Swamplandia! (15 page)

That may have been the case, but once these birds got to Swamplandia! it was hard not to take their presence personally. Bundles of feathers quivered all along the Pit walls and the tramway railings, sprouting bright doll’s eyes and talons as you drew closer. The flock of them watched over our doings like disinterested angels; at that point the buzzards probably knew more than I did about my sister’s nighttime activities. They saw more of her than I did.

“We are in love, Ava,” she told me one night while we were brushing
our teeth. “We’re practically married.” Her face in the mirror seemed so sad. “When he left me tonight, Ava? It was terrible. It hurts worse than when a Seth bites you! It’s like the opposite of that feeling—like an unlatching. You know what I mean?”

I shook my head. I did not know. Nods weren’t going to come cheap anymore. If she wanted a nod, she’d have to do better than her easy, lazy invocation of “love.”

“Is it like being hungry?”

“Not really … maybe a little. It’s hard to explain. You know how light-headed you get when you don’t eat?”

“Sure. You feel bad.” I licked a pea of toothpaste off my finger. “Starved. About ready to eat Spaghetti Surprise.” Spaghetti Surprise was a simple equation for indigestion, invented by Mom: noodles tossed like a blond wig over all your leftovers. Noodles as a culinary disguise for gross, inedible root vegetables: surprise! In a trash can this dish was raccoon kryptonite; even Grandpa couldn’t finish it.

“Hey, remember when Kiwi goes, ‘Forget the cheese, Mom, you should grate antacids over these noodles,’ how hard she laughed …?”

“I don’t want to talk about Mom tonight, Ava, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We were talking about my boyfriend.”

Ossie made her voice shiny, doing her best impression of the mainland girls’ gossip:

“… and people think a ghost is just air but Louis is
heavy
, Ava. There’s so much to carry—he gave me his whole life …

“… his death, too.” She touched his shirt pocket and shivered a little. She felt cold, she said. Her heart, her vocal cords, they’d gone cold.

“I won’t feel warm again until my boyfriend comes back.”

I stared at her with the toothbrush in my mouth. Was she crazy? She was crazy—I hardly needed to ask the question. It was 80 degrees in our room. I tugged at my hair with both hands and watched her performing hygiene in the mirror. My sister didn’t
look
possessed—we were both wearing the same ankle socks and the striped pajamas that we wore to bed every night. Ossie had a green freckle of toothpaste on her upper lip, her hair was pulled into a high ponytail for sleep purposes, her cheeks were sunburned, she looked pretty and dumb with her same big-eyed, ostrichy features, and all these outside things were
so as-ever and ordinary that I wanted to scream at her:
You are faking, you are lying! There is no such thing as your dredgeman
.

“You know who
I
miss? I miss our brother. I miss Mom. I don’t miss some invisible
boyfriend
. That’s …” But the words I tried to stick to the knot I felt all drifted away.

I told myself that I didn’t believe in ghosts at all, or at least not with the ardor of my sister, but at night the huge, paperwhite moths flew up to hit or kiss their wings against our bedroom window screens and even the tiniest rasp made me want to cry out.

T
he employees of the World of Darkness got paid on a biweekly basis. On his third Friday in Loomis County, Kiwi queued up outside a small office catty-corner to the Jaws, waiting to ask a question about his paycheck. He whistled the new hit single “Haters Will Hemorrhage Blood!” (Incredibly, this turned out to be a love song. It had a violin in it. Very popular that year, Vijay informed him, at area proms.) Kiwi undid a triple knot on his shoelace that had been bugging him for weeks, which felt as satisfying as solving a crime. A bunch of kids were shrieking as they slid down the Tongue.

“We love the World!” an entire family screamed in unison—this was the catchphrase from the World of Darkness commercials. People liked to scream it down the slide from the top of the Tongue, as if to confirm via sonar that they were at the location they’d seen advertised on their TV screen. Kiwi craned around to watch their descent. The mom and tiny daughter were wearing matching skirted yellow bathing suits and foam Whalehead hats. Mere seconds after they vanished inside the Leviathan ride, another family appeared at the top of the slide, their wide buttocks pancaked and drawn upward by the cushioned ruby pads.

Watching people board the ride and get released down the chute was like watching an eerie factory assembly line. Real whales, Kiwi had to believe, were less orderly but more expedient about their consumption
of plankton. There were no lines winding around outside their great teeth, no hand stamps and tickets; the real whales just opened wide and destroyed.

