Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  “Whatcha drawing there, Ava Bigtree? That sure is—huh.”

  I had filled in a dozen sheets with single colors, our Bigtree tribal colors: Indian red and heron blue. The whole time I was coloring, I lived a second life in my head. I’d glance up at the kitchen clock every minute or so and think: Now is when our matinee should begin. Now is when the Chief flips on the blue lights. Gold, clap! Orange, clap! Red lights. Now here comes the song—ba-da-dum! Now Hilola Bigtree is climbing the ladder, waving at all the tiny cheering people; now she is running down the diving board; and here, ladies and gentlemen, she hits the water! …

  Behind me, Uncle Gus coughed.

  “I see you, ah, you like the color blue there.”

  “Yup.”

  Uncle Gus smelled like eggs and diesel and I wished that he would please go away. We had our food, our mail, we were all set. Uncle Gus seemed to want to pat my back, but perhaps couldn’t figure out how or where to touch a kid for sympathy purposes; his large hand hovered near my right ear, then dropped back to his side.

  “You sure you’re all right? You know, I told your old man this already, but you girls are welcome to spend the night at our place, anytime. Mrs. Waddell would love to have you over.”

  “Thanks. Maybe next week. We’re going good, Gus. I fed the Seths a few hours ago. Ossie is good, Judy Garland is good. It’s good here. Quiet.”

  That morning I’d found a half-dead gator in our Pit. She looked like the drowned gators that wash up after storms, their blond tongues glittering with hundreds of decaying minnows. She was alive but I couldn’t tell what was wrong with her—disease was so infrequent among our alligators that scientists from the University of Florida came out once a year to take samples of their blood. I’d let her rest her leathery head against my shoulder while I touched the saffron plates of her neck. The Chief says it’s a terrible sign when a monster gives you this kind of access.

  On Tuesday, it seemed that good news had come at last! Gus brought me another letter. This one came in an envelope with Loomis University’s orange-and-green seal on it.

  Dear Ms. Bigtree:

  Thank you for your inquiry. I have done some research on your behalf; unfortunately no such Commission or Committee or alligator-wrestling competition has ever existed. You might visit the Miccosukee Indian Reservation to watch a live alligator show.

  Regards,

  Amalia Curtis

  Secretary to the President

  University of Loomis

  I tore up this letter within seconds of finishing it, put the bits of it into a plastic bag, and shook the bad news out over the Gator Pit. Later I caught some sunfish for the red Seth—she was eleven and three-quarter inches now, and very healthy-seeming, not sluggish or inappeteant or anything, a few more centimeters and maybe it would be safe to share her with Ossie and the Chief. Not tourists, though, I frowned; I really did not want strangers to see her yet, even though I knew that was the ultimate point of our training. I practiced with her for two hours. I had her to where she would walk this perfect debutante circle around my Swamplandia! ball cap. She would bite my finger with a precocious viciousness. We were going to get famous and save the park. My dream kicked painfully inside of me, and I was surprised to find how easy it was to go on working toward it as if I’d never heard from Mrs. Amalia Curtis.

  I didn’t try to write the commission again, but I did begin a letter to my brother.

  Dear Kiwi,

  I tapped the pencil against my lips. How to explain Louis Thanksgiving? Already I had amassed a stack of Bigtree postcards that I planned to send to him in bulk just as soon as he wrote with his new address. Weeks and weeks of postcards, our mother’s face on most of them. I liked the satisfying clack the stack made against the edge of our dresser, like I’d collected Time itself for my brother. Kiwi could just read these, come back to the swamp, and pick up where he left off.

  Dear Kiwi,

  How are you? Good, I hope. Are you in a college yet? I wanted to tell you something: last night I met Ossie’s boyfriend. His name is Louis, and he is a dredgeman. I don’t know, Kiwi. I think I maybe believe in this one? You know what, as far as ghosts go he is really not so bad. He sure got a raw deal in his first lifetime. Ossie is saying that he’s “the One,” which means that we could have a ghost for a brother-in-law, haha. Poor Ossie. I guess I’ll have to tell you the rest in person … hint hint. We miss you.

