Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  Really, it didn’t seem possible that Dale was using this Rescue Net correctly. He dragged the kid’s kicking body toward the shallow end, and the kid, a skinny white boy with a crew cut and froggy eyelids, began to scream: “Let me go! Idiot! I was just diving!”

  “Sorry, bro!” Dale released the kid from the Rescue Stick, smiling dreamily down at—so far as Kiwi could tell—nothing. He stirred the Lake of Fire like a giant punch bowl. “I used to work at the Red Lobster in Fullerton,” he said, “so I’m good at getting the squirmers.”

  “Hey,” Kiwi said. “That’s great. I think I can take it from here.”

  “Awesome.” Dale stooped to retrieve some of the trampled rental towels. He had the extreme pallor and off-kilter good nature of a TV serial killer. Possibly Dale wasn’t evil at all, Kiwi thought, just extraordinarily sleepy. His voice when he spoke was cryptic, academic: “Look, man. Just don’t let one drown.”

  Thus ended Kiwi’s Life-Saving Orientation.

  Every twelve minutes a high-speed fan blew pressurized air into the caissons, transforming the Lake of Fire into a turbulent wave pool. The water shivered up into red pyramids while the swimmers screamed with surprise. This happened twenty-eight times during Kiwi’s shift. When the waves receded, Kiwi watched the ruby dye congeal in the deep end. He thought about the wings of roseate spoonbills, their brilliant plumage. He thought about the July skies over the saw grass. In this way his mind emptied very naturally into thoughts about home, his sisters and his mom, Grandpa, his delusional father. Kiwi had to paddle a long ways back before he could focus on the Lake.

  During his lunch break Kiwi wandered the tunnels until he found the payroll office. Nobody had cashed the checks he’d signed over to his father yet. Had they even gotten to the island? Was his asshole dad trying to make a point? From the pay phone, Kiwi spoke to “Holly,” a loan officer at the Sunshine Community Bank.

  “I’m a relative. No, I’m not Hilola. I’m her son. I’d like to pay down Samuel Bigtree’s debt, ma’am. Can we maybe work out some kind of deal? I’m interested in buying my family some time.”

  Kiwi meant this very literally. At his current wage of $6.50 an hour he probably couldn’t afford to purchase Swamplandia! a month or even a week, he explained to Holly. But to forestall their homelessness he was willing to negotiate the price of minutes, hours—how much would a minute cost?

  The woman on the other end of the line laughed sadly.

  “Honey, are you a signer on this account? No? Then you need to put your father on the phone.”

  “Okay, Holly? That’s not possible. Could you just tell me the dollar amount that we owe you?”

  But she couldn’t, not legally. She informed Kiwi Bigtree that he did not owe her employer anything.

  “Are you guys going to foreclose on us?”

  But she couldn’t tell him that, either. What she could do—she put the phone down to get her supervisor’s consent—what she would be very happy to do was apply any moneys Kiwi sent her toward Swamplandia!’s “substantial debt load.”

  So after work, Kiwi mailed a money order directly to the bank. Fourteen dollars and twenty-two cents, the change in his stupid World trousers. What was left of his salary after food and rent. He watched his signature swirl over and under the mint line and licked the little stamp, feeling sick in his gut.

  Lifeguarding was exhausting. Kiwi moved from his chair only to take bathroom breaks. Vijay returned to smoking on the roof without him. Kiwi spent most of each shift doing a mental good cop/bad cop narration in the Lake’s general direction: Please, children, I am begging you, nobody drown, followed by, You bitches better not drown. The Lake of Fire was adjacent to Beelzebub’s Snack Bar, where Lost Souls ate fourteen-dollar boxes of Dante’s Tamales “for the experience.” What experience? A Dante’s Tamale was a mutant breed of tamale from Cienfuegos, Mexico, that was, without exaggeration, the size of a wind sock. A grown man ate a Dante’s Tamale and wept into his wife’s hair. Toddlers ate the Dante’s Tamales and turned unhealthy shades of purple.

  “Smile!” The itinerant photographer wandered through the Lake of Fire and snapped candid pictures of the Lost Souls—the itinerant photographer was a graduate of a prestigious art school in Rhode Island and everyone agreed that his shots were very creative. At the end of the day Lost Souls queued up to buy a $29.95 picture of themselves printed on a mug or a calendar, glossy assurance that they had suffered in Hell.

