to have this cardboard clock on Swamplandia! and you could move the tiny red hands to whatever time you wanted, NEXT SHOW AT ___:___ O’CLOCK!
Acknowledgments
During the years that I spent lost in the swamp, sometimes the only thing that kept me pushing forward was the thought of making it to this acknowledgments page. It’s a joy at last to get to thank the following people:
Huge love and gratitude to: Karina Schmid, Alexis Vgeros, Sharon Bowen, Victoria Bourke, Christopher Shannon, Jessica MacDonald, Kate Hasler-Steilen, Laura Storz, Stefan Merrill Block, Lucia Giannetta, Jess Fenn, Scott Snyder, Stu MacDonald, Dan Chaon, J. R. Carpenter, Stephen O’Connor, Bradford Morrow and Conjunctions, Karen and Jim Shepard, Andrea Barrett, Barry Goldstein, Larry Raab, François Furstenberg, Sam Swope, Andrea Libin and John High, Rivka Galchen, John Tresch, Putney Student Travel and my Putney kids, Becky Campbell and the staff at Symphony Veterinary Center, and to my teachers, my former classmates, and my students, for being a solar source of inspiration.
To Carey McHugh, Kim Tingley, Lytton Smith, Michael White, Brandon Freeman, Lauren Russell, Kent Russell, Vince Ruiz—thank you to the moon for being my first readers and for the lifeline of your friendship. And thanks to Rob, Carey, New Rob, and Russell Haus for my many fellowship stints on your fine sofas. If I could somehow make this page interactive, I’d give each of you an ovation and a Cadillac.
I’m very grateful to the UCross Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Jean Strouse, and my fellow Fellows for the wonderful gift of time and community. Special thanks to Mary Ellen von der Heyden for her friendship and generous support.
Enormous thanks to my incredible agent, Denise Shannon, and to my boundlessly encouraging editor, Jordan Pavlin, for their faith in me and for their tremendous help with revisions. Thanks to the great Leslie Levine and the staff at Knopf. And to the brilliant and indefatigable fiction editor Carin Besser, for parachuting into this novel and helping me to find a way through—thank you.
This book is dedicated to my parents, Janice and Bruce Russell, with all my love and with a special thank-you to my dad for helping me with the Florida research; to my bro and my sis; to Alan and Fran Romanchuck; and in loving memory of Alex Romanchuck. The Bigtrees’ story owes a huge debt to many authors but especially to Katherine Dunne, George Saunders, and Kelly Link. And a final thank-you to the readers of this book.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2009, she received the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation for excellence in fiction writing for writers under thirty-five years of age. Her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was published by Knopf in 2006 and released in paperback in 2007 by Vintage. It was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Oxford American, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Conjunctions. Three of her short stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories volumes (2007, edited by Stephen King; 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie; and 2010, edited by Richard Russo). She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Williams College and is currently writer-in-residence at Bard College.
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