Swamplandia! (29 page)

Touch me again, Bird Man
, I thought urgently.
Tell a joke, say anything
—because I was having the convection feeling. As if my skin were rippling, dissolving. Kiwi describes this phenomenon, “convection” [n], in his Field Notes: the rapid cooling of a body in the absence of all tourists. Even Kiwi, King of Stage Fright, admitted to feeling it on Sunday nights. Convection caused your thoughts to develop an alarming blue tinge and required touch or speech with another human as its antidote (Seths didn’t work, not even my red Seth, I’d tried). Sweating could feel dangerous if you were alone in the swamp, as if droplet by droplet your body might get whisked into the sun.

When I baled water I leaned sideways and grazed the edges of the Bird Man’s black coat. My fingers came back wet, with tiny black feathers stuck to them, which reassured me that neither one of us was a figment. At noon the basking lizards slid into the water to cool off. The river began to pick up speed.

At twelve thirty we ate lunch inside a Park Services chickee hut to avoid the mosquitoes. When you rowed into a cloud of skeeters it was loud as a tractor but there was nothing there, just these tiny molecules of sound. Some ranger had borrowed the Seminole design and erected a modern chickee here to use as a campsite, since there was nowhere high enough on the surrounding tree islands to pitch a tent. The inside smelled clean and dry, like a hollowed-out stump. We weren’t the first people to use this shelter, either—overnighters’ trash filled the corners. Their beers and soda bottles looked shiny as treasure. On the back platform I found a dead anhinga furred in mosquitoes, and a single, mysterious crutch. The poor bird had a broken left wing. The crutch belonged to a human invalid, presumably. Someone on our same mission, maybe, limping toward a wife or daughter in the underworld.

“Uh-oh,” the Bird Man said, shaking the crutch at me. “A bad thing to forget, huh? Wonder what the story was there.”

“Can you talk to that one?” I asked the Bird Man, indicating the dead anhinga, and he looked at me with an adult’s generic formula of pity and irritation; I was disappointed in him. Given where we were headed, I thought my question was a good one. We made our tuna sandwiches and scooted under the palm window.

“There are lots of Seminole ghosts out here, did you know that, Bird Man? My sister told me.”

“Of course,” he nodded, as if I’d just told him there were lots of sheepshead minnows. “We might see them later.”

“My sister is named for a Seminole chieftain. The whites killed him with malaria. He died in Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. Do you think he’s in this part of the underworld?”

“Who knows, kid? Maybe we’ll meet him.”

After the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830, the Seminole people were hunted like animals. They built the palm-thatched chickees for use as temporary shelters, hiding places. President Jackson sent a letter to the Seminoles that we reproduced in our museum, the last line of which reads:

“But should you listen to the bad birds that are always flying about you, and refuse to remove, I have directed the commanding officer to remove you by force.”

Few mainlanders know that the Seminole Wars lasted longer than any other U.S. conflict, longer than the Vietnam War and the American
Revolution. By the time Colonel Loomis declared the end of the Third Seminole War in 1858, thousands of Seminoles had been slaughtered or “removed” to the western territories. My sister was named for the Seminoles’ famous warrior and freedom fighter, War Chief Osceola, who, legend has it, said, at a time when General Jesup was upon them, and all seemed lost:

“If the Great Spirit will show me how, I will make the white man red with blood; and then blacken him in the sun and rain … and the buzzard live upon his flesh.”

Ossie said the spirits of Seminole babies killed by Major Francis L. Dade’s men still haunted the swamp, as did the ghosts of hundreds of army regulars who were murdered out here. So our home was actually a very crowded place.

These Seminoles, the “real” Indians that the Chief envied in a filial and loving way, were in fact the descendants of many displaced tribes from the Creek Confederacy. This swamp was not their ancestral home either, not by any stretch—they had been pushed further and further into the swamp by President Jackson’s Tennessee boys and a company of scarecrows from Atlanta, a militia that was starved and half-crazed. We Bigtrees were an “indigenous species” of swamp dweller, according to the Chief and our catalogs, but it turned out that every human in the Ten Thousand Islands was a recent arrival. The Calusa, the shell builders—they were Paleo-Indians, the closest thing our swamp had to an indigenous people. But the Calusa vanished from all maps hundreds of years ago, and it was not until the late 1800s that our swamp was recolonized by freed slaves and by fugitive Indians and, decades later, by the shocked, drenched white pioneers shaking out wet deeds, true sitting ducks, the patsies of the land barons who had sold these gullible snowbirds farms that were six feet underwater. And then by “eccentrics” like the Bird Man and my parents.