  A new World of Darkness jingle, sung by a deeply ironic gospel choir, was being piped in through the World speaker system: “The Leviathan, the Leviathan, what a bargain! All that pain in a single afternoon!” The chorus was like a virus, playing in a self-replicating loop in everybody’s brains. Sometimes whole winding lines of Lost Souls would all at once burst into the song.

  Swamplandia! had its own jingle, too, which nobody seemed to know. It wasn’t conventionally “catchy,” although it sometimes almost rhymed. Risa Bigtree had written the original lyrics, with old Sawtooth on the uke. His mother and the Chief had sung it for the radio ads—the Chief, whose voice rumbled like a washing machine full of shoes, and his mother, who happily admitted that she didn’t understand what pitch was. Fortunately, the Bigtree tribe never had the bucks to saturate the mainland airwaves with it. Kiwi and Ava and Ossie were on the recording, too. They shared a middle verse.

  We Bigtree children wrestle gators

  With the skill of our forefathers

  With the steel of our foremothers

  We Bigtree children tame our gators …

  From the tall lifeguard chair, which rose nine feet above the Lake and overlooked the deep end beneath an ornamental black umbrella, Kiwi blew his whistle—a Korean kid had just beaned his twin sister in the head with a BrimStone, an enormous inflatable beach ball (rental units: $8.75; on the weekends hundreds of BrimStones blew in from the Vesuvius Blast Off, which meant an extra hour of cleanup for Kiwi). When the screaming began, he thought this roughhousing was the reason for it, even though the Korean boy’s mouth was a seam.

  It was whole seconds before he saw the body.

  A blot appeared and spread in the pool’s deep end. It stopped and shivered in place. Arms rose out of the blot, flailing and falling a little ways, rowing again. This T shape in the deepest part of the Lake was a girl or a woman, Kiwi realized, floating there with such gracefulness that at first Kiwi thought her posture must be deliberate, part of some show, her arms fluttering and black tendrils lifting and separating from her head. He guessed what must have happened: she’d gotten a foot or leg caught in an open drain. Kiwi rose onto the platform on trembling legs and began to blow into his whistle. The crowd in the Lake was screaming at him.

  “Help her!” he shouted back to them. “She’s drowning!” It was the crowd’s howling, finally, that got Kiwi to leap, and not the girl at all—he wanted only to escape the sound of the strangers’ terror.

  When Kiwi jumped from the lifeguard platform, he shut his eyes. Everybody was screaming but he could feel his own silence unfurl and flutter in streamers behind him, like two black ribbons tied to the soles of his feet. Then Kiwi hit. The Lake water rushed into his nose and unhinged his jaw, flooded into him, and this felt like swallowing a gallon of melted pennies, swallowing everything the wrong way, a mucoid sting. He made it over to the girl, found her wrist and closed onto it and held on, and he was worried that he was going to break all the small bones inside the girl’s fingers as he gripped a hand and then an arm and pulled at it, blanking on all his reading and certain now that he was injuring her, doing her some terrible and irreversible physical harm; but then as he tugged her toward the surface Kiwi could feel the wake of her legs kicking alongside him. For a hallucinatory second, just before surfacing, he came face-to-face with the girl under the lava globes in the water. She is staring at me! Their eyes met. Her hair was rising and twirling continuously into a slow fountain above her pale temples and her two eyes were open, black and alert. She’s conscious, Kiwi had time to t
hink. Awake under the lake. Then they were both kicking for the surface together, their arms linked at the elbow like twins. When they broke the surface the girl immediately went limp again.

  “Hey, come on,” Kiwi gasped, jerking at her arm, “what are you doing?” She wasn’t moving at all now. Her eyes (had he imagined them open?) were smoothly shut. He hooked an arm around her and dragged her in, and throughout the great cavern of the Lake of Fire he could hear the Lost Souls cheering.

  “The lifeguard got her, Mommy …!”

  “The lifeguard saved her …!”

  Shut up, he wanted to growl. The girl was growing in her sleep, becoming so heavy inside the crook of his arms. He kicked his right foot out until his toes curled around the ladder rung.

