Swamplandia! (39 page)

Kiwi didn’t hear what the Chief said after his boss exploded. Kiwi did not run, exactly. “Excuse me …,” he kept saying, pushing past low tables covered in empty pitchers.

If anyone follows me I’ll pretend to throw up
, he thought.
With any luck I won’t even have to fake it
.

But no one was following him.

A craps table got him good just above his hip bone; it was going to bruise badly. Ecchymosis, his brain helpfully reported. “Owww!” screamed Kiwi, knocking into the disgusted dealer.

In the back lot a few motorcycles and one dust-red Chevrolet were parked beneath the lamps. The night was a bowl of heat. No moon, no stars.

Kiwi was surprised to see the Chief working here, but it was a dull and terrible surprise. With a grim, spiderlike lacemaking Kiwi’s brain knit his surprise into a dull and terrible knowledge.

This was not Kiwi’s first experience with the spider. That was Kiwi’s nickname for the complex neurophysics that processed your shock into horror. Spun love into fear. In January, for example, he’d seen his mother’s chart on Dr. Gautman’s wall. The spectacled doctor had entered and paused by the window. A pat of sun slid down the doctor’s biscuit-white face. He leaned by the tinted green window shades, watching Kiwi with his clipboard (“I imagine you’ll have some questions for me, Mr. Bigtree …”). But Kiwi Bigtree had turned his head quickly; nope, he didn’t have anything to say. All the questions that had gone hooking through his bloodstream abruptly straightened—aha! And: eureka! Now Kiwi understood perfectly what was happening.
Okay
, he blinked.
Okay, sure. All right
. His blood flow was red and serene. His mom was dying. In two months, if all went according to schedule, she would be dead. Like a genius he’d understood this, without any help from the doctors. A prodigy of the buzzing fluorescence. T3 c, A+!

He read the chart through twice. Afterward, all his uncertainty about his mother’s cancer—all that optimistic darkness—drained right out of him. He didn’t tell Ava and Ossie, and when they learned it for themselves from Dr. Gautman he’d felt an evil satisfaction. He’d watched his sisters’ calm faces fall away like scabs and become something else, something more terrible than he could have imagined. Ava’s and Ossie’s mouths were perfect Os. Meanwhile the doctor had tried to
hedge the word “death” for them. He made it sound like the best thing for her; anyhow, there was “nothing left to do.”

“Imagine, children,” he’d said with a false, gentle grin, as if death itself were the miracle cure they’d all been waiting for. “At last your mother will be at total peace!”

You thought you couldn’t stand not to know a thing until you knew it, wasn’t that right? Who had said that, the Chief? Some poet from the Library Boat, maybe.

Knowledge at last
, Kiwi’s mind recited dutifully.
The fish’s living eye: glass
.

Sometimes you would prefer a mystery to remain red-gilled and buried inside you, Kiwi decided, alive and alive inside you.

Kiwi gulped air and went back inside the casino. The scene was unchanged: stale cigarettes, the slots expulsing tokens, all these heads bent in a dying garden over the machines. The old women’s wigs looked to him like faded flowers, dull oranges and carmines and silvers. Horrifically, impossibly, the pageant had started up again. This was good news? His dad was still employed, at least. He spotted Leo and Vijay at the bar. His friends looked a little lost next to the tyrannosaurus drunks, old men whose tiny, atrophied arms curled whiskey sours against their Hawaiian shirts. The Chief’s voice swam everywhere in this nicotine aquarium:

“Let’s all welcome lovely
Bella
to the stage!”

For a second, Kiwi swore he locked eyes with the Chief. He lifted one hand in a stiff wave. The Chief, if he recognized him, didn’t wave back.

Kiwi stared over the wide expanse of rug and strangers and machines. Why couldn’t he cross a square of carpet to get to his father?

Kiwi counted out the money he’d brought—sixty-two bucks in pristine singles and fives. Kiwi would have ironed his salary if it were possible, he was that careful with it. He stuffed the bucks into one of the dealer’s envelopes.

“Miss?”

The woman who took the money from him was one of the Live Girls. Bouncing Bella. She stared down at the cone of twenties, and when she stared up at him her face had transformed.

“We have a place around the back where we can go, honey, it’s real nice …”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry …,” Kiwi yelped as if a great weight had just fallen on his toe. “Oh, my God, ma’am. You are misunderstanding me. We are having a misunderstanding.”

Well, his dick was stirring regardless. He noted this with dismay, his penis dumb as a beagle jumping for this woman’s gartered leg. Kiwi stared down at the red nails she’d hooked through his belt loop. Fantastic. Luckily yards and yards of Cubby’s heavy denim concealed his arousal from anybody. Somewhere in the suburbs of Loomis, Kiwi imagined Cubby Wallach making his seventh ham sandwich, grabbing a pie slice, adding to his empire of girth—that friendship seemed impossibly remote to Kiwi now, impossibly childish. Bella dropped her hand and frowned at him.

