Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

“Are you looking for Miss Arenas’s class?” snapped a janitor. “You’re on the wrong floor.”

  “Cool. Thank you.” Kiwi could feel the janitor’s hatred rising out of the darkness like heat from a vent; this was another new mainland experience for Kiwi: to feel immediately hated, to be anonymous and hated. “Wow, those are some quality gloves, sir. I work at the World of Darkness and the management is really parsimonious about our supplies …”

  The janitor, a whiskery man with blue exhausted eyes, gaped up at him.

  From the stairwell, Kiwi heard the always-intimidating squeal of mainland girls’ laughter—a wolf pack howling for blood on an open glacier would have been less terrifying, the bellow of a thousand Seths would be a lullaby—and he followed their voices to a crack of light below the stairwell. When he touched the knob the door swung back.

  “No, I don’t want to hear excuses. You’re late. I was about to lock up.”

  Had he missed the class? The teacher was a tall, unsmiling woman in high-waisted pants with a nickel-bright Afro. Her body had a switchblade beauty that Kiwi was not encouraged to continue appreciating by her face.

  “You just going to stand there? Shut your mouth, find a desk. One warning. You can’t get here on time, don’t bother coming.”

  She wrote her name on the board and underlined it with a defiant little flourish: VOILA ARENAS. “I will be your instructor,” Voila Arenas said, chalking urgently, as if human life were an equation they were going to solve together in the next hour and twenty-two minutes. Facts screamed at meteoric speeds across the board.

  “We’re all adults here, so you can call me Voila.”

  Somebody in the back left corner made a crack about a magician’s hat and a vagina and the room roared.

  “Excuse me? My parents were first-generation immigrants.” Voila locked black eyes with Kiwi as if she suspected him of being the joker. “It’s a beautiful word.”

  “My name is Kiwi,” Kiwi offered.

  Everybody had to introduce themselves and say something about why they had chosen to enroll in Voila Arenas’s GED class. When it was Kiwi’s turn, he told the truth: “I am a Bigtree alligator wrestler. I’m here because my dad put us under a mountain of debt, and I need to make money, and to do that I need to get my high school equivalency.” He paused. “I aspire to get a scholarship to a four-year university.”

  “I ass-pire to fuck a bitch with great ass cheeks!” The kid behind him giggled.

  “White boy’s here to tutor us,” said another white boy, a corncob-haired Midwestern-looking kid. “Community service! White boy trying to …” Kiwi heard sniggers and a few affirmative grunts. The insult drifted into something unintelligible. It took a beat to realize that he was the joke here, the punch line—he didn’t think it came naturally, to see yourself as an object. It was like conjugating your own name in a foreign tongue. So: in Loomis County he was a “white boy,” apparently. This was news. Well, it’s not like I can disagree—Kiwi stared at his skin in the pencil’s aluminum rim. He wished he could explain the island to these city kids, though. Could tell them about Chief Bigtree’s “Indian” lineage; how as a kid they’d put makeup and beads on him, festooned him with spoonbill feathers and reptilian claws; how at fourteen he’d declared: “I’m a Not-Bigtree. A Not-Indian. A Not-Seminole. A Not-Miccosukee.” This category “white” gave him a whistling fear, a feeling not unlike agoraphobia. “White” made Kiwi Bigtree picture a vast Arctic plain, a word in which one single person could never survive. Whitey, white boy—Kiwi didn’t like getting snowballed into a color. But maybe everybody felt that way about their adjectives, Kiwi thought. He remembered the feeling of coming down the Loomis ferry dock with his battered Swamplandia! duffel into a wilderness of faces.

  Kiwi wondered if Miss Voila Arenas always began the class with this question. Several female students in the class had gotten pregnant and had to drop out of regular school; one slight young man had escaped a horrific home life, alluded to by the student in monotone; several admitted to having fallen into Loomis solution holes of drug use or unintelligent, repetitive crimes and crawled back out again; or they were ESL, new arrivals from Ecuador and Pakistan and Cuba. There were many older folks, too, older women especially. The oldest student, a woman with sparkling, hooded eyes, was wearing a bomber jacket worn to peach fuzz at the elbows and had brought a stack of old textbooks with her from her high school in Havana. She’d covered them in plastic. Kiwi disliked her immediately. How stupid could you get, carting all your Communist books to Loomis County? It wouldn’t occur to him until their fifth class together that his classmate’s stack was perhaps not so dissimilar from his own Field Notes and the soggy 1962 encyclopedias shelved in his bedroom at Swamplandia!

