Swamplandia!
Page 19
“Okay. No problem, cousin.” I tried to grin. “Are you a Bigtree then, or am I a … you? One of your kind?” But the Bird Man didn’t like this game. I smelled salt and a skunkier odor, and knew that water must be hidden behind the yellow pines.
SWAMPLANDIA! AND BEYOND read a wooden sign at the edge of the grounds.
OVER 1,000,000 ACRES OF WILDERNESS!
“We can find her, I know we can,” I mumbled. “How far can she have gotten?”
The Bird Man didn’t respond. He lifted a low cocoplum branch for me: the glare of water dazzled in. Through the bushes I saw a treeless spit of sand.
“See that, kid? A hidden harbor.” I saw a horseshoe of earth around shallow broth. A glade skiff made a long snaky beak along the sand.
“You wait there.” He flipped the skiff and began wading out with it, the gravied water covering his boots. Grasses got crushed and sprang back around the hull. “You know how to paddle?”
“You bet.” I’d been kayaking through the Ten Thousand Islands before. I used to go rare-flower hunting in the spring with Mom and, on summer nights, gator hunting with carbide lanterns and .22 rifles with my grandfather. This would be a different kind of voyage, I thought, and felt a little yellow slurry of excitement. Sister hunting. Ghost seeking. Squeezing through the Eye of the Needle to another world.
The skiff was a fourteen-footer. I saw that he’d built it following the old Seminole blueprint, with penny nails and a cypress transom, a poling platform in the back; he waved me forward and offered me a glove. I hesitated—a second later his gloves hooked my armpits and swung me onto the bow seat. Up close, I noticed that the Bird Man had the finest purse of wrinkles around his mouth, so that he seemed older or younger depending on where the sun hit. His chin was pocked and small as a red potato.
“So you don’t think my sister is crazy?” I asked happily. Now that I could feel the current tugging at our boat a knot was loosening in my stomach.
“I don’t know your sister.”
“But you do think that ghosts are real? You think it could be true, that she’s been talking to them all this time?”
Feelings tumbled through me.
One was: Ossie does have powers.
And another: What if I follow her to the underworld and find my mother?
The Bird Man, tightening the screws in the poling platform with a doll-size tool, didn’t respond. I started babbling about Ossie and Louis then, as his silence deepened. I wanted him to agree with me that she wasn’t “sick,” like Kiwi claimed. Even at her wildest, I told him, even while possessed, my sister had certain ideas about herself that you couldn’t change, fixed in place like the burning constellations—who could love her, who couldn’t or would never, what she could ask for on the Ouija, what she was likely to get.
“I’m too ugly for him,” Ossie had told me one October day with the dispassion of a much older woman, checking her reflection in the back of a café spoon. I had only been joking, telling her that she should conjure Benjamin Franklin. “Didn’t Benjamin Franklin invent a car that runs on lightning or something? He’s too good for me, Ava. He won’t come if I call.”
Even in her trances, even while possessed, my sister was very shrewd about her prospects. A fantasy would collapse like a wave against the rocks of her intelligence. Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
“Okay, kid. She doesn’t sound crazy to me. Enough, huh?”
The Bird Man kept shooting looks at the coast.
“Listen, did you hear something? Did you see anybody following us?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t a Gus day.
“Good.”
“Also—I swear this is the last thing, okay?—it’s not like my sister believes she could summon just anyone.” I paused. “She can’t contact our mother, either.”
Ossie said a spirit’s voice was as fine as a needle, tattooing her insides with luminous words. I’d seen a picture of this in The Spiritist’s Telegraph. A young Spiritist levitated a full foot above her bedsprings. A ghost was curled like a blue snail inside her chest, and it was so tiny! It burned through the lace of her old-fashioned dress like a second heart. A musical staff wound in a thorny crown around the Spiritist’s forehead, so that notes ran down her cheeks in a loose mask of song. Her eyelids were blacked out—and I saw this again and again in nightmares about my sister. Her eyelids had the high polish of acorns. But her ears: that was the truly scary part. Great fantails of indigo and violet lights spiraled into her earlobes in an ethereal funnel—what the book called the Inverted Borealis. The caption read: “A ghost sings its way deeply inside the Spiritist.”
