Swamplandia! (34 page)

Which was fine by Kiwi, because now he’d have ten hours of overtime this week. After taxes, this boosted his salary by $43.12.

Yesterday—two Mondays after his “miraculous resuscitation” of Emily Barton—he’d gotten on the number 14 city bus after his shift with no real destination in mind, happy to pay a buck seventy to get out of the World. He’d wound up riding it all the way to the ferry docks. It was raining when Kiwi climbed down from the bus. A black cat was stalking a fat, doofy pelican across the cement landing; Gus’s ferryboat and a few misused U-RENT kayaks were moored there. The ferry had received a fresh coat of paint, a spectacularly ugly gourd orange. Nobody was around.
FERRY SERVICE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
said a sign on the gangplank. Kiwi sat through the intensifying rain for an hour and fifty minutes, the time it took for the bus to repeat its loop, and for that entire period he stared in the direction of the island. Slowly it sank in that he couldn’t get home that afternoon, even if he’d wanted to. Kiwi could feel this thought descending from his brain to his lungs, where it winnowed like a noose.
You’re stuck here, kid
, Kiwi imagined the Chief saying in his microphone voice, a booming, put-on friendliness.
We need you and you’re nowhere
.

Lost Souls percolated around him in the Leviathan, sightlessly munching at diabolical corn chips or tugging up their bathing straps. A few of the tiny kids were wearing Whalehead hats, foam skullcaps in orca whites and blacks that looked vaguely French, monastic, cost $17.99, and disintegrated—Lost Souls were always complaining—in the wash. Kiwi Bigtree seemed to have hit minute fourteen of his fifteen minutes of fame. It had been over a week since Emily Barton did her last TV interview about “the angel” whom she had seen underwater and later pegged as the human lifeguard Kiwi Bigtree. Since Monday he’d signed only three autographs. Lost Souls still stopped him in the halls, but most of them needed to validate their parking ticket, or urinate.

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn’t
be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library’s peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light …

Kiwi grunted; someone had written
BOOTY FUCK THE MOTHERFUCKERS
on the wall beside the escalator to the Jaws. Where was his paintbrush?

Heaven would be a comfy armchair, Kiwi decided, rubbing at expletives with his elbow. Beige and golden upholstery, beige and golden wallpaper (what he was actually picturing here, he realized, was the pattern of his mother’s brown rosettes on their curtains). You’d get a great, private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to your life’s melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy—the a cappella version—or you could play it back with its accompaniment, embedded in the brass and strings of mothers, fathers, sisters, windfalls and failures, percussive cities of strangers. You could play it forward or backward, back and back, and listen to the future of your past. You could lift the needle at whim, defeating Time.

Roaring erupted from the high, angled vents that lined the Leviathan—it began all at once, as sudden as a flood of rainfall. The white intrusion that makes you aware of what the silence had been before. Kiwi paused with his hands in the bucket.

Mom
? Kiwi shuddered, feeling immediately stupid.

“Whadduppp, Bigtree!” Sergio from concessions appeared in one of the labyrinthine hallways, wheeling a trash can behind him. His name tag was coming loose on its pin and the great red moose fans of his devil horns hung around his scrawny neck.

“I thought I was the last fool in the World. Weird to be inside the Leviathan so late, right? That air conditioner sounds like a fucking hurricane, bro! I’m
freezing.
”

On Monday, Kiwi got special permission to leave work early and get his medical certificate for the FAA licensing requirement. He’d thought about making the appointment with the Bigtrees’ family physician, Dr. Budz, a liver-spotted Ukrainian man who was sort of mentally spotty as well—who did not, for example, require that his patients have insurance or even legally viable surnames; who’d instructed the Bigtree tribe to call him Al in an accent thickened by his weird humor, and whose
office was above a women’s gymnasium. You could hear the basketballs drumming as he stethoscoped your heartbeat. No one had seen Dr. Budz since the previous fall, when Hilola’s medical needs introduced them to a new class of death specialist.

Instead, Kiwi made the appointment through the World-contracted flight school with an AMA-accredited physician. The office was in the fanciest part of Loomis, where the buildings were identical pastels and weepy-eyed with windows; even their decorative plants had this sort of futuristic sheen that said, “I’m germless.”

