Swamplandia! (20 page)

“Did you see that?” I asked softly.

“Yeah, wow. That fall looked like it hurt. You okay?” She gave me a squeeze and dropped my hand. “Thank you for doing that. But look, the spell said we needed tree-growing orchids. See? Nothing terrestrial.” She tapped at a line from a torn page of
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
.

I looked back at the dredge porthole and saw nothing and no one behind the dirty glass.

“Ava, will you hold these for me?” she asked, handing me a bunch of loose spells with titles that seemed to have come straight from the headlines of a woman’s magazine (sleep enchantments, 479; a spell for happiness in marriage, 124; magic herbs to enhance beauty, 77). Ossie lifted and winged the hem of her dress so that her yellow orchids slid into the middle. Fat raindrops were sliding down both our noses now.

“Okay, Ava. I have to go.”

“It’s time for your date?”

Ossie nodded. In the compromised light of the Last Ditch my sister’s skin took on a watery, greenish cast, like the palest rings around a watermelon.

“Don’t wait here, okay?” she said.

“Okay,” I said, as I leaned against a swamp oak to wait for her.

“Ava …”

“You go. I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll save your place here,” I said, and drew a little
X
with my sneaker toe where she had just been standing.

“Ava, listen. You have the Chief’s number? You remember where he left the money for us?”

I nodded. I thought we were talking about this Bird Man’s debt and I was annoyed that Ossie was going to leave me to deal with that.

“I—”

Then she swooped in and hugged me. Coming from Ossie, a hug like this was very unusual, but I think it’s hard to ever hear your own happiness as an alarm bell. All that I suspected in that moment was that we loved each other, and that things between us might soon return to what they’d been before. I threw my arms around her neck.
Stay in your body, Ossie
. She kissed my cheek and then released me with a little push.

“Go already, please? Ava, he’s waiting on me …”

She set off across the muck as briskly as a mainland woman who is late for her ferry. Her footprints filled with groundwater and as I watched a dozen tiny lakes opened between us. Rain blew in from the east while out west the sun burned through a V in the trees, bright and gluey-gold as marmalade.

Halfway across the ditch, Osceola reached a hand up to her braid, tightening her purple ribbon; then, just when I imagined she was possessed again and had forgotten all about me, she turned back and waved at me. Her face didn’t look so happy any longer—she looked old to me, older in age than our grandmother’s picture, and scared. A mood could age you a hundred years in a finger snap, I now saw.

I was still standing there when my sister Osceola pulled herself across the brown canal and into the dredge barge, and shut the door.

* * *

Quiet rode outward like wildfire after that, engulfing the ditch and me inside it. I held on to the flashlight with both hands. I listened for my sister’s movements inside the dredge; instead, I heard the creaklings of quick, hunted life inside the ditch and the groans of the taller trees in the center of the dome. When you wrestled Seths it was clear when something was going wrong—even indoor people knew what to do when they saw blood, heard screams. But if Louis was at all, he was invisible, and I wouldn’t know from where I was standing if Ossie needed my help.

I swung the flashlight like a little sword, made a combat hiss.
Kshhh! Kshh-kshh!
No moon tonight.

“Ossie?” I called once, after fifteen minutes. The dredge hunched motionless on the canal. My throat felt raw and I wondered if I was maybe getting sick. Yes, I decided, I definitely was. I concocted an elaborate fantasy about how I’d break it to Ossie that I’d gotten pneumonia while standing in the rain, waiting for her to reappear. The leaves opened a low green heaven above me. Next I made up a language with my flashlight, a sort of luminous pidgin tongue, a battery-powered Morse code for my mom or whichever of the ghosts was watching me. The day was peppery with rain and darkening. I held the flashlight under my chin, the plastic ridges against my throat feeling somehow deeply comforting, a fuzzy portal opening onto my sneakers. There were eyes in the grass down there, lizards and bugs. I tried to wiggle my goofus slicker on—one of Mom’s picks, a Goodwill special with off-brand cartoon rats dancing on it—and when I looked up again I saw something high in the trees: two shoes. Two burgundy boot toes, brightly polished with rain, the long thin laces wagging down below the cypress leaves. These boots, when tracked backward with my flashlight beam, sprouted two thin legs. Above these I found a feathered torso, and added to this a puffy white face on which—compared to the boots and the patchwork outfit—looked almost ordinary. The man was blinking violently down at me, caught in the light, his pale lips twisted in a grimace. I could calculate a Seth’s age from its battle scars or the girth of its tail, but I was bad with adults generally and this man’s age was impossible for me to guess. He was younger than my grandfather and older than my brother. His eyes were something terrifying.

