Swamplandia! (35 page)

The owner held the door for him. He patted Kiwi’s left shoulder.

All that day and into the next his head felt clouded. Where was everybody? Were they visiting Grandpa or something? Had the Chief instructed the girls not to answer the telephone—were they avoiding the creditors? Probably he was overreacting? Kiwi pictured all ninety-eight Seths in the pit lifting their great warblers’ chins at the sun while just inside the screen door the telephone rang and rang and rang.

Kiwi Bigtree, Hell’s Angel, got a leather jacket from the World of Darkness management with his new epithet emblazoned on it. He got a free Friday. He stood in his jacket and waved sightlessly into the lanes of traffic until a green Toyota that was batwinged with dents on its left side honked at him, screeched to a halt well before the intersection.

“Hello again, Mr. Pelkis.”

“Oh My Christ Son the Light Is Green Get in the Car!”

Kiwi was relieved when Dennis Pelkis told him that they were just going to eyeball the plane. He drove Kiwi to the papaya-colored seaplane
hangar off Route 302 where the flight school conducted their lessons. He taught Kiwi how the water rudder and the floats worked and walked him through a preflight checklist. It took Kiwi two tries and a rump-assist from Denny to scrabble over the gap between the dock and the plane and get inside the cockpit.

Later Dennis drove Kiwi to his house in the Coconut Creek development, in a suburb of Loomis, so that Denny could have black coffee and a roast beef sandwich that was hemorrhaging horseradish, treat a corn on his big right toe, watch the ball game; and also so that Kiwi could take a test on the pitot-static instrument family. Kiwi felt sort of forgotten about. Kiwi pictured his existence in the mind of Dennis Pelkis: a tiny Kiwi politely letting Dennis’s other concerns cut in front of him in line at the register until he was the last priority, the afterthought.

The test was easy. Kiwi had retained most of the colorful facts from the textbook:

A white arc indicates the arc in which it is safe to use flaps.

The green arc is the normal operating range of the aircraft.

The yellow arc is the caution range for the airplane.

“More apple juice, Kee-wee?” asked Denny’s dotty wife, whose hostessing strategy was to remove each item from her refrigerator—a carton of juice, a pie slice with lime green filling, a single egg—and offer it to Kiwi. She did this with the serene efficiency of a crazy person; was this a custom of the suburbs?

“No thank you, ma’am.”

“Too bad they don’t make
kiwi
juice, right?”

“Ha-ha, right. Thanks, Mrs. Pelkis.”

I am going to be a pilot, you bitch!
Kiwi thought. His rage felt wonderful, like cake icing in his mouth. Pure lipids dissolving onto his taste buds. Kiwi didn’t care for middle-aged women. He found them all to be ugly, flighty, soft. Their wrinkles enraged him. Their dyed or graying hair. All the obvious, dimpled evidence that they had enjoyed years and years of life.

Coming into the kitchen, Denny rolled his eyes at Kiwi and barked at his wife: “Kid has to take a test, Nancy.”

Now that Kiwi had at last made it to a suburb it was easy to want the swamp. What was this fresh hell? The World of Darkness seemed like a cozy and benign place compared to the sprawl of these stucco boxes,
these single-family houses. Kiwi saw no coconuts and no creeks. The Pelkises had a poinciana tree dragging magenta combs over the grass and a bunch of rusting croquet wickets in the yard. Inside, they had a Wurlitzer piano and a mantel covered in what appeared to be hundreds of tiny porcelain cats. The Pelkises’ decor was such a clean and pleasant variation on the Bigtrees’ cabinets of gin and lizards that Kiwi found himself holding tightly to the edge of the Pelkises’ Lysoled table, as if these shiny surfaces were trying to buck him. Instead of a Juggernaut Human Cannon, they had a green Toyota. Instead of a Gator Pit, their backyard had a shrunken plastic house that contained an animate cotton ball that turned out to be a dog.

“That’s the wife’s Pomeranian,” Denny said, following Kiwi’s gaze. “Vol de Nuit. She gave him a French name. Do I look like I speak French, son? The wife does a lot of things that just mystify me. Totally worthless animal.”

My dad would feed your dog to the Seth of Seths
.

“How we doing?” Denny asked forty minutes later. He was on his fourth plain doughnut and listening to baseball on the radio. He looked over the page in front of Kiwi.

