Swamplandia! (24 page)

I watched my hand scratch out a note to my father, in case he got home before we did. The note was very formal. “Sincerely, Ava,” I wrote, because the Bird Man was watching me and “I love you” or even just “Love” struck me as a childish sign-off.

Then I took the telephone off the hook. That way if the Chief called us before we got back he wouldn’t worry, he’d think we’d just been careless. So: we were going. The rose gardens on my mother’s curtains continued rippling. The lizards clung to the window screens, motionless. We left her china plates in a pretty stack.

We packed in a hurry: cans of pork and tuna, red beans, powdered coffee and milk, dry curls of macaroni, a skillet, the Chief’s fishing knife, a package of ground hamburger, envelopes of the powdered orange drink Ossie liked. I grabbed knives and old gallon jugs. But the Bird Man said we should bring more food, more water. Nonperishables. It seemed to me like we were overpacking; how long did a trip to the underworld take?

Two hours after I’d discovered Ossie’s note tacked to the tree, we started down the trail toward the island’s muddy shoreline.

“I never tie off at your dock—that’s a public spot, and you’ve got that fat ferryboat captain puttering around, minding other people’s business …”

“Gus.” I felt a little pang. “He’s nice.”

The Bird Man’s feathers heaved up and down—he was only shrugging again.

“I try to protect folks from their own curiosity about me. My profession. Not too many Bird Men working the islands these days. This way, kid. I’m over on the lee side.”

In addition to food and water I had decided to bring the red Seth in her wooden carrying crate. It wasn’t a practical or a kind decision, and I whispered a little apology through the breathing holes; if it was any consolation, I told her, by this time next year she would be too big and fangsome for me to carry. Her stint as my pet would be over. We would have to become rivals, I explained a little sadly, a world-famous duet of muscles and scales, we would pioneer new holds and we would invent our own championship if we had to …

The Bird Man glanced down at me. “Who are you talking to, kid?”

“Nobody. I’m, ah … I’m praying.”

“Just keep that thing taped up. If you’re dead set on bringing it, which is a pretty stupid move—but I noticed that you didn’t ask my opinion.”

My hand tightened on the carrier’s handle. We were deep into the underbrush now. He paused to make some grunting adjustment to the red cooler’s weight, sliding cans and jugs around, when a fish crow cried out, a long squawk. The Bird Man stood up.

“Hear that? That’s our augur. Hell’s doorbell. It’s time to go.”

“That’s it, really? That’s hell’s doorbell? A fish crow?”

This cawing was a sound I heard and ignored a dozen times each day. I would have expected something more impressive, like
Phantom of the Opera
music or the boom of a chasm opening. But this crow sounded like any old crow sounds, foreboding and hoarse, like a psychic who is indifferent to your fate. We entered a stand of madeira trees. As we walked beyond the strains of the crow’s last, dry cry, the Bird Man ticked off instructions on his thumb:

“One, keep your arms and legs inside the boat.

“Two, keep your questions to a minimum.

“Three: Some of the Ten Thousand Islands on the way to the underworld are inhabited.” The Bird Man’s voice seemed to issue from the pool of shadows beneath his hat. “The people who live along the Riptides of the Dead … these are not people you should trust, kid. A few of them aren’t even, to get real technical, people. Don’t get too loose and free with the details about your sister, either. Anybody asks, I’m your cousin. We’re on a fishing trip.”

“Okay. No problem, cousin.” I tried to grin. “Are you a Bigtree then, or am I a … you? One of your kind?” But the Bird Man didn’t like this
game. I smelled salt and a skunkier odor, and knew that water must be hidden behind the yellow pines.

SWAMPLANDIA! AND BEYOND
read a wooden sign at the edge of the grounds.

OVER 1,000,000 ACRES OF WILDERNESS!

“We can find her, I know we can,” I mumbled. “How far can she have gotten?”

The Bird Man didn’t respond. He lifted a low cocoplum branch for me: the glare of water dazzled in. Through the bushes I saw a treeless spit of sand.

“See that, kid? A hidden harbor.” I saw a horseshoe of earth around shallow broth. A glade skiff made a long snaky beak along the sand.

“You wait there.” He flipped the skiff and began wading out with it, the gravied water covering his boots. Grasses got crushed and sprang back around the hull. “You know how to paddle?”

