Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  Florida itself was a newcomer to these parts, you could argue. Kiwi did—he said that Florida was the “suture” between Africa and North America three hundred million years ago, when all the continents were fused. According to the geologic clock, our state was an infant. Our soils contained the fossils of endemic African species—my brother said these feathery stencils of the past in our bedrock sort of gave the lie to the Chief’s ideas about the purity of our isolation.

  “So, is your sister like the war chief Osceola?”

  “Oh, no! She wears barrettes and stuff. She’s a real girl-girl. She’s not like us.” I paused. “Hey, Bird Man?” I watched a bead of sweat travel down his neck and disappear below his collar of feathers. “Why do you always wear that coat?”

  “This old thing?” The Bird Man smiled and ruffled a sleeve as if he’d never really considered it, fanned his grimy leather glove at me with a funny coquetry. I didn’t laugh—I didn’t know if I was supposed to—and his face soured.

  “Oh, habit, I guess. I’ve been wearing it for so long that I feel naked without it.”

  “Okay, wait, I have another one. Where did you get your, ah … that?” I pointed at his black whistle. We were two days into our journey and the Bird Man had yet to use it.

  “My birdcall?” He picked it up and held it between his lips, took a long suck of air; for a moment I felt my own belly muscles contract. Then he spit it out and laughed.

  “It’s just a whistle, kid. I made it.”

  “When?”

  “I was even younger than you when I started up with the birdcalls. Ten, eleven.”

  I tried to picture the Bird Man as a child—just some runty kid whistling into the leaves. Already odd enough at eleven to give women misgivings.

  “When did the song change so that you heard it as words?”

  “I don’t hear birdsong as words.”

  I had pictured the birds’ strident calls trembling through the air and dying, and then all of a sudden those same cries taking on a coloring—red, black, blue—until what had previously been an empty hissing splintered into a hundred separate dramas: males squabbling over carrion, a lover’s quarrel, a chick and its four siblings protesting their hunger.

  “That’s beautiful,” the Bird Man said. “I wish it had been that way.” He sounded tired. All the dark storyteller’s charisma in his voice had vanished, and now his eyes had the absent sheen of my dolls’ eyes. “Really, kid, I couldn’t tell you. It’s still birdsong. One day I heard patterns, that’s all. I’d row out to Black Gum Rookery and I could hear a logic under all that shrieking. Peaks and valleys. Once I could use their calls to get them out of trees, I started to tour the swamp.”

  “So you don’t—”

  “No.”

  “But do you—”

  “No more questions for a while, Ava.”

  We ate the rest of lunch in silence: tinned ham and little pinkie-length fishes packed in oil, most of which I fed to the red Seth. Our food was running low now. We had, what? Cooler 1 contained six hard-boiled eggs. Crackers, we still had two greasy brown tubes of those. At the bottom of the dry-foods box I found a jar of blackberry jam that had been left for Mom by the Pick Up Club, the little green ribbon still tied to it. Some lady had used scissors to curlicue the ends.

  (Q: Why did those good Christian women volunteer to ornament a loss? With their terrible pity, a glittery pity, as if Death were a holiday like Christmas? We kids got a load of gifts and sweets from the neighbor women, all wrapped up in paper and bows. My brother told me that he was only “intermittently certain” that their intentions were good …)

  “I’ll pass,” I said, but the Bird Man wanted some jam. With his coat on, and hunched over the tin jar lid like that, the Bird Man looked like a huge crow intelligently attacking a piece of metal.

  “You should try some,” he said, extending a black spoonful. “It’s sweet. Tasty.”

  Stands of pond-apple trees were adorned with long nets of golden moss and shadowed a kind of briary sapling I didn’t recognize. Air plants hung like hairy stars. We poled through forests. Twinkling lakes. Estuaries, where freshwater and salt water mixed and you could sometimes spot small dolphins. A rotten-egg smell rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangroves’ stilted roots. If Osceola was out here, even with the ghost helping her, I thought she must be so tired by now—she would be thirsty, and very hungry, blood-sucked by all the chizzywinks and mosquitoes, she’d be aching, she’d be wondering why she ever left our island in the first place …

  “Can we take another break, Bird Man?”

