Swamplandia! (18 page)

Louis held a hand to his face and found it came away sticky. Blood was trickling out of one of his eyes and the other didn’t like to open. Suddenly he felt tired, a terribly heavy tiredness.
I could fall asleep right here
, he thought. His own square face surprised him in the water below the barge; he had at some point pitched forward on the railing. His reflection blinked up at him, as if the boy below was trying to remember how they knew each other. The otters, he noticed, had vanished.

“Gideon needs a hospital!” Hector screamed. “He’s killed, he’s killed!”

Apparently Hector had forgotten the usual chronology of death and medicine as it worked on the mainland, Louis thought grimly—if Gid was killed then it was late now for the hospital. It was almost impossible to push through the wall of steam, and when he finally located the door to the engine room Louis found the scalded body of Gideon Tom. Gid was lying on the floor with his right hand wrapped around his throat. Dead, Louis thought—the steam from the exploded boiler and the still-burning fire must have seared his eyes and lungs. But then as Louis watched the hand began to
move
, massaging Gid’s black skin. His
eye opened like a blue crack of sky and his other hand pushed flat against the metal wall—and then, impossibly, he was standing up, staring abstractedly at Louis, half his face a sputtering blank. His mouth was moving but no words came. His jaw made convulsive chewing motions, and above this his right eye regarded the deck incuriously, full of a blue ancient calm.
The Mariner
, Louis thought—this line bubbled up to him from some long-forgotten event, a poetry recitation that the youngest Auschenbliss had given at a church assembly many winters ago.
The bright-eyed Mariner
 …

Somehow Gid had gotten upright and was now lurching toward them, trying to retch up smoke.
This is a bad miracle
, Louis thought as he watched Gid trying to move.
Go to him!
—but Louis was frozen, staring. Gideon took a step toward Louis and then said, with a grievous eloquence, “I believe my lungs are all burnt up, Louie. I do believe …,” before crumpling.

“A hos-pee-tal! A—”

“Goddamn you, Heck, shut up,” Louis said with the first true viciousness of his life. “Hos-pee-tal” sounded like an imbecile’s taunt. What place could they take Gid to? There were no places here. That was the point of the crew’s continued presence, that’s what they’d all been hired by the Modern Land Company to accomplish: to turn this morass into a real place. The swamp was a waste and men had built the machines to fix it.

Something was happening down below. The whole deck had begun to vibrate. Elsewhere the other cranemen were racing around, hauling water to put out the small fires that had spread now to the houseboat. Flames licked at the bleached planks of the cook shack. The smell of burning metal stung Louis’s lungs, throat. Lights rocketed up in the deep swamp like a July fireworks show, and then every bulb burned out at once—the governor belt on the steam engine must have broken, Louis thought, letting the engine run wild and burning out all the lights. This would be an interesting problem come nighttime, assuming everybody calmed down sufficiently to make repairs. The cattails hushed around the dredge, shushing each other and brushing close to the ship like alien observers. That’s what Louis remembered, the purple sky and the grasses winding upward—the world felt as though it were a bubble curving in on itself.

“Pop, pop,” Louis mumbled. Trees stood wide-armed in the river. He felt as though his thoughts were drifting loose from him and popping on the skeletal branches. Something or someone came crashing down onto the work deck on the stern of the dredge and Louis didn’t turn to look. The blood on his hands had become the blood in his brown hair, he noticed, the blood on his neck, on his dungaree jacket. Hector came to tell him that the backing drum was reeling in its cable; Hector’s scream had dropped into his shoes and now he was staring at Louis with a goggle-eyed, just-awakened look. He pointed at the engine room, where two coal lumps—two feet, Louis realized, Gideon’s boots—were sticking out. His legs were limp, and the soles of his shoes flopped outward from the heel in a heart shape. From the waist down he looked like a man relaxing on deck.

“Take his shoes off,” Louis said. “Please, goddamnit, just somebody take them off …,” but the other men stared at him and moved to give the flailing Louis space, as if afraid to get contaminated by his raving. Several of the crew had gathered now. Nobody knew what had caused the accident—corrosion, the captain speculated. He’d seen a two-inch rent in the boiler head. “It was Gid, it was Gid’s fault!” Hector said, then made the sign of the cross as if in apology to Gideon. “May he rest in peace,” he mumbled, staring down at Gid’s shoe soles.

