I pause, my fingers hovering over the pointer. I can’t remember if “disappointed” is spelled with one s or two. “Go to your room,” I spell instead, “and think about what you did.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I lie down on the cot in the silent bungalow, and think about what I’ve done. I close my eyes. I discover that even with my eyes shut, I can still see the black swope of the ceiling fan, the steady scything of the blades, just by listening to the air. The jolly mosquitoes drone on and on. The heat rises like a hand clamped over my mouth.
Sometime around sundown, I manage to get up, and go feed the gators. It occurs to me, in a fuzzy, directionless way, that it is Thursday. When Mom was alive, Thursdays used to be synonymous with Live Chicken Thursday, one of the few Bigtree rituals that I refuse to perform. You have to tie twelve hens to a clotheswire by their hoary talons, so that they’re hanging upside down. Then you hoist them over the Gator Pit and stand back. The Seths jump clear out of the water, seven or eight feet high, and snatch at them. Squawking, thrashing, feathers, blood—and then silence, the naked hooks glinting on the line. It’s easy to tune out the caged noises if you are a spectator, but the squalling becomes newly horrible when you are its conductor. Usually I stop halfway, overwhelmed by a mercy born of my own cowardice. The Chief used to tease me for being such a little girl about it.
“It’s natural. It’s the food chain, Ava,” he’d laugh. “These chickens are happy”—he had to yell, over the squawked protests of the chickens—“to be fulfilling their chicken destiny.”
If the Chief’s not around to do it, I usually just thaw out a bucket of frozen baitfish. I’m nervous around the rooster, and too squeamish to tie the knots. But today I find myself walking around back behind the stadium to the red coop. The swamp hens greet me with a flurry of shin pecks, puffing out their patchy, distended chests. I pick them up, one by one, and unceremoniously dump them into the wooden crate. Then I attach the crate to our pulley, ignoring the jabbing beaks, and hoist it out over the water.
The hardest part is figuring out how to manipulate the pulley, and then guessing when to pull the lever to release the crate. After that, it’s all over in a matter of seconds. I listen to the cooing panic, the frantic splashing. I wait, alone in the concrete half-moon of the stadium, until the splashing has stopped. Above me, the sun has nearly set. In the distance, the river is the color of a melting pearl. There, I think, I’ve done it. When the Chief gets back, he’ll make me the line girl for sure. And still I feel nothing—just a numb surprise at my own lack of affect, like watching your foot curl when it’s fallen asleep. I lie belly-flat on the blue mats. I peer into the turbid pit, feeling light as the feathers floating on the rosy water.
On Saturday, Ossie announces that she is taking Luscious to the Swamp Prom. From her huffy, vaguely French pronunciation of “Swamp Prom,” I gather that I’m not invited. It will be held at seven in the Bigtree Café, she says, and I can be on the Decorating Committee. She hands me a box of party toothpicks and a bouquet of wilted balloons.
“Can I come?”
“Do you have a date?”
We glare at each other. I nearly tell my sister about the Bird Man, and then bite my lip. She finally agrees to let me go to her dance, but only on the condition that I be the chief musician. Basically, this means that I have to supply a sack of quarters for the jukebox in the Bigtree Café.
“Only love songs, only slow songs, mostly Patsy Cline,” she instructs.
I haven’t actually spoken to my sister for several days. She comes home from her swamp dates after I’ve already fallen asleep, and then spends the day in bed. Now that she’s with Luscious, she has no free time for me. It’s not like I particularly want to chaperone her dates to the underworld, but I’m starting to feel a little crazy, a little like a spook myself, wandering around the park with no one to talk to. I’ve tried and failed to develop a rapport with the gators.
“Hello, Seths,” I say, shaking a bag of alligator flea powder over their pen.
“How is it going? Hot enough for you?”
Sometimes a Seth will sneeze, but mostly they ignore me. In my library books, kids always seem to develop a transcendental bond with their animals, detective cats or injured eagles, stout ponies that save people from drowning. But the gators discourage this sort of identification, by being scaly and reptilian and so thoroughly alien, and by occasionally trying to eat my relatives. At this point, I am grateful for Ossie’s company, even if it means I have to share custody of her with a ghost.
