We paddled zags through Stiltsville until the Bird Man found a house he said was good for us to sleep in. He tied off on one of the southern pilings. Wooden steps rose eleven or twelve feet to the front door.
“Okay, pal. Up, up, and such.”
“You first. Please.” I was still thinking about the bobcat.
Inside the house was bare wood. Smells bloomed in the dark, a mix of salt and bird droppings and deep rot, but the structure itself was in surprisingly good condition. No Seths, no hawks, no raccoons, no trespassing felines. The main room was about three hundred square feet, and the roof was low enough to scrape back the Bird Man’s hat. There was almost no furniture, but what remained was arranged in the patterns you’d expect: a dining table, twin beds bunked in an alcove that opened like a walnut mouth behind what had been the kitchen, a small black desk that looked so weak that I didn’t even like to rest my eyes on it. Black and white specklings covered the walls, these grim starbursts of mold on the pale wood that made me miss with a random stab my acned brother. A huge hole in the middle of the ceiling opened onto a clear night sky: it looked as if some great predator had peeled the thatched roof back, sniffed once, and lost interest.
Immediately the Bird Man began setting small smudge fires in pots along the holes in the wall to smoke the mosquitoes out. I climbed down to the river again to change out my Seth’s water dish. Outside I watched clouds sail over the neighboring houses, which stood on tall and lemon-gray legs like a flock of herons in the shallows. From the bottom of the ladder I watched the sun fall behind the many wooden legs of Stiltsville; you could almost hear the splash. Soon afterward the river became a looking glass for stars. Now it was our first night on the water. I climbed the ladder to a plank where I could see the Bird Man hunched over our Coleman in a yellow round of light, his shadow flung far back against the wall. I paused there for a while, watching him.
For dinner, the Bird Man cooked up some fatty hamburger meat on his one-burner camper stove and sliced two small, golden onions into the oil. “Eat up, kid,” he said, “because this stuff will spoil rotten by tomorrow night.” (Tomorrow night?) We ate in silence at a gimpy three-legged table. It was the only piece of furniture left in the kitchen. The original chairs were long gone but the Bird Man had scavenged two from the adjacent house and they were unexpectedly beautiful, a matched set with swirly black rails painted with pink roses. We both sat down gingerly at opposite ends of the table; when the chairs held our weight our eyes met, surprised. Maybe he will dance with me later, I thought out of nowhere, and felt a quick flulike joy. Back home I never got to dance during our mock proms that we girls held after hours in the café; Ossie always made me be the disc jockey. Being the DJ meant feeding a black poker chip on a string to the jukebox. Ossie and her invisible partner twirled in front of the windows, her purple skirt going full as a balloon as she spun around the empty tables. Once a ghost had tried to dip her near the fryer and she’d fallen and given herself a shiner.
“Hey, Bird Man?” I asked him abruptly. “Do you have another name that I could call you? Like, I don’t know, Alan or Paul or something? Stanley? A regular name?”
The Bird Man glanced up as if this were a shockingly rude question. “I had a name when I was your age. Not anymore. I guess I don’t see enough people in my line of work that I feel a name is necessary, kid. Who would I need to distinguish myself from?”
“I don’t know. Other men?”
“Not too many other men out here in the first place, and my customers aren’t much interested in getting to know me. Generally speaking, I mean.” He gave me a small smile. He was garnishing a third hamburger with slick onions and green slices of tomato. “So I don’t mind being the Bird Man to them.”
I nodded, but I felt hurt—here he had a name like an ace in his pocket and he didn’t want to show it to me. Didn’t he know that a Bigtree alligator wrestler was trustworthy?
But I guess the Bird Man was right to keep the secret of his name from me, because later that night I broke my promise to Ossie. I told him the story of the Dredgeman’s Revelation. It happened by accident—I was only planning on asking him if he knew or had known a man named Louis Thanksgiving, and then I watched as one sentence after another exited my mouth like those knotted magician’s scarves. Louis’s death story came out unstoppably; I didn’t even feel so guilty about breaking Ossie’s trust. As I babbled onward the Bird Man removed his gloves and settled his warm, bald hands on my knees, as if this were the polite thing to do. The whole time I spoke his slate eyes were liquid and dog-kind above the camp lantern. He didn’t tease me like my brother would have done but instead regarded me with an attentiveness that felt wonderful, like relaxing into a net over a wide ocean. When I got to the part about the buzzards he whistled softly and began to nod, and it occurred to me with a cold wonderment that he might have seen this species of bird himself; in the underworld he might have sailed beneath the very flock that got Louis.
