Swamplandia! (17 page)

“She’s stately, you bastards,” the cook had said, correcting for gossip.

So there was no woman around to tell Louis T. that he had become, quite suddenly, a handsome man. This had not been a foregone conclusion: in childhood, in Clarinda, he had been a bland, doughy creature. The only things that had foreshadowed this turn were Louis’s hazel eyes and the promising size of him. Louis T. wouldn’t know that he was in possession of this beauty until after his death, when he first appeared to my sister inside a pool of water and she told him so.

The dredge clanked downstream with the dipper handle swinging. For the first time in his short life, Louis had real friends, all sorts walking alongside him into the long glade—calm men, family men, bachelors, ex-preachers, hellions, white men, black men, the childen of Indians and freed slaves; Adams, who had kicked a coral snake away from Louis’s naked big toe and saved his life with a casual grunt; ex-army boys who followed the deer into damp hammocks; drunks who took potshots at the queer golden cats that stalked the perimeter of their camp, and missed; gamblers who took all of Louis’s money with a pair of jacks and then gave (some of) it back to him at the day’s end; all of them, every man was Louis’s friend. When there was light in the sky they waded forward. They surveyed the old section lines of the national forest during the workweek, and during the weekends they “rambled,” as LaVerl, the buck sergeant said: shooting, fishing, sometimes even gator hunting along the nests that filled the unused railway bed. The cook told Louis to collect two dozen leathery eggs from these alligator nests, and then he made the whole crew a dinner of fishy-tasting omelettes.

When the light expired, they slept. White-tailed deer sprinted like
loosed hallucinations between the tree islands. Sometimes Louis fell asleep watching them from the deck and it worried him that he couldn’t pinpoint when the dream began: deer rent the mist with their tiny hooves, a spotted contagion of dreams galloping inside Louis. There were bad fires that blurred the world; in the summer months you could see smoke rising almost daily, wherever lightning struck the pure peat beds.

Louis heard from the other surveyors that men all over the country were “hunting a week for one day’s work.” Sometimes when he thought about this he felt so lucky that it almost made him sick to his stomach. Happiness could be felt as a pressure, too, Louis realized, more hard-edged and solid than longing, even. In Clarinda he had yearned for better in a formless way, desire like a gray milk churn; in fact he’d been so poor in Iowa that he couldn’t settle on one concrete noun to wish for—a real father? A girl in town? A thousand acres? A single friend? In contrast, this new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it. Well, Louis Thanksgiving determined that he was not going to lose it, and he was never going back. The Depression was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He had a crisp stack of dollars, a uniform with his initials stitched in raspberry thread on the pocket, pig and grits in his belly.

Elated, wanting never to leave, he signed another contract, this time to dredge a canal clear across the swamp to the Gulf Coast for the Model Land Company. They were going to drain the swamp and develop and sell it, and they needed a team of skilled muck rats to do it.

But nobody had explained to Louis just how deep into the swamp they would have to go now, and how
quickly
their bosses at the Model Land headquarters in St. Augustine, Florida, would expect the crew to drain the floodplains with a single bucket arm—a Herculean task for any machine, especially for the ancient and fumey Model Land dredge, which made the government vessel look like some futuristic spaceship by comparison.

The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, and spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through
twenty-four feet
of peat before hitting stabilizing rock.

And the crew had changed, too—none of the CCC boys had signed
on with him. LaVerl was going back to his family’s horse farm in Savannah, and the lone Indian on the crew, Euphon Tigertail, who had survived subhuman conditions while working on the Panama Canal, decided that he couldn’t work in the swamp any longer. He’d been undone by minuscule foes, the chizzywinks, and the deer flies. “You sure
you
want to be a dredgeman for this outfit, Lou?” Euphon had whispered, both of them staring at the hulk of the dredge. Its digger arm was as tall as a house and sunk deep into a quagmire. A pair of enormous cast-steel feet gave the contraption a drunken, donkey-legged appearance. The stack slumped toward the saw-grass prairie, which looked like a drowned and shimmering field of wheat. For a second Louis thought of the distant Auschenbliss pastures and shuddered.