At the apex of the Tongue, the ride operators came running out like bandits to pluck the eyeglasses and rings and wristwatches from the startled riders; you couldn’t wear these things into the deep inner pools of the Leviathan. You couldn’t have heart arrhythmias, spinal injuries, psychoses. You couldn’t have a baby growing inside you, either—not if you wanted to plunge headlong into the Jacuzzi steams of the Leviathan! No pregnancies! No stowaway futures! A chubby new hire in a tight
WORLD OF DARKNESS SECURITY
shirt was escorting a pregnant woman in a pink-and-blue-striped bathing suit down a side stairway just now. “Twins” he mouthed to Kiwi when their eyes met across the long hallway, rolling his eyes, as if he had just caught a nervy shoplifter.

“My mother had a pregnancy that turned into a cancer!” Kiwi shouted back to him, confident that over the roar of the Tongue’s salivary jets he would not be understood. Then he pushed a fist to his mouth, stunned. Really, what the hell was wrong with him? (She wanted a baby and she got cancer instead! Isn’t that
funny
…) The new hire grinned, shook his head. He waved good-bye before disappearing down the stairs with his ward.

The full length of the Leviathan experience, a.k.a. “Digestion,” took twenty-three minutes. Lost Souls dropped seventy-six feet from an elevated chute into the first of a series of domed funnels, pools, and bowls meant to replicate the twists and turns of a labyrinthine whale’s stomach. Kiwi had never been on the Leviathan ride himself, in part because it would have required changing into a bathing suit, in semipublic. And Kiwi, according to his first paycheck, couldn’t afford a bathing suit, or any suit. Or food.

This office had a marmalade-tinted window that opened onto a dark, box-strewn artery of the World. Kiwi wondered how the payroll guy could stand to exist here. You could go a full day inside this part of the Leviathan without seeing the sun. Kiwi made sure to take breaks with Vijay on the roof. Some days he’d go running into the parking lot at noon, nostalgic for clouds and shadows. Finally the door swung open.

“Good morning! How can I help you, ma’am?” the payroll manager asked. He had the crew cut and the saturnine blue eyes of an ex-marine.
He introduced himself as Scott, and Kiwi thought he looked crisp and official compared to the grunts on the World’s payroll.

Kiwi hadn’t cut his hair in a while; it hung in glossy waves over his ears.

“My name is Kiwi Bigtree,” he said politely, and when that didn’t help he tugged at the puffy brimstone design on his collar and added, with a note of quiet apology, “I’m, uh, I’m a guy?”

“I’m sorry?” Scott the payroll manager said. He was linking paper clips into a chain that ran across his desk. Scott was alternating colors: blue clip, red clip, green clip, white clip, repeat. They hung over the side of his desk and trailed into his wastepaper bin, swaying hypnotically.
How much does Scott get paid per hour?
Kiwi wondered.

“Well, you see …” Kiwi realized that he was unconsciously craning his neck to display his sizable, indubitably male Adam’s apple. Evolutionary psychology: he’d read about this. A vestigial, animal impulse to impress his superior. In fact the payroll manager was just a kid himself, a twenty-something in a glittery red World jacket, his black-and-magenta dress socks peeking beneath his ordinary slacks. He had a framed degree from Volmer State, economics BA, 3.2.

(Later, on the rooftop, Kiwi would try to gauge the weirdness of his encounter with the payroll manager by relaying it to Vijay: “I wish you had seen that jacket they make him wear … bro. He went to college! I saw his degree. Do you think he is embarrassed to be wearing that?”

“You think you know everything about everyone? Please. You don’t know shit about shit, Margaret. Maybe the payroll manager
loves
to dress up like in that jacket. Maybe that’s the reason he even went to college—maybe he, like, can’t wait to put it on in the morning. Maybe he sets a fucking
alarm
, bro …”)

“There’s been some mistake here.” Kiwi smoothed the check on Scott’s desk; according to the computer-generated invoice that accompanied it, Kiwi had worked three sixty-hour weeks inside the Leviathan and yet he somehow owed the Carpathian Corporation, the World’s parent company, $182.57.

“Well.” He wheeled his pencil around the well of one freckled ear. “Well! That’s what I’m here for, Mr. Bigtree. Let’s do the tally together.”

Lunches, those Jumbo Magma sodas that only left you thirstier and
the eye-watering Hellspawn Hoagies? They weren’t free and neither was his dormitory rent.

Water, AC, electricity, et cetera, mumbled the payroll guy without looking up at Kiwi’s face. Instead he stared sternly down at his computer keyboard, as if he were trying to draft a letter with no hands.

Seventy dollars had been deducted for his flame-emblazoned World of Darkness uniform, Scott informed him.

