Swamplandia! (12 page)

On weeknights, he could hear fat Leonard’s heavy breath coming from a dormitory off the kitchen. His snores came in fusillades, once causing Kiwi to jump up and ding his head on the microwave door, and yet Kiwi felt grateful for even this noise, and for all the small and tolerable irritations of dorm living. Leonard Harlblower was a park greeter, a loud, obnoxious young man who would probably go through life disliked by everyone he met and never know it. Sometimes Kiwi would look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror they shared and think:
Oh my God, I pray that I am not a Leo
. Large Leonard, via some athletic self-deception, believed himself to be the most popular employee in the World. He read everyone’s behavior backward to fit this thesis: Carl Jenks’s open contempt for him became a convivial respect, Kiwi’s queasy dislike was shy sycophancy, Yvans’s insults became “Caribbean banter,” and Nina Suárez and her girlfriends’ eye-rolling avoidance of him was just “those bitches playing hard to get.” “Ladies love Leo” was his auxiliary hypothesis.

Even Chief Bigtree—an “indigenous swamp dweller” who was actually a white guy descended from a coal miner in small-town Ohio, a man who sat on lizards in a feathered headdress—even the Chief seemed like a genius of self-awareness next to this kid Leonard. Leonard Harlblower was always slapping Kiwi too hard on the back and demanding to be called “Leo Nard-on” and cracking up at his own misogynist puns, many of which Kiwi would later hear repeated on TV reruns of the canceled sitcom
It’s a Man’s Grand World
.

Oh my God, you are not even an original asshole! You are a plagiarist of assholes
.

Kiwi thought Leonard had the worst job in the World—he had to dress up in a whale suit in hundred-degree weather and shake the small children’s hands with his flippers, which were made of a hard bubbly plastic and about the size of car doors; the whale head alone must have
weighed ten pounds. (The irony here was that Leo’s real-life head was also huge, the size of a moai; Vijay sniggered that the foam domehead was probably a snug fit.) You half-expected sweat to come pouring out of the whale’s eyeholes.

Kiwi had a PO box now, a mainland address, and he sent away for brochures from the northern colleges. He began to receive pamphlets in the mail with fall leaves and brunettes in toothpaste-colored turtlenecks, modest castles behind them. These were the New England colleges where he could get a liberal arts education. He had taken the number 23 bus to the public library a few times and checked out a stack of outdated books about the college application process. He’d left a message for a woman named Jennifer Davies at the LCPS about enrolling for the fall, and written out a short autobiography that he planned to read to her when she called him back on the World of Darkness pay-phone number.

Kiwi’s plans to save the park—or at least to forestall bankruptcy, to keep the family afloat until August or even September—these plans were off to a sluggish start. He had an envelope of twenties, but it wasn’t his salary—he had stolen this money from the Chief. This theft had been easy to justify: as an investment, or an early draw on his inheritance, or as his salary for years of unpaid tribal labor. Rationalizations buzzed inside him as he slid the bills out.
Owed me
, these shrill voices in Kiwi droned on and on, bees swaying in columns in the dark room, until he’d pocketed even the change. Pennies. A lintlike currency, value that collected in corners. He swabbed pennies out of the Chief’s wallet and trouser pockets. People thought the worst robbers stole the most, whole vaults. But it was the smallest denomination that you stole, he wrote later in the Field Notes, that was the real measure of your greed.

Kiwi shook out the envelope: $22.12 now. His thumbs found and pressed the two pennies; for some reason this action made him think of Ava and Ossie. One, two. He wanted to save for the girls’ college tuition. A doctor or a psychiatrist or something for Ossie. He had drawn up a budget to address the Chief’s deficits; Ossie would of course get priority. But given that he had a job flossing a whale’s teeth with a sudsy rope and the lowest salary allowed by law, things were not looking inspiring. Kiwi took out the repayment calendar he had drawn up on Swamplandia! and flipped through the weeks ahead of him, erasing
the naive numbers, subtracting his state taxes, making adjustments based on phantom increases that he planned to receive to his tiny salary.

So he hadn’t sent any checks home yet, but he had swiped a stack of greeting cards from the World of Darkness gift store. “I’m Having a Whale of a Time!” read one: a bug-eyed black woman in her seventies or eighties was caught on camera sliding into the Leviathan, her blue wig a full inch above her head. “It’s Hell Without You!” read another, this one of a very confused-looking girl in a cherry-pink party dress descending into a hole.