“You’d be better off gum tapping in the turpentine woods. It’s all soup doodly in those prairies, it ain’t like the pine rocklands. There’s nothing piney about it. No elevation, Lou. No lakes or trees or breaks. It’s just saw grass till you want to scream. You won’t have a dry day again for months. You’ll go in there and never come out.”

How could you make a mistake when you had one option? Louis felt that his hellish past exempted him from all regrets. But he was humbled by his friends’ defection—and a little shocked, hearing their complaints about the last months. Ultimately, Louis felt an almost romantic embarrassment, listening to the grizzled guys talk—it turned out that the same nights and routes that he recalled as heavenly had been, to the other CCC men, “godawful months, a nightmare” and “the valley of the shadow—only full of mosquitoes!” When the dredge anchor hit at Chokoloskee their whole CCC fraternity came loose like a knot, and he and Euphon and LaVerl all parted at the dock like strangers.

His first job on the dredge was described by the splinter-toothed captain as “involved”: he had to dive overboard with a knife clenched in his teeth and cut the slimy ropes of cattails away from the dredge’s wheel and shaft. “Removing detritus” was what the captain called this labor, which tasted like brine and sour blood. Dee-tree-tus. A name from a book, Louis T. figured as he removed the knife from his mouth and spit copper. He had split his lower lip. Five times his first day he’d had to jump overboard into that stinking gator marinade and hack at the weedy ropes.

“What do I do if there’s a gator?” Louis asked the first night at supper.

“You put that knife between the blamed scaly-back’s eyes, he’ll lay offa you. Or get the base of his neck, sever his spinal cord.” Ferguson, one of the cranemen, had gone gator hunting with some white glade crackers once and now claimed to be the crocodile expert.

“Don’tcha go for the eyes themselves, though. The crocs can retract those.”

He held up two gnarled fingers and jerked them back into his fist.

“Thanks for the advice,” said Louis. He imagined screaming underwater and the tiny needles of salt against his gums and eyeballs. Louis, curiously modest, refused to strip before diving. He jumped in with his pants and cotton underwear on and kicked beneath the dross of slimy marine plants. His legs floated like two planks behind him, every muscle tensed, ready to jerk away from an alligator’s teeth.

The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through
twenty-four feet
of peat before hitting stabilizing rock!

Louis T. wasn’t a particularly quick learner, but he was strong and docile and within one month he was doing all sorts of jobs on the dredge: trimming greenish fat off the pork in the cookhouse, helping the sweating firemen to keep up steam. The men looked like beekeepers in their cotton gloves and mosquito veils, their lungs filling with black mangrove smoke from the smudge fires they burned constantly to keep the insects away.

“Line up, boys! Take your medicine,” the cap said, pressing indigo flecks of charcoal and sulfur into Louis’s cupped hands. Every time you asked what they were for you got a different answer: ear infections, hay fever, styes, skin lesions. Gideon Tom said the pills were placebos, although Louis noticed that he still queued up to receive them like a good Catholic boy in line for communion.

“Ahhh,” Gideon said, extending his chaw-stained tongue.

“Stick out your palm, you jackass, I’m not your damn mother!” the cap howled. If the pills were making a difference, it was hard to imagine how bad you could go without them. Men held their fallen orangey scabs up to the sun and cataloged them like entomologists. Week 1:
Men couldn’t sleep for the bug bites; scratching at them, and fending off new ones, was an eight-hour endeavor. The insects had been a chronic irritation on the CCC barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they felt pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men’s own thirst. Their dense bodies put a fur on the steel hull of the Model Land dredge. More mosquitoes rose out of the cattails at dusk like tiny vampires. Theodore Glyde, the dredge’s dour engineer, grumbled that he was working back-to-back shifts on the dredge, quitting the deck at sundown to work a second job as a bug killer. Week 2: Everybody’s legs acquired the cracked sheen of cockroach wings. Louis, who had hosted much more colorful bruises back in Auschenbliss country, poured a little vial of alcohol over his shins and returned to work. Back on the CCC barge, they had never been more than twelve miles from a port with a doctor, but now they had entered an unmapped part of the swamp where wounds had the opportunity to fester. Week 3: Sores began to ooze. Of all the dredgemen, only Louis T. was indefatigably happy. He volunteered to haul water off-shift and shared his larded fried eggs with whomever.