“Wait, they made me pay for this shirt?” Kiwi stared down at his chest, which glowed like a barbecue coal. “Is that hopefully against some law?”

This uniform was starchy, ill-fitting. It had a huge puffy flame exploding out of it. “Like a blister,” Kiwi told Scott. Kiwi was no expert, but it seemed like the World of Darkness employees should be the ones receiving extra money to wear these suits. Yvans liked to jog around the ladies in his outfit and blow into an invisible whistle. “Margaret!” he’d shout. “Look! I am the referee for a girls’ soccer game in hell!”

Forty dollars had been deducted as well, a “processing” fee for his ID badge and locker assignment.

The lock on his locker cost him $5.02.

Kiwi was paying city and state taxes now.

He was also, unwittingly and against his wishes, saving for retirement.

“Oh,” Kiwi said, and “Thank you.” Terrific. He smoothed the cotton flames on his seventy-dollar shirt with the flats of his hands and left the office.
I’m turning out to be a pretty shitty Redeemer here
, he thought. He hadn’t yet made a penny to send to Swamplandia!

W
hen the Chief called us on the kitchen telephone to see how we were doing, I said, “Fine, Dad.” And when he asked me about the Seths, I said the same. Everything was fine, everyone was gone. The park was still “temporarily closed” with green tarps drawn over all the airboats and picnic tables. The park was all ours. Without a show to perform, the whole island had become our backstage. The Seths grinned up at us, our only audience. One afternoon Osceola and I fed cookies and whipped cream to the Seths to see what would happen. Nothing happened. I wrote
M-O-M?
on the Ouija wood, wishing for dark vegetables, punishments.

A few times I walked out to the original gator hole. The baby Seth rode in my coveralls with her fingerling jaws taped up, a little coal in my pocket. My face in the water looked ugly, I thought, bulbous and freckled like some red-spotted frog. Even the gator hole was derelict that summer—algae covered its surface. No mama gator and no hatchlings. Unmenaced, all the fish inside the hole had grown huge and lippy. The bass turned in a thick circle, a clock of gloating life.
You guys think you’re safe? The buzzards are going to come and eat you next, you stupid fish
. This time when I ate the saw-grass buds I got a bad stomachache.

Osceola was barely talking to me. I’d trot after her toward the Last Ditch until she turned and shouted at me to leave her alone. One time she sprayed insect repellent at me.

“Ava,
please
. Quit spying on me! He won’t come if you’re here.”

“I can’t visit the ditch? It’s a free country. Hey, slow down!”

But I’d stop at the end of the boardwalk, frozen in place. “Just tell me, Ossie—who are you going to see?”

One night I finally made her crazy enough to turn and face me. It was twilight, and we were halfway down the shadowy path behind the Gator Pit, my flashlight beam chasing hers along the sticks and rocks.

“I’m going to see Louis Thanksgiving, Ava. His ghost. My boyfriend. That’s who. One of the crew of dredgemen who never made it to the Gulf.”

“Yeah, right.” The lamps glowed. “Your
boyfriend.
” Saw grass bent westward on either side of the boardwalk. Neither of us moved.

“So what happened, exactly?” I finally asked. “Will you tell it to me?”

“What? Tell you what?”

“How it … how the Dredgeman became a ghost?”

“Okay,” she said after a long pause. “But it’s a secret. And it’s not a happy story, Ava. Obviously. You sure you’re ready? Sit,” she said, and the lights seemed to tremble with her voice.

I thought she sounded a little relieved, and I wonder now if the Dredgeman’s Revelation wasn’t also a kind of burden, a weight that my sister needed my help to carry. His death story seemed very heavy to me, in whatever unit death stories get measured.

The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss; but on the dredge barge he preferred to think of himself as a profession. For the past six months, he’d spent each day and half the night pushing deep into the alien interior of the Florida swamp, elbow-to-elbow with twelve other crewmen, the “muck rat” employees of the Model Land Company. They were the human engine of a floating dredge, a forty-foot barge accompanied by two auxiliary boats—the cook shack and, for sleeping, the houseboat. The Model Land Company was digging a canal through the central mangle of the swamp and the dredge clanged toward the Gulf amid blasts of smoke and whining cables, tearing up roots and bedrock and excavating hundreds of thousands of gallons of bubbling soil. In sunlight and in moonlight, everybody on the barge had to work under billowing capes of mosquito netting—and the
weave of that finely stitched protection was what the word “dredgeman” felt like to Louis. Like soft armor, a flexible screen. As a dredgeman, Louis was the same as anyone on deck. And on the floating machine, in this strange and humid swamp, every yellow morning was like a new skin that you could slip into.