Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  We all looked up. The thin whine of the jukebox seeped into the crater his voice had dug into the café dining room.

  “No, Chief. It’s great.”

  Ossie stretched the shirt between them like a fence.

  “Try it on.”

  “Dad?”

  “You’re right, it looks too small to me. Kiwi, go get your sister the next size up.”

  Osceola stood. “Dad, I’ll be back in a little while,” she said. She tightened the ends of her long white braids. She’d smoothed three different shades of Mom’s powder onto her eyelids. My sister, I realized with a funny dip in my gut, looked very beautiful. I think the Chief must have noticed this, too, because his face did something funny.

  “What are you talking about?” He glanced down at his watch. “It’s nine o’clock.”

  “I know. I’m going on a walk.”

  “Now? Baby, sit down. As long as we’re all together I thought we could have a tribal meeting. We’ve got some important business to discuss …”

  But Ossie took a step toward the door, where a fat green anole was clinging to the metal hinge and silently watching everything.

  “I want to. Walk.” She paused. “It’s my birthday.”

  Ossie made it across the room. When her hand closed around the doorknob he finally spoke.

  “Well, you’re going to miss some really good news, Osceola.”

  “Okay. Ava can catch me up.” She smiled at him sweetly. Her sweatshirt, all her birthday stuff, was still on the table. “Good night, guys. Thanks for a good party.”

  And then the door closed, and somehow we were not allowed to ask: where is she going? The Chief turned his attention back to us.

  “As you may have noticed,” he said, in his booming chieftain’s voice, “we Bigtrees have a serious enemy. We have a new battle to win.”

  “Oh my God,” said Kiwi. “Dad. This isn’t a show. We are all sitting in the same room.”

  My brother had tugged the brim of his Swamplandia! hat as far down as it would go, practically to the freckles on his nose, which meant that we had to stare at our own cartoon images to talk to him. I think he did this on purpose, to mock us. (I really hated that particular hat—there had been a mistake at the factory and the whole family came out looking hydrocephalic and evil. Tourists would regularly mistake the bump-eyed alligator on the brim for me. They would tap at the grinning alligator on the hat and say, “And who could that one be, young lady?” like they were giving me an excellent present.

  “Don’t you take that tone with me, son,” the Chief bellowed again.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Kiwi,” I said.

  The Chief nodded at me, pleased. “Ava? You want to contribute?”

  I shook my head. I had been working on my plan to save Swamplandia! but I didn’t want to talk about it yet; I worried that I would jinx it, or that my brother would kill it dead with one joke. It had to stay in my head for now.

  “What’s everybody so damn glum about?” the Chief mumbled. He swallowed his humongous second serving of cake in three bites, and then he quickly finished the half piece that Ossie had left on her plate, his shoulders glugging up and down like an anhinga swallowing a fish. Then he left the dining room and returned with the little blackboard that rested on a tripod outside the Swamp Café. He wiped it clean and stared to write:

  Island tameness is the tendency of many populations and species of animals living on isolated islands to lose their wariness of potential predators.

  “We Bigtrees are an island species,” he told us. “I’ve been reading your brother’s textbook here.” He hoisted an antiquarian-looking book with the faded coin of a Library Boat sticker on its spine. “Turns out we islanders are very special. A bunch of new and wonderful crap can evolve here because we’re off to ourselves. But there are also trade-offs. Island species get complacent.”

  NEW PREDATOR: WORLD OF DARKNESS

  he wrote, and beneath this:

  OUR EVOLUTION: CARNIVAL DARWINISM

  Kiwi chuckled. He could manufacture laughter as joyless as flat cola. “How are we going to adapt, exactly?” he asked the Chief from inside the cave of his hat. “Are we going to hike prices again? ’Cause if we only have two tourists in the stands, Dad, it doesn’t matter how much we charge them. We’ll never break even …”

  The Chief continued to write:

  REVENUE FOR MARCH: $1,230

  OUTSTANDING DEBT: $52,560*

  When the Chief put an asterisk next to something, it meant that he was only telling you the best part of the truth. He wasn’t being dishonest, he explained—he was only letting us know that our debt was “evolving.” Just like everything else in this universe. The asterisk, the Chief taught us, was the special punctuation that God gave us for neutralizing lies. One recent example would be “Your mother’s cancer is getting better.*”

  “What about the county taxes?” Kiwi asked, very quiet now. “What about Mom’s medical bills?”