In the early evening, we decorate the café with hula lamps and old vanity posters of Luscious. The torchlight casts ivory shadows along the hairy walls of the tiki hut. Patsy Cline croons, “till death do us pa-a-art.” Even without a ghost boyfriend of my own, I recognize this phrase to be a stupid fantasy. Is Patsy for real? What makes Patsy think that she’ll get off so easy, loving only for a lifetime? I plunk in another quarter, scowling.
I am sitting at a round café table, pretending to do a crossword puzzle, while Ossie waltzes around the room with Luscious. Her head is crowned with an unhappy hydra of geckos. We couldn’t decide between Yellow-head, a gaudy meringue, or Tokay, an understated avocado, so she’s worn them both. My sister isn’t a very good dancer. Yellow-head is livid, envelope-flat against her fancy bun. Tokay is trying to bite his leg off.
“Wanna cut in, Ava?” She holds a hand to my forehead. “You okay?”
“Nah, s’okay. I mean, I’m okay. Maybe later.”
“Okay”—she frowns—“just let me know. Luscious doesn’t mind…. A-va!”
The music has stopped, without my noticing. I plunk in another quarter, scowling.
Soon, Patsy recommences, filling the straw room. Ugh. My sister has retreated to a dark corner, where she is nuzzling into the palm straw of the tiki wall. I chew on my pencil, unable to concentrate. I keep snapping up at every groove in the record, watching the windows for the Bird Man. He’s gone; I’m certain of it. I’ve scouted around, and there isn’t a single buzzard left in our mangrove forest. I haven’t figured out how to feel about this yet.
The next song is a slow dance. Ossie is struggling with her empty sleeves, trying to slip her own hand under her dress. I stop hearing the spaces between words, every song rising into an identical whine, bright and coppery, the wail of a jukebox banshee. My vision blurs. I’ll think I see the Bird Man’s face, his long fingers twittering against the glass, and then the panes go dark again. For a terrifying moment, the table melts into numbered squares, rows and columns, all blank.
DOWN
ACROSS
DOWN
ACROSS
Something is going wrong with my eyes, my forehead, my hot, stoppered throat, and I don’t know how to tell my sister.
What’s a six-letter word, the crossword asks me, for…
It is way past some kid’s bedtime when we finally leave the dance. My head is still pounding, but I’m not about to spoil Ossie’s good mood. She is flush with success, already nostalgic for the Swamp Prom. “Did you see those moves, Ava?” She keeps spinning beneath the giant cypress trees, starry-eyed, comparing Luscious to Fred Astaire. We hold hands on the walk home—Ossie’s fingers shooting out and linking through mine in the dark—and I feel a joy so intense that it makes my teeth ache inside my skull. It is everything I can do not to clamp down on Ossie’s hand, a gator wrestler’s reflex. We sing some silly songs from Ossie’s Boos! Spellbook, sloshing through the reeds:
I loose my shaft, I loose it and the moons cloud over,
I loose it, and the sun is extinguished.
I loose it, and the stars burn dim.
But it is not the sun, moon, and stars that I shoot at,
It is the stalk of the heart of that child of the congregation,
So-and-so.
Cluck! cluck! soul of So-and-so, come and walk with me.
Come and sit with me.
Come and sleep and share my pillow.
Cluck! cluck! soul.
“Is Luscious coming home with us?”
“No,” Ossie says, unlocking the bungalow door. “He’s not going to come to Grandpa’s house anymore.”
I do my Flying-Squirrel Super Lunge onto my cot, burying my smile in the scratchy pillow. As I hear the door slam shut, I worry that I might start crying, or laughing hysterically. Just us, I grin, just us—just us! I don’t want to lie and feign regret, but neither do I want to hurt Ossie’s feelings by delighting in Luscious’s expulsion from her body. Instead, I make a noncommittal pillow sound: “Hrr-hh-mm!”
“Good night, Ava,” Ossie whispers. “Thanks for being the record player.”
