Swamplandia! (21 page)

“Want to see something else?” I asked him as we walked down the wood-chip trail and turned at the shed. “It’s a real miracle.”

My flashlight found her first, its beam falling through the crepe of the palmetto straw. At her new length of twelve inches, the red Seth was almost too big for the tank now. She twisted her head and let out a dry hiss in the light.

“Beautiful,” the Bird Man said. He said it exactly right, with the whistling wonder that I had dreamed the red Seth would elicit from a tourist. I thumbed her jaws open and flipped her over to display her checkering of belly scales, which tapered to the single row of scales down her tail (which was still fully half the length of her) as proud of her as if she were my own design.

“See? This is her palatal valve, the same fire-type color, pretty impressive, right? And these are her dorsal scutes …”

“Well,” he smiled, “I’ve never seen anything like her.”

He thanked me; he still hadn’t mentioned the money we Bigtrees owed to him for his avian removal services. This made me feel grateful and a little nervous. We couldn’t pay him, obviously. I was embarrassed, imagining handing him my dad’s voice on the phone. The Chief would offer him coupons instead of cash.

When we got to the house it was very quiet—Ossie hadn’t come home yet. I didn’t think she would tonight.

“I haven’t slept indoors in such a while,” the Bird Man told me absently from the bottom step. He touched our wall the way a child might touch the flesh of a strange animal, flattening his hand against the polished grain of the wood and frowning at it for a moment. The indoors was exotic to folks from the remote swamp, I guessed.

“Thanks again, kid.” He smiled at me. “Beds and linens. It’s like a little vacation.”

His coat made a shuffling sound against the wall of the stairwell.

“See you in the morning! The sixth step sags a little,” I called idiotically. “The towels are sort of dirty?”

I watched him disappear behind my brother’s bedroom door, trailing wispy blue-black feathers behind him. They floated on a slender flume
of light from Kiwi’s bedroom, dreamy nicks suspended in the dimness, so small they seemed like molecules of night or visible scent. Should I offer him water, a toothbrush? Did he want a cookie or a sandwich before bed, like I did? For a swamp kid, a visit from a Bird Man was like a dark Christmas. I wished Mom or the Chief were there to help me work out the etiquette of the visit.

Within minutes I could hear our guest snoring behind the wall. I sank beneath a dirty cloud of sheets and lay open-eyed on the pillow. I tried to match my breaths with his snores. I had a feeling like I was dreaming although I was wide awake, staring at the beige cracks overhead and floating happily on my mattress. Maybe this was how a possession started? The Bird Man was no ghost, though, and I was grateful for his company. I had childish fantasies about this man: I wanted to hold his hand in the woods again. I wanted to put my ear on his chest, something I used to do with Mom. To listen to the thud-thud-thud of another heartbeat. For the first time in what felt like months, I slept all the way through a long furrow to dawn.

When I woke up from a dissolving dream of great happiness, Osceola was not in her bed. Light filtered through our window and when I read the clock I felt a little sick. I pulled on yesterday’s socks, my muck boots, and tied my grimy shoelaces. I tromped past the wax-fruit shine of the smaller reptiles’ plastic cage lids, still waking up. Searching for her from the crow’s nest of the kapok tree house, I felt chilled and annoyed. This time she wasn’t in the Gator Pit. I followed our old footsteps from yesterday’s trip to the ditch, which now felt like it had been a thousand years ago. Then our footsteps ran out, and fear unspooled through me as slowly as a yawn. The ditch that I returned to was empty. I remember it as being calm and wet, and very peaceful, flat as a pasture in the blue light.

As I approached the live oak in the center of the Last Ditch my heart began to pound—a glowing square was taped to peeling bark: a blank sheet of paper. No, I saw, hurrying forward, not blank, just white. There was a beautiful handwriting on it that I recognized:

All I could think was:
Her spelling is perfect
. I pictured Ossie in Kiwi’s empty room, looking up each word in his dictionary. Slowly I got up and walked to the bank of the canal, which that morning was swollen with rainwater and stained from the cypress roots. We’d checked our rivers against Louis Thanksgiving’s map, and it seemed possible that this canal in our backyard could be the very same artery that the Model Land Company dredge had dug out during the Great Depression. I peered around the river bend, saw only thin trees and moths.

