Swamplandia! (19 page)

“The Chief doesn’t know a thing about this passage to the underworld,” said Ossie. “Nobody living does, except for me, and I only know because Louis told me on the Ouija board.”

“So how come Louis knows?”

“Uh, because he’s a ghost? It’s a doorway to the
underworld
, Ava. The whole dredge crew is there. It’s where Louis goes when he’s not with me—he crosses over.”

Ossie pronounced the word “underworld” with great authority, as if we were talking about Cincinnati or Peru.

I got excited then. “Have you been there, Os? To the, ah, the underworld?”

“Not yet.”

“So you don’t know what it’s like … down there?”

“Not really. Louis can’t describe it to me. Louis says it’s the kind of place you have to see to believe.”

“Okay.” I was thinking that we might find our mother in this place, and I was also thinking that my sister was officially nuts. “You’d think Grandpa Sawtooth would have mentioned something about all this, though.”

Ossie smoothed a wrinkle in the old map and met my gaze with clear, violet eyes.

“
Grandpa
? He’s a great wrestler but he’s no Spiritist. I’m sure he thought the Eye was just a pile of rocks. He didn’t have a clue what he was looking at.”

Weekend 3: The Chief is still gone.

Seths: Ninety-eight.

Sisters: Two.

Brothers: Zero.

Tourists: Zero.

Ghosts: One.

Park Hours: ?

Mom: ???

Gus Waddell came by late Saturday to see how we were doing.

“Most awesome, Uncle Gus,” I said from the kitchen table, not looking up. The mail crashed onto the dark sea of wood around me—I was coloring. Even I knew that I was years too old for this baby activity. Next I’d be playing dolls like some mainland girl. Using my gator noose as a jump rope.
Well, somebody stop me
, I frowned, snapping a blue crayon.

“Whatcha drawing there, Ava Bigtree? That sure is—huh.”

I had filled in a dozen sheets with single colors, our Bigtree tribal
colors: Indian red and heron blue. The whole time I was coloring, I lived a second life in my head. I’d glance up at the kitchen clock every minute or so and think:
Now is when our matinee should begin. Now is when the Chief flips on the blue lights. Gold, clap! Orange, clap! Red lights. Now here comes the song—ba-da-dum! Now Hilola Bigtree is climbing the ladder, waving at all the tiny cheering people; now she is running down the diving board; and here, ladies and gentlemen, she hits the water! …

Behind me, Uncle Gus coughed.

“I see you, ah, you like the color blue there.”

“Yup.”

Uncle Gus smelled like eggs and diesel and I wished that he would please go away. We had our food, our mail, we were
all set
. Uncle Gus seemed to want to pat my back, but perhaps couldn’t figure out how or where to touch a kid for sympathy purposes; his large hand hovered near my right ear, then dropped back to his side.

“You sure you’re all right? You know, I told your old man this already, but you girls are welcome to spend the night at our place, anytime. Mrs. Waddell would love to have you over.”

“Thanks. Maybe next week. We’re going good, Gus. I fed the Seths a few hours ago. Ossie is good, Judy Garland is good. It’s good here. Quiet.”

That morning I’d found a half-dead gator in our Pit. She looked like the drowned gators that wash up after storms, their blond tongues glittering with hundreds of decaying minnows. She was alive but I couldn’t tell what was wrong with her—disease was so infrequent among our alligators that scientists from the University of Florida came out once a year to take samples of their blood. I’d let her rest her leathery head against my shoulder while I touched the saffron plates of her neck. The Chief says it’s a terrible sign when a monster gives you this kind of access.

On Tuesday, it seemed that good news had come at last! Gus brought me another letter. This one came in an envelope with Loomis University’s orange-and-green seal on it.