When I wake up, my sister is not in her cot. Her shoes are gone. Her sheets are on the floor. The glass terrarium, the one Ossie dipped into as her personal jewelry box, usually opaque with lizards, has been ransacked. Only the water bottle and the decorative lichens remain.
“Ossie?”
In the closet, all of her hangers are naked as bones. When I check the bathroom, it’s like entering an invisible garden, perfumed with soap blossoms. The mirror is fogged up, and there is a note taped to the corner:
dir ava
i am not a bigtree enemore. i am living on my honey-moan. don worry we will com back and visat you. i will fid mom miself and brig her to. sory ava i haf the sownd of more words butt i coud not remember the shaps of the letters.
—ossie robacow
I have to read the letter three times before I understand that she’s left me for good. My judgment about these things is getting all the time better, and I know that this is not a secret for keeping. “Ossie, don’t go!” I holler. “Wait! I’ll…I’ll stove-pop you some Boos!” Which sounds wincingly inadequate, even to my own ears. What was the thing she was going to do? Eel-up? Earlobe? Elope, I remember. I find Grandpa’s dusty, checkerboard dictionary and check it for clues:
elope: [v] to run away, or escape privately, from the place or station to which one is bound by duty
Elope. The word lights up like a bare bulb, swinging long shadows through my brain. Because how exactly do you elope with a ghost? What if Luscious is taking my sister somewhere I can’t follow? What if she has to be a ghost, too, to get there? And then another horror occurs to me: What if it’s the Bird Man she’s been meeting all along?
You’d think I’d start after her right away, but I do not. I put on my rain boots, and then take them off, and then put them on again. I pick up the telephone to call for help, and then drop it back into the receiver, jumping at the blank hum of the dial tone. I try to scream, and only air comes out.
Outside, I can feel the swamp multiplying, a boundless, leafy darkness. The distant pines look like pale flames. Without the Chief to cordon it off, without the tourists to clap politely and commend it to memory, Swamplandia! has reverted to being a regular old wilderness. If the Bird Man were to show up right now, I would barrel into his arms, so grateful for the human company. Where is the Chief, I howl, and where is my sister? My hand hovers above the doorknob. I stand there, a thin wire of fear spooling in my gut, until I can’t stay in the empty house any longer. And I’d be tempted to tell Ms. Huerta that this is the feeling that separates us from the animals, if I hadn’t seen so many of the Chief’s dogs die of loneliness.
I pack a flashlight and a Wiffle bat and a steak knife and some peanut butter Boos, to lure Ossie back into her body. We don’t have any garlic bulbs, so I bring the cauliflower, and hope that any vampires I encounter will be of the myopic, easily duped variety. And then I open the door, and run.
The air hits me like a wall, hot and muggy. I run as far as the entrance to the stand of mangrove trees, and stop short. The ground sends out feelers, a vegetable panic. The longer I stand there, the more impossible movement seems.
And then comes that familiar sound, that raw bellow, pulsing out of the swamp.
The cubed thing inside me melts into a sudden lick of fear. Something hot-blooded and bad is happening to my sister out there, I am sure of it. And the next thing I know I am on the other side of the trees, crashing towards the fishpond. It’s a sensory blur, all jumps and stumbles—oily sinkholes, buried stumps, salt nettles tearing at my flesh. I run for what feels like a very long time. One wisp of cloud blows out the moon.
I wish I could say I gulp pure courage as I run, like those brave little girls you read about in stories, the ones who partner up with detective cats. But this burst of speed comes from an older adrenaline, some limbic other. Not courage, but a deeper terror. I don’t want to be left alone. And I am ready to defend Ossie against whatever monster I encounter, ghosts or men or ancient lizards, and save her for myself.
When I break free of the trees and make for the pond, my whole body primed for fight, there is no visible adversary to wrestle with. The Bellower is not the Bird Man. It’s not a wild gator. It’s my sister, standing stem-naked in the moonlight, her red skirts crumpled around her feet like dead leaves. Osceola, poised over dark water, and singing:
“Cluck! cluck! soul of So-and-so,
come and walk with me….”