“Jesus, kid, get that out of my face.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” I lowered the light a few inches and tried not to gape at him. “You’re lucky I didn’t scream. I didn’t know you were up there.”

“Did I frighten you?” He smiled. “Well, shoot, kid, you scared me, too. I was just getting to the last of your buzzards.”

“Huh?”

Droplets of rain seemed to tremble singly along a thin wire between us. I tracked up the tree with my flashlight but I didn’t see any birds.

“I cleared out those buzzards for you. Strange, the numbers of them out here.” He lowered himself delicately from the tree, pushing up from the branches as easily as a mainlander lifting out of an armchair. “Chief Bigtree pays me every year. It’s a service I’m providing for you islanders.”

I know what you are!
I thought, triumphant. I should have guessed it right away. The heavy, tussocked coat, the black wooden whistle for birdcalls, the bright eyes in a shingled face. He was a gypsy Bird Man. There are several such men who travel around Florida’s parks and backwaters, following the seasonal migrations of various species of birds. These men are like avian pied pipers, or aerial fumigators. They call your problem birds out of the trees and send them spiraling over the sloughs; then they wait for them to alight on another person’s property and repeat this service. It’s rumored that even the Florida Wildlife Commission employs them when the more traditional methods of animal control are attempted, fail.

“Did the Chief call you to get rid of them?”

“No. What’s your name?”

“Ava.”

“Ava.” He shook my hand. “Can you keep a secret?” He reached his gloved hand out and pressed two fingers against my lips. “Listen to this.”

The first three sounds he made were familiar to me. A green-backed heron, a feral peacock, a bevy of coots. Then he made another, much deeper noise, as close to an alligator bellow as I have heard a human make but not quite that, exactly. It flew up octaves into an otherworldly keen. A braided sound, a rainbow sound. I stepped closer, and closer still, in spite of myself. I tried to imagine what species of bird could make a sound like that. A single note, held in an amber suspension
of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning.

“What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer.

The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth.

“You.”

The Bird Man told me that he’d be leaving our island in the morning, now that the buzzards were cleared. “I saw that you folks could use some help,” he said, his feathered shoulders heaving up and down in a shrug. That was how he operated these days, he explained. He wasn’t one for drawing up contracts.

“You’re welcome to stay the night at our house,” I heard myself tell him. “At the moment we have plenty of room.”

I was an alligator wrestler, accustomed to bold movements. On the walk back I took this Bird Man’s hand in my own without looking up at his face and was shocked and pleased when he didn’t release me.
Now we are friends
, I thought hopefully as we slid sideways over the muck-soils. My roof was a stern-looking triangle above the trees. I’d left every upstairs light on; behind the palm trees our house looked like a fat man taking little yellow breaths in the dark. The Bird Man let me squeeze the empty thumbtip of his leather glove. He’d heard about our shows, he said. The Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular, Swimming with the Seths. I had to explain to him about Mom’s death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.

“I’m very sorry about your mother. What is your performance like without her?”

“Oh, we haven’t been wrestling much lately,” I said. “Our show is really famous, though. It’s gotten written up in a bunch of newspapers and we were on the seven o’clock news once, the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular …”

The Bird Man soared vertically above me, taller than the Chief, six three or six four, and thin as a scarecrow, and walking next to him I felt like a yapping dog, each of my stories about my family and the Seths like a tug at the stranger’s trouser cuff. He didn’t ask many questions, but he slowed down so that I could keep up with him and he smiled
as I babbled about the Seth of Seths, my grandparents, my favorite alligator-wrestling victories. He was such an interested listener that I wondered if it was possible that this Bird Man had been lonely, too.