Dear Ava—

Dear Ossie—

He went on accumulating beginnings.

N
ow that the Chief was gone on his business trip and we’d temporarily closed Swamplandia!, we girls were the queens of the island. The Seths followed the sun around the Pit, the moon continued to whir. I could sleep into the deep yolk of any afternoon, wear my dirty pajamas to the Pit, stow away on the Library Boat and read murder mysteries until four in the morning. I could watch the World of Darkness commercials with the volume cranked. All this possibility made me dizzy with a strange kind of grief. I wasn’t sleeping right. On the nights that Ossie didn’t come home, I dragged a blanket down to the sofa and left our whole house lit up like a ship.

One Saturday, four or five days after the Chief’s depature, in the late red light of June, a black shape appeared on the westernmost edge of our park. At first it was just a mote that I glimpsed between the bayhead hammocks, floating in the blue eye of the island like a speck in jelly. I blinked and rubbed my eyes and the blot stayed put. Then Ossie said that she could see the blot, too.

Ossie and I were a mile from the house, walking the limits of the touristed park. After the Last Ditch the trail became impenetrable palmetto scrub. All day we had been hunting for melaleuca saplings.

Water once flowed out of Lake Okeechobee without interruption, or interference from men. Aspiring farmers wanted to challenge her blue hegemony. All that rich peat beneath the lakes was going to waste!
Melaleuca quinquenervia
was an exotic invasive, an Australian tree imported to suck the Florida swamp dry. If you were a swamp kid, you were weaned on the story of the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse, these men who had flown over the swamp in tiny Cessnas and sprinkled melaleuca seeds out of restaurant salt and pepper shakers. Exotic invasives, the “strangler species” threatened our family long before the World of Darkness. The Army Corps of Engineers had planted thousands of melaleuca trees in the 1940s as part of their Drainage Project, back when the government thought it was possible to turn our tree islands into a pleated yellowland of crops. I was raised to be suspicious of the Army Corps of Engineers, with good reason. The dikes and levees that the Army Corps had recommended for flood control had turned the last virgin mahogany stands into dust bowls; in other places, wildfire burned the peat beds down to witchy fingers of lime.

Now the melaleucas had formed an “impermeable monoculture.” That meant a forest with just one kind of tree in it. Most of the gladesmen had long ago abandoned the dream of farming their islands. You could sum up the response of the Army Corps of Engineers and the swamp developers in one word, said our dad: “Oops!” Forest fires raged and burned the swamp down to peat. Frosts came and a man could break his knife trying to slice through a glade tomato. By 1950, the dream of drainage was largely dead. The Army Corps of Engineers changed its objective from draining the “wasteland” of the swamp islands to saving them. Unfortunately for my family, the melaleucas were still root-committed to the old plan, the drainage scheme. They swallowed fifty acres a day. Back in May, Kiwi had discovered a punky infestation behind the Gator Pit: saplings the width of mop handles. The Bigtree men swung axes into them, bled them, flooding the world with the smell of camphor. We kept cutting them down, and the earth kept raising them. It was a haywire fertility, like a body making cancer.

Why, the swamp is writing her own suicide note!
A visiting botanist looked down and said this to me once on an airboat ride, running a thumb around the pinky-gold rim of his glasses as if he were extraordinarily pleased with this phrase. We’d taken a team of five Corps engineers, hydrologists, and botanists out to a hammock behind West Lake where the new forest had come in so thick that “a chubby wood rat couldn’t get through it.” The afternoon was full of these “Stanley,
look!” kinds of comments from the scientists. Like our dereliction was a zoo for them.

“Fifty trees to an acre, my
God
” was how Stanley the stunned hydrologist summed up the problem; he’d taken a photograph for a journal article.

“Do you folks believe in God?” my dad had asked. “Because that’s who I’m praying to now. I’m through waiting on you people.” The Chief said that the Army Corps had a funny amnesia about the fact that our crises—the wildfires, the melaleuca stands, the fatal flooding in the gravity canals—had each originated as a Corps blueprint.