  Kiwi dragged the girl up and out on her back. “Are you okay? Are you okay?” he shouted moronically into her ear before bending close to deliver two rescue breaths. Fernando, his World of Darkness CPR instructor, had told him that he was “too nicey-nicey.” He tapped harder. People were watching him; he could feel the familiar onstage lurch of his body beginning to panic.

  Okay, genius, this is a human person, this is not some alligator that you have to wrestle. But Kiwi had muscular amnesia. What came next? His fingers clutched at his rib cage as if he were holding his own guts together. Her, he had to help her. This girl was pretty. She had coal-black curls in a crazy sprawl on the towel and a narrow squint of a face; she was his age or even a little younger. Kiwi fixed his lips over the girl’s lips. He pinched her nostrils shut, one hand floundered against the alien slickness of her black swimsuit—she was breathing, Kiwi realized, he’d forgotten to listen for breaths. A fraction of a second before Kiwi exhaled his air into her, the drowned girl’s eyes flew open.

  Kiwi sat back on his heels. He stared stupidly at his own hand, which was still pasted to the thin black fabric on her stomach. Both of their eyes were running clear ruby tears, their fingernails brilliantly stained, their lashes clumped and dark.

  “You’re okay? You feel okay, huh?”

  She sniffled and nodded, rubbing at her eyes.

  “You were okay, though,” he said suspiciously, but the girl didn’t hear him. Her lips opened in a joyful shout:

  “You saved me …” Even as she spoke she was turning from Kiwi to the crowd, beaming at the two dozen or so swimmers gathered at the Lake’s edge. “This lifeguard saved me!”

  “What?” Kiwi mumbled. “No, really, I didn’t do anything, you just needed to catch your own breath …”

  “What’s your name, son?” someone called, and without thinking Kiwi answered truthfully:

  “Kiwi Bigtree.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” the girl kept whispering, her lips opening and closing so delicately against the cleft above his left shoulder that he could feel the buzz of her gratitude on his neck—but what did she think he had done for her? Why were these other people agreeing with her? Rumors began within earshot of him:

  “See that young man, son? He was all action. Fell back on his training. He’s a hero.”

  “Did you watch the kid move down there? He freed her hair from the pool drain, the whole production took him under a minute, she wasn’t even breathing …”

  A woman in a yellow sarong at the far end of the Lake with five duckling children thronged around her started clapping: “Bravo, young man!” And then the whole crowd around the Lake of Fire broke into a standing ovation. Applause like he remembered from the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular echoed around the vaulted ceiling—directed, incredibly, at him.

  (With his eyes shut, with his face turned toward the din, he could see his mother standing in sunlight so bright it looked like slick ice on the wooden stage, waving at all her tourists indiscriminately, a sea of red ball caps and cellophane visors. H-I-L-O-L-A B-I-G-T-R-E-E! He could see himself at thirteen, selling bags of popcorn to her great admirers. When he watched his mother wrestling Seths onstage he’d felt proud and ashamed of her in shifting ratios—his mother’s tourists he just hated. Hate like that was an easy, monochrome feeling. Look anywhere but at my mother, he’d think at thirteen, and also: Stand up for her ovation, you assholes.)

  Someone was taking a photograph of him, and others followed suit. Someone patted a thick towel around Kiwi’s shoulders. Kiwi heard the ricochet of the word “Kiwi” throughout the grotto and he felt a smile spreading messily on his face. He stood, dragging the girl up with him. After so many days and nights of being anonymous, a Margaret, his real name had a narcotic effect. He put one hand around this girl, and his free hand lifted in a wave.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Help Arrives, Then Departs

  Stiltsville was miles behind us and there was as yet no sign of my sister. We were traveling southwest with the current, alligators sprawled on either bank. My oar head was white and scummy with grass. A skipjack landed in our bow and I cleaned it and fed it to the red Seth. Behind me, the Bird Man’s pole kept clanging against limestone bedrock. Was the Bird Man angry with me? His hood hid the clue of his face.

  Touch me again, Bird Man, I thought urgently. Tell a joke, say anything—because I was having the convection feeling. As if my skin were rippling, dissolving. Kiwi describes this phenomenon, “convection” [n], in his Field Notes: the rapid cooling of a body in the absence of all tourists. Even Kiwi, King of Stage Fright, admitted to feeling it on Sunday nights. Convection caused your thoughts to develop an alarming blue tinge and required touch or speech with another human as its antidote (Seths didn’t work, not even my red Seth, I’d tried). Sweating could feel dangerous if you were alone in the swamp, as if droplet by droplet your body might get whisked into the sun.