“What an ending,” the Bird Man said when I finished. “A vanishing point. And what do you think the Dredgeman’s Revelation means, kid?”
I paused. Is he testing me? I wondered, and wished that I could crane around and peek at what the Bird Man knew, as if he might have an answer card hidden behind his back.
“Oh, I think it means that …”
I thought about Louis Thanksgiving’s hands, Louis’s freckled knuckles curled around the dredge railing at the end of his story. I could see the black dredge in greenish storm light, and how brave he’d been then, staring down that darkness. I thought of how he’d left his surname “Auschenbliss” floating miles behind him like molt feathers or snakeskin.
“My mom had a name that she tore off, too,” I heard myself saying. “Like Louis. She had a mainland name—her maiden name, it’s called. She used to be Hilola Owens. So she wasn’t always a Bigtree. And then she only got to be a Bigtree for eighteen years, you know, and now she’s nothing.”
Why had Louis died so young, before he could even become anybody? On Swamplandia! my sister and I found the dredge crane’s bucket frozen at a noon tilt, filling with sunlight and moonlight. That light, I felt like it belonged to Louis Thanksgiving. The world owed it to him, it was his child’s inheritance. He should get to drink that pink light through every pore and every follicle, every cell, the way our basking Seths ate the sun through their wet skin! Death is a theft, a crime, a cry in the sky, that’s what the story means to me, Bird Man. But as soon as I opened my mouth I sounded like a dumb kid again.
“I guess I don’t know what it means.” I tugged on my shoelaces like tiny reins, embarrassed. My sense of it had dissolved back into the old hurt in my chest. “I wish that Louis had never died. I wish that Louis and Hector and Gideon Tom and all the rest of them could have finished digging their road to the Gulf of Mexico. Then Louis Thanksgiving could have gotten married, and had a wife and a son—not to my sister, you know? But maybe married to some nice lady from his, ah, his own time. And he’d grow up to know for sure that he was handsome and good. And he would be an old man now.”
I paused. I hadn’t known that I wanted all that for the ghost.
“So you wish that the dredgeman Louis was still flesh and blood?” the Bird Man asked. It was a serious question. He took me seriously, and I did feel taken up by his musing tone and carried, lifted onto the ledge of adults.
“Right. That’s not really a revelation though, is it?”
That night we unrolled our bright blue tarps onto the floor of the central room, which gave the wrecked wood a planetary look. I wanted to play the End of the World, a cheery game Ossie and I had invented in our bedroom, back when the worst threat we faced was Mom’s Spaghetti Surprise. We rolled blankets down the stairs and pretended that we were reupholstering the dead world. The towels were the grass and the seas. Ossie always wanted to be the Creator and fluff the prairies, and then I’d burst in as the Destroyer and kick at stuff and roll everything up again. Mom hated this game because all her t
owels ended up on the floor. Before the ghosts showed up, we played all kinds of silly games like that, doing a theater of personalities for each other. Ossie liked to be the sweet and kind one: saints, princesses, Vanna White. Not me! Even in games I liked to play myself: Ava Bigtree, World Champion Alligator Wrestler. I was as strong as ten men, ferocious. Ossie always let me be the hero.
The Bird Man grumbled that he wasn’t in a great mood for pretending. He shuffled inside the foil of his bedroll. On the sill behind him, the wind kept trying to pluck the orange petals of our fires. Mosquitoes waved angrily just beyond them. Through the saw-cut boards I could see the empty neighborhood of Stiltsville. Pilings bolted down the water, where the moon boiled.
“What the hell are you doing over there, kid?”
“Nothing. Can’t sleep. Just praying.”