  “Not a chance,” he said with his grave cheer. “No more breaks, my friend. Not if you want to come to a rescue.”

  All day the horizon was inches from our noses. We’d been poling the leafy catacombs of the mangrove tunnels for hours. Any changes—palings of the sun that dropped the temperature a degree or two, or a brilliant lizard hugging the bark—felt like progress. More than once I’d think a tunnel was truly impenetrable. We’d pole into a green cone of water lapping at the trees’ wickery roots: the end of our journey! I’d think. And then we’d slide through a stew of crimson propagules, duck through a wishbonelike mangrove root, pop out. At one point an osprey’s nest crashed onto the poor red Seth’s carrier, knocked loose by our boat; that time we had to pole out stern first.

  The Bird Man could always find us a way through. Often it took several tries: a tunnel would appear to be plumb shut and he would lift a branch, pull the skiff into sudden darkness, and slingshot us forward into the undergrowth. Blossoms dropped in a delicate static around us. The mosquitoes hid in wait for us, even in these shadows.

  “You don’t see her, right?” I kept asking. “You don’t see anything yet?”

  Eventually I stopped asking when we were going to get there. I stopped studying the buzzards, or worrying about whatever future was snaking upstream to meet us. At first it alarmed me to watch the buzzards drop into the thick palms; our map to the underworld kept rewriting itself, and how could anybody read a map like that? Half the black atlas would vanish into a hardwood hammock.

  “Bird Man?” I asked at one point. “There goes our map again …”

  But the Bird Man snapped in a tired voice that I should leave the navigation up to him. (The buzzards are our stars …) I took his advice; I didn’t let my mind wander anymore. Too dangerous. Instead I sent my thoughts flying backward. Certain memories I could reenter like safe rooms, and I had this one in particular I liked to turn the knob on: once when my sister was fourteen she had led the afternoon tour of the Bigtree Family Museum. The Chief was away on a business trip, and Mom was taking some Lithuanian schoolkids with weird haircuts backstage to see the alligators’ incubators. I was in a mood. I told Ossie that I was sick, and convinced her to do the tour. You used to be able to get Ossie to do anything for you—Ossie was the kindest member of our tribe. Privately I thought my big sister was weak and pitied her a little, for her softness and her status as a nonwrestler. She used to be so very quiet, back before her possessions started up. During these tours she read from a script that the Chief typed up for her. She stuttered t’s and said her s’s adenoidally. Her hands would shake. I still made her cover for me. I was passing by the museum window, eating a lemon ice and feeling like an expert deceiver, when I heard her voice float out:

  “Ava Bigtree is only eleven years old. But she is already one of the best-t-t alligator wrestlers in the history of Swamplandia! She is Hilola Bigtree’s daughter and my sister. Remember her name, because one day she will be the best alligator wrestler in the world.”

  Maybe Ossie was already home? I pictured Ossie sitting Indian style on the burgundy sofa in her polka-dotted pajamas. Watching TV, the mainland stations. News programs. Cartoons. Ossie eating popcorn while Tom and Jerry beaned each other with mallets. And then the TV went black, and the house was empty again. My giggle turned into something raw and terrible—accidentally, I’d just met this part of myself that no l
onger believed my sister was alive. Your sister, an old voice told me, as frank as noonlight, is lost forever. You’re too late. There’s not a shadow left for you to chase. You’ll go home and you won’t have a sister.

  “Stay put, Osceola!” I’d put in the note pinned to our refrigerator. “If you beat me back home, sit tight. Don’t come looking for me now …”

  “Look out, kid—”

  I watched a water moccasin wrinkle slowly across the river. We passed her; we were gaining speed. Gray and rustling branchways arced above the skiff like dried-out rainbows. The magnolia leaves turned green or black with the always-changing light.

  “Al-most,” the Bird Man whistled. He sank his pole into the water near an enormous frizz of roots. A hundred-year cypress lay on its side in the middle of the water. Roots shot outward from the hollow at the base like desiccated sun rays. Bright leaves like butterflies impaled there. Closer and closer, I thought, we are getting closer and closer to the land of the dead. The Bird Man pointed at the buzzards, then turned our bow until our boat was nearly facing upstream. We poled hard against the grain of the river.