On land, Ossie’s body looks like an unmade bed, lumpy and disheveled. But in the moonlight, my naked sister is lustrous, almost holy. This is a revelation to me, Ossie’s unclothed bulk, her breasts. My own chest is pancake-flat, and covered in tiny brown moles. All this time, my odd-waddling sister has been living in a mother’s body.
And something is shifting, something is happening to Ossie’s skin. As she walks towards the water, flying sparks come shivering out of her hair, off of her shoulders, a miniature hailstorm. It’s the lizards! I realize. She is shaking them off in a scaly shower, flakes of living armor. The geckos fall from her arms, her breasts, they plink into the pond, her hissing, viscous diamonds. I watch, mesmerized. Soon, my sister is completely naked, her thighs ruffled red by the high, prickly grasses. I don’t have enough breath left to say a word. And then, still holding the last note of her spell, Ossie walks into the water.
“Ossie, no!” Once I start screaming, I find that I can’t stop. But I don’t want to wade into the water until I can see exactly what morass I’m getting into. I feel around my overalls for the pocket flashlight, and find Seth’s eye instead, my lucky charm. With a biblical wail, I throw the eye at the back of her head.
“Osceola!”
This turns out to be a girly display of strength. The eye falls way short; it barely makes the pond. I picture Seth’s eye swirling down and settling in the red mud, its lidless gaze turned up towards Ossie as her legs twitch with the memory, the anticipation, of…what? I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. All I know for certain is that she’s leaving me.
I wait for what feels like eons for Ossie to resurface, but the pond remains glassy and smooth, that same winking blankness of our mother’s mirror. Lily pads coagulate in blots of vapid light. Below the water, I sense more than see Ossie’s body, spiraling towards some mute blue crescendo.
“Don’t you dare!” I yell at the pond. “Don’t you dare go any farther down there!” I charge into the water after her.
I flail around in the shallows, black water pouring through my fingers, seeping into my eyes and mouth and ears, until finally my fingers brush skin. I seize Ossie’s shoulders and yank her up. The water buoys her huge body, and I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it’s just me at my most desperate. I splash towards the shore, making this anguished, honking noise, struggling to find purchase in the silty mud.
“Ava?” Ossie sputters. “What are you doing? Let me go!”
We fight each other with all the signature Bigtree moves—the whirligig, the chin thrust, the circumnavigator. Finally, with a triumphant howl, I manage to yank her onto the bank of the pond. I grab the fleshy pads of her feet, black as old orange peels, and try to drag her over a bed
of rocks and sticks. Now Ossie is spitting up muck, and I can tell from her filmy, sightless rage that she is still possessed. A lily pad is pasted to her left cheek.
In the process of pulling her out of the water, I’ve dug these little half-moons into Ossie’s arm. Tiny nicks, like the violet impact of kisses, or bruises. They are already darkening, and I watch, fascinated, as they swell into puffy white welts. As if something were still clawing at her from within, pushing outwards, a pressure that is trying to break the skin.
Haunting Olivia
My brother Wallow has been kicking around Gannon’s Boat Graveyard for more than an hour, too embarrassed to admit that he doesn’t see any ghosts. Instead, he slaps at the ocean with jilted fury. Curse words come piping out of his snorkel. He keeps pausing to readjust the diabolical goggles.
The diabolical goggles were designed for little girls. They are pink, with a floral snorkel attached to the side. They have scratchproof lenses and an adjustable band. Wallow says that we are going to use them to find our dead sister, Olivia.
My brother and I have been making midnight scavenging trips to Gannon’s all summer. It’s a watery junkyard, a place where people pay to abandon their old boats. Gannon, the grizzled, tattooed undertaker, tows wrecked ships into his marina. Battered sailboats and listing skiffs, yachts with stupid names—Knot at Work and Sail-la-Vie—the paint peeling from their puns. They sink beneath the water in slow increments, covered with rot and barnacles. Their masts jut out at weird angles. The marina is an open, easy grave to rob. We ride our bikes along the rock wall, coasting quietly past Gannon’s tin shack, and hop off at the derelict pier. Then we creep down to the ladder, jump onto the nearest boat, and loot.
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Page 2