We were a quarter mile from the house when the Bird Man asked to see my show. To see me, specifically, wrestle an alligator.

“Oh! Sure! You mean … now?”

With my ears buzzing, I led the Bird Man (a tourist!) toward the Gator Pit. When we reached the stadium, I showed the Bird Man to an orange seat in one of the middle rows. Out of habit I began to set up as usual but my heart was thumping. I didn’t know how to work the follow spot or start the music; I was too short to reach the rack of gator nooses. I turned the popcorn machine on. I pulled on a wrinkled brown bathing suit I found backstage, its leg holes very loose on me, the material shivery and dank, and then I climbed the ladder to the diving board. I did not tell the Bird Man that while I had watched Hilola Bigtree’s Swimming with the Seths act hundreds of times, and even practiced swimming in the Pit with her, tonight was going to be my first dive. I stared at my bare feet on the stenciled stars and took a jittery breath.

I peered down into the water—I couldn’t see any of the alligators. I’d figured out how to work the control panel for the auxiliary lamps that glowed along the edges of the Gator Pit and lit the stairs up the stadium rows, but backstage the follow spot sat lidded and dark.

I took a final breath and I was flying. Water flooded my nostrils. When I opened my eyes, I could see the Seths’ dim shapes from below, their great bellies that look like prehistoric pinecones and their dinosaur feet. I could see the glint of a Seth’s claws, curled motionless at the mountains of its sides—an alligator’s tail does all the work of swimming. Little starbursts of teeth, pebbles over lips. A three- or four-hundred-pound Seth sailed over my head, and I watched a thin jet of bubbles rising from my own nostrils. Far above me peach ovals opened on the water—a column of milky illumination from the stadium lamps. They seemed to gasp back their light as I swam for them, like good dreams on waking.

I swam as smoothly as I could for the edge of the Pit. My palms scooped through little nets of algae and something thicker. (
Don’t look, don’t look
, cautioned my mother’s voice inside me—often during shows
I could hear her in my mind’s ear, directing me. She’d scream at you good if you goofed a move; she got protective at odd moments. Our mom was her most conventionally maternal when she was watching one of us fight the gators.) A Seth floated above me as serenely as a souring iceberg, its huge legs contracting. Bubbles fell like crystals of salt from its thrashing tail. I surfaced as far as I could get from the Seths and scrambled up the ladder rungs. “Ta-da!” I said lamely. Without the Chief to hit the switch, the end of the show was harder to pinpoint. I caught my breath, my hands on my knees; then I walked around the Gator Pit fence to find the Bird Man in the stadium. He was standing up in the middle row, giving me a kind ovation.

“Beautiful, kid.” The Bird Man clapped his gloves together as I shook the water from my hair and grinned.

I had a feeling like I was still moving, still flying up and up toward the next surface. The stars greeted me like a second challenge. After months of the bad feeling—months of the sensation that I was evaporating, of practicing for wrestling shows we were never going to perform again—I could taste the old Bigtree victory. Suddenly I remembered: I am an
alligator wrestler
. This Bird Man’s eyes were like new lamps for the old performance. He kept smiling and smiling at me, and when his gaze rolled over my skinny legs, the pins of my knees became twin suns.

The Bird Man waited for me to finish drying off with one of the grungy towels we kept slung over the pine railing.

“That was really something, kid. You say you learned that from your mother?”

“Yup.” I smiled happily and squeezed my toes against the pool ledge, feeling suddenly shy. I got dizzy looking into the pure whites of his eyes. The alligators slid through the murk beyond the railing: lamplight opened there in soft petals between the black water and the alligators’ sand mounds. I switched the lights off; I knelt and checked the temperature of the Pit water with one finger. Then I led my new friend to our house.

This Bird Man was not what I’d expected a Bird Man to be; for starters, he was very kind. He did not conform to any of the common stereotypes of his profession: redneck exterminators, mangrove gypsies, backwoods ornithologists, black magicians, feathered druids, scam artists. This Bird Man volunteered very little about himself, his age or
where he came from, but he told me that he’d been working hard all spring on account of the unusual migration. I wanted to ask, but did not:
You do kill them, right? Or is that a rumor? And if you don’t kill the buzzards, where do you take them?