  Your sister,

  Ava Bigtree

  Now that the Chief was gone I left the TV news on all the time. I knew about the gas hike in Loomis County and the famine in Uganda, the mayor’s “fiscal indiscretions.” Kiwi’s bulb burned like a lighthouse at the top of our stairs. In the new emptiness I’d made a series of discoveries. For example, if you stared out our bedroom window you could see a forest of dark, inverted trees in the pond beyond the kapok. Pop ash, the kapok, mahoganies, all draped with the irregular lace of Spanish moss—the pond was about fifty feet wide, but it repeated every leaf and branch in a deep layer of endless colors. This second forest had a watery, independent life. Where did the real woods begin? you’d start to wonder after a while.

  Two cinnamon lizards blinked at me from behind Ossie’s unmated work boot. Earlier I’d searched the park for her and then given up to read my Bandits of the West comics. Cowboys were still the closest things to alligator wrestlers I had found in kids’ literature—they lassoed the killing horns of steers and smoked like Dad, drank like Grandpa, wore Mom’s secret smile. That night I gave myself fifteen pumps of Mom’s perfume. Then I let the whole bottle drop onto the floor. Glass flew everywhere. Our bedroom became a terrible canopy of artificial roses. The glass shards I left alone until the thought of my sister cutting her feet on one grew unbearable and I swept them into the dustbin. Ossie is going to really lay into me, I thought. But dawn broke and my sister’s bed was still made. She strolled up to the house at noon, smiling cheerfully, with huge bags under her eyes.

  “Where were you?” I asked dully. I felt exhausted just looking at her. After hours of pumping up for a big speech my anger turned tail on me, slinking away.

  “A secret. But don’t worry, Ava,” she smiled. “Louis takes care of me out there.”

  Wednesday was the same, and Thursday—she stayed out all night. When she came home she slept through most of the day. On Friday, I did the usual: fed our gharials, visited the red Seth and brought her fresh water, checked on the incubators, gave Judy Garland her raw tarpon and berries, went back to the house to make myself a jam and jam sandwich. When I got to the kitchen I saw a white paper rolled small as a cigarette—someone had pushed a note through a rip in our screen door:

  PAYMENT FOR SERVICES RENDERED REQUESTED—

  Yrs, The Bird Man

  “You don’t think some tourist left it?”

  “A tourist from what planet? Ossie, the ferry hasn’t even been here today.”

  We were in the cypress dome, gathering petals and roots for one of her spells. The interior trees in a cypress dome are one hundred feet tall, with roots, or “knees,” that stick out of the water and breathe for them; with their veins of vines they look like petrified rain. Really, it feels like you’re walking through the weather of the dinosaurs. The gray-blue fossil of a storm, now dropping small leaves. I watched my sister stand The Spiritist’s Telegraph against a live oak, her mouth full of flowers.

  “Anyways, that doesn’t make sense, Os. Why would a tourist want payment from us?”

  “Well, Gus will probably know what to do.” My sister yawned. Her eyes watered behind a flume of swamp violets and orchids.

  “Hey, P.S., you look super really ugly,” I said. Ossie was wearing all of our mom’s makeup at once. “Your eyelashes look like spider legs.”

  “You don’t own her, Ava. Anyway, you’re too young to wear mascara.” She blinked her clotted eyelids and shook the note. “ ‘The Bird Man,’ ” she laughed. “How silly. Maybe Uncle Gus is playing a trick on us.” She handed it to me. “Write one bac
k.” She shrugged. “Put the Chief’s mainland phone number on it, let him deal with this.”

  Once you exited the cypress dome, you followed a little dip in the elevation of the island and wound up in a swampy meadow on the banks of a brown canal that was often more mud than water, a place we called the Last Ditch. It was about two miles from the touristed park, at the extreme end of our wanderings; you couldn’t penetrate the mangrove scrawl on the opposite side of that canal without a machete. Osceola was wandering around the Last Ditch, picking a bouquet for herself. She kept reaching up to them on her tiptoes, huffing like those ladies in neon unitards we sometimes watched doing Stretch for the Stars! on Grandpa Sawtooth’s rabbit-eared TV. She’d amassed an armful of cowhorn orchids, an epiphyte species that grew on the sunlit side of these trunks.

  We’d been collecting the orchids all afternoon and we were both panting and crosshatched with scratches when Ossie spotted a cowhorn orchid wrapped serpentlike around the uppermost branch of a live oak.