  When I baled water I leaned sideways and grazed the edges of the Bird Man’s black coat. My fingers came back wet, with tiny black feathers stuck to them, which reassured me that neither one of us was a figment. At noon the basking lizards slid into the water to cool off. The river began to pick up speed.

  At twelve thirty we ate lunch inside a Park Services chickee hut to avoid the mosquitoes. When you rowed into a cloud of skeeters it was loud as a tractor but there was nothing there, just these tiny molecules of sound. Some ranger had borrowed the Seminole design and erected a modern chickee here to use as a campsite, since there was nowhere high enough on the surrounding tree islands to pitch a tent. The inside smelled clean and dry, like a hollowed-out stump. We weren’t the first people to use this shelter, either—overnighters’ trash filled the corners. Their beers and soda bottles looked shiny as treasure. On the back platform I found a dead anhinga furred in mosquitoes, and a single, mysterious crutch. The poor bird had a broken left wing. The crutch belonged to a human invalid, presumably. Someone on our same mission, maybe, limping toward a wife or daughter in the underworld.

  “Uh-oh,” the Bird Man said, shaking the crutch at me. “A bad thing to forget, huh? Wonder what the story was there.”

  “Can you talk to that one?” I asked the Bird Man, indicating the dead anhinga, and he looked at me with an adult’s generic formula of pity and irritation; I was disappointed in him. Given where we were headed, I thought my question was a good one. We made our tuna sandwiches and scooted under the palm window.

  “There are lots of Seminole ghosts out here, did you know that, Bird Man? My sister told me.”

  “Of course,” he nodded, as if I’d just told him there were lots of sheepshead minnows. “We might see them later.”

  “My sister is named for a Seminole chieftain. The whites killed him with malaria. He died in Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. Do you think he’s in this part of the underworld?”

  “Who knows, kid? Maybe we’ll meet him.”

  After the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830, the Seminole people were hunted like animals. They built the palm-thatched chickees for use as temporary shelters, hiding places. President Jackson sent a letter to the Seminoles that we reproduced in our museum, the last line of which reads:

  “But should you listen to the bad birds that
are always flying about you, and refuse to remove, I have directed the commanding officer to remove you by force.”

  Few mainlanders know that the Seminole Wars lasted longer than any other U.S. conflict, longer than the Vietnam War and the American Revolution. By the time Colonel Loomis declared the end of the Third Seminole War in 1858, thousands of Seminoles had been slaughtered or “removed” to the western territories. My sister was named for the Seminoles’ famous warrior and freedom fighter, War Chief Osceola, who, legend has it, said, at a time when General Jesup was upon them, and all seemed lost:

  “If the Great Spirit will show me how, I will make the white man red with blood; and then blacken him in the sun and rain … and the buzzard live upon his flesh.”

  Ossie said the spirits of Seminole babies killed by Major Francis L. Dade’s men still haunted the swamp, as did the ghosts of hundreds of army regulars who were murdered out here. So our home was actually a very crowded place.

  These Seminoles, the “real” Indians that the Chief envied in a filial and loving way, were in fact the descendants of many displaced tribes from the Creek Confederacy. This swamp was not their ancestral home either, not by any stretch—they had been pushed further and further into the swamp by President Jackson’s Tennessee boys and a company of scarecrows from Atlanta, a militia that was starved and half-crazed. We Bigtrees were an “indigenous species” of swamp dweller, according to the Chief and our catalogs, but it turned out that every human in the Ten Thousand Islands was a recent arrival. The Calusa, the shell builders—they were Paleo-Indians, the closest thing our swamp had to an indigenous people. But the Calusa vanished from all maps hundreds of years ago, and it was not until the late 1800s that our swamp was recolonized by freed slaves and by fugitive Indians and, decades later, by the shocked, drenched white pioneers shaking out wet deeds, true sitting ducks, the patsies of the land barons who had sold these gullible snowbirds farms that were six feet underwater. And then by “eccentrics” like the Bird Man and my parents.