Now the Bird Man seemed really interested. “The Inverted Borealis. That sounds like a big event for one girl’s body to host. Must get awfully bright in there. Does your sister wear sunglasses? Is there a ‘Sunblock for Spiritists’?” He chuckled once and stopped. “Aw, hell, kid, don’t look that way. Just a bad joke.”
“That’s okay. It’s not so funny when it happens to her.”
“Does she like talking to them, these ghosts?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “She sure likes talking to her … to this guy Louis.” I was horrified—I had almost said “her husband.” How exactly does a person marry a ghost? I wanted to ask, because a very very bad thought had just occurred to me.
“And what do these voices tell your sister, I wonder?”
“The voice. There’s only ever one voice at a time, I guess, and she and it … converse. The ghost tells her romantic stuff. Stuff like you hear in the movies: that it loves her, that it needs her. That she, you know …” I frowned and hoped that he believed me. “That she smells like flowers.”
This bluff embarrassed me because I had no idea what two teenagers in love might talk about. My parents had their own language for that stuff that involved the alligators, and us. TV movies and radio songs were the only models I had for love transmissions, a boyfriend-girlfriend conversation.
“That’s mostly it, I think.”
The Bird Man nodded distractedly. He was knee-deep in the water with his pants trailing threads, his coat slung like a pelt over one shoulder. He pushed his trousers up and shook out a lighter from what I thought of as the left wing of his coat (it was hard for me to think of it as a sleeve) and held it up to a cigarette. I watched his lighter jump. Aside from the cranberry brightness of the flame against his slick feathers, everything else checked out. I examined his ungloved fingers, his chewed nails surrounded by little flags of skin—what had I been expecting, claws? Talons? His legs were very ordinary. His shins were slightly hairier than my brother’s. Hyacinths slid around them and stuck to the boards of the transom.
“Oh, wow, you smoke my dad’s brand of cigarettes.”
“Sure do. I took the carton from your house. A little advance on my fee.”
Then I started noticing other acquisitions. The Chief’s fishing knife was under the stern seat and the Chief’s beer was in the cooler. I saw a knot of antique Heddon lures from Grandpa Sawtooth’s tackle. The Bird Man had raided our fridge and our museum. This gave me a dizzy feeling, as if we were only going on an ordinary camping trip together, a family trip. I caught myself listening for squelching footsteps, my mother and the Chief and Ossie and Kiwi lagging behind us on the trail.
“Took a few more things from your museum, kid. Useful stuff. You can bring it back after we find her.”
“Sure. Okay.” We were poling faster and faster now. Through the peeled branches I saw a dense, soft shuffle of wings. “Bird Man? I thought you got rid of them. Are they coming, too?”
“Of course they are coming,” the Bird Man said. “If I am the navigator, the buzzards are our stars. They’re our map, kid. Nobody can get to the underworld without assistance, myself included.”
Buzzards filled the trees along the riverbanks. They panted their wings at us, scattering water droplets like slavering dogs on high perches.
“Oh, yeah, there it is. I think I see it now.” I paused. “You can read that map? We can get there, for sure?” Doubt felt like a lash caught in my eye, a little hair I had to blink out if I wanted to find Osceola. “You promise it’s a real place, Bird Man?”
“What a question. Do I promise that hell is a real place?” He chuckled at me, as if to reassure me, but his eyes were bright and cold as snow banked in the valley under his hat. “Hell’s real, all right. We can be there tomorrow, or Wednesday at the latest. So long as you want to go.”
He’d stopped poling, and I realized that he was waiting for me to say something. Hurry up! Our map is getting ahead of us. A fat mosquito blimped through the air between us; I watched it crawl inside the open throat of my water canteen and slip down the plastic walls like a coward’s tear.
“I …”
The skiff was pointed at the bend in the channel, where dry grass exhaled yellow butterflies. If we could get around that bend, I’d feel better.
