Swamplandia! (25 page)

“I didn’t plan to make this trip again, you know,” he said softly at one point, and not really to me.

“Thank you. We are going to pay you, I swear, Ossie and me …” I studied the sky, trying to see what he saw. So the map to the underworld was not a secret, static document like the paper map we’d recovered from the dredge but alive and legible above us, beating its wings. I leaned into my knees and tried to lift off my tailbone a little, get settled on the skinny bow seat. The Bird Man began to perform a strange call—it took a minute before I realized it was our own English language:

“
And and and and …
”

The Bird Man told me that he was singing a transition song. He dipped his pole into the shallows and parted clumps of golden periphyton.

“
And and and …,
” he called, poling steadily faster. Again I fought the desire to cover my ears.
Please stop
, I thought, but after a few more measures the droned melody snuck inside me, it was infectious, and I almost wanted to sing along. After a while the song wasn’t a language anymore but a note like a skipped stone—a melodic conjunction. The bull gators were sopranos compared to the Bird Man’s deep pitch. I knew then that this person had a real magic. My pet Seth’s crate wobbled between my sneakers, her eyes two pins between the slats. We made a keyhole turn around the coast. The Bird Man’s pole kept clanging over rocks, his song like a cog in his throat, and I watched my home pull away from us.

V
ijay was wearing his red bandanna and doing twenty over the speed limit, and for once Kiwi didn’t say a word. Kiwi made no mention of the study he’d read on vehicular manslaughter or the difficult medical ethics of life support; he didn’t comment on the alarming flap-flap-flaping of Vijay’s unbuckled seat belt against the door lock; he didn’t ask if Vijay was a registered organ donor, or call attention to the many drivers flipping his best friend the bird: no, tonight Kiwi Bigtree was ready to endorse reckless speeds. Kiwi’s name was second on a green-and-white computer printout from the LCPS: Álvarez, Ruben, and then Bigtree, Kiwi. It was 7:01, and he was late for his first night of school.

“Buckle up, bro,” he’d mumbled at a light, but Vijay had stared sightlessly forward. Kiwi sighed. Out of kindness—perhaps as part of some private philanthropic project—Vijay was now pretending not to hear the dorkiest things that Kiwi said.

They flew onto a bridge that spanned downtown Loomis. Huge, luminous pharmacies pushed at the darkness like giant cruise ships at anchor. Kiwi spotted a billboard that the Chief used to lease,
SWAMPLANDIA!
in green-and-sapphire circus letters above his mother’s beautiful face. Now it advertised the Bigfoot Podiatry Treatment Center of America. There was a grinning Bigfoot in a karate suit on it, kicking a hirsute monkey foot at traffic.

“Can you maybe crack a window, bro?” Kiwi asked in a small voice. “I feel sort of carsick?”

The neighborhoods went from bad-historic to bad-dilapidated, then recovered their lawns and flowering trees again in mere minutes of highway travel. The Loomis Children’s Hospital appeared on the other side of the bridge, a putty-colored complex ringed by the world’s saddest playgrounds, with medieval-looking bucket swings on rusted chains and the pastel skeletons of bouncy-horsies. Next door was a church. A group of stone angels gathered like hunchbacked hitchhikers in the garden. A boarded-up movie palace called Casa del Encanto had become a lion’s den of hundreds of stray cats—Kiwi could see dark and pale fur coursing around the ticket booth. The strip malls and the XXX … And More video stores gave way to stucco coffee-colored office buildings, drab apartment complexes, a few hallucinatory glimpses of the sea.

“So what’s the deal with this XXX … And More chain?” Kiwi muttered. “What’s their business angle? That you can rent pornography
and Bambi
there?”

“
Bambi!
Ha-ha. That’s about a baby deer. Shit. You’re sick, Marge. You got weird tastes.”

But Vijay was only half-listening. He kept craning over, checking out the two girls in the car next to them. Kiwi liked them instinctively. The larger girl had a face as round and white as a clock and she kept touching a spot near her heart and exploding into a laughter that shook her every frizzy curl. The driver had an acned face and musty-colored bangs and laughed without teeth. Kiwi wondered if they were sisters. Something about their ease with one another and all the happy, feckless ugliness in that car made him think of sisters. They were singing along to the radio, acting much younger than their ages. It was clear that these girls didn’t care who was watching them through the clear panes. Kiwi wondered if they would step out of the car and shrivel into individuals, grow self-conscious again.