  That first night Voila passed around a sheet. Diagnostic Test. Kiwi’s neck ached. He could hear the clock tick and the distancing breaths of the other thinkers, the way their cognition seemed to be happening down long, echoey corridors, somewhere impossibly remote. Words he hadn’t understood in the questions appeared again, in new orders, in the choice of answers. It was like an evil game of musical chairs. Names crowded into his brain, a drunken stadium of names, refusing to get quiet and organized.

  Part I: True/False/Uncertain

  “The fact that total revenue rose when half the crop was destroyed indicates that demand for coffee is inelastic …”

  “Substituting in the information about price and utility, we get …”

  “Cross-multiplying for x, we get …”

  “Five minutes,” said Voila, turning the page of a bodybuilding magazine called Bulk Up. A woman with an Arctic-white smile and scary bauxite skin grinned out at him from the cover. Skinny Voila was underlining something, her face pensive.

  When Kiwi got stuck, which happened every third question, he would stare up at this grinning bodybuilder. He felt as puny, as desperate as he ever had during the Bigtree shows. In his sweaty fingers his pencil kept slipping; he’d already broken one. Kiwi had taken many tests on Swamplandia!, his pencil moving at a steady clip in the evergreen light of his own kitchen; he couldn’t understand why his intelligence wouldn’t make a fist now, and pound reliably, like his heart.

  He couldn’t remember the quadratic equation, or which one the rhombus was, or whether the perimeter of Griswald Wallace’s fence would be fifty-four meters or seventy-two, given the area of his outhouse and the volume of his well. Where the Christ did Griswald Wallace live, anyhow? Why did Griswald Wallace need a fence around his outhouse? Kiwi couldn’t make sense of the reading comprehension portion, either: some excerpt from a poem about a sick dog and blueberries. “What is the theme of the passage about Rochester the dog?” “What do the blueberries symbolize for the dog named Rochester?” Kiwi’s eyes were swimming. He began to bubble in indiscriminate letters.

  They had to sit at their desks while Voila graded the diagnostic tests. She put his scored test paper facedown on his desk: 38/100. She handed Kiwi a Remedial Algebra and English II, the same textbooks that the Cuban woman in the bomber jacket got. They eyed each other over the beet-orange covers of their books with the perfect contempt of equals.

  Vijay showed up twenty minutes late, which gave Kiwi time to read and reread all his mistakes. At 11:33, Vijay came screeching into the parking lot with several greasy bags of fries and two girls in the backseat. Vijay had (hypocritically, Kiwi thought) seduced them away from their registers in the Burger Burger and now they were all going to see a movie. That new one, the box-office leader, starring a very popular obese gay Polynesian comic actor who, in this latest cinematic vehicle for his self-loathing, starred as a prince attending a royal ball in drag.

  “That’s our plan? We’re going to pay six bucks to see Cinder-Ralphy?”

  “You’re not coming, Margie. These girls, see …”

  “Good.” Kiwi chewed his lip and watched the Volvo make its way onto the highway. “Thank God. That film looks terrible.”

  The two girls spent the whole ride whisperin
g and doing horsey eye rolls and hand mannerisms in their mysterious female language. So far as Kiwi could tell, they managed to agree that Rollie, a mutual friend of theirs, was in fact a fat bitch and not their friend, and also that Enormous Gladys needed to get some self-esteem, stupid! But Kiwi assumed a second, secret conversation must be happening below this. Otherwise how to explain all the gesticulating? Wrists and elbows went flying through the air in some jujitsu of lady-empathy. Kiwi thought that he should take down Field Notes but he was still smarting from night school and his testing hand was actually cramping.

  The girls never bothered to exchange names with him. But at a red light one of them poked Kiwi through the seat-back hole and asked: “Right that my friend is pretty? Right, nerd?”

  Four intricately painted and lined eyes glared at him in the rearview mirror.

  “You’re both pretty!” he gasped. “Equally pretty!”