  “That one,” Ossie said, pointing at the lone blossom on a spindle of raveling bark almost twenty feet above our heads. “That’s the one the ghost wants.”

  “Of course it is,” I muttered, wedging my sneaker into the crotch of the tree and hoisting myself onto one of the strongest-looking branches near the trunk’s base.

  “Hey,” I hollered. “Tell the ghost to pick another one. That branch won’t hold me.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do it,” she called up to me. “He did.” And here she jerked her thumb at the black wreck of the Model Land Company dredge.

  “Ossie, I can’t,” I yelled, already halfway up the bald cypress. A fist of wood broke off under my hand, and for a second I saw long stripes of ants run like wet paint; I swung my leg horizontally as high as I could manage, huffing air. A prong of little ants went running over my left hand. The world swooned below me.

  Now I made the time-honored, biblical and mythical and TV mountain-climbing movie mistake of looking down: my sister was small as a rag doll. Birds whirled like paper scraps around the bottom of the trunk. I saw where a long metal blade from some quartered machine was sunk into the earth like an ax head buried in some giant’s green scalp. The dredge rocked gently on the canal.

  I tipped my chin skyward: the yellow orchid was two feet above my outstretched hand. The wind lifted the tiniest hairs on the back of my neck and I was reaching blindly, clumsily for the yellow orchid, hugging the trunk with one arm and swinging wildly with the other, scraping the same tough nub of bark and getting fistfuls of air. On the third grab I got it. Something shuffled the air below my feet and a cormorant streaked cobalt mere inches from my face, upsetting my balance; I righted myself, panting.

  “I almost fell,” I screamed down at Ossie, wanting to get credit for this. It had started to rain lightly. Below me, I could hear it landing on the roof of the dredge barge with a tinny drub-drubdrub. I began my one-handed descent down the tree. Lightning cracked the sky and then I did fall, crashing down the tree. My T-shirt rolled up as branches snapped, Ossie squealing at me at top volume. For a crazy second I worried that my belly was going to peel away, torn off by the rough bark. Then it was over; I was a jumble of limbs in the marl. Somehow I managed to hang on to the thin stem all the way to the bottom.

  “Here!” I screamed, thrusting the crushed orchid at Ossie. “Your ghost is a jerk. Do you want me to die and haunt you? Because I swear I will.”

  If I were a ghost I would ride that pointer around her Ouija like a little white Cadillac, giving her so much grief! I would—

  Something flashed inside the dredge cabin—half a man’s face. His nose and neck and lips were plume-thin. Then he disappeared into the glare on the porthole.

  “Did you see that?” I asked softly.

  “Yeah, wow. That fall looked like it hurt. You okay?” She gave me a squeeze and dropped my hand. “Thank you for doing that. But look, the spell said we needed tree-growing orchids. See? Nothing terrestrial.” She tapped at a line from a torn page of The Spiritist’s Telegraph.

  I looked back at the dredge porthole and saw nothing and no one behind the dirty glass.

  “Ava, will you hold these for me?” she asked, handing me a bunch of loose spells with titles that seemed to have come straight from the headlines of a woman’s magazine (sleep enchantments, 479; a spell for happiness in marriage, 124; magic herbs to enhance beauty, 77). Ossie lifted and winged the hem of her dress so that her yellow orchids slid into the middle. Fat raindrops were sliding down both our noses now.

  “Okay, Ava. I have to go.”

  “It’s time for your date?”

  Ossie nodded. In the compromised light of the Last Ditch my sister’s skin took on a watery, greenish cast, like the palest rings around a watermelon.

  “Don’t wait here, okay?” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, as I leaned against a swamp oak to wait for her.

  “Ava …”

  “You go. I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll save your place here,” I said, and drew a little X with my sneaker toe where she had just been standing.

  “Ava, listen. You have the Chief’s number? You remember where he left the money for us?”

  I nodded. I thought we were talking about this Bird Man’s debt and I was annoyed that Ossie was going to leave me to deal with that.

  “I—”

  Then she swooped in and hugged me. Coming from Ossie, a hug like this was very unusual, but I think it’s hard to ever hear your own happiness as an alarm bell. All that I suspected in that moment was that we loved each other, and that things between us might soon return to what they’d been before. I threw my arms around her neck. Stay in your body, Ossie. She kissed my cheek and then released me with a little push.