“I don’t want to go there,” I said slowly. “But I’m not scared. And maybe we can find my sister before she and Louis get married.”
The Bird Man extended a glove; at first I didn’t understand what he wanted. I grinned and shook his hand. Then he resumed his ferry work. We poled around the scummy crystals of the oyster beds and made a beeline for the mirrorlike slough. I watched a line of water creep up his pole as the channel deepened, like the mercury in an old-fashioned thermometer, and then we broke into wild sun.
“Put your hat on, sonny,” he said, and grinned back at me so then I knew that he had been making a joke. “Put on your sun cream.”
I laughed, startled, because the Bird Man sounded so much like an anxious mainland dad. We were bringing actual sundries to this underworld: sun lotion and aloe, itching powder, blond jugs of mosquito repellent, iced-tea mix from the café, a Ziploc bag of bandages and unserious medicines to treat a traveler’s minor aches and pains. To this cache the Bird Man contributed a half-full brown jar of pink bismuth antacid tablets. If indigestion was one of the dangers that we were preparing for on this trip to hell, I thought, then I was going to do just fine.
“I didn’t plan to make this trip again, you know,” he said softly at one point, and not really to me.
“Thank you. We are going to pay you, I swear, Ossie and me …” I studied the sky, trying to see what he saw. So the map to the underworld was not a secret, static document like the paper map we’d recovered from the dredge but alive and legible above us, beating its wings. I leaned into my knees and tried to lift off my tailbone a little, get settled on the skinny bow seat. The Bird Man began to perform a strange call—it took a minute before I realized it was our own English language:
“And and and and …”
The Bird Man told me that he was singing a transition song. He dipped his pole into the shallows and parted clumps of golden periphyton.
“And and and …,” he called, poling steadily faster. Again I fought the desire to cover my ears. Please stop, I thought, but after a few more measures the droned melody snuck inside me, it was infectious, and I almost wanted to sing along. After a while the song wasn’t a language anymore but a note like a skipped stone—a melodic conjunction. The bull gators were sopranos compared to the Bird Man’s deep pitch. I knew then that this person had a real magic. My pet Seth’s crate wobbled between my sneakers, her eyes two pins between the slats. We made a keyhole turn around the coast. The Bird Man’s pole kept clanging over rocks, his song like a cog in his throat, and I watched my home pull away from us.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Kiwi Goes to Night School
Vijay was wearing his red bandanna and doing twenty over the speed limit, and for once Kiwi didn’t say a word. Kiwi made no mention of the study he’d read on vehicular manslaughter or the difficult medical ethics of life support; he didn’t comment on the alarming flap-flap-flaping of Vijay’s unbuckled seat belt against the door lock; he didn’t ask if Vijay was a registered organ donor, or call attention to the many drivers flipping his best friend the bird: no, tonight Kiwi Bigtree was ready to endorse reckless speeds. Kiwi’s name was second on a green-and-white computer printout from the LCPS: Álvarez, Ruben, and then Bigtree, Kiwi. It was 7:01, and he was late for his first night of school.
“Buckle up, bro,” he’d mumbled at a light, but Vijay had stared sightlessly forward. Kiwi sighed. Out of kindness—perhaps as part of some private philanthropic project—Vijay was now pretending not to hear the dorkiest things that Kiwi said.
They flew onto a bridge that spanned downtown Loomis. Huge, luminous pharmacies pushed at the darkness like giant cruise ships at anchor. Kiwi spotted a billboard that the Chief used to lease, SWAMPLANDIA! in green-and-sapphire circus letters above his mother’s beautiful face. Now it advertised the Bigfoot Podiatry Treatment Center of America. There was a grinning Bigfoot in a karate suit on it, kicking a hirsute monkey foot at traffic.
“Can you maybe crack a window, bro?” Kiwi asked in a small voice. “I feel sort of carsick?”