“You bet.” I’d been kayaking through the Ten Thousand Islands before. I used to go rare-flower hunting in the spring with Mom and, on summer nights, gator hunting with carbide lanterns and .22 rifles with my grandfather. This would be a different kind of voyage, I thought, and felt a little yellow slurry of excitement. Sister hunting. Ghost seeking. Squeezing through the Eye of the Needle to another world.

The skiff was a fourteen-footer. I saw that he’d built it following the old Seminole blueprint, with penny nails and a cypress transom, a poling platform in the back; he waved me forward and offered me a glove. I hesitated—a second later his gloves hooked my armpits and swung me onto the bow seat. Up close, I noticed that the Bird Man had the finest purse of wrinkles around his mouth, so that he seemed older or younger depending on where the sun hit. His chin was pocked and small as a red potato.

“So you don’t think my sister is crazy?” I asked happily. Now that I could feel the current tugging at our boat a knot was loosening in my stomach.

“I don’t know your sister.”

“But you do think that ghosts are real? You think it could be true, that she’s been talking to them all this time?”

Feelings tumbled through me.

One was:
Ossie does have powers
.

And another:
What if I follow her to the underworld and find my mother?

The Bird Man, tightening the screws in the poling platform with a doll-size tool, didn’t respond. I started babbling about Ossie and Louis then, as his silence deepened. I wanted him to agree with me that she wasn’t “sick,” like Kiwi claimed. Even at her wildest, I told him, even while possessed, my sister had certain ideas about herself that you couldn’t change, fixed in place like the burning constellations—who could love her, who couldn’t or would never, what she could ask for on the Ouija, what she was likely to get.

“I’m too ugly for him,” Ossie had told me one October day with the dispassion of a much older woman, checking her reflection in the back of a café spoon. I had only been joking, telling her that she should conjure Benjamin Franklin. “Didn’t Benjamin Franklin invent a car that runs on lightning or something? He’s too good for me, Ava. He won’t come if I call.”

Even in her trances, even while possessed, my sister was very shrewd about her prospects. A fantasy would collapse like a wave against the rocks of her intelligence. Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of
everything
.

“Okay, kid. She doesn’t sound crazy to me. Enough, huh?”

The Bird Man kept shooting looks at the coast.

“Listen, did you hear something? Did you see anybody following us?”

I shook my head. It wasn’t a Gus day.

“Good.”

“Also—I swear this is the last thing, okay?—it’s not like my sister believes she could summon just
anyone.
” I paused. “She can’t contact our mother, either.”

Ossie said a spirit’s voice was as fine as a needle, tattooing her insides with luminous words. I’d seen a picture of this in
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
. A young Spiritist levitated a full foot above her bedsprings. A ghost was curled like a blue snail inside her chest, and it was so tiny! It burned through the lace of her old-fashioned dress like a second heart. A musical staff wound in a thorny crown around the Spiritist’s forehead, so that notes ran down her cheeks in a loose mask of song. Her eyelids were blacked out—and I saw this again and again in nightmares
about my sister. Her eyelids had the high polish of acorns. But her
ears:
that was the truly scary part. Great fantails of indigo and violet lights spiraled into her earlobes in an ethereal funnel—what the book called the Inverted Borealis. The caption read: “A ghost sings its way deeply inside the Spiritist.”

Now the Bird Man seemed really interested. “The Inverted Borealis. That sounds like a big event for one girl’s body to host. Must get awfully bright in there. Does your sister wear sunglasses? Is there a ‘Sunblock for Spiritists’?” He chuckled once and stopped. “Aw, hell, kid, don’t look that way. Just a bad joke.”

“That’s okay. It’s not so funny when it happens to her.”

“Does she like talking to them, these ghosts?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “She sure likes talking to her … to this guy Louis.” I was horrified—I had almost said “her husband.”
How exactly does a person marry a ghost?
I wanted to ask, because a very very bad thought had just occurred to me.

“And what do these voices tell your sister, I wonder?”

“The voice. There’s only ever one voice at a time, I guess, and she and it … converse. The ghost tells her romantic stuff. Stuff like you hear in the movies: that it loves her, that it needs her. That she, you know …” I frowned and hoped that he believed me. “That she smells like flowers.”