As the men stood huddled on the starboard side of the barge, a now-familiar shape began to populate the sky: buzzards appeared and dotted the watery horizon in twos and threes, dozens more behind these. They moved so swiftly they looked like pure holes advancing through the air, a snowfall of inky holes. Talons began to hail down on Gid. The first batch dove and took Gid’s hat, tore at the buttoned collar of his shirt. Hector shot wildly at them and a bullet grazed the captain. “Put the gun away,” the cap screamed. “You’re liable to kill somebody …”

Everyone was watching the buzzards. These buzzards were nothing like the red-headed turkey vultures they’d been seeing since Long Glade; these were huge birds, black and wattled, and with their wings folded they made Louis think of the funeral umbrellas dripping rain along the stone walls of the St. Agnes Church in Clarinda. Several of them formed a heaving circle around Gid; within moments one had flown off with his cigarettes and another had torn his shirtsleeve loose
from the elbow. Two buzzards worked industriously to tug the black shoe off his foot. Louis couldn’t move or think: his mind was helium light. The taste of screws and pennies pumped into his mouth until Louis felt sick with it. Around him the cranemen were hollering
Fire!
at a pitch that canopied the dredge.

What rolled through Louis’s mind were like the shells of thoughts, a series of
O!
s, round and empty, like the discarded rinds of screams. A fine tooth of purplish glass marked the spot on the deck where Gid’s eyeglasses had been and Louis got down on his knees to retrieve it; when he felt a prickling on his neck, he looked up.

In a scene that seemed as plausible and horrifying as Louis’s worst dreams, the birds descended on Gideon Tom and hooked the prongs of their talons into his skin; perhaps a dozen of them lifted him into the sky. Gid’s body shrank into the cloudless expanse. The sky that day was a bright sapphire, better weather than they’d had in weeks; for a long time, the men could still see the shrinking pinpoint of Gid’s black head. It was the only part of Gid that was not held by talons, and it lolled below his shoulders as if Gid were trying to work out a bad crick in his neck.

A strangled quiet came over the men after that. It felt like hours before anybody moved.

“You boys ever seen birds do anything like that?” Hector asked, close to sunset. His voice was a child’s squeak, and Louis thought there was real bravery in the act of speech. Louis’s own throat was a desert and he couldn’t have gotten a word out for one million dollars. No, Louis thought, you saw a thing like that and you went deep inward, you didn’t want to make a single ripple in the air.

“Never,” the launchman said behind him. “Never seen a bird behave that way.” His tone was mild and genial, as though he were discussing unseasonably cold weather, or food with a peculiar taste. Hector, in his panic, didn’t seem to hear the answer. Some of the men were still staring at the spot in the sky where Gid had disappeared into a bone-white ridge of cloud; some, including Louis, had fixed their attention on the spots of blood on the deck. The moon was rising. Louis, able at last to overcome his vast, black speechlessness, noticed something interesting that he pointed out to the other men—the buzzards were returning.

People began screaming, babbling obscurely; someone went splashing
overboard. Louis heard the wet, frantic beats of arms on water. The birds had completely swallowed the dredge now. They were perched all along the trusses and gunwales and the cabin roof so that the whole structure looked upholstered in black velvet; it didn’t seem possible to Louis that there could be so many birds in all the world. Louis saw a buzzard that looked as large as a man lift and stretch its wings; some part of Gid went winking from its beak and fell into the water. Finally Louis felt a scream tear loose from his throat.

“Oh, shut up. They’re just birds,” Theodore Glyde, the tall, sallow engineer, kept repeating crossly next to him, gesticulating at no one. “They’re just filthy buzzards, they shouldn’t hurt us at all, anyhow, men, we’re
alive
 …” He went on and on like this as the buzzards grew in size and definition—how could more be coming? Louis wondered. Hundreds more were coming. He stood there and waited with a pale, uplifted face. He might have looked courageous from the outside. Theodore Glyde was still throwing his arms around as if he could argue his death back into the hole of the moon.

“Here they come, fellas,” Louis T. said quietly, and beside him Theodore snorted with disgust and crossed his long arms in their slate-blue sleeves as if he were impatient to prove a point.

Oh God
, Louis thought. He didn’t feel any more horror—just pure sadness, because he was seventeen that summer and he didn’t want to go. His real life had begun less than a year ago.
I’m next
.