“New rule, kid: don’t fall out.”
“Dear God,” I prayed awkwardly, unrolling the tongue of my bedroll, “let me not veer away from this darkness amen.”
Our mother grew up in a churchgoing family on the mainland, and Grandma Risa was an Italian Catholic who collected these truly spooky Virgin Marys carved out of raw abalone on her trips to Key West, but we kids were never raised to religion. “God” was a word I used as a spell-breaker. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. “God,” I’d whisper, feeling sometimes an emptiness and sometimes a spreading warmth. If a word is just a container for feeling, or a little matchstick that you strike against yourself—a tiny, fiery summons—then probably I could have said anything, called any name, who knows? I didn’t have a normal kid’s ideas of the Lord as an elderly mainland guy on a throne. The God I prayed to I thought of as the mother, the memory of love. She was my own mother sometimes, baggy-eyed and smiling in the Chief’s heavy canvas work clothes in the morning, one of the Chief’s cigarettes hanging from her mouth. The Our Father and the Hail Mary I’d picked up somehow by osmosis but it was her name I invoked out there, her memory I summoned like a wind I could lean into, and I liked this prayer much better:
Mom, please help me to find Ossie. Please help me to make the net.
The next thing I knew light was pouring through all the holes in Stiltsville: dawn light screaming through the doorways that hung on their hinges, the broken windows that birds could fly through, the plank lace, the cheesed metals. Red sunbeams burned through the tin panels above my head. Where am I? I sat up. In the daylight I saw that parts of the room were sprouting a fuzz the spring green of scallions. An empty bedroll on the floor was halfway into its stuff sack. Ossie?—and her name was like a trapdoor latch that brought the whole predicament tumbling down on me.
Across the room, the Bird Man’s antique boots were coming toward me, the toes addressing the air like sniffing noses, and slowly I gathered up the long length of him: trousered legs, brace of feathers, face, hat. Today the Bird Man wore a strange expression. He crouched inches from my bedroll, staring right into my face—he reminded me of a tourist touching his nose to the ferry porthole, his eyes coming slightly unglued and his breath on me. It gave me a little chill. Something about his gray eyes seemed urgent and vacant at once. We had known each other for hours and miles now, but I thought that he looked even stranger, even more like a stranger, as if the currents that governed such things were blowing him backward. Stubble peppered his cheeks and I missed my father.
“I just talked to a fisherman out of Chokoloskee. Says that yesterday he saw a strange ship at dusk. About two miles west of us.” His voice was as excited as I’d ever heard it. “Sunrise at six a.m., kid. We’re going now. We’ve got fifteen-knot winds against the tide.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Drowning Chain
Kiwi Bigtree was in an excellent mood. He had just dropped a fat check in the mail, made out to Samuel Bigtree in the amount of one hundred and forty-seven dollars and twelve cents, a check he’d sealed in an envelope addressed to Swamplandia!, c/o Chief Bigtree.
YOU ARE WELCOME, DAD, he’d written on the flap.
His essay about the Glenfinnan Viaduct for Voila Arenas’s class had received a purple check-plus mark, not just a check for credit. To research the paper, he’d taken the bus to the Loomis Public Library—the two-story brick building near the courthouse downtown, with large, placid librarians moving through the stacks like human galleons and glass-green plants in pots. This place was nothing like the Library Boat, with its smashed hull and its stink of hydrogen sulfide. He’d spent four hours in the Non-Circulating Room next to a homeless man in a bloodstained Christmas sweater who had introduced himself as Rudolph. Rudolph kept screaming “Wheel … of … Fortune!” and dissolving into a guttural laugh while Kiwi frowned and traced mechanical diagrams of each of the Glenfinnan Viaduct’s twenty-one arches. Rudolph spit his gum on one. The title of Kiwi Bigtree’s paper was “That Scottish Wonder.” His report had a glossary. He’d made two appendices. Rudolph had admired them.
“This assignment was one page,” Voila had written lightly under her check-plus.
Victory 2: Kiwi passed his CPR exam. Monday was his first day of work as an indoor lifeguard. Which meant he had only to survive a last weekend as the Leviathan’s janitor. One Friday, one Saturday, one Sunday—more or less what the original Jonah of biblical fame had done.