Kiwi had to answer pages and pages of questions about himself. Nope to measles, never to mumps, scabies, diabetes. He’d had two weeklong bouts of weird dreaming and terrible chills when he was six that his mom referred to as “grasshopper fever,” but who knew how that illness translated into mainland etiology? Old crackers in the swamp used bear piss to cure chicken pox. One section of the form was called “Family History.”
Well, for starters, my sixteen-year-old sister is crazy, she has aural and visual hallucinations … my youngest sister is an equestrian of Mesozoic lizards … my father wears a headdress … my grandfather bites men now …

The doctor’s office smelled like lemon disinfectant and even the big-shouldered leather furniture made him very nervous.

“Oh, Mr. Bigtree!” the receptionist called after him. “You forgot one. No, don’t get up, hon. I’ll fill it in for you. I just need your home address.”

“The World of Darkness” fell lightly from his lips, Kiwi noticed.

The private CFI the World of Darkness had hired to train him was an ex-army guy in his early sixties, Dennis Pelkis, or Denny, as he kept encouraging Kiwi to call him. “Relax, relax,” Denny would say, and then he’d proceed to regale Kiwi with some story about a former student who fell out of the sky. In every case these tragedies had occurred because the student pilot failed to obey the teachings of Dennis. He kept referring to “Denny’s ground rules” and “Denny’s philosophy on that issue,” with open arms and a tour operator’s smile, as if he were giving Kiwi a cultural orientation to the country of Denny. Dennis Pelkis had silvery chest hair and a satyr’s physique. He smiled at Kiwi in a sightless, professional way, a smile that faltered only slightly
when Kiwi asked him, apropos of nothing, if he and Mrs. Pelkis had ever been to a place called Swamplandia! to see Hilola Bigtree wrestle alligators.

“I’m sorry?”

“Sorry,” Kiwi mumbled, which was the usual volley. “Thought you looked familiar …” Really, Kiwi had hoped that
his
face would look familiar to this Denny. On those rare occasions when Kiwi found a mainlander who knew about Swamplandia!, even secondhand, he went after their memories like a magpie tugging at bright string. He’d strike up conversations with the Lost Souls in the Leviathan and engineer an opportunity to ask them,
Say, have you ever visited Swamplandia!?
A few days ago he’d met a couple from Sarasota, Florida, who began nodding immediately when he mentioned the Bigtrees.

“Oh, right, those alligator people,” the wife had laughed. “I remember that place. Swampy Land. That woman alligator wrestler, Don, what was her name, we used to pass her billboard on the way to your sister’s …?”

Hilola!

Whenever tourists remembered her name, men with beards included, Kiwi wanted to passionately kiss them. Her name in a stranger’s mouth was a resurrection: however briefly, she was alive with him again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb. On those rare and wonderful occasions when he found an entire mainland family who had seen his mother’s show, Kiwi could watch the strangers’ eyes brighten with recognition and picture a tiny Hilola Bigtree climbing a tiny ladder in each of their brains, walking out to the edge of the green diving board.

Dennis Pelkis coughed once and resumed a rolling discourse about the World of Darkness floatplanes versus “terra firma” aircraft. He punctuated his major points by jabbing a lit cigarette at the sun.

“Soon it will be time to fly,” he concluded. This was also the title of the 630-page flight instruction manual that he handed over to Kiwi. Kiwi had a polynomials test this week in Miss Arenas’s class and he was picking up shifts for Yvans; lately Kiwi felt like an understudy in his own life on the mainland, stumbling over his lines and missing important cues and waiting with less and less patience for the real actor to show up.

“I can’t wait,” Kiwi said sincerely. He was thinking about money.
From Denny’s explanation of the pilot licensing requirements, it sounded like he and this cheerful and alarming man were going to spend forty hours together in the plane and twenty more in ground school—four months.

“Longer than a Vegas marriage,” he grinned, and Kiwi let out an accidental whimper. The kind of grief that shows up at a Halloween party with its costume in tatters, swears “I’m a chuckle!” What if Swamplandia! went into foreclosure before he got his license, his pay raise?

“Ha-ha! Four months does sound like a long time. And there’s no way to, ah, expedite the process?”

“Ex-speed-ite.” Denny frowned. “You sure that’s how it’s pronounced? We can’t speed anything, Bigtree. Same FAA rules apply for heroes.”