And, Osceola told me in a whisper, he was. We sat there for a full minute listening to a wild gator clawing through the brush that lined the boardwalk. Afterward, she swore me to secrecy.

“You cannot tell
anybody
, Ava Bigtree.”

“Gee, okay. I’ll try …”

I pointed backward at the dark windows of our house and for some reason we both broke up, laughing and laughing. I made binoculars with my hands and pretended to scan the boardwalk for tourists.

“Got that, everybody?” I said. “It’s a secret!”

But then I saw, through the open fists of my binoculars, that Ossie’s pale eyes above her laughing mouth were filling with tears. It was strange to watch a face having that kind of secret disagreement with
itself. For some reason I flashed to a dry, sunny day last year outside the hospital, to the Chief’s deadcalm eyes over his screaming red mouth.

We walked up the steps to the Bigtree Swamp Café and ate two pistachio cones while a storm rolled in. The longer I thought about the Dredgeman’s story, the more convinced I became that Louis was or had been real. How else could Ossie know about his death in such detail? My sister could memorize obituaries but tonight’s performance had been different. She hadn’t stuttered at all, she’d used words I thought she couldn’t possibly know. And then there was her face as she told it—she had reacted to her own recitation of the Dredgeman’s Revelation like a first-time listener. My sister’s eyes had turned melty and black as the cook shack fire spread. We’d both gasped when Gid died, and when the white sky had swallowed him cold. When the dredge wrecked, we’d been truly
afraid
.

Now Ossie crunched into her cone. “You want more ice cream, Ava?”

A tumor-headed buzzard cocked its head and looked at us from behind the café glass, not quizzically like a sparrow or a gull, but with a buzzard’s bored wisdom, and I imagined then that this bird, too, must also know the story, and that all the quiet trees and clouds had always known the story. I ate the second stale cone my sister handed me, licked green drops from the back of my palm. We polished off a tub of sprinkles. They covered our hands like magnetic shavings, and we were still giggling about our “gloves” when the power went out.

“Ava? That’s you, right? Don’t move. It’s okay. I’ll get candles.”

“Why not ask your boyfriend to do it?” I whispered, waiting to see if the café light would flicker on again. Louis Thanksgiving could be just outside the café windows. He could be inside this room with us, I shivered, riding out the storm.
Ossie
, I almost screamed, until it occurred to me that the ghost could also be inside of her.

Later, back in our bedroom, my sister unscrolled another, smaller map. She said she’d found it in the cuddy cabin on one of her dates.

“Look, Ava,” she whispered. “Louis says this is where the door to the underworld opens …”

“Na-uh.” I squinted at the map. “That’s the Eye of the Needle.”

I recognized the coordinates she was pointing to—we labeled this
place on our own souvenir Swamplandia! maps and place mats. The Eye of the Needle was an Indian landmark. Grandpa Sawtooth had been fishing out there. Good red snapper hole.

“Of course it’s a real place, silly. But it’s also one of the thruways to the underworld. A gateway to the world of the ghosts.”

“The underworld? You mean, like, hell?” Just the word made my mouth go dry; I didn’t even like living this close to Loomis County. “Does the Chief know?”

The Eye of the Needle was a full day’s journey by airboat from our island—at least that, given how difficult it was to navigate the narrow mangrove tunnels between Swamplandia! and the Gulf-side shell mounds. Tourists certainly couldn’t get there, and we kids had never been. Grandpa Sawtooth took a photograph of the Eye of the Needle passageway during his rambles in the forties: a gray channel cut between two twenty-acre islands made entirely of shells. These islands looked like twin boulders to me, or like one island that lived next to its echo. Two intricate skulls rising out of the river. They are hundreds or maybe even thousands of years old—the Calusa Indians contructed the mounds out of clay and every kind of local shell: oysters and conchs and whelks. The Calusa Indians were well established in our swamp when Ponce de León arrived in 1513, and they probably hugged the shoreline of Florida for hundreds of years before the European contact; by the late 1700s their tribe had disappeared, undone by Spanish warfare and enslavement, and by microbes: smallpox and measles. The Calusa shell mounds, these seashell archipelagos, had outlasted their architects by at least five hundred years. You can find them scattered throughout the Ten Thousand Islands; visitors will drag their kayaks up a shell mound’s glittery shores and picnic there. On the Gulf side a 150-acre shell mound supports a modern township. But the Eye of the Needle was a special landmark, known only to locals, and very remote.