  “Son, you need to quit on that. You think you’re some kind of detective?”

  “What about Mom’s funeral bills?”

  “We don’t need to tally those. Those are being taken care of.”

  “Dad? I’ve been running some numbers myself … Admittedly, I’m not privy to all your records here …” Kiwi’s voice was as monotonous as a sleepwalk. “For starters, you need to sell some of the equipment. Maintenance costs are going to crush us without tourists. The follow spot, the Seths’ incubators …” Kiwi blinked, as if he’d woken from his sleepwalk on a cliff. “Think big. You could sell the whole park.”

  The Chief set his chalk on the little ledge. He stared at our brother.

  “Think of what you could get for the airboats,” Kiwi said. “And there are those alligator farms in central Florida, they would buy the Seths I bet. We can finish out school at Rocklands High, I’ll get a job to help out, we can all enroll for the fall …”

  Rocklands High. Ossie would be, what, in mainland nomenclature? A high school junior. I would be a freshman, assuming they didn’t put me in some duncey catch-up school. I tried to picture myself in a Rocklands classroom: the place rapidly filled with swamp water, all its desks and books floating away until it became our Gator Pit. We were the Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty. Kiwi wanted to give up our whole future for—what? A sack of cafeteria fries? A school locker?

  The Chief echoed my thoughts:

  “That’s what you want? To sell your mother’s home? To let some damn Cajun factory farmers butcher our Seths for fifty bucks a head? What’s that? Oh! Less! Have you been doing a little research? To live in the city,” he snarled. “To go to school …”

  While they fought, I frowned and studied the blackboard. The eraser had left a ghostly square on the front of the Chief’s Dijon-golden vest, which was unfortunate because nobody was really doing laundry anymore. Balls of socks and underwear banked like snow around the corners of our bedrooms.

  I don’t know what Kiwi was doing for clean clothing during that period; for months my sister and I had been spraying our undershirts and shorts with Mom’s perfume. A strong rose scent. It was in a heart-shaped bottle beveled in tiny gold and pink hexagons with a black rubber pump. It was the fanciest thing in our house by a big margin—tinted and glamorous, foreign enough to feel a little sinister. (We thought of it as an ancient formula; it was a scent called Fox, discontinued in the early 1970s.) Ossie and I had worked out a rationing system: two pumps, per sister, per day. We were using Mom up, I worried, and for some reason that fear made me want to spray on more and more. The perfume worked like a liquid clock for us: half a bottle drained to a quarter, that was winter.

  Both my parents had denied that my mother’s illness was serious, not just our father. They claimed that she was getting better right up until the moment that she left for the hospice. Dr. Gautman, her oncologist, was the first to show my brother and sister and me “the chart,” to say “T3c” to us, and to translate this alphanumeric code into the frightening co
da of “your mother’s final days.” Dr. Gautman gave us plastic glasses of water with lemon from the nurses’ station before he broke the news to us: “The Malig-Nancy has spread beyond her, ah, her ovaries, I’m afraid …”

  And into your mother’s liver, and to the pleural fluid of her lungs. As a kid I heard the word malignancy as “Malig-Nancy,” like an evil woman’s name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her.

  “Nobody is going to a Loomis school. We are not abandoning your mother’s dream here, do you understand that? We are the Bigtree Tribe, son, and we have a business to run …”

  Meanwhile the list beneath Carnival Darwinism kept growing:

  ADAPTATION 1: INVEST IN SALTWATER CROCS

  ADAPTATION 2: WE BECOME AMPHIBIOUS—NEW WET-SUIT COSTUMES FOR THE GIRLS? SCUBA WITH THE SETHS?

  ADAPTATION 3: MODERNIZE THE GATOR PIT—ILLUMINATED DIVING BOARD, BUBBLE JETS

  The Chief pulled out a booklet of photographs of the saltwater crocs he was interested in acquiring: horned and sad-looking, these crocs did not seem like gods of the Nile. They resembled partially deflated tires. The seller was a retired breeder in Myrtle City, South Carolina, who wanted twenty-five thousand dollars for them. Kiwi flipped the booklet over without looking at it.