“Die, melaleuca!” I’d been hollering all afternoon, swinging my paintbrush. Ossie was cutting the saplings down, and I was painting herbicide onto the stumps. We were tree warriors, I told Ossie. We had come to the Last Ditch for a massacre.

“This is a pretty boring massacre,” said my sister. “When is lunch?” I was stirring the bucket of vitreous poisons when I looked up and saw the shape: something black, liquefying and resolving behind the reddish grain of the pines.

It took us five minutes to get through the scrub. Spanish moss and pineapple-like bromeliads waved in tall curtains from the bay trees. The shape kept changing dimension on us between the trunks; I thought it might be a house of some kind. But how could a whole house wash up here?

“HELLO!” we both called into the Last Ditch.

“It’s a boat after all, Ava …,” my sister shouted, running ahead. But not a boat like we’d ever seen. It was a twenty-five- or twenty-six-foot vessel with a cuddy cabin and a maze of ropes that was in a process of solving itself, the pulleys lying on the stern where some knot had collapsed; a thin crane with rusting struts was attached to its bow. Its dipper bucket was thirty feet above us, like a dinosaur’s little yellow skull. Tall palms stretched around the latticed crane as if in competition. My sister punched straight through the willow heads and pulled me after her.

“Hello?” we asked, more quietly now.

“Ava!” said Ossie. “It’s a
dredge.
”

“Oh.” For some reason the word made my heart speed. Now that she’d found the name for it I saw immediately that Ossie was right—
this boat had a bucket and cables and a crane arm, presumably for bringing up the crumbling muck and digging a road or canal. We had black-and-white pictures of them hanging in our museum: The Dredge and Fill Campaign, 1886–1942.

Ossie was already moving toward it. The canal had swollen to seven or eight feet and twisted and hissed now like an unbungalowed snake; the recent rains would have driven it even higher. I guessed that the dredge would have continued on, too, but it had gotten hung up in the crooked pincers of the mangroves. Something about the angle of its entry made me think of a key that had been jammed hard into the wrong lock. Several buzzards sat on the dipper bucket. Once I noticed the birds I started to see them everywhere: one was slim-winged on one of the crane’s ladders. One was eating a squirrel on the hull. There was something canny and bald about their attention, their tiny wet eyes. I felt like these buzzards had been waiting here for us, for a long time.

Ossie didn’t seem to notice them; she was intent on reaching the boat. She took the first-moon-man leap over the canal and I followed. The deck was a dull, uneven black. Slick. We got the cuddy cabin door to open, which took a lot of one-two-three!ing and team wrenching. When the door came loose, colors flooded over us. I screamed, too, and covered my face with my arms, and if Ossie hadn’t caught me I might have fallen into the wedge of canal between the shoreline and the boat. In that second I knew that I’d been wrong this whole time: that my sister was psychic, that the whole world was haunted, and now a ghost was tuning itself like a luminous string above me. Then the ghost broke into particulates of wings.

“Calm down, dummy, it’s just a bunch of moths.”

Moths jumbled tunelessly above our heads, kaleidoscoping in this way that looked like visible music to me—something that would be immediately audible to an alligator or a raccoon but that we human Bigtrees couldn’t hear. Could my sister hear them? I wondered. She was picking a wedgie on the deck.

“Hear what, Ava?” She freed a tiny, beating moth from my bangs. Moths kept coming at us in unbelievable numbers. “My God,” she whispered, “there must be thousands of them in here!”

“More than that.”

“You heard somebody in the boat, Ava?”

“No, that’s why I was asking. I don’t hear anything.”

The cloud of moths drew their darker blues across the pale egg of the sky. Now I felt stupid. Nothing about these cake-icing blues suggested ghosts or monsters.

“Well, only one way to know for sure. Ready, Ava?”

“You bet I’m ready.” Wings painted our faces. “For what?”

Ossie yanked me into the cabin, sunlight flashing everywhere as we pulled at the door; a second later the moths were outside a dark porthole, and we were inside the machine.

Inside the cabin of the dredge barge we found:

Flaking metal everywhere in these fantastic reds and greens;

The staring socket of a pole sticking straight out of the floor;

A box of lemon candies called Miss Callie’s Pixie Dust, which looked like the flavors of spinsterdom, yellow and soda brown;