“Louis, are you on a diet or what?” Gideon Tom grumbled; he was leaning against the starboard railing next to Louis, gobbling down a plate of Louis’s eggs with a guilt-racked expression. “You should eat, kid. It’s not good to share the way you do out here. What the heck are you always staring at?”

“The landscape.”

“The landscape!” Gid snorted. His broad nose wrinkled as it often did when someone said something he didn’t like, as if he were trying to sniff out what was wrong with their reply. “There’s something … something
womanly
about watching that, Lou.”

Louis grinned over at Gideon Tom, shrugged; even the other men’s ribbing made him happy. Daybreak, sunset: he liked to watch the red sun pour through the tiny doors of his mosquito screen until his blue eyes filled. Behind the screen he had the face of a man in church.

“Hey, Gid?” he asked his friend when they were baling wastewater later, the sun a pinhead of color behind the green trees. “Gid … are you anxious to get back?”

Warily his friend turned to him. “Get back where?”

And what Louis really meant was
Anywhere
. Back to land. Back to
themselves, back to their names without jobs, back to any motionless, dirty place—or back to either of the twin poles that the swamp road they’d been digging was meant to connect. He had heard of hydrophobes, and he wondered if there was another word like that, for him. Or for what he was becoming. Terraphobia? It was a fear of the rooted, urban world, of cars and towns and years on calendars. He wouldn’t be the dredgeman there, that was for sure. Sometimes, at night, Louis thought in a dreamy way about becoming the dredge’s saboteur—plucking parts like flowers from the engine room. It was only a thought, and a crazy one; but the closer they got to the Gulf the sicker he felt. His sweats got worse when he pictured the dawn horizon solidifying—a sudden break in the mangroves that revealed the swallowing saltwater ocean, the big success for which the bosses of the Model Land Company had hired the dredge and her crew.

“Jesus, Louis, you’re just like what’s-his-name? Greek guy. Narcissus! Just making puppy eyes down at your face in that bucket.”

“Sorry. I was getting a little … homesick, I guess. So you’re excited for the end? For the Gulf side of things?”

“Fool, of course I am!” Gideon laughed, pouring the black water over the railing onto the head of a small and outraged alligator. “Am I excited for a paycheck and a woman and a bed? Am I excited to climb out of this soggy hell and get a pair of pants that’s not infested with forty kinds of insects, and get a pair of shoes where I can’t count my toes? Goddamn, Lou, I’ll be singing ‘Ave Marias’! I’ll be diving for land!”

Louis spent the morning of his death beating himself at hand after hand of solitaire with Gideon Tom’s faded deck. He was off-duty, and free to ruminate. He did not have any headaches that day or dark presentiments. At noon he felt a little hungry, ate some ibis jerky, considered rowing over to the houseboat to bathe. He lit sticks of dynamite and lobbed them into the marl, watched as the white-tailed deer shot off through the elevated hammocks. For every ten hours of work, the canal grew eighty feet longer; they were still months away from the Gulf and the end of their contract.

Louis T. was sitting on the starboard side of the dredge barge with his bare feet swinging, his calves hot against the metal rail, watching a pair of otters mock-dueling in the cattails. When next they appeared
they were lovers, their bodies turning in a silly ballet, black volutes beneath the lily pads and the purple swamphens. He was maybe twenty-five feet from the engine room when a roar like a tidal wave rolled forward and nearly knocked him loose from the deck. He turned and watched flames engulf the roof of the engine room in one spectacular red spasm; within seconds a thick smoke swallowed the entire port side of the deck and shrouded acres of the sunlit saw-grass prairie to the southeast.

What Louis saw next came filtered redly through one slitted eye:

A stencil of a man—Ira, Louis thought sleepily, or maybe Jackson—went flailing off the fantail. Louis heard him hit his head on the way down; another man jumped in after him. To save him, Louis thought, proud to have finally made the connection. Foggily, it occurred to him that he should perhaps do a thing, too. This fog seemed to have penetrated his brain from the outer world, because the whole deck of the dredge was lost in a roar of escaping steam.
The boiler head has burst
, Louis thought, and felt his pulse jump. That’s what shook the deck. He pushed himself up and started to make his way toward the smoking engine room, where the other men were already hauling water.