  “Go already, please? Ava, he’s waiting on me …”

  She set off across the muck as briskly as a mainland woman who is late for her ferry. Her footprints filled with groundwater and as I watched a dozen tiny lakes opened between us. Rain blew in from the east while out west the sun burned through a V in the trees, bright and gluey-gold as marmalade.

  Halfway across the ditch, Osceola reached a hand up to her braid, tightening her purple ribbon; then, just when I imagined she was possessed again and had forgotten all about me, she turned back and waved at me. Her face didn’t look so happy any longer—she looked old to me, older in age than our grandmother’s picture, and scared. A mood could age you a hundred years in a finger snap, I now saw.

  I was still standing there when my sister Osceola pulled herself across the brown canal and into the dredge barge, and shut the door.

  * * *

  Quiet rode outward like wildfire after that, engulfing the ditch and me inside it. I held on to the flashlight with both hands. I listened for my sister’s movements inside the dredge; instead, I heard the creaklings of quick, hunted life inside the ditch and the groans of the taller trees in the center of the dome. When you wrestled Seths it was clear when something was going wrong—even indoor people knew what to do when they saw blood, heard screams. But if Louis was at all, he was invisible, and I wouldn’t know from where I was standing if Ossie needed my help.

  I swung the flashlight like a little sword, made a combat hiss. Kshhh! Kshh-kshh! No moon tonight.

  “Ossie?” I called once, after fifteen minutes. The dredge hunched motionless on the canal. My throat felt raw and I wondered if I was maybe getting sick. Yes, I decided, I definitely was. I concocted an elaborate fantasy about how I’d break it to Ossie that I’d gotten pneumonia while standing in the rain, waiting for her to reappear. The leaves opened a low green heaven above me. Next I made up a language with my flashlight, a sort of luminous pidgin tongue, a battery-powered Morse code for my mom or whichever of the ghosts was watching me. The day was peppery with rain and darkening. I held the flashlight under my chin, the plastic ridges against my throat feeling somehow deeply comforting, a fuzzy portal opening onto my sneakers. There were eyes in the grass down there
, lizards and bugs. I tried to wiggle my goofus slicker on—one of Mom’s picks, a Goodwill special with off-brand cartoon rats dancing on it—and when I looked up again I saw something high in the trees: two shoes. Two burgundy boot toes, brightly polished with rain, the long thin laces wagging down below the cypress leaves. These boots, when tracked backward with my flashlight beam, sprouted two thin legs. Above these I found a feathered torso, and added to this a puffy white face on which—compared to the boots and the patchwork outfit—looked almost ordinary. The man was blinking violently down at me, caught in the light, his pale lips twisted in a grimace. I could calculate a Seth’s age from its battle scars or the girth of its tail, but I was bad with adults generally and this man’s age was impossible for me to guess. He was younger than my grandfather and older than my brother. His eyes were something terrifying.

  “Jesus, kid, get that out of my face.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” I lowered the light a few inches and tried not to gape at him. “You’re lucky I didn’t scream. I didn’t know you were up there.”

  “Did I frighten you?” He smiled. “Well, shoot, kid, you scared me, too. I was just getting to the last of your buzzards.”

  “Huh?”

  Droplets of rain seemed to tremble singly along a thin wire between us. I tracked up the tree with my flashlight but I didn’t see any birds.

  “I cleared out those buzzards for you. Strange, the numbers of them out here.” He lowered himself delicately from the tree, pushing up from the branches as easily as a mainlander lifting out of an armchair. “Chief Bigtree pays me every year. It’s a service I’m providing for you islanders.”

  I know what you are! I thought, triumphant. I should have guessed it right away. The heavy, tussocked coat, the black wooden whistle for birdcalls, the bright eyes in a shingled face. He was a gypsy Bird Man. There are several such men who travel around Florida’s parks and backwaters, following the seasonal migrations of various species of birds. These men are like avian pied pipers, or aerial fumigators. They call your problem birds out of the trees and send them spiraling over the sloughs; then they wait for them to alight on another person’s property and repeat this service. It’s rumored that even the Florida Wildlife Commission employs them when the more traditional methods of animal control are attempted, fail.