What are Ava and Ossie doing today
? An easy thought to erase. Sometimes Kiwi wondered if he was also a genius at Zen Buddhism, he had become such an expert at annulling certain attachments.

The rap song playing now was one that Vijay had been trying to teach Kiwi for weeks. It was called “Gas Hose” and the title seemed to
be a metaphor for oral sex. One of the verses Kiwi simply refused to sing: it rhymed “big old tits” with “my catcher’s mitts,” and then, most bafflingly to Kiwi, “cricket bits”—Kiwi
believed
that was the lyric, he could be wrong, because behind it was a chorus of moans and what sounded like a thousand air horns. “Cricket bits” [n]: could this be yet another mainland synonym for female genitalia? The party slang of entymologists? Either way, the rhyme really unnerved him.

On Swamplandia!, the crickets sang to announce the day’s transition to evening, the flash of pink to black time that meant: deep summer. Vernal currents, an air as lushly populated as seawater, deer flies and damselflies, a whole cosmos of mosquitoes: all this iridescent life rose out of the solution holes at dusk. Seths bellowing in gravelly eruptions, launching that strange sound at the sky until you braced yourself for an astral landslide. Crickets meant that the moon was up, that a tide was rising, that his mother or the Chief would soon be calling for them across the mudflats …

“Oh fuck,” Vijay muttered. “Traffic.”

The Volvo was trapped inside a tunnel, sedans and a crocus-blue delivery van and one snouty limousine beeping all around them. Kiwi felt his lungs fanning open and shut, the first white tinge of panic. He shut his eyes and pictured the ocean. Vijay was twisting the knob of the radio, and Kiwi heard the “cricket bits” song fly past on three different stations. He heard the jingle for the World of Darkness: “Jo-nah survived the Le-vi-a-than …” Finally the cars began to move. When he opened his eyes, Kiwi saw a slab of blue night up ahead—and then the stars began to fly. The Volvo jumped forward. A rain-soaked banner sagging from the roof of a two-story building read
LOOMIS COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE
.

“Have a good first day at school, son,” Vijay giggled.

“Okay!” Kiwi waved Vijay off the premises. “Thank you! I can take it from here.”

Night school was held in a chilly top-floor room of the community college, now dark and humming, the moon floating like a buoy just outside the window. Kiwi opened door after door onto empty classrooms. “Hello …? Uh, is this … school?”

Kiwi had purchased all these rainbow multiclip folders, which he carried fanned against his chest, like a float in search of a parade. The
floors squeaked under his sneakers. The same moon greeted him in all the empty rooms. Kiwi wondered if he’d messed up the time and date.

“Are you looking for Miss Arenas’s class?” snapped a janitor. “You’re on the wrong floor.”

“Cool. Thank you.” Kiwi could feel the janitor’s hatred rising out of the darkness like heat from a vent; this was another new mainland experience for Kiwi: to feel immediately hated, to be anonymous and hated. “Wow, those are some quality gloves, sir. I work at the World of Darkness and the management is really parsimonious about our supplies …”

The janitor, a whiskery man with blue exhausted eyes, gaped up at him.

From the stairwell, Kiwi heard the always-intimidating squeal of mainland girls’ laughter—a wolf pack howling for blood on an open glacier would have been less terrifying, the bellow of a thousand Seths would be a lullaby—and he followed their voices to a crack of light below the stairwell. When he touched the knob the door swung back.

“No, I don’t want to hear excuses. You’re late. I was about to lock up.”

Had he missed the class? The teacher was a tall, unsmiling woman in high-waisted pants with a nickel-bright Afro. Her body had a switchblade beauty that Kiwi was not encouraged to continue appreciating by her face.

“You just going to stand there? Shut your mouth, find a desk. One warning. You can’t get here on time, don’t bother coming.”

She wrote her name on the board and underlined it with a defiant little flourish:
VOILA ARENAS
. “I will be your instructor,” Voila Arenas said, chalking urgently, as if human life were an equation they were going to solve together in the next hour and twenty-two minutes. Facts screamed at meteoric speeds across the board.

“We’re all adults here, so you can call me Voila.”

Somebody in the back left corner made a crack about a magician’s hat and a vagina and the room roared.

“Excuse me? My parents were first-generation immigrants.” Voila locked black eyes with Kiwi as if she suspected him of being the joker. “It’s a beautiful word.”

“My name is Kiwi,” Kiwi offered.