Oh-no. Please-no. Mom …

Moths flapped in mute hysterics all along the canal. I counted hundreds, flying downriver like a second water.

The ditch is empty
, I realized.

The dredge is gone
.

F
rom the roof of the World, the pigeons looked like falling stars. It was a shame you couldn’t relax and enjoy the Olympic splendor of this, Kiwi thought, on account of how the pigeons kept shitting on everything. Their timing was uncanny, malevolent—the pigeons had gotten him twice this week, down his open work-shirt collar and splat across the back, and the King Suds Laundromat off I-95 was yet another mainland luxury that Kiwi couldn’t afford. Kiwi didn’t even have the bus fare to get to the King Suds Laundromat. He did not have sufficient quarters to pay tribute to King Suds, the mustachioed monarch who ran it. Instead, he took his uniform shirts and his losery boxer shorts into the dormitory showers and washed them with Leo’s dark green dandruff shampoo, which burned like acid on your skin. Somehow it had gotten onto his balls and into the webbing between his fingers and the shit just
hunkered
there like cold fire. He had developed a rash or a pox, something purplish and specklesome on his bony thighs that he was determined to ignore until it went away, or killed him.

“Ahh, Leo,” Kiwi moaned into the mildewed nave of the showers, “why is this shampoo so
thick
?”

Was Leo trying to regrow hair or something? In the break room his colleagues plugged their noses and made a big show of asking, “What smells like formaldehyde, yo?”

During their break hour, Vijay sighed and tugged at Kiwi’s slimy
shirt hem. “I told you, I will lend you quarters to do your fucking laundry, you retard.”

“Laundry is my last priority right now, V.”

“Shit, I’d rethink that! Have you smelled you? I will, like, sneak your laundry into my house, bro. My mom
loves
doing laundry, it’s like this Immigrant Mother disorder? She uses Lluvia de las Montañas detergent—it’s so badass. You’ll smell like Costa Rica!”

The last thing Kiwi wanted was some other kid’s mother doting on him. Just the word “mom” still made his stomach flip.

“Ha-ha. Yeah. I am none to be fucked with.”

“Vijay. I need another job.”

“Yeah, I hear you.” He sighed happily and rolled his pant legs up. “Who don’t?”

The boys were sitting on the sooty edge of the roof overlooking the eastern side of the main lot, watching someone in a BMW double-park. An awesomely jawed man in chinos got out of the car, took a furtive look around, then sprinted on his loafer toes for the park entrance. Banker/lawyer, Kiwi thought, ticking down his taxonomic chart. Silk tie, comb-over, tassels. Something about his gait made the double-parker seem almost jolly; it was like watching an elf leave a Christmas surprise.

“Sing it with me now, Margie: what a d-d
-douche.
” Vijay was smiling his breaktime smile. You could tell time by that smile—5:45 must be just around the corner.

“D-d-d …”

Far below them, the Loomis traffic roared. A pigeon waddled along a pipe, lifting its mauve wings like an acrobat. Kiwi felt a stab of the unpredictable homesickness.

“How much do they make over there?” he asked quietly. He was pointing at the row of businesses that abutted the Leviathan hangar, which looked small as a ring of petrified rocks. As if someone had planted them around the World of Darkness, Kiwi thought, thinking for some reason of
The Spiritist Telegraph
. Those diagrams in the appendix of sacerdotal magic.

“Where? What are you talking about? The gas station? Don’t you read like every newspaper that was ever invented? Don’t you know the facts? People who work at gas stations get
shot
. They get
capped
, Marge.”

“No, no. The restaurant.” Kiwi pointed through the scrim of pigeons to a neon
B
.

“The Burger Burger? I would not really call that place a restaurant, bro. You can buy a cheeseburger there for a fucking
quarter
. You think the Burger Burger is going to pay you big money? Leo calls it the E. coli factory!”

“Leo eats there all the time.”

“They pay a dollar less than here and you smell like dead cow forever and all the girls are skanks, which is fine with me, but I swear to God they all got herpes.”

“Oh. I see.”