“Well! You must have memorized that whole dang chapter.” He planted the doughnut into milk. “But you know, son, this test, strictly speaking, doesn’t count for anything? These are for practice. It’s the FAA written exam you gotta pass. And then you gotta actually fly the damn plane.”

Kiwi nodded. “Right.” He covered his test with his palm and slid it toward his edge of the table.

“See you next Friday. We’ll see what happens when we get you airborne.”

The Jaws were terrifying at night. Something gaseous seemed to shimmer around them, a trick of the weak lighting and the ventilation. The molars shone like huge basalt blocks and everything looked suddenly, impressively real to Kiwi, the giant cave of the maw arching forty feet above him, the web of puce and ruby mesh shot through with dangling yellowish gray threads on the roof. A luxury of being the only rider in the Leviathan was that you could drift for hours. You could let the current conduct you. Also it was a good study break, Kiwi thought.

At two o’clock, after finishing the last of his homework, Kiwi stripped to his boxer shorts and climbed the frozen escalator up the Tongue. He crossed his arms in the
SAFEST POSTURE
depicted on the sign and he flew down the slide into the first of a seemingly infinite number of brachiating chambers—caves of water, some neck-deep and others shallow as dishes. The Leviathan felt bigger than he had ever imagined, impossibly big. The white points of his knees looked like distant buoys in the darkness. Kiwi’s mouth slammed shut and his teeth hit together as he flew around a bend in the Esophagus, and then he was submerged in deep water, his feet cycling and touching nothing.

Usually at this juncture one of the more athletic park employees would drag you up and bully you out of the pool and into another tortuous line—the Leviathan staff moved four hundred people through the ride each hour. Some kid’s feet would be punching into your back.

Kiwi shut his eyes and breathed very slowly. At night he felt less like a kid than a sick calculator. He ran the same problems and numbers in his head.
What am I doing here?
Kiwi wondered.
Why don’t I go home?
The longer he stayed in this place, the less he understood about his own motivations.
But the World of Darkness gets me!
Kiwi thought.
The World has me gotten
. The World of Darkness seemed to understand its workers the way that floating sticks got understood by a river, and studied to splinters, and undone by it.

Kiwi floated from room to room with his palms up. He got sucked beneath a grid of radiance, little stars that glowed blue and lime green above him—as if the roof of the Leviathan had suddenly opened onto the real sky! And with his own eyes filling with salt and his total spatial disorientation, the slow flow of the water, the turgor of a nonsensical hope in his body that grew and grew beneath the stars and left him airless, bewildered, so very unexpectedly happy—over the roar of his own happiness it took Kiwi a long time to understand that the blue and green galaxies spooning above him, blinking down in some holy binary, were actually banks of emergency lights.

T
here were thousands of stars above us—that much I knew from the neon hour blinking on my watchface. We couldn’t see any stars from our skiff because they were trapped behind the storm. Fifteen minutes after Whip left us, rain began to pound the slough.

“I’m sorry. I got nervous.”

“Jesus, kid.”

“I shouldn’t have told about the dredge.”

“You almost blew it for us. You almost cost us our best chance at saving your sister.”

“I know,” I said miserably.

A mosquito crawled out from the feathers at his collar. It drifted up and landed on my nose, its little wings sawing the air.
My sister is alone out here
, I remembered, watching it bob between my eyes.

“That was a close call.” When the Bird Man was angry, he sounded like anyone to me, like a blue-haired tourist demanding a refund. “We could have both gotten into some serious trouble. Imagine the hassle that man could have kicked up for me …”

I nodded, blinking mightily. The mosquito flew off. I was thinking that I had made a bad mistake, maybe. We were miles from any telephones, from the airboats with their UHF radios, from the city ferry. Back home, I could have placed a simple call to Search and Rescue and the whole rescue operation would have been out of my hands. I could have called my dad …

“You want to turn back?” The Bird Man peered out at me from the rain-sleeked hood of his coat. His mood was on the downswing now. Light caught on his whistle and in the soft, wet curls of hair around his ears, but his eyes were dull as gunmetal. “Say the word, kid.”

I took a breath. “I think I want to turn back, yes.”

“Kid, I’ve been poling for two days. We’re knocking at the door.”

“I’ll still pay you when we get home!” This came out as a cry, startling us both. I hadn’t expected my voice to sound that way. The Bird Man gave me a sidelong look of bad disappointment. For a while there was no noise from the stern beyond the air in the oarlocks, the hull’s regular lift and slap. The glade skiff nosed forward.