Everybody had to introduce themselves and say something about why they had chosen to enroll in Voila Arenas’s GED class. When it was Kiwi’s turn, he told the truth: “I am a Bigtree alligator wrestler. I’m here because my dad put us under a mountain of debt, and I need to make money, and to do that I need to get my high school equivalency.” He paused. “I aspire to get a scholarship to a four-year university.”

“I ass-pire to fuck a bitch with great ass cheeks!” The kid behind him giggled.

“White boy’s here to tutor us,” said another white boy, a corncob-haired Midwestern-looking kid. “Community service! White boy trying to …” Kiwi heard sniggers and a few affirmative grunts. The insult drifted into something unintelligible. It took a beat to realize that he was the joke here, the punch line—he didn’t think it came naturally, to see yourself as an object. It was like conjugating your own name in a foreign tongue. So: in Loomis County he was a “white boy,” apparently. This was news.
Well, it’s not like I can disagree
—Kiwi stared at his skin in the pencil’s aluminum rim. He wished he could explain the island to these city kids, though. Could tell them about Chief Bigtree’s “Indian” lineage; how as a kid they’d put makeup and beads on him, festooned him with spoonbill feathers and reptilian claws; how at fourteen he’d declared: “I’m a Not-Bigtree. A Not-Indian. A Not-Seminole. A Not-Miccosukee.” This category “white” gave him a whistling fear, a feeling not unlike agoraphobia. “White” made Kiwi Bigtree picture a vast Arctic plain, a word in which one single person could never survive.
Whitey, white boy
—Kiwi didn’t like getting snowballed into a color. But maybe everybody felt that way about their adjectives, Kiwi thought. He remembered the feeling of coming down the Loomis ferry dock with his battered Swamplandia! duffel into a wilderness of faces.

Kiwi wondered if Miss Voila Arenas always began the class with this question. Several female students in the class had gotten pregnant and had to drop out of regular school; one slight young man had escaped a horrific home life, alluded to by the student in monotone; several admitted to having fallen into Loomis solution holes of drug use or unintelligent, repetitive crimes and crawled back out again; or they were ESL, new arrivals from Ecuador and Pakistan and Cuba. There were many older folks, too, older women especially. The oldest student, a woman with sparkling, hooded eyes, was wearing a bomber jacket
worn to peach fuzz at the elbows and had brought a stack of old textbooks with her from her high school in Havana. She’d covered them in plastic. Kiwi disliked her immediately. How stupid could you get, carting all your Communist books to Loomis County? It wouldn’t occur to him until their fifth class together that his classmate’s stack was perhaps not so dissimilar from his own Field Notes and the soggy 1962 encyclopedias shelved in his bedroom at Swamplandia!

That first night Voila passed around a sheet. Diagnostic Test. Kiwi’s neck ached. He could hear the clock tick and the distancing breaths of the other thinkers, the way their cognition seemed to be happening down long, echoey corridors, somewhere impossibly remote. Words he hadn’t understood in the questions appeared again, in new orders, in the choice of answers. It was like an evil game of musical chairs. Names crowded into his brain, a drunken stadium of names, refusing to get quiet and organized.

Part I: True/False/Uncertain

“The fact that total revenue rose when half the crop was destroyed indicates that demand for coffee is
inelastic …
”

“Substituting in the information about price and utility, we get …”

“Cross-multiplying for
x
, we get …”

“Five minutes,” said Voila, turning the page of a bodybuilding magazine called
Bulk Up
. A woman with an Arctic-white smile and scary bauxite skin grinned out at him from the cover. Skinny Voila was underlining something, her face pensive.

When Kiwi got stuck, which happened every third question, he would stare up at this grinning bodybuilder. He felt as puny, as desperate as he ever had during the Bigtree shows. In his sweaty fingers his pencil kept slipping; he’d already broken one. Kiwi had taken many tests on Swamplandia!, his pencil moving at a steady clip in the evergreen light of his own kitchen; he couldn’t understand why his intelligence wouldn’t make a fist now, and pound reliably, like his heart.

He couldn’t remember the quadratic equation, or which one the rhombus was, or whether the perimeter of Griswald Wallace’s fence would be fifty-four meters or seventy-two, given the area of his outhouse and the volume of his well. Where the Christ did Griswald Wallace live, anyhow? Why did Griswald Wallace need a fence around his outhouse? Kiwi couldn’t make sense of the reading comprehension portion,
either: some excerpt from a poem about a sick dog and blueberries. “What is the
theme
of the passage about Rochester the dog?” “What do the blueberries
symbolize
for the dog named Rochester?” Kiwi’s eyes were swimming. He began to bubble in indiscriminate letters.