Florida itself was a newcomer to these parts, you could argue. Kiwi did—he said that Florida was the “suture” between Africa and North America three hundred million years ago, when all the continents were fused. According to the geologic clock, our state was an infant. Our soils contained the fossils of endemic African species—my brother said these feathery stencils of the past in our bedrock sort of gave the lie to the Chief’s ideas about the purity of our isolation.

“So, is your sister like the war chief Osceola?”

“Oh, no! She wears barrettes and stuff. She’s a real girl-girl. She’s not like us.” I paused. “Hey, Bird Man?” I watched a bead of sweat travel down his neck and disappear below his collar of feathers. “Why do you always wear that coat?”

“This old thing?” The Bird Man smiled and ruffled a sleeve as if he’d never really considered it, fanned his grimy leather glove at me with a funny coquetry. I didn’t laugh—I didn’t know if I was supposed to—and his face soured.

“Oh, habit, I guess. I’ve been wearing it for so long that I feel naked without it.”

“Okay, wait, I have another one. Where did you get your, ah … that?” I pointed at his black whistle. We were two days into our journey and the Bird Man had yet to use it.

“My birdcall?” He picked it up and held it between his lips, took a long suck of air; for a moment I felt my own belly muscles contract. Then he spit it out and laughed.

“It’s just a whistle, kid. I made it.”

“When?”

“I was even younger than you when I started up with the birdcalls. Ten, eleven.”

I tried to picture the Bird Man as a child—just some runty kid whistling into the leaves. Already odd enough at eleven to give women misgivings.

“When did the song change so that you heard it as words?”

“I don’t hear birdsong as words.”

I had pictured the birds’ strident calls trembling through the air and dying, and then all of a sudden those same cries taking on a coloring—red, black, blue—until what had previously been an empty hissing splintered into a hundred separate dramas: males squabbling over carrion, a lover’s quarrel, a chick and its four siblings protesting their hunger.

“That’s beautiful,” the Bird Man said. “I wish it had been that way.” He sounded tired. All the dark storyteller’s charisma in his voice had vanished, and now his eyes had the absent sheen of my dolls’ eyes. “Really, kid, I couldn’t tell you. It’s still birdsong. One day I heard patterns, that’s all. I’d row out to Black Gum Rookery and I could hear a logic under all that shrieking. Peaks and valleys. Once I could use their calls to get them out of trees, I started to tour the swamp.”

“So you don’t—”

“No.”

“But do you—”

“No more questions for a while, Ava.”

We ate the rest of lunch in silence: tinned ham and little pinkie-length fishes packed in oil, most of which I fed to the red Seth. Our food was running low now. We had, what? Cooler 1 contained six hard-boiled eggs. Crackers, we still had two greasy brown tubes of those. At the bottom of the dry-foods box I found a jar of blackberry jam that had been left for Mom by the Pick Up Club, the little green ribbon still tied to it. Some lady had used scissors to curlicue the ends.

(Q: Why did those good Christian women volunteer to ornament a loss? With their terrible pity, a glittery pity, as if Death were a holiday like Christmas? We kids got a load of gifts and sweets from the neighbor women, all wrapped up in paper and bows. My brother told me that he was only “intermittently certain” that their intentions were good …)

“I’ll pass,” I said, but the Bird Man wanted some jam. With his coat on, and hunched over the tin jar lid like that, the Bird Man looked like a huge crow intelligently attacking a piece of metal.

“You should try some,” he said, extending a black spoonful. “It’s sweet. Tasty.”

Stands of pond-apple trees were adorned with long nets of golden moss and shadowed a kind of briary sapling I didn’t recognize. Air plants hung like hairy stars. We poled through forests. Twinkling lakes. Estuaries, where freshwater and salt water mixed and you could sometimes spot small dolphins. A rotten-egg smell rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangroves’ stilted roots. If Osceola was out here, even with the ghost helping her, I thought she must be so tired by now—she would be thirsty, and very hungry, blood-sucked by all the chizzywinks and mosquitoes, she’d be aching, she’d be wondering why she ever left our island in the first place …

“Can we take another break, Bird Man?”