  The clock on the dash flashed 11:42. Vijay was bulleting down the freeway, talking to the girls in his Seductor Voice, a creamy baritone that made him sound like he was on muscle relaxants. Eleven forty-three. Eleven forty-four. I want to go home, a voice in Kiwi whispered, raggedy as a child. The Leviathan loomed in front of the Volvo; it seemed a miracle that Kiwi’s tiny staff key ring would let him into a place that size. As Vijay pulled into the World’s parking lot, Kiwi’s eyes found the bright blue door for late-night entry; the door led to the elevator that led down to his bedroom. All he wanted now was to study: he imagined sliding the contents of each of these night school textbooks into his brain as easily as a pillow goes into its case. He clutched the exam to his chest.

  “What are you holding there, bro?” Vijay asked. “You think somebody’s going to steal your paper?”

  “Test. It’s a test I took.”

  “Well, son,” Vijay clucked, reaching across the gearshift with a goony smile, “what’s the verdict? Are we a genius?”

  “Fuck you.” Kiwi hopped out of the car and started loping away, hands deep in pockets; he was halfway to the World when he had to pivot and jog back and open the door again to snatch his folders and textbooks, his face the lopped red of a watermelon. The girls twittering behind him like birds.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Welcome to Stiltsville

  Are we there yet, Bird Man?”

  “Kid, you are making me crazy. New rule: you are not allowed to ask me that question.”

  The Bird Man sank his pole into the river with a furious curl to his lips and I flinched, instinctively drumming my knuckles on the red Seth’s carrier. I’d been doing that all morning, a request for luck.

  “Okay. Sorry. I was just trying to make a joke.” I tried grinning at him. “But what should I be looking for, Bird Man?”

  “Hell’s a special place, kid. You’ll know it when you get there. Everybody does.”

  We were poling through the glitter of high noon, and even the Bird Man’s voice sounded sweaty. Still he insisted on wearing his coat, on straddling the poling platform with his elbows bent, the black hood of his coat looming like a gloomy sun over the gunwales.

  “I’m going to pay you when we get back, you know …,” I mumbled, to make myself feel better. I felt guilty imagining how tired my friend must be—the Bird Man had been standing ramrod straight on the poling platform for three hours now. He didn’t take breaks. I sat in the bow seat and paddled hard around the strainers. No sign of my sister on the river—no sign of any vessel, really, besides a bleached dinghy hung up in a swamp oak, a beard of vines and flowers tumbling out of it. But for some reason I wasn’t worrying anymore; in fact a small, indecipherable part of me hoped that we wouldn’t find Ossie right away. On Swamplandia! I wrestled alligators for hundreds and maybe thousands of tourists, men and women from fourteen countries and every U.S. state (except, weirdly, Oklahoma—the Okies had other vacation plans, I guess). But the Bird Man was the first adult besides Grandpa Sawtooth or Chief Bigtree or my mother who’d spent more than an hour with me.

  At one o’clock, we poled into a place where the water level suddenly rose again, a channel glutted with rain, and the Bird Man had to climb down and sat behind me in the stern seat. We moved our gear forward to bring the bow down. The skiff was well built and didn’t tip. We both rowed for a while, passing islands of lightwood—the old pine stumps west of my house—and sundews. It was deep enough here to dip our oars through the golden brown algal mats without scraping bottom.

  At three o’clock there was still no sign of Ossie.

  At four o’clock we broke clear of the mangroves and now the horizons seemed to speed away from our boat, receding in both directions. A fuzzy black cloud line striped the bayheads. At five thirty the red Seth was agitating in her wooden crate, and I felt guilty for bringing her, and also glad she was there. As we poled deeper, I used my rain slicker to seine minnows and wiggly, translucent cricket frogs the size of my thumbnail for her.

  Around six o’clock we got doused by a nasty chop on the narrow bay. A strong wind was blowing in out of the northeast and sending four-inch swells over the skiff’s low gunwales. The Bird Man showed me how to roll the boat with each wave, keeping our hull as parallel as possible to the waves. We couldn’t tack straight and the Bird Man took the brunt of the swells; within minutes his coat was soaked through, its outer feathers slimily adhered to his arms. He grimaced when the waves hit but he didn’t complain.

  “Drink some water, kid. We’ll have to stop soon,” the Bird Man said from the poling platform.

  “Thank you so much for doing this, Bird Man.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Thank you for taking me to find her. Thank you. Are you tired?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re tired I can pole, I’m much stronger than I look.” I waited two minutes and then I was spitting words at him again. Fits of grateful or fearful language kept rising in my throat, embarrassing but unstoppable—they felt almost like knots of phlegm that I had to cough up.