Kiwi wasn’t 100 percent on what that meant. What was the use of talking about anything? He needed to make a thousand dollars this month and he didn’t see how that was possible.

“Check their lips, bro.”

“Okay. I will. Poor girls.” Kiwi was sure he’d read about this ailment somewhere but he couldn’t quite recall the etiology—he would have to do some research later.
Regardless of my findings, I am going to wolf like twelve of those burgers
. Kiwi stared at the neon
B
and felt his mouth flood. Hellspawn Hoagies were eight dollars and he had thirty-two cents on his employee card.

Vijay was looking at him strangely.

“You cannot work there. Not to sound arrogant, bro? But without me around, they will
destroy
you.”

“What are you talking about?” Who could he mean, “they”? The skanks?

Vijay blew hair out of his left eye and looked at Kiwi darkly. “
Everybody
. The people who hear you talk.”

“Oh.”

Kiwi pushed greasy hair out of his own eyes—he couldn’t afford a haircut at the moment, either. On Swamplandia! Ossie had taken this duty over from his mother, surprising the other Bigtrees with the steadiness of her hands. Their compliments had irritated her—“Well, I’m not a chimpanzee, you guys. I can use scissors. I can cut in a straight line.” Now Kiwi had hanks of red hair that crimped in the heat like sea serpents.

Yvans had offered to shave Kiwi’s skull bald for him (“For free, Margaret!”),
but that seemed to Kiwi like a move of premature despair. Possibly he would bleed to death from lacerations on his head, or more likely he would be exposed to the cruel hail of female mockery. Also Yvans had more than once confessed to suffering weird ailments like “the shakes,” which didn’t seem, as the girls of the World would say, so super compatible with a razor.

“Do you know any way I could, uh, supplement my income?” Kiwi asked.
I’m going to save the park
, he beamed out across the parking lot toward his sisters, in a direction that he believed led to their water—he could see one small bird rowing its wings into the sun over the interstate, centered up there like the face on a coin.

Vijay was staring at him. “Are you asking me to rob a bank with you? Maybe you want me to pimp you out as an erotic dancer by the airport?”

“Exotic.”

“Erotic. Whatever, bro. Same thing.”

Was it? Vijay lifted his shirt and rippled his abdomen like a belly dancer. Kiwi watched Vijay’s belly button pinch inward and roll sinuously back into existence, which was mesmerizing.

“Quit acting gay, Vijay,” said Kiwi. “I’m serious here. I’m in trouble.”

“How much do you think I could make, Marge? With moves like this?”

“Zero dollars and zero cents.” (
Bro!
Kiwi remembered, too late now.) “Hey, I really don’t think you should be touching your abdomen to this roof like that? Because you will notice there is glass everywhere and you’re putting yourself at risk for tetanus …?”

A seaplane made a noisy loop above them, fangs painted on its black nose in a simulacrum of an alligator’s grin.
Don’t scream
, he heard in Ava’s small growl. For a moment they were in the shadow of its wings, the roar of engines sucking their speech upward.

“What is that?” he managed.

“New ride. You didn’t hear about it?”

Kiwi’s heart was in his throat—the seaplane was landing on the moat that surrounded the World, coming in so close that Kiwi thought its propeller would crash through the Leviathan windows. He dropped his head in anticipation of a phantom shower of glass, but when he
looked again, the seaplane was skimming the surface of the moat. A heavy spray exploded around the seaplane’s fixed wings. Something about the way it landed, floats first, gave Kiwi the impression of teeth entering the water, the jet floats biting into the red-dyed water like two bright fangs.
Probably just the effect the World of D. is going for here
, Kiwi thought. Part of the grand theme.

The seaplane blew red jets of foam across the water for another hundred yards or so, stopped with the whiskers of its propellers trembling near the Leviathan.

“Oh my God,” said Kiwi.

“Right? Say. You know who makes bank, Marge? Those pilots.”

The World of Darkness had its own flight school, Vijay said. The managers were recruiting from inside the World, instead of doing outside hiring, because then they could pay the pilots less—$45,000 a year, said Vijay. Kiwi would have to sell his greenhorn sperm and platelets for a decade to make anywhere near that.