“My mother had a pregnancy that turned into a cancer!” Kiwi shouted back to him, confident that over the roar of the Tongue’s salivary jets he would not be understood. Then he pushed a fist to his mouth, stunned. Really, what the hell was wrong with him? (She wanted a baby and she got cancer instead! Isn’t that funny …) The new hire grinned, shook his head. He waved good-bye before disappearing down the stairs with his ward.
The full length of the Leviathan experience, a.k.a. “Digestion,” took twenty-three minutes. Lost Souls dropped seventy-six feet from an elevated chute into the first of a series of domed funnels, pools, and bowls meant to replicate the twists and turns of a labyrinthine whale’s stomach. Kiwi had never been on the Leviathan ride himself, in part because it would have required changing into a bathing suit, in semipublic. And Kiwi, according to his first paycheck, couldn’t afford a bathing suit, or any suit. Or food.
This office had a marmalade-tinted window that opened onto a dark, box-strewn artery of the World. Kiwi wondered how the payroll guy could stand to exist here. You could go a full day inside this part of the Leviathan without seeing the sun. Kiwi made sure to take breaks with Vijay on the roof. Some days he’d go running into the parking lot at noon, nostalgic for clouds and shadows. Finally the door swung open.
“Good morning! How can I help you, ma’am?” the payroll manager asked. He had the crew cut and the saturnine blue eyes of an ex-marine. He introduced himself as Scott, and Kiwi thought he looked crisp and official compared to the grunts on the World’s payroll.
Kiwi hadn’t cut his hair in a while; it hung in glossy waves over his ears.
“My name is Kiwi Bigtree,” he said politely, and when that didn’t help he tugged at the puffy brimstone design on his collar and added, with a note of quiet apology, “I’m, uh, I’m a guy?”
“I’m sorry?” Scott the payroll manager said. He was linking paper clips into a chain that ran across his desk. Scott was alternating colors: blue clip, red clip, green clip, white clip, repeat. They hung over the side of his desk and trailed into his wastepaper bin, swaying hypnotically. How much does Scott get paid per hour? Kiwi wondered.
“Well, you see …” Kiwi realized that he was unconsciously craning his neck to display his sizable, indubitably male Adam’s apple. Evolutionary psychology: he’d read about this. A vestigial, animal impulse to impress his superior. In fact the payroll manager was just a kid himself, a twenty-something in a glittery red World jacket, his black-and-magenta dress socks peeking beneath his ordinary slacks. He had a framed degree from Volmer State, economics BA, 3.2.
(Later, on the rooftop, Kiwi would try to gauge the weirdness of his encounter with the payroll manager by relaying it to Vijay: “I wish you had seen that jacket they make him wear … bro. He went to college! I saw his degree. Do you think he is embarrassed to be wearing that?”
“You think you know everything about everyone? Please. You don’t know shit about shit, Margaret. Maybe the payroll manager loves to dress up like in that jacket. Maybe that’s the reason he even went to college—maybe he, like, can’t wait to put it on in the morning. Maybe he sets a fucking alarm, bro …”)
“There’s been some mistake here.” Kiwi smoothed the check on Scott’s desk; according to the computer-generated invoice that accompanied it, Kiwi had worked three sixty-hour weeks inside the Leviathan and yet he somehow owed the Carpathian Corporation, the World’s parent company, $182.57.
“Well.” He wheeled his pencil around the well of one freckled ear. “Well! That’s what I’m here for, Mr. Bigtree. Let’s do the tally together.”
Lunches, those Jumbo Magma sodas that only left you thirstier and the eye-watering Hellspawn Hoagies? They weren’t free and neither was his dormitory rent.
Water, AC, electricity, et cetera, mumbled the payroll guy without looking up at Kiwi’s face. Instead he stared sternly down at his computer keyboard, as if he were trying to draft a letter with no hands.
Seventy dollars had been deducted for his flame-emblazoned World of Darkness uniform, Scott informed him.
“Wait, they made me pay for this shirt?” Kiwi stared down at his chest, which glowed like a barbecue coal. “Is that hopefully against some law?”