Weekends, inside a whale: Kiwi worked the nine-hour Friday shift inside the Leviathan and for that period he forgot all about Swamplandia! He dragged his wheelie bucket through the Flukes and he forgot his mother, his sisters, the Chief’s impossibly stupid Carnival Darwinism, his anger, his mission, his genius burning inside him all day like a grounded rocket. After a few hours of cleaning the tunnels and slippery chutes in the Leviathan, Kiwi found he couldn’t worry about his family anymore—it was as if his mind itself got soapy-fingered. His mind lost its grip on the future.
By five o’clock, Kiwi’s thoughts had been sucked into the vacuum’s hum.
By nine o’clock, it was all he could do to manage a “Good night, Mr. Jenks” before punching out. There was a sort of grimly lit, fluorescent party happening in the break room. The party was catered by the girls who worked in the Dorsal Flukes, who had stolen a bunch of pizzas and soggy boluses of garlic loaf after their shift ended. About fifty kids were crammed around the sofa, shedding their uniforms. It was a frenzied scene, their weekend-night molting—Kiwi caught sight of several belly buttons and boxer waistbands and the wide hot pink strap of one girl’s sports bra as everybody peeled down to their regular clothes. Kiwi shoved four breadsticks into his pants and grabbed a two-liter bottle of diet cherry soda and fled. At 9:17, he shuffled off the elevator deck to his dormitory cot and fell open like a palm.
Monday finally came, and Kiwi celebrated by washing his face. The Lake of Fire was in a concrete grotto dug out of the same limestone shelf that ran beneath the entire city of Loomis; this shelf itself was artificial bedrock, dynamited out of the blue bay by dredge crews in the early century. The Lake of Fire had a separate admission fee for visitors. Kiwi had to use a swipe card and a special elevator bank to get there.
“Going down?” the recorded voice inside the elevator car kept asking on a demonic loop. “Going down?”
At the Lake of Fire, Dale Bonilla was waiting to orient him.
Little kiddies in their swimming trunks and their rental goggles engaged in gleeful masochism around him, shrieking, pounding one another’s sopping backs and buttocks, and giving indiscriminate wedgies. The mothers were all bone-dry; they slumped against one wall. The mothers’ faces were so slack with exhaustion that they looked almost rapturous—Kiwi thought so, anyhow, watching waves of electric light ripple over them. The Lost Souls’ expressions mirrored his own weekend stupefaction inside the Leviathan.
Dale Bonilla walked Kiwi down the left side of the Lake of Fire, his hands clasped behind his back and resting in the little coulee just above his swimming trunks.
“This is a cake job, Margaret, you’re going to love it. Look, here’s your Rescue Stick. Push the button her
e and give it a shake, see, like an umbrella, and it springs into a net.”
Kiwi sprang back as what appeared to be a commercial fishing net burst open from the Rescue Net. How many people was this thing designed to save, a wedding party?
“That’s for when you got to fish a kid out of the Lake.”
The Lake was a hundred-foot-long pool, twelve feet deep at its far end. Dye turned the water the color of dead rose petals, which Kiwi found beautiful in its own disturbing way. But this tenebrous dye made it next to impossible to see the swimmers’ bodies.
“I can’t see anything, Dale.”
“Right? Visibility blows. Here, though, I got the manual for you—”
Dale gave Kiwi what appeared to be an enormous cardboard coaster. It folded out into a kind of daisy-chain checklist of the forces working counter to a lifeguard.
THE DROWNING CHAIN
Lack of Education
Lack of Protection
Lack of Safety Advice
Lack of Supervision
Inability to Cope
Kiwi opened and closed the coaster-thing like an accordionist. Excellent, he thought, surveying the list. Check, check, check. It would appear that I am drowning right now, Dale.
“Allow me to demonstrate,” said Dale, pointing at a pair of feet kicking up spume the color of melted bricks. “See the feet? Watch the feet. The feet are, like, the flags of the body.”
Swamplandia! Page 21
