Swamplandia! (10 page)

I nodded. Inside the TV screen Elizabeth II was putting the millionth pin into her hair.
DRAMATIC RE-CREATION!
flashed across the bottom; truly I had never seen anything less dramatic in my life.

“Ossie is sixteen now, Chief. We’re not babies.”

The Chief didn’t go into much detail about his upcoming mainland trip, but I understood that it had something to do with raising more capital for his Carnival Darwinism ideas. He was seeking investors. New partners. Men with the foresight to invest in our family’s evolution!

“We don’t have generations to wait around, try things out, see: Does it work? Is it a good adaptation? None of that bullshit, Ava. We want to get this thing done
soon
.”

“Okay, Dad. Sounds good.”

He was going to buy us adaptations: wings and goggled eyes, skin suits, new tridents for hooking Seths. The crocs in the Carolinas could be shipped to us by Christmas. Soon the indigenous Bigtrees would be able to compete with our niche competitor, that exotic invasive species of business, the World of Darkness.

I mentioned that he might run into Kiwi on the streets of downtown Loomis, and he looked up at me through a fog.

“What’s that now, Ava?” he bellowed across the carpet. Steam came dreaming up from the little ark of the iron.

“Who?”

The last tourist we ever had that summer came on a Friday in June, four days after Kiwi left our island. It was raining, and I barely remember what she looked like. I remember her running up the boardwalk, screaming, had we seen her hat? She was worried about missing the ferry back.

Some things you know right away to be final—when you lose your last baby tooth, or when you go to sleep for the ultimate time as a twelve-year-old on the night before your thirteenth birthday. Other times, you have to work out the milestone later via subtraction, a math you do to assign significance, like when I figured out that I’d just blown
through my last-ever Wednesday with Mom on the day after she died. “We do not have your hat, ma’am,” the Chief apologized to this tourist, and she was very upset. She jogged back toward the ferry dock in a huff and I remember that as being one of the few times after the End had begun that I was glad to see a tourist go. Later we did find the hat, a crinkly pink-and-white-striped visor, mall-fancy from some chain haberdashery, and the Chief put it up for sale in our Bigtree Gift Shop for sixteen dollars, similarly ignorant of the fact that we were not going to have any more customers. We must’ve had a last customer make a last purchase in the gift shop and completely missed that milestone, too.

Nobody came the following day, or the day after, and a week later the Chief would “temporarily suspend” all Swamplandia! shows and activities in preparation for his business trip to Loomis County.

F
orty miles south and west of Swamplandia! as the crow flies, beyond the grid of Army Corps levees and drainage canals, across a triangle of new highways that slide over and under one another like snakes in a warren, was the parking lot of the Loomis World of Darkness, where Kiwi Bigtree sat on the burning hood of a powder blue Datsun and watched with an anthropologist’s prudish fascination as his new friend Vijay packed and smoked a bong. “Bong” was on a list of twenty-three new mainland vocabulary words that Kiwi had acquired just that week. “Dude, do you blaze?” asked dreamy-eyed Vijay. “You want a
hit
?”

Kiwi shook his head. He did not. He did not think that he did. He watched Vijay’s work shirt contract, Vijay smiling with his eyes shut.

“Come on, Margaret Mead, get over here and do a hit with me! Seriously, bro, it trips me out when you just watch like that.”

“No thanks … Listen, please don’t call me that.”

He was trying very hard not to respond to Margaret, although since this was the only name by which his colleagues in the World of Darkness knew him, Kiwi worried that he might come across as a little aloof. Somebody, probably Vijay, had discovered a copy of
Coming of Age in Samoa
in Kiwi’s work locker and introduced the book as a break room conversation piece. It was Yvans, his Trinidadian coworker, who’d turned to the picture of a scowling Margaret Mead in her grass skirt and
palm-leaf hood, kneeling between two Samoan girls with her field notes in hand, and had rechristened him as Margaret. Now everybody in the World knew him as Margaret or Margie Mead, although recently some of the girls had shortened this to M&M, a trend that Kiwi was trying to encourage. M&M was an improvement; M&M could stand for all kinds of mysterious things, much less emasculating things. Macho Macho? Maybe that was a little too on the nose, Kiwi conceded … The important thing here was that the abbreviation “M&M” didn’t automatically equate Kiwi Bigtree with the encyclopedia photograph that Yvans had taped above Kiwi’s locker of a middle-aged woman covering her breasts with jungle foliage.