This uniform was starchy, ill-fitting. It had a huge puffy flame exploding out of it. “Like a blister,” Kiwi told Scott. Kiwi was no expert, but it seemed like the World of Darkness employees should be the ones receiving extra money to wear these suits. Yvans liked to jog around the ladies in his outfit and blow into an invisible whistle. “Margaret!” he’d shout. “Look! I am the referee for a girls’ soccer game in hell!”
Forty dollars had been deducted as well, a “processing” fee for his ID badge and locker assignment.
The lock on his locker cost him $5.02.
Kiwi was paying city and state taxes now.
He was also, unwittingly and against his wishes, saving for retirement.
“Oh,” Kiwi said, and “Thank you.” Terrific. He smoothed the cotton flames on his seventy-dollar shirt with the flats of his hands and left the office. I’m turning out to be a pretty shitty Redeemer here, he thought. He hadn’t yet made a penny to send to Swamplandia!
CHAPTER NINE
The Dredgeman’s Revelation
When the Chief called us on the kitchen telephone to see how we were doing, I said, “Fine, Dad.” And when he asked me about the Seths, I said the same. Everything was fine, everyone was gone. The park was still “temporarily closed” with green tarps drawn over all the airboats and picnic tables. The park was all ours. Without a show to perform, the whole island had become our backstage. The Seths grinned up at us, our only audience. One afternoon Osceola and I fed cookies and whipped cream to the Seths to see what would happen. Nothing happened. I wrote M-O-M? on the Ouija wood, wishing for dark vegetables, punishments.
A few times I walked out to the original gator hole. The baby Seth rode in my coveralls with her fingerling jaws taped up, a little coal in my pocket. My face in the water looked ugly, I thought, bulbous and freckled like some red-spotted frog. Even the gator hole was derelict that summer—algae covered its surface. No mama gator and no hatchlings. Unmenaced, all the fish inside the hole had grown huge and lippy. The bass turned in a thick circle, a clock of gloating life. You guys think you’re safe? The buzzards are going to come and eat you next, you stupid fish. This time when I ate the saw-grass buds I got a bad stomachache.
Osceola was barely talking to me. I’d trot after her toward the Last Ditch until she turned and shouted at me to leave her alone. One time she sprayed insect repellent at me.
“Ava, please. Quit spying on me! He won’t come if you’re here.”
“I can’t visit the ditch? It’s a free country. Hey, slow down!”
But I’d stop at the end of the boardwalk, frozen in place. “Just tell me, Ossie—who are you going to see?”
One night I finally made her crazy enough to turn and face me. It was twilight, and we were halfway down the shadowy path behind the Gator Pit, my flashlight beam chasing hers along the sticks and rocks.
“I’m going to see Louis Thanksgiving, Ava. His ghost. My boyfriend. That’s who. One of the crew of dredgemen who never made it to the Gulf.”
“Yeah, right.” The lamps glowed. “Your boyfriend.” Saw grass bent westward on either side of the boardwalk. Neither of us moved.
“So what happened, exactly?” I finally asked. “Will you tell it to me?”
“What? Tell you what?”
“How it … how the Dredgeman became a ghost?”
“Okay,” she said after a long pause. “But it’s a secret. And it’s not a happy story, Ava. Obviously. You sure you’re ready? Sit,” she said, and the lights seemed to tremble with her voice.
I thought she sounded a little relieved, and I wonder now if the Dredgeman’s Revelation wasn’t also a kind of burden, a weight that my sister needed my help to carry. His death story seemed very heavy to me, in whatever unit death stories get measured.
The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss; but on the dredge barge he preferred to think of himself as a profession. For the past six months, he’d spent each day and half the night pushing deep into the alien interior of the Florida swamp, elbow-to-elbow with twelve other crewmen, the “muck rat” employees of the Model Land Company. They were the human engine of a floating dredge, a forty-foot barge accompanied by two auxiliary boats—the cook shack and, for sleeping, the houseboat. The Model Land Company was digging a canal through the central mangle of the swamp and the dredge clanged toward the Gulf amid blasts of smoke and whining cables, tearing up roots and bedrock and excavating hundreds of thousands of gallons of bubbling soil. In sunlight and in moonlight, everybody on the barge had to work under billowing capes of mosquito netting—and the weave of that finely stitched protection was what the word “dredgeman” felt like to Louis. Like soft armor, a flexible screen. As a dredgeman, Louis was the same as anyone on deck. And on the floating machine, in this strange and humid swamp, every yellow morning was like a new skin that you could slip into.