  The current grew stronger. It wove our skiff in an S-shaped path. In certain places now, the river was so narrow that trees on opposite banks could touch.

  * * *

  Some hours later I realized that we hadn’t seen a melaleuca in miles. No more threat of “monoculture,” as the scientists called it. The trees out here were a dark variety.

  “You sure this is the river to hell? This place would be heaven to my father, all the hammocks out here.” I pointed at a stand of bearded trees whose flowers gave off a syrupy perfume as we paddled beneath them. “I don’t even know the names of some of these twisty ones …”

  “Hey, kid, look where we’re going …”

  We had to go onto our backs, flat as water moccasins, to pull our skiff through the next tunnel. My head was on the Bird Man’s lean stomach as we entered a net of branches. I could feel him breathing in a careful way under my damp scalp; each exhalation sank me a little. A black maze of branches moved over the sun. Leaves, round as pucks, waggled their tongues at us.

  “What happened here?” The Bird Man touched the flaky spot on my knee where I’d scraped hard against the chickee ladder. “Poor kid. You okay?”

  “Huh? Oh. Yeah. I don’t even remember how I got that one.”

  He kneed forward in the skiff with his black feathers moving in wavelets, slid something from an interior pocket. The next thing I knew the Bird Man was uncapping a jar of green fluid. He drizzled a cool ointment over me and crisscrossed a bandage on my cut.

  “There. Home remedy. ‘Home’ being a fluid terminology, in my special case.” He smiled. “There you go. Nomad medicine. Works better than anything in a first-aid kit, that’s for sure.”

  Love.

  “I love you,” I blurted out. The Bird Man laughed; for once I had succeeded in startling him.

  “Are you feeling okay, kid? Do you need some water?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry …” My eyes were burning. “I, uh, I thought …”

  We ducked the subject of love by swapping water from the canteen. But now I had an embarrassed feeling and I wanted to explain myself to him; I didn’t want him thinking I was some idiot kid. So between sips of water I started telling him about my mother’s show. That show was my model for love, the onstage and the backstage parts. In this goony kid way, I think I must have been hoping that my story might get the Bird Man to love me the way my mother was loved by the Chief.

  “You know, my father trained himself to be my mother’s sun, electrically speaking.”

  That was exactly how my dad described the job of love. The Chief rigged the lights for Mom’s act years and years ago, on their fourth date—he dreamed up the lights and the choreography for her show before she’d ever so much as touched an alligator. This was a popular story on our island (Bigtree Museum, Exhibit 12). After she became a wrestler and started doing evening performances, he operated the follow spot. I’d always try to find a way to be backstage for this part. Love, as practiced on our island, was tough work: the blind eye of the follow spot took all your strength to direct and turn. Every night the Chief ratcheted its yellow-white iris around my mother’s muscular back on the diving board. The follow spot we used was decades old, heavy, with poor maneuverability, and the Chief struggled to hold the beam steady. I remember his hands better than his face (I was a short kid): the square nails discolored against the metal, his big knuckles popping from the pressure of his grip like ten white valentines.

  My mother did her breaststroke inside the spot’s golden circle of light, growing smaller and smaller as she headed for the deep end. “Now watch this,” my father would say, smiling at me as he changed the color filter and adjusted the iris diaphragm. By the end of her performance his shirt was soaked with sweat.

  Now I mopped my own brow and stared at the Bird Man with my knees stowed under my chin, waiting to see if the story had worked.

  “Sounds like a nice show,” he coughed.

  “I saw posters of your mother all over the islands, you know,” the Bird Man offered almost an hour later, breaking a long silence. He said this like we’d been in steady conversation, like he was answering my question. “She was a beautiful woman. You look just like her, Ava.”

  I burned in the bow seat. I thought this was the kindest lie anybody had ever told me.

  * * *

  On the skiff I made up a little credo for myself:

  I believe the Bird Man knows a passage to the underworld.

  I believe that I am brave enough to do this.

  I have faith that we are going to rescue Ossie.

  Every doubt got pushed away. Kiwi’s voice (There are no such things as ghosts) I ignored. Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.