Vijay was inhaling deeply and rhythmically; he was becoming a conscious participant in his own respiratory process, he said.

“Say what you will about our shitty jobs, Margine,” Vijay said, exhaling, “but at least the World’s got
air-conditioning
 …”

The World of Darkness got shortened to “the World”—as in: “Hey, Kiwi, hook me up! Clock me out of the World, yeah?” and “What do you fools want to do when we get out of
the World
?” Everybody did this, Kiwi included, although to Kiwi the abbreviation felt dangerous; there was something insidious about it, the way it crept into your speech and replaced the older, vaster meanings. “The World” now signified a labyrinth of depressing stucco buildings that fed into a freezing airplane hangar. Neon tubing and the vaulted roof of the Leviathan made the place feel modern, but when the lights came on after hours, Kiwi had the same melancholy feeling that used to strike him when he waded ankle-deep into the pulpy napkins and Styrofoam cups that littered the stadium floor on Swamplandia! The owners of this franchise of the World of Darkness had filled the hangar with evil rides, evil water fountains, smoke machines, and unconvincing robots. Kiwi got paid $5.75 an hour to work as part of an army of teenage janitors. Park greeters, security officers, customer service reps, costumers, janitors: all of them pimpled gum chewers, deodorized for war. There were plenty of adults, too, but the worst work seemed to be reserved for the youngest summertime employees.

That morning Kiwi had aced his first test, the New Employee Quiz. You could use your employee manual to look up an answer if you forgot it, said the proctor, his manager, Carl. Kiwi was disconcerted to find that many of these questions were worded like unfunny knock-knock jokes:

The other choices had been “A Naval Maneuver,” “The Hoover Maneuver,” or “No Maneuver.”

Kiwi had been pushing brooms in the World for weeks now, and the only other employee besides Vijay with whom he’d become friendly was Yvans Parmasad, a Trinidadian man with Tabasco-red veins in his eyes and so many young children that he often got their names confused. (“Bum me some money, Kiwi, today it is … 
Tam’s
birthday.”) Their friendship commenced when Yvans pointed out to Kiwi a particular Lost Soul—a stunning woman on crutches in a red sundress, Kiwi’s age—and then very casually proceeded to detail the things he would like to do to her in bed, in a Jacuzzi, after a lobster dinner, on his Camaro’s hood …

“Wouldn’t that be extremely hot, Yvans?” Kiwi was thinking about the thermal conductivity of metal, the insulation of her crutches …

“Yes!” Yvans clapped his hands, the first person on the mainland to acknowledge Kiwi’s genius. “Hot, that it would be! Kiwi, I’m saying it but you’re thinking it, am I right?!”

“N-h-h.” Kiwi made a clicky sound in the back of his throat. (Growing up with the Chief, Kiwi had become the master of the lukewarm assent.)

On their first day on duty together, Yvans announced that he would handle “the hard stuff”—tasks rated as difficult by Yvans included counting the cash drawer and “improving the retail experience” of the female customers. Kiwi could do “the easy stuff,” defined by Yvans as plunging the toilets and running the gleaming armadillo-beveled nozzle of a futuristic vacuum over the carpeted walkway that constituted the Tongue of the Leviathan.
Yeah
, thought Kiwi, tugging at a fat knot in the vacuum cord with his incisors,
the easy stuff, real simple …

Kiwi looked over with a spurt of envy to the Devil’s Oven, the baked-goods stand where Yvans worked, ostensibly selling baked goods, although at this particular moment Yvans appeared to be making
some kind of lewd visual analogy for a female customer using a container of pretzels and hot cheese.
How has he not been fired
? Kiwi wondered, but then the short Italian woman Yvans was talking to began giggling and scribbling something on a paper fished out of her purse. She let Yvans feed her a pretzel. Kiwi resisted the urge to document this baffling progression on his notepad—his note-taking seemed to make his fellow workers uncomfortable, and Carla García-Founier, a black girl with a smattering of beautiful acne on her nose, had asked Kiwi very seriously if he was some kind of serial killer.