“I just … I’m really worried here?” I kept my gaze fixed on the blue quicks of my fingernails. “I think we made a mistake.”

“You need to be brave now, Ava,” the Bird Man told me seriously. I scooted forward a little and snuck my knee under his gloved hand. I liked the weight of the heavy metal buckle on my bare skin. When I leaned into him I was safe, I was pinned in space.

“Have you ever heard of Bianca Defiore and Michael Taylor?” the Bird Man asked quietly.

I shook my head.

“They went on their first date on Michael’s airboat, launched from Viper Bight at sunset for a little scenic tour. And then Mikey got lost.”

“Out here?”

“In a similar nowhere. He hit a tree that cut their gas line. He stranded them on the saw-grass prairie with food and water for one night. Bianca had a diabetic attack while they were waiting for Search and Rescue and she died, Ava. With all of their technology it was fourteen days before they found Mr. Michael Taylor, half-looney with his dead acquaintance in his arms.”

I shivered. “So, they goofed up one time. The swamp’s a big place …”

I got an image of Whip Jeters putzing around on his boat with his anemic flashlight.

“And don’t forget, these are people who have gotten into bad scrapes, yes, but they are
here
. They are in our world. They
can
be found by Search and Rescue,” he said slowly, checking my eyes for understanding.

“Right … I know.” I took the Bird Man’s hand. I was close enough
to see the red canoes above his eyelids, the hazel lines that shot through his gray irises. You could stand this close to a Bird Man, or any man, I thought with wonderment, and still not guess what was in his mind.

While we were talking I let my fingers slide through his fingers, not really thinking about what I was doing, and he relaxed his own long fingers, squeezed down. The knit of our hands on his lap looked so distant from either of us, like a sculpture we’d made. My small fingers pushed inside the pallid roses of his knuckles. One knuckle had a raised scar on it, nasty as a tattoo; I saw older scars, too, from beaks or maybe talons. I figured this for evidence that the Bird Man was a powerful fighter, like my father and my mother and my grandmother and my grandfather, and hopefully, one day, myself.

“You’ve got a wrestler’s grip there, kid,” he said, smiling down at our fist. “Look, Ava—”

He jabbed a thumb up, and I started at the chaotic movement of our map. Three buzzards were crashing around on the wind a little ways behind us.

“You think Search and Rescue can find the back entrance of the underworld? You think Mr. Jeters can read a map like that? You’re on the edge of the universe, kid, and you don’t even know it.”

We rounded a bend and I groaned inwardly. The wind tilled the saw grass for miles and miles in every useless direction. We were going to have to carry the skiff for another long, mucky stretch. “The edge of the universe,” I repeated, and picked up the dripping handle of my oars.

Another portage of a quarter mile, and hard rain when we got back on the water. We both had pulled our slickers on—it was strange to see the Bird Man’s feathers pasted below the yellow plastic. He kept scratching his head, and he seemed more genuinely agitated now than I’d seen him at any point on this trip. It was a little frightening. He’d scratched his thin hair into a pompadour—it looked as though every wire were coming disconnected in his brain. I thought about making a joke about it (we used to tease Kiwi when he woke up with Amadeus Mozart hair, for example), but the Bird Man’s eyes warned me away from doing so. They mirrored the storm.

And then my breath caught, because we had arrived. Two great humps rose in the rain before us. I could see the gigantic swells of them not fifty yards away.

“We made it? That’s the Eye?”

The Eye had been described to me as a kind of Calusa Scylla and Charybdis, and I’d seen Grandpa’s grainy photograph, but I hadn’t been prepared for the overwhelming strangeness of seeing the mounds’ weird, pyramidal shapes up close. They rose out of the river like twin volcano peaks. They were perfectly denuded of trees or any green growth, fogged over by the rainstorm and made of what looked like lunar cement, whelk, and conch. The two middens that formed the Eye were a kissing cousins’ distance from each other. A tall man could have easily jumped from one mound to its neighbor. Water cut between them in a perfectly straight gray line; the channel couldn’t have been much more than four feet at its widest point. It was going to be a squeeze for us; no way could an entire dredge barge pass through the Eye; if Ossie and Louis had come this way, they would have had to abandon the barge somewhere and use the dredge scow, a tiny red canoe hung over the barge’s stern like a wooden eyebrow. The scow didn’t have a motor; she and Louis would have had to paddle
hard
. Which was exactly what the Bird Man wanted me to do now, apparently—to push our skiff into the portal.