  When I shut my eyes I could see the underworld: a blue wave in front of us. The painting from Ossie’s book sprawled behind my eyelids—Winter on the River Styx—and if I really concentrated I could get this painting to snow. Dark flakes falling into our near future. It was hard work to keep believing that we were going to get there, but I persisted. Faith cupped and kept the future like leaves on the hidden water that (I believed) we were rowing toward. Where Ossie was waiting for me, and maybe my mom.

  We kids cultivated a faith in all the Bigtree legends—I’d heard them so often from my parents that they seemed to me like memories I’d made myself. At the time, I also had faith that my pet Seth and I would be champions—how could it be otherwise? In fact I sort of thought this future must exist somewhere, the year of our triumph floating in utero in outer space, as small as the pinheads of stars.

  Sometimes when I caught the sun sinking and felt a rinse of panic, I risked a look back at the Bird Man. Imagine the thousands of birds this man can summon! I told myself. Armies of birds, whole rookeries. Colors on their underwings that I thought were the prettiest part of our universe and here this man could paint the skies with them. Most incredibly, he had called me.

  “Ava.” The Bird Man’s voice sounded preoccupied; he was trying to backferry us around some rocks. “Tell you what, kid, I’m going to sit and paddle for a while. You’re tired, why don’t you rest here? Lean back, huh? Put your head on my lap if you want. I’ll wake you if I see signs of your sister.”

  I shook my head. This kindness was so sudden and extravagant that it made me, for some reason, want to cry. In a very different context, I had responded the same way when Mrs. Gianetti on Gallinule Key had offered me fancy chocolates once and I’d declined to eat even one, intimidated by the blue satin ribbon around the box. The Bird Man’s gaze rippled over me, calm as clouds.

  “Suit yourself.”

  We were traveling so slowly through the mangrove keys. The bark on the trunks here wove together brilliant magentas and silvers, which reminded me for some reason of the old tourist women’s dye jobs,
that funny mix of rubies and milk, age and vanity.

  “Those tourists are sure going to love you,” I told the red Seth in her crate. It was three, I noted, the time of our Swamplandia! matinee. “When we get home …”

  The red Seth squirmed unhappily in my palm, like a little dinosaur dreaming of amber.

  Where was the dredge right now? I wondered. Where was the fisherman who claimed to have seen it?

  Waves of feeling seemed to heave and smooth in me to the tempo of the actual waves. Big-mouthed fishes sucked whirlpools between the prop roots.

  “Ossie?” I called into miles of trees. “Ossie, it’s me …”

  At some point, our waterway disappeared, dried up, and we had to carry the boat overland. In The Spiritist’s Telegraph, Lethe was described as a deep, reliable channel. Well, that was not the situation we encountered in the Ten Thousand Islands. The sun was a white hole. I was walking with the wet prow of a boat on my head through waist-high marsh grass and the hundreds, the thousands, very possibly the millions of mosquitoes.

  “Hey, can you use your whistle to call these bugs off?”

  We were seeing a part of the swamp that I was unfamiliar with. The distant saw grass waved like wheat that silvered at its tips. I was grumpy, then scared: what wind could it possibly be moving in? Sweat covered my forearms; the clouds hung motionless.

  It was a terrible portage—the Bird Man stood beneath the skiff’s rough yoke and my job was just to steer us, and it turned out I couldn’t even do that well, mud everywhere and flies in my eyes and my nostrils. I imagined we made a strange insect, our four feet moving beneath the boat’s flipped hull.

  Very suddenly we drew up to the ruins of a bridge. Wooden trestles spanned a canal that was fifteen feet wide—it looked like part of a skeletal roller coaster. The Bird Man told me that wild-cotton crews employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture built this bridge in the 1920s. They were hired to eradicate the red cotton borer, a wild species of cotton that threatened the commercial plantations in northern Florida; they’d been working on a network of roads and bridges through the swamp to get their trucks and equipment out here before the infamous Labor Day hurricane of 1935 struck. Hundreds of World War I veterans died when the train sent to rescue them departed too late and every car—all but the locomotive—got swept into the sea. Broward, Bolles, the private contractors, they all ran out of money. Money appeared to be the one species that couldn’t take root in the swamp—and this blight was a killer of dreams, the Chief said, more potent than the red cotton borer.