I tore up this letter within seconds of finishing it, put the bits of it into a plastic bag, and shook the bad news out over the Gator Pit. Later I caught some sunfish for the red Seth—she was eleven and three-quarter inches now, and very healthy-seeming, not sluggish or inappeteant or anything, a few more centimeters and maybe it would be safe to share her with Ossie and the Chief. Not tourists, though, I frowned; I really did not want strangers to see her yet, even though I knew that was the ultimate point of our training. I practiced with her for two hours. I had her to where she would walk this perfect debutante circle around my Swamplandia! ball cap. She would bite my finger with a precocious viciousness. We were going to get famous and save the park. My dream kicked painfully inside of me, and I was surprised to find how easy it was to go on working toward it as if I’d never heard from Mrs. Amalia Curtis.

I didn’t try to write the commission again, but I did begin a letter to my brother.

I tapped the pencil against my lips. How to explain Louis Thanksgiving? Already I had amassed a stack of Bigtree postcards that I planned to send to him in bulk just as soon as he wrote with his new address. Weeks and weeks of postcards, our mother’s face on most of them. I liked the satisfying clack the stack made against the edge of our dresser, like I’d collected Time itself for my brother. Kiwi could just read these, come back to the swamp, and pick up where he left off.

Now that the Chief was gone I left the TV news on all the time. I knew about the gas hike in Loomis County and the famine in Uganda, the mayor’s “fiscal indiscretions.” Kiwi’s bulb burned like a lighthouse at the top of our stairs. In the new emptiness I’d made a series of discoveries. For example, if you stared out our bedroom window you could see a forest of dark, inverted trees in the pond beyond the kapok. Pop ash, the kapok, mahoganies, all draped with the irregular lace of Spanish moss—the pond was about fifty feet wide, but it repeated every leaf and branch in a deep layer of endless colors. This second forest had a watery, independent life. Where did the real woods begin? you’d start to wonder after a while.

Two cinnamon lizards blinked at me from behind Ossie’s unmated work boot. Earlier I’d searched the park for her and then given up to read my
Bandits of the West
comics. Cowboys were still the closest things to alligator wrestlers I had found in kids’ literature—they lassoed the killing horns of steers and smoked like Dad, drank like Grandpa, wore Mom’s secret smile. That night I gave myself fifteen pumps of Mom’s perfume. Then I let the whole bottle drop onto the floor. Glass flew everywhere. Our bedroom became a terrible canopy of artificial roses. The glass shards I left alone until the thought of my sister cutting her feet on one grew unbearable and I swept them into the dustbin.
Ossie is going to really lay into me
, I thought. But dawn broke and my sister’s bed was still made. She strolled up to the house at noon, smiling cheerfully, with huge bags under her eyes.

“Where were you?” I asked dully. I felt exhausted just looking at her. After hours of pumping up for a big speech my anger turned tail on me, slinking away.

“A secret. But don’t worry, Ava,” she smiled. “Louis takes care of me out there.”

Wednesday was the same, and Thursday—she stayed out all night. When she came home she slept through most of the day. On Friday, I did the usual: fed our gharials, visited the red Seth and brought her fresh water, checked on the incubators, gave Judy Garland her raw tarpon and berries, went back to the house to make myself a jam and jam sandwich. When I got to the kitchen I saw a white paper rolled small as a cigarette—someone had pushed a note through a rip in our screen door:

“You don’t think some tourist left it?”

“A tourist from what planet? Ossie, the ferry hasn’t even been here today.”

We were in the cypress dome, gathering petals and roots for one of her spells. The interior trees in a cypress dome are one hundred feet tall, with roots, or “knees,” that stick out of the water and breathe for them; with their veins of vines they look like petrified rain. Really, it feels like you’re walking through the weather of the dinosaurs. The gray-blue fossil of a storm, now dropping small leaves. I watched my sister stand
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
against a live oak, her mouth full of flowers.

“Anyways, that doesn’t make sense, Os. Why would a tourist want payment from us?”

“Well, Gus will probably know what to do.” My sister yawned. Her eyes watered behind a flume of swamp violets and orchids.