At seventeen, Louis was the youngest member of the crew. It was the height of the Depression, and sometimes the men turned to the past for distraction—talking about the girlfriends they’d left mooning after them in red diner booths in Decatur, or their high school teachers, somebody’s family store in Rascal Mountain, Georgia, or their army stints, the dogs and the children that they’d left on terra firma, the debts they’d gleefully abandoned. Inside the suck of these other guys’ nostalgia, Louis became almost unbearably nervous.
“What about you, Lou?” somebody eventually asked. “How did you get washed down here?”
“Oh, not much to tell …” he mumbled. Very little of his childhood before the dredge felt real anymore. In fact, the vast and empty floodplain that spread for miles in every direction around the dredge’s gunwales seemed to mock the notion that a childhood had ever happened. Two skies floated past them—one above and one below on the water, whole clouds perfectly preserved. “One thing about me, though,” Louis said, coughing, trying like the other guys to make his past into good theater. “One sort of interesting thing, I guess, is that I was born dead.”
“Well, goddamnit, Louis, you don’t need to brag about it.” Gideon Thomas, the engine man, laughed. “Born dead—shit, son, everybody is!”
Of all the men on the dredge, Gid was probably Louis’s best friend, although it wasn’t exactly a symmetrical relationship, since Gid teased Louis without mercy and “borrowed” things from the kid that he couldn’t really return, like food.
“I’m not bragging,” Louis said, and he wasn’t bullshitting the crew, either. He was just repeating a fact that he’d heard from his adopted father—“born dead” was an epithet that he had used to needle Louis whenever he moved too quickly for the old man’s fists. And although the old man had boiled the boy’s birthday story down to two cruel words, they both happened to be true—Louis Thanksgiving had very nearly been a nobody.
At birth, his skull had looked like a little violin, cinched and silent. The doctor who had uncorked the baby from his dead mother in the chilly belly of the New York Foundling Hospital had begun shaking it to a despondent meter, thinking, Ah, what a truly rude awakening! Because this tiny baby—holding its breath, refusing to wiggle—was failing at the planet’s etiquette. He did not blink. He was resolute and blue in the doc’s blood-soaked arms.
“A stillborn,” the doc told a nurse. “And the woman’s dead, uterine rupture, terrible …” So this kid had missed it totally, then, his windy little interval between birth and death. His life. And the unwed mother, lying naked on a table in the Foundling Hospital, was now no one’s mother or daughter.
The doctor lit a Turkish cigarette and let out a little cry, a sadness that registered in decibels somewhere between a gambler’s sigh and the poor woman’s grief-mad wailing at the end of her labor—and then another cry joined the doctor’s. The stillborn’s blue face opened like a flower and he started crying even harder, unequivocally alive now, unabashedly breathing, making good progress toward becoming Louis. The baby’s face kept reddening by the second, and the doctor plucked the cigarette from his lips like a tar carnation. He would have liked to keep on smoking, and drinking, too, but babies—you could not just stand there and toast their voyage back to nothingness! Although. If the room had been emptied of witnesses, no nurses, no mother, just this baby’s squalling eyes, and your own …? Could you maybe then …? No, the better doctor inside the doctor insisted. We can’t do that. So the doc put on his self-prescribed green eyeglasses and massaged air into the baby’s chest with the flats of his hands; and when blood and air started to work in tandem and the midnight pigments in Louis’s bunched-sock face brightened to a yellowish pink, the doc stared down at the baby and said, “Well, pal, I think you made the right choice.” The mother’s cracked heels were by this time cooling to putty on the table.
Exhausted, the doctor left the birth certificate blank. L-O-U-I-S read the alphabeads that two nuns strung on a little black bracelet for the baby, because the doctor remembered or imagined he remembered that the dead mother had at one point whispered this American name to him. Louis’s mother was an immigrant from a country that Louis could not have pronounced or found on a map—and if Louis ever did hear its name when he was growing up, well, it could have been Oz or the moon to him, an imaginary place.