  “Really, thank you so much. You’re sure you’re not tired? If you hadn’t showed up, I don’t even like to think about …”

  “Sit down, kid. Calm down. If your sister’s smart she’s not on the water now. She and her friend are making camp somewhere.”

  “But did she come this way, you think?”

  I leaned into the hull: I saw nothing. Rain fizzing in the near distance. A vague red sun behind the trees.

  Seven o’clock: we were on a drift slough now, small oak trees and cocoplums rising along the water’s edge. Butterflies flecked the air in pale triangles, so pretty that I concluded we must still be a long ways off from the underworld. The sun was lowering itself behind the tree line at an angle, as carefully as a round man descending a ladder. Two bullnose turtles craned their black caramel necks at us from a rock.

  Instead of camping on a hammock, the Bird Man said we were going to spend the night in a “sky house” at Stiltsville. “Stiltsville is our Swamp Roanoke,” the Chief liked to say, giving the place a black-ice twinkle for the tourists. (“Stephen, did you hear that! Everybody disappeared. Oh, it gives me the chills to think about it! What a morbid riddle!”) The truth is a lot less interesting: Stiltsville emptied out when Park Services took over this part of the swamp. Residents of Stiltsville abandoned their platform houses and moved to townships on the sloping rock of the continent. The sky people had mailboxes now, elms and gardens; their houses no longer resembled arks. The last family moved out of Stiltsville in the dry season of 1952; in the intervening decades it devolved into a wooden rookery. The name “Stiltsville” had always made me picture a cloudland of these acrobatic palaces, but the reality was pretty modest: just a collection of ten or twelve houses mounted on fourteen-foot support pilings.

  “Do you think anybody lives here anymore?” I asked the Bird Man. “Do you think there are any ghosts here?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  Each house had a shadow beneath it, a sort of liquid basement. Small waves rose midway up the platfor
m supports and collapsed into a thin foam. The temperature dropped tens of degrees whenever we poled beneath a house. Above us, the rotted planks and greenish white cross-boards looked like they’d been nailed shut by some lunatic carpenter—I saw the glint of what seemed at a distance to be hundreds and hundreds of nailheads. Barnacles. Not nails but shells, dark red horns spiraling out of every surface. Some of the houses had disintegrating dinghies tethered in their “garages.” Some had holes in the floor that aligned with holes in the ceiling, and you could see the sun pinwheeling cheerfully above the ruined kitchens and bedrooms.

  “Know any good knock-knock jokes, kid?” the Bird Man asked, and for some reason this made me laugh hysterically. “This whole place looks like a joke that got knocked over, doesn’t it?” He touched a support where tiny brown-and-red crabs clung like bottle caps to the wood.

  Be alive, Ossie, I beamed over the monotony of water. Be safe.

  We poled under a porch where a bobcat was shouldering through a cracked blue door frame. For a second it paused to look at us. Ancient blue and red flowerpots sat all over the deck, heavy enough to have survived who knows what. I saw spiders, the long absence of flowers. The bobcat slunk around the maze of ceramics, broke free, leapt through a gray space in the porch slats, and easily cleared the six-foot channel between two of the houses, its white belly fur flying above our skiff. The creature landed soundlessly in front of a second doorway, bulled its flat head through the screen, disappeared into another house. All told this took maybe twelve seconds tops.

  The Bird Man sucked air between his teeth.

  “We’ll make sure to find an empty house tonight, kid. No ghosts or cats.”

  Above us a hundred birds screamed. I watched a snow cloud, a pale blue cloud, a black and crimson-edged cloud, a green cloud, a nickel cloud explode into the sky.

  “Are you making them do that?” I asked the Bird Man. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  The Bird Man didn’t answer me and I hadn’t heard him chirrup or whistle, as he’d done back on Swamplandia!, but the birds danced in a weird clockwork above us and I guessed that he had something to do with it. The sun was a low, red ball behind gray clouds. I felt scared, watching the cormorants and the ibis obey his secret commands, but this was a wonderful kind of fear. It was nothing like the metal-in-your-mouth terror I got thinking about Ossie and Louis. It was an exhilaration, the way you feel when you are wrestling a Seth and it nearly knocks you loose. Kiwi, my smug brother—I wanted to tell him that I was watching real magic.