“Hey, P.S., you look super really ugly,” I said. Ossie was wearing all of our mom’s makeup at once. “Your eyelashes look like spider legs.”

“You don’t own her, Ava. Anyway, you’re too young to wear mascara.” She blinked her clotted eyelids and shook the note. “ ‘The Bird Man,’ ” she laughed. “How silly. Maybe Uncle Gus is playing a trick on us.” She handed it to me. “Write one back.” She shrugged. “Put the Chief’s mainland phone number on it, let him deal with this.”

Once you exited the cypress dome, you followed a little dip in the elevation of the island and wound up in a swampy meadow on the
banks of a brown canal that was often more mud than water, a place we called the Last Ditch. It was about two miles from the touristed park, at the extreme end of our wanderings; you couldn’t penetrate the mangrove scrawl on the opposite side of that canal without a machete. Osceola was wandering around the Last Ditch, picking a bouquet for herself. She kept reaching up to them on her tiptoes, huffing like those ladies in neon unitards we sometimes watched doing
Stretch for the Stars!
on Grandpa Sawtooth’s rabbit-eared TV. She’d amassed an armful of cowhorn orchids, an epiphyte species that grew on the sunlit side of these trunks.

We’d been collecting the orchids all afternoon and we were both panting and crosshatched with scratches when Ossie spotted a cowhorn orchid wrapped serpentlike around the uppermost branch of a live oak.

“That one,” Ossie said, pointing at the lone blossom on a spindle of raveling bark almost twenty feet above our heads. “That’s the one the ghost wants.”

“Of course it is,” I muttered, wedging my sneaker into the crotch of the tree and hoisting myself onto one of the strongest-looking branches near the trunk’s base.

“Hey,” I hollered. “Tell the ghost to pick another one. That branch won’t hold me.”

“I didn’t ask you to do it,” she called up to me. “He did.” And here she jerked her thumb at the black wreck of the Model Land Company dredge.

“Ossie, I
can’t,
” I yelled, already halfway up the bald cypress. A fist of wood broke off under my hand, and for a second I saw long stripes of ants run like wet paint; I swung my leg horizontally as high as I could manage, huffing air. A prong of little ants went running over my left hand. The world swooned below me.

Now I made the time-honored, biblical and mythical and TV mountain-climbing movie mistake of looking
down:
my sister was small as a rag doll. Birds whirled like paper scraps around the bottom of the trunk. I saw where a long metal blade from some quartered machine was sunk into the earth like an ax head buried in some giant’s green scalp. The dredge rocked gently on the canal.

I tipped my chin skyward: the yellow orchid was two feet above my outstretched hand. The wind lifted the tiniest hairs on the back of my
neck and I was reaching blindly, clumsily for the yellow orchid, hugging the trunk with one arm and swinging wildly with the other, scraping the same tough nub of bark and getting fistfuls of air. On the third grab I
got
it. Something shuffled the air below my feet and a cormorant streaked cobalt mere inches from my face, upsetting my balance; I righted myself, panting.

“I almost fell,” I screamed down at Ossie, wanting to get credit for this. It had started to rain lightly. Below me, I could hear it landing on the roof of the dredge barge with a tinny
drub-drubdrub
. I began my one-handed descent down the tree. Lightning cracked the sky and then I did fall, crashing down the tree. My T-shirt rolled up as branches snapped, Ossie squealing at me at top volume. For a crazy second I worried that my belly was going to peel away, torn off by the rough bark. Then it was over; I was a jumble of limbs in the marl. Somehow I managed to hang on to the thin stem all the way to the bottom.

“Here!” I screamed, thrusting the crushed orchid at Ossie. “Your ghost is a jerk. Do you want
me
to die and haunt you? Because I swear I will.”

If I were a ghost I would ride that pointer around her Ouija like a little white Cadillac, giving her so much grief! I would—

Something flashed inside the dredge cabin—half a man’s face. His nose and neck and lips were plume-thin. Then he disappeared into the glare on the porthole.