Inside the World of Darkness, Time happened in a circle. Shifts were nine hours, and the hours contracted or accordioned outward depending on several variables that Kiwi had cataloged: difficulty of task, boredom of task, degree to which task humiliates me personally. For a while all Kiwi had to do was vacuum in the anonymous many-peopled solitude of the front hall, but then he screwed up that sweet gig. Kiwi made wide orbits with the industrial vacuum cleaner, which trembled and belched in repose like a rodeo bull; on the first day of his third week he ran over his own shoelaces with it and broke it in a way that he couldn’t ignore, hide, or repair.
Fuck-fuck-fuck
, Kiwi thought—his fluency in mainland expletives had made huge leaps in just two weeks. Kiwi glanced around the World and considered ditching the vacuum in a different hallway to distance himself from the truly alarming sound it was making, a
g-r-r-r
like the prelude to fire or explosion. A group of Catholic schoolgirls in mauve-and-navy-blue checkerboard skirts froze in front of the Vesuvius Blast Off, just outside the mock-up of a charred Italian village; they began to scream, one after the other like bells tolling, their braids and faces bright spots of fever among the waxy Pompeian mannequins.

“Sorry, children!” Kiwi Bigtree waved at them from inside a cloud of smoke. “It’s my first day!” He’d used this “first day” excuse at least three times hourly since his actual start date two and a half weeks before.

Vijay didn’t know how to fix the vacuum either. He knelt and touched the vacuum cleaner’s bag sorrowfully, as if it were the belly of a crippled horse, and Kiwi felt that in a different epoch he and Vijay could have been El Paso ranch hands together:
Vijay shoots the horse and romances all the saloon prostitutes, and I am the wussy sidekick. Yes—in the
movie I am the ranch hand slated for death in a midnight raid; I jump into a barrel of rattlesnakes or small cactuses or something, trying to escape, a bullet makes a hole in my hat, the crowd loves it …

“Hey, did you hear me, Margie?” Vijay was staring up at him. “I said, just tell Carl. He’s not going to fire you.”

Kiwi’s manager was a baby-faced young man named Carl Jenks. Carl Jenks was thirty-seven years old, his oldest sister taught astronomy to undergraduates at Dartmouth College, he himself had a master’s degree in some undisclosed discipline—he’d offer these facts to anyone who approached him, like a caterer with a tray of bitter hors d’oeuvres. He was always reading fantasy books with orcs and orc princesses on the cover. (Why did these orc princesses have breasts like human women? Kiwi wanted to ask someone. Was that really likely?) In short, Carl was the sort of mainland nerd with whom even Kiwi, with a rare social intuition, knew better than to ally himself. Carl listened to Kiwi’s apologies with an expression of mild distaste; one thick finger was folded in his paperback book. He was wearing his high school ring, a Florida ring, an ugly garnet stone with a turd shape engraved on it—a manatee, the high school mascot—which caused Kiwi to look down at his own naked, knucklesome fingers in alarm.
That’s the kind of wedding I want
, Kiwi thought:
to a
school.
No, to a mainland
academy.

“Has anybody ever told you, you have a beautiful smile?” Carl Jenks’s tone made Kiwi think of iridescent acids. “What’s so funny? You think it’s hilarious to break World equipment that costs more than your weekly salary?”

“No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking of something.”

“How exciting. Let’s hear it.”

“I was thinking that I’d like to enroll in high school here. To go to college.”

“School. Right. How old are you, fifteen? Sixteen?”

Kiwi straightened to his full height of six one. “I’ll be eighteen on September fifth, sir.”

“Ah. You’re a dropout and we hired you?”

Kiwi shook his head. “Homeschooled. But not really officially … I mean, we didn’t keep in the best touch with the LCPS Board. I assume I will have to take some, you know, some tests before they let me sign up …”

Kiwi was really hoping that Carl Jenks might clue him in as to who “they” might be.

“Well, gosh, I never would have guessed. You seem like an absolutely brilliant scholar. You speak like an orator. Look at that hair. I thought you were a professor emeritus. Ohkaaay, so let’s review—you broke the vacuum. What is this, your first week? Your
third
week. Terrific. Keep up the good work, Bigtree.”