One of the Children’s Aid nuns at the New York Foundling Society came in to retrieve the newborn orphan. Louis lost his true past in a few squeaks of her nun shoes on the linoleum. Carrying him away, leaving that widening blank of a woman behind him, this wimpled stranger wound the clock of Louis’s life. The nun (who sometimes dreamed she was a man in advertising, writing copy for Hollywood movies) tucked a paper with a short description of his delivery into his blanket, thinking that this might help him to be adopted by a Christian family at the train station: MISLABELED STILLBORN MIRACLE BABY ALIVE PRAISE GOD FOR LOUIS, THANKSGIVING!
Somewhere down the line the nun’s purple comma got smudged and then Louis had a surname.
When he was three days old, Louis Thanksgiving was added to a group of eleven orphans, accompanied by one nun, one priest, and one mustachioed western agent who really did not care for children at all. He became one of those unfortunates who grew up in the Midwest, part of the human sediment deposited by the orphan train that ran from New York to Clarinda, Iowa; and while plenty of boys and girls found their way to loving adoptive families, such was not the case for Louis. The New York Foundling Society had placed a melodramatic advertisement in the newspapers of each of the towns along the railroad route, and dozens of farm families had gathered under a striped awning at the Clarinda station to size up the scabby knees from New York City. Louis was picked up at the station by Mr. Frederick K. Auschenbliss, a German dairy farmer who treated him worse than the livestock—at least the dairy cows got to stand still and swat flies; Louis was up to milk the cows at 2:30 a.m., spreading manure on the flat fields at sunup. Mr. Frederick K. Auschenbliss was not an affectionate father. Picture instead a slave driver who grew into the hard hiss of that name—a hog-necked man with a high Sunday collar, his eyes a colorless sizzle like grease in a pan, half his face erased by the dark barn. Louis was zero when he arrived at the Auschenblisses’ farm, sixteen when he escaped it—and even Death, judging by the gaps in Osceola’s story, had not yet afforded Louis T. enough time and distance to permit him to tell the story of those lost years.
Louis T., now grown into a bruised and illiterate young man, the brother to no one in that house of twelve, escaped the farm as soon as flight seemed possible. He rode the rails southward on a voyage that had the fitful logic of a sleep interrupted: suns set and suns rose. Forests dispersed into beaches and regrouped again in mountain passes. Lightning sent down its white spider legs outside the dining-car windows and crawled up the pine trunks, trailing fires. He hopped trains that crisscrossed the Midwest, touching go
lden millet fields and the black corners of the Atlantic before he finally pushed beyond the Florida Panhandle.
Florida, in those days, was a very odd place: a peninsula where the sky itself rode overland like a blue locomotive, clouds chuffing across marshes; where orange trees and orderly rows of vegetables gave way to deep woods and then, further south, broke into an endless acreage of ten-foot grass. This, finally, was the vision that reached Louis T. through the train window: a prairie that looked as vast as the African savanna. A strange weed or wild corn shifted restlessly in the afternoon winds—saw grass, said a fellow passenger beneath the slouch of his hat. That was the name for the long stalks that swallowed the WPA men up to the waists of their coveralls. Teams of lumbermen and government surveyors were working up and down the train rides, an eerie counterpoint to the dozens of herons and deer that Louis saw standing in the marshes. Then the dizzying height of the trees in the pinewoods, the thin millions of them extending as far as the eye could see. They were called slash pines for the cat-face scars left by the gum tappers—already thousands of acres had been tapped for turpentine. The slash pines reminded Louis of a stark daguerreotype he had once seen as a child of Lee’s emaciated Confederate forces.
These woods were deep but they were neither peaceful nor quiet—they were full of men. Axes swung and fell, a blue glinting on the edges of the woods, and Louis followed the blade handles to the stout arms and the square, heat-flattened faces of the Civilian Conservation Corps lumbermen. It was the Depression, and thirteen million job seekers were surging southward, westward, eastward and massing like locust clouds in the cities. But few of these money hunters had made it to the deep glade. From Louis’s window seat in the train, he saw just a smattering of humans. When the train had some mechanical problem outside the Crooked Lake National Forest, they cut the engine and the metal moaned to a full stop in the middle of a wrinkled wood. Out here you could hear the beginning of the wind, the hiss of the air plants and the crimson bromeliads. Oak toads chorused incessantly. If he could hear his own death in all that lively hubbub, he ignored it. Home, home, home, sang the rails, and the train lurched back to life.
Swamplandia! Page 12