The neighborhoods went from bad-historic to bad-dilapidated, then recovered their lawns and flowering trees again in mere minutes of highway travel. The Loomis Children’s Hospital appeared on the other side of the bridge, a putty-colored complex ringed by the world’s saddest playgrounds, with medieval-looking bucket swings on rusted chains and the pastel skeletons of bouncy-horsies. Next door was a church. A group of stone angels gathered like hunchbacked hitchhikers in the garden. A boarded-up movie palace called Casa del Encanto had become a lion’s den of hundreds of stray cats—Kiwi could see dark and pale fur coursing around the ticket booth. The strip malls and the XXX … And More video stores gave way to stucco coffee-colored office buildings, drab apartment complexes, a few hallucinatory glimpses of the sea.
“So what’s the deal with this XXX … And More chain?” Kiwi muttered. “What’s their business angle? That you can rent pornography and Bambi there?”
“Bambi! Ha-ha. That’s about a baby deer. Shit. You’re sick, Marge. You got weird tastes.”
But Vijay was only half-listening. He kept craning over, checking out the two girls in the car next to them. Kiwi liked them instinctively. The larger girl had a face as round and white as a clock and she kept touching a spot near her heart and exploding into a laughter that shook her every frizzy curl. The driver had an acned face and musty-colored bangs and laughed without teeth. Kiwi wondered if they were sisters. Something about their ease with one another and all the happy, feckless ugliness in that car made him think of sisters. They were singing along to the radio, acting much younger than their ages. It was clear that these girls didn’t care who was watching them through the clear panes. Kiwi wondered if they would step out of the car and shrivel into individuals, grow self-conscious again.
What are Ava and Ossie doing today? An easy thought to erase. Sometimes Kiwi wondered if he was also a genius at Zen Buddhism, he had become such an expert at annulling certain attachments.
The rap song playing now was one that Vijay had been trying to teach Kiwi for weeks. It was called “Gas Hose” and the title seemed to be a metaphor for oral sex. One of the verses Kiwi simply refused to sing: it rhymed “big old tits” with “my catcher’s mitts,” and then, most bafflingly to Kiwi, “cricket bits”—Kiwi believed that was the lyric, he could be wrong, because behind it was a chorus of moans and what sounded like a thousand air horns. “Cricket bits” [n]: could this be yet another mainland synonym for female genitalia? The party slang of entymologists? Either way, the rhyme really unnerved him.
On Swamplandia!, the crickets sang to announce the day’s transition to evening, the flash of pink to black time that meant: deep s
ummer. Vernal currents, an air as lushly populated as seawater, deer flies and damselflies, a whole cosmos of mosquitoes: all this iridescent life rose out of the solution holes at dusk. Seths bellowing in gravelly eruptions, launching that strange sound at the sky until you braced yourself for an astral landslide. Crickets meant that the moon was up, that a tide was rising, that his mother or the Chief would soon be calling for them across the mudflats …
“Oh fuck,” Vijay muttered. “Traffic.”
The Volvo was trapped inside a tunnel, sedans and a crocus-blue delivery van and one snouty limousine beeping all around them. Kiwi felt his lungs fanning open and shut, the first white tinge of panic. He shut his eyes and pictured the ocean. Vijay was twisting the knob of the radio, and Kiwi heard the “cricket bits” song fly past on three different stations. He heard the jingle for the World of Darkness: “Jo-nah survived the Le-vi-a-than …” Finally the cars began to move. When he opened his eyes, Kiwi saw a slab of blue night up ahead—and then the stars began to fly. The Volvo jumped forward. A rain-soaked banner sagging from the roof of a two-story building read LOOMIS COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE.
“Have a good first day at school, son,” Vijay giggled.
“Okay!” Kiwi waved Vijay off the premises. “Thank you! I can take it from here.”
Night school was held in a chilly top-floor room of the community college, now dark and humming, the moon floating like a buoy just outside the window. Kiwi opened door after door onto empty classrooms. “Hello …? Uh, is this … school?”
Kiwi had purchased all these rainbow multiclip folders, which he carried fanned against his chest, like a float in search of a parade. The floors squeaked under his sneakers. The same moon greeted him in all the empty rooms. Kiwi wondered if he’d messed up the time and date.