  * * *

  That night Osceola never came home from her walk. When I woke up at midnight her bed was neatly made. Nothing like this had ever happened before; Ossie didn’t even like to go to the tree house alone. I lay awake waiting for her return until 3:22 a.m. When you are waiting for somebody for that long, your ceiling fan can whip ordinary air into a torture. I must have finally nodded off, because when I woke again there was Ossie, snoring lightly in her black cotton dress. She had collapsed facedown on the pillow. Her puffy white arms were flung in a T over the mattress. Wet mangrove leaves clung to every clothed and unclothed inch of her, even her fingers, even the line of her scalp. Where had she been? In a gator hole? Crawling around a tunnel? Osceola was smiling, some good dream rippling over her.

  The next day Ossie stalked downstairs without apology, as self-possessed as a cat, and slid the obituaries section out of the Chief’s paper. She spooned eggs out of the frying pan, opened the obituaries on the countertop like this was all very normal. She still had on screwy lipstick and was wearing a pair of Mom’s fishnet stockings, her legs pale and unshaven.

  Your legs look like Sasquatches in nets, I considered saying. They look nothing like our mother’s. I kept waiting for the Chief to make a comment.

  Kiwi came downstairs and did a double take.

  “Well, you look weird. New pajamas? Did somebody exhume you last night?”

  Kiwi looked exhausted, too, with his baggy eyes and his dirty hair, the top half of his red scalp greased to a wet-looking brown, as if somebody had tried to put out a fire on Kiwi’s head with a rag. He sat down and gaped at Ossie.

  “You’re the one who’s been wearing that same shirt since, like, Christmas,” Ossie mumbled. She left her toast and her runny eggs untouched and shoved past him, the stockings making an itchy noise as she opened and shut the door. Outside it was a beautiful sunny morning. For a second the sky yawned blue at us, then disappeared. The Chief looked blankly up from the newspaper. An ad on the front page read: WORLD OF DARKNESS TO HOST INFERNAL LIGHT SHOW. It was a hologram ad. If you let your eyes unfocus, a laser shot out of a whale’s blowhole and fractaled into columns of fire.

  “Well?” Our dad shuffled Kiwi’s hair. “What’s your problem today, son?”

  “Ossie is talking to the dead people again, Chief,” I told him.

  My father was sipping at a third cup of black coffee. He glanced up at us with the dreamy look of a mutt leashed to a tree.

  “It’s a stage, Ava. We’ve been over this. You want me to talk to her?”

  “Cancer happens in stages,” my brother grunted, “and guess what the last one is?”

  I stirred crumbs into a puddle of ketchup. Sometimes the word “cancer” was like a hinge we could swing onto a conversation about Mom, but not that day. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something crawling along the bottom of the Chief’s newspaper. Just the advertisement again, lifting fizzily away from the paper.

  Lasers! We didn’t have anything close to a laser. I felt queasy with a new kind of embarrassment. Until 1977, Swamplandia! had used crank generators. The caimans had eaten or destroyed most of the eraser-size bulbs in their terrarium. The poor bear was eating her fish heads under strings of five-and-dime Christmas lights.

  “I need to go change some things, you guys,” I mumbled.

  Outside our porch had become a cauldron of pale brown moths and the bigger ivory moths with sapphire-tipped wings, a sky-flood of them. They entered a large rip in our screen. They had fixed wings like sharp little bones, these moths, and it was astonishingly sad when you accidentally killed one.