Kiwi frowned down at his fingernails. “Your hands are damn pretty,” Sawtooth used to say accusingly. Like most alligator wrestlers, Sawtooth Bigtree had lost substantial chunks of several fingers. Part of his thumb was somewhere in the Gator Pit, remaindered by one of the Seths. Even Ossie boasted scars from an accident that took place when she was four years old and a juvenile alligator had snapped at her hand while she was pulling up weeds along a riverbank. Kiwi was the only Bigtree with zero injuries—no stitches, no scars. He’d once cut his pointer finger opening a can of cherry soda after a wrestling match. He tried to imagine his ladylike hands throttling up inside a floatplane.

“Do you happen to know, sir, what my ranking is going to be? Second? Third?”

“Huh? That ain’t how the check ride gets scored.”

Kiwi nodded. “I recognize that I probably won’t rank as the First Pilot of the Apocalypse, given that I am an airplane greenhorn. But do I necessarily have to be the last one?”

Denny exhaled two cool gusts of smoke through his nostrils and stared at him.

“You’re a funny young man, Kiwi.”

On Thursday, Kiwi found himself ducking the crack in the break room door, where he got a brief glimpse of a bunch of flame-clad staffers
watching TV, and then he was pinball-whizzing out of the World: upstairs, downstairs, through staff-only hallways. There was an empire of supplies down here: pyramids of toilet paper (single ply; this was Hell), boxes of BrimStones that spilled over the cardboard like collapsed speech bubbles, devil horn hatbands and devilish ribbons for the ladies. Finally he exploded through the same small service hole that spat out garbage. Yvans was standing right there by the Dumpster, waving at him.

“Where you going, Kiwi?”

So much for the secret mission.

“Nowhere,” he said, hurrying past Yvans. Really, he had no time today to listen to Yvans complain about the complaints of his wife. Kiwi’s secret destination was the gas station. You couldn’t really skulk there, you had to walk across the highway. Kiwi walked through four lanes of stalled traffic. A knotted sock of quarters bulged in his pocket. The pay phone was at the end of the candy aisle. It was the nearest semiprivate phone that Kiwi knew about. He hunched between the black- and yellow-jacketed candy bars and the gigantic freezer. For twenty minutes Kiwi kept plunking the same quarter in the phone and dialing Swamplandia!

“Answer,” he commanded the receiver. “Pick up.”

The phone was busy. Busy! Busy! Busy! Busy! it told his ear in black starbursts.

Weird
, Kiwi thought, which became:

Bad
.

Wrong
.

Really fucking worrisome
, as a mainland kid would say.

The busy signal whammed into his head in a series of right hooks. He rolled his quarter out, dialed again. “Ava. Ossie. Chief,” he said between teeth. After a while he switched the speed and order: “Chief-Ossie-Ava. Ossie-Ava-Chief. Pick. Up.”

The owner dropped his newspaper and stood. He was an older Afro-Cuban man with powdery hair and eyes like acetone. He didn’t like Kiwi—he’d sell Black and Mild cigarettes to Leo and Vijay but never to Kiwi. The cigarettes cost one dollar and came in two flavors: wine and apple. The last time Kiwi had tried to buy a pack with his fake Kiwi Beamtray ID, the owner had shouted at him to get out of the store. A
curtain of pink and green lottery tickets hung level with his forehead, which gave him an exotic, Scheherazade look.

“Hey! In the back!” He unlatched the little gate to the register. “
¿Qué haces?
”

“Hey, sir!” said Kiwi. “Good afternoon?”
Maybe he thinks I’m making sex calls
, Kiwi thought, his ear smashed and rubbery against the receiver.
Masturbating into the CLOSET OF ICE!

He dropped another quarter into the slot, watched his fingers hopscotch across the dial pad onto his home numbers.
Last try. Okay, no
, this
is the last try
—he began threatening the receiver, trying to bluff the universe into giving him an answer.

“Hang up the phone,
maricón
!”

“I’m not doing anything wrong here. I’m a hero, sir. Hell’s Angel. Don’t you watch TV?”

Kiwi hung up the phone. He tried to mad-dog the owner and then gave up, felt his face tremble and collapse. On the way out he knocked over a display of gummies.

“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his cheeks with his fists, a teenage mantis. “God, sir, I’m really sorry.”