“Not a chance,” he said with his grave cheer. “No more breaks, my friend. Not if you want to come to a rescue.”

All day the horizon was inches from our noses. We’d been poling the leafy catacombs of the mangrove tunnels for hours. Any changes—palings of the sun that dropped the temperature a degree or two, or a
brilliant lizard hugging the bark—felt like progress. More than once I’d think a tunnel was truly impenetrable. We’d pole into a green cone of water lapping at the trees’ wickery roots: the end of our journey! I’d think. And then we’d slide through a stew of crimson propagules, duck through a wishbonelike mangrove root, pop out. At one point an osprey’s nest crashed onto the poor red Seth’s carrier, knocked loose by our boat; that time we had to pole out stern first.

The Bird Man could always find us a way through. Often it took several tries: a tunnel would appear to be plumb shut and he would lift a branch, pull the skiff into sudden darkness, and slingshot us forward into the undergrowth. Blossoms dropped in a delicate static around us. The mosquitoes hid in wait for us, even in these shadows.

“You don’t see her, right?” I kept asking. “You don’t see anything yet?”

Eventually I stopped asking when we were going to get there. I stopped studying the buzzards, or worrying about whatever future was snaking upstream to meet us. At first it alarmed me to watch the buzzards drop into the thick palms; our map to the underworld kept rewriting itself, and how could anybody read a map like that? Half the black atlas would vanish into a hardwood hammock.

“Bird Man?” I asked at one point. “There goes our map again …”

But the Bird Man snapped in a tired voice that I should leave the navigation up to him. (
The buzzards are our stars
…) I took his advice; I didn’t let my mind wander anymore. Too dangerous. Instead I sent my thoughts flying backward. Certain memories I could reenter like safe rooms, and I had this one in particular I liked to turn the knob on: once when my sister was fourteen she had led the afternoon tour of the Bigtree Family Museum. The Chief was away on a business trip, and Mom was taking some Lithuanian schoolkids with weird haircuts backstage to see the alligators’ incubators. I was in a mood. I told Ossie that I was sick, and convinced her to do the tour. You used to be able to get Ossie to do anything for you—Ossie was the kindest member of our tribe. Privately I thought my big sister was weak and pitied her a little, for her softness and her status as a nonwrestler. She used to be so very quiet, back before her possessions started up. During these tours she read from a script that the Chief typed up for her. She stuttered
t
’s and
said her
s
’s adenoidally. Her hands would shake. I still made her cover for me. I was passing by the museum window, eating a lemon ice and feeling like an expert deceiver, when I heard her voice float out:

“Ava Bigtree is only eleven years old. But she is already one of the best-t-t alligator wrestlers in the history of Swamplandia! She is Hilola Bigtree’s daughter and my sister. Remember her name, because one day she will be the best alligator wrestler in the world.”

Maybe Ossie was already home? I pictured Ossie sitting Indian style on the burgundy sofa in her polka-dotted pajamas. Watching TV, the mainland stations. News programs. Cartoons. Ossie eating popcorn while Tom and Jerry beaned each other with mallets. And then the TV went black, and the house was empty again. My giggle turned into something raw and terrible—accidentally, I’d just met this part of myself that no longer believed my sister was alive.
Your sister
, an old voice told me, as frank as noonlight,
is lost forever. You’re too late. There’s not a shadow left for you to chase. You’ll go home and you won’t have a sister
.

“Stay put, Osceola!” I’d put in the note pinned to our refrigerator. “If you beat me back home, sit tight. Don’t come looking for
me
now …”

“Look out, kid—”

I watched a water moccasin wrinkle slowly across the river. We passed her; we were gaining speed. Gray and rustling branchways arced above the skiff like dried-out rainbows. The magnolia leaves turned green or black with the always-changing light.

“Al-most,” the Bird Man whistled. He sank his pole into the water near an enormous frizz of roots. A hundred-year cypress lay on its side in the middle of the water. Roots shot outward from the hollow at the base like desiccated sun rays. Bright leaves like butterflies impaled there.
Closer and closer
, I thought,
we are getting closer and closer to the land of the dead
. The Bird Man pointed at the buzzards, then turned our bow until our boat was nearly facing upstream. We poled hard against the grain of the river.