  “Ossie!” I called. “Ossie, wait for me!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Osceola K. Bigtree in Love

  Shortly after Ossie’s strange birthday, our Ouija “séances” began to change focus. Our sessions at the board became a game of spectral Telephone: Ossie would get me to anchor my side of the pointer while she cruised through the alphabet, summoning “boyfriends.” It made her too sad, she explained, to get “a dial tone” when we tried to ring Mom; now we were going to practice conversing with other ghosts, the ones whom she could make contact with. At first I refused to play; I felt as though we were giving up on our mother. Getting Mom on the board was the whole point of the game, as I’d understood it. But pretty soon I started to sort of enjoy reading my sister’s conversations with these ghosts—it was a very special kind of eavesdropping. Your eyes had to dart around the board and add up the words as fast as her pointer flew. We sat on the bedroom planks and spelled things to ourselves like I LOVE YOU, GORJUS. Wally Pipp was my sister’s first “date.” Wally looked like a living dimple, just this chubby footnote to sports history that she’d found in a book called Baseball: An American Passion. It was not for me to criticize my sister’s tastes, but why not try for Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth? I asked her. Or even Lefty Gomez? Why not Lefty?

  “Too famous,” Ossie told me, concentrating. “We’ve got to be realistic here, Ava.”

  Then the rules changed again, and Ossie told me that I was not allowed to play anymore. I was “too young to understand” her Spiritist communications. Ouija was no longer “our toy”; it was now a private rotary. She’d sit with her delicate hands vaulted over the pointer for an hour, like a concert pianist waiting for her score to appear.

  Now that I couldn’t play the game with her anymore, I was happy to ally myself with my brother. We’d tag-team tease her:

  “Hey, Ossie, what do baby ghosts eat for breakfast? Dreaded wheat!”

  “What do you call a ghost’s mother? Trans-parent!”

  In addition to his many academic aptitudes, Kiwi had a genius for embarrassing our sister—he could make her plump, serene face crumple into tears of rage in under a minute, and I encouraged him. If she got angry, then I knew she was listening to us. Frequently now she was within earshot of us but zonked, out of it. When she was doing a séance her pupils blew wide and her violet eyes became as hard and shiny as bottle caps. You could yell her name at her and she wouldn’t look up. During the day it was easy to roll your eyes at Ossie’s love spells. At night everything changed. Then something shifted in our house’s atmosphere, and I felt outnumbered. Ghosts silked into our bedroom like cold water. Ossie sucked in her breath and twisted in the yellow sheets, just like my fantasy picture of a hurricane being born. Sometimes she called out strange names. Then a ghost would enter her. I knew it, because I could see my sister disappearing, could feel the body next to me emptying of my Ossie and leaving me alone in the room. The ghost went moving through her, roll
ing into her hips, making Ossie do a jerky puppet dance under her blankets.

  Get out of here, ghost, I’d think very loudly across the chasm between our two beds. Get back in your grave! You leave my sister alone!

  Ossie told me that when she left our room at night she was going on “dates” to meet these ghosts in the woods. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell the Chief. “You have to cover for me, Ava, okay?” I nodded queasily, hoping that Kiwi was right, that the séances were just silly pageantry, an excuse Osceola made up to wear her homemade purple turban with the gold felt star. By noon her terrifying “possessions” became as unrecollectable to me as a dream and the whole problem seemed goofy. So what if she went on these “dates”? Probably it was just a new permutation of the game, and at least this way I got to play it with her again, albeit in the sidekick position of secret-keeper.

  One Friday I found The Spiritist’s Telegraph open on my bed. It wasn’t anything I could read: the letters were printed in a runic alphabet that looked to me like flattened bugs. I’d had enough of this spooky crap, feeling scared in my own house—I carried the huge book to our bathtub, thinking that I would turn the faucet on it. When I set it down, a skinny velvet bookmark dropped out like a tongue. I screamed and threw a washcloth over it.

  “Ava?” my sister called suspiciously later that evening. “Do you think one of the ghosts flew my book into the bathtub?”

  “Yes. I do.” In my comic book another radioactive superhero had just saved the planet Earth. Why couldn’t Ossie read cheerful stuff like this? “Probably it was an ex-boyfriend of yours.”

  I developed a weedy crop of superstitions regarding The Spiritist’s Telegraph. If accidentally I glimpsed one of the ink drawings of the Victorian Spiritists in their lizard-frilled dresses, or of one of the purple “daemons” built like pugilists, I had to knock twice on something real to ease a bad feeling inside of me. Not-real, I’d recite. One-two. I knocked on wood, food, the wavy black soap dish with melted pink soap flakes, even Tokay, our house gecko.