This bluff embarrassed me because I had no idea what two teenagers in love might talk about. My parents had their own language for that stuff that involved the alligators, and us. TV movies and radio songs were the only models I had for love transmissions, a boyfriend-girlfriend conversation.

“That’s mostly it, I think.”

The Bird Man nodded distractedly. He was knee-deep in the water with his pants trailing threads, his coat slung like a pelt over one shoulder. He pushed his trousers up and shook out a lighter from what I thought of as the left wing of his coat (it was hard for me to think of it as a
sleeve
) and held it up to a cigarette. I watched his lighter jump. Aside from the cranberry brightness of the flame against his slick feathers, everything else checked out. I examined his ungloved fingers, his chewed nails surrounded by little flags of skin—what had I been expecting, claws? Talons? His legs were very ordinary. His shins were
slightly hairier than my brother’s. Hyacinths slid around them and stuck to the boards of the transom.

“Oh, wow, you smoke my dad’s brand of cigarettes.”

“Sure do. I took the carton from your house. A little advance on my fee.”

Then I started noticing other acquisitions. The Chief’s fishing knife was under the stern seat and the Chief’s beer was in the cooler. I saw a knot of antique Heddon lures from Grandpa Sawtooth’s tackle. The Bird Man had raided our fridge and our museum. This gave me a dizzy feeling, as if we were only going on an ordinary camping trip together, a family trip. I caught myself listening for squelching footsteps, my mother and the Chief and Ossie and Kiwi lagging behind us on the trail.

“Took a few more things from your museum, kid. Useful stuff. You can bring it back after we find her.”

“Sure. Okay.” We were poling faster and faster now. Through the peeled branches I saw a dense, soft shuffle of wings. “Bird Man? I thought you got rid of them. Are they coming, too?”

“Of course they are coming,” the Bird Man said. “If I am the navigator, the buzzards are our stars. They’re our map, kid. Nobody can get to the underworld without assistance, myself included.”

Buzzards filled the trees along the riverbanks. They panted their wings at us, scattering water droplets like slavering dogs on high perches.

I peered up at the sky where a few birds were getting knocked around by the wind. I tried my best to see a map there. Maybe a map to the underworld worked like an optical illusion—you had to train your eyes to see it. I thought of Kiwi’s gray M. C. Escher print of a stairway that I could never bring into focus.

“Oh, yeah, there it is. I think I see it now.” I paused. “You can read that map? We can get there, for sure?” Doubt felt like a lash caught in my eye, a little hair I had to blink out if I wanted to find Osceola. “You promise it’s a real place, Bird Man?”

“What a question. Do I promise that hell is a real place?” He chuckled at me, as if to reassure me, but his eyes were bright and cold as snow banked in the valley under his hat. “Hell’s real, all right. We can be there tomorrow, or Wednesday at the latest. So long as you want to go.”

He’d stopped poling, and I realized that he was waiting for me to say something.
Hurry up! Our map is getting ahead of us
. A fat mosquito blimped through the air between us; I watched it crawl inside the open throat of my water canteen and slip down the plastic walls like a coward’s tear.

“I …”

The skiff was pointed at the bend in the channel, where dry grass exhaled yellow butterflies. If we could get around that bend, I’d feel better.

“I don’t want to go there,” I said slowly. “But I’m not scared. And maybe we can find my sister before she and Louis get married.”

The Bird Man extended a glove; at first I didn’t understand what he wanted. I grinned and shook his hand. Then he resumed his ferry work. We poled around the scummy crystals of the oyster beds and made a beeline for the mirrorlike slough. I watched a line of water creep up his pole as the channel deepened, like the mercury in an old-fashioned thermometer, and then we broke into wild sun.

“Put your hat on, sonny,” he said, and grinned back at me so then I knew that he had been making a joke. “Put on your sun cream.”

I laughed, startled, because the Bird Man sounded so much like an anxious mainland dad. We were bringing actual sundries to this underworld: sun lotion and aloe, itching powder, blond jugs of mosquito repellent, iced-tea mix from the café, a Ziploc bag of bandages and unserious medicines to treat a traveler’s minor aches and pains. To this cache the Bird Man contributed a half-full brown jar of pink bismuth antacid tablets. If indigestion was one of the dangers that we were preparing for on this trip to hell, I thought, then I was going to do just fine.