“This money isn’t for … that. I’m here to repay a loan. Miss, could you give this to that man over there?”

“Who? Bobby?”

“May-be …,” Kiwi said carefully. “Which one do you call Bobby?”

“Bobby’s our boss. The floor manager. You a friend of his?”

“No, no, the, ah … the other one. The older white man.”

“Sammy?” Bella’s eyes regarded him milkily. “Why don’t you give it to him? You should give it to him yourself, he’s having a rough night. I’ll take you over there. He’s a nice guy, isn’t he? We all love Sammy. He makes us feel beautiful.”

“He’s good at that,” Kiwi agreed. “Good with words.”

“Say!” Bella said, peering in at him. “Do I know you from someplace? Are you that kid who was on TV a few weeks back, the angel?”

“No, ma’am. I’m no angel, ha-ha.” Kiwi held his hands up. “Falsely accused.”

Bella began to tug Kiwi across the floor.

“Can’t do it …” Kiwi left her holding the envelope, already pushing back into the crowd. “… really busy, so … thank you!”

No signature, no note—Kiwi didn’t see how he could write a letter to his father
here
, on the edge of a pool table. It was a communication so private even Kiwi wasn’t certain what he was trying to tell his father. With the money he was saying “thank you” and “keep this job.” So far as he knew. Maybe he was saying something else entirely and they’d both have to wait to find out what. Kiwi was starting to think that certain gifts were like hieroglyphs that could take years to decipher.

He’ll know it’s from me, at least
, Kiwi thought. Who else would address Sam Bigtree as “the Chief” here? He watched the Chief accept the envelope.

“Let’s go,” Kiwi said. He found Vijay chatting up a woman with hair like chamomile tea and pink, alcoholic eyes, who was at minimum four decades his senior. Whatever they’d been talking about was causing her eyes to water with pleasure and Vijay was laughing, too, his braying, abort-mission laughter, desperate as a fist punching the ejector button. When he saw Kiwi he rolled his eyes and grabbed him by the wrist.

“Kiwi! Meet my lovely friend Clarisse—”

“We’re going. Right now.”

The Chief was on his feet, walking through the rows and rows of machines. He held one stout, hairy arm out, like a farmer dowsing for a spring. The chewed, stained fingers on the end of the arm were Kiwi’s own. Same length, same fingernails even. Their eyes met again, and this time the Chief held his son’s gaze. Or seemed to; it was difficult to tell behind the big glasses. Light filled them like drink.

“I’m sick.” He grabbed Vijay by the elbow and swayed a little to demonstrate.

Vijay rousted Leo from the men’s room and they were off—it was immediately clear from the colorful dribble on his chin that Leo was legitimately ill. But Kiwi pushed his way between his friends and flung his arms around them, transforming them into de facto bodyguards, his neck contracting into his shoulders like a turtle. “
Go,
” he hissed. The three boys passed an elderly couple on their way out, and Kiwi turned to watch the casino doors shutting on the old man’s walker, and Kiwi watched as his Jamaican caretaker stooped on the AstroTurf green rug to yell directly into his ear: “Freddy, you gotta move.
Move!
”

“We’ll come back soon,” Kiwi heard himself saying as he searched for the Volvo. “Tomorrow, even. We can come back tomorrow.”

“Unh.” Vijay nodded sleepily, his head wobbling unsteadily on his neck. The road itself seemed to hiccup as he drove. In the backseat Leonard was already snoring.

One Cyclops eye burned in the rearview mirror: the prison watch-tower. Kiwi felt really sick now. Behind the prison, the swamp flew outward in every direction. It occurred to Kiwi that at this moment, he and his father were both within twelve nautical miles of Swamplandia!

Turn around
, he considered saying.

Turn the car around, please
.

Turn the car around
now.
Oh guys, my dad is in trouble back there
.

A light rain patterned itself on the Volvo’s hood.

“Tomorrow, okay?”

Kiwi could hear his promises to himself becoming vaguer.

Had his father recognized him? Would his father come looking for him? In the backseat, Leo was snoring heavily; in a trough between snores, with a shocking tenderness, Leo mumbled the name of a girl whom Kiwi had never heard him mention before. Amy? Annie? So everybody in this car had a stowaway.

“Wake up!” he shouted into the backseat. Vijay turned to stare at him.

Kiwi buckled his seat belt, shocked into old habit. In the rearview mirror the casino blew backward into darkness, and the white candle of the security tower got snuffed.

A
s I’ve mentioned, the Loomis County Public Schools used to mail us workbooks and videotapes. The year that Kiwi would have entered high school as a freshman we received a brand-new slide projector, a Kodak Ektagraphic III Carousel. It looked a lot like the old slide projector, only free-er. I don’t know if some gentleman altruist was donating this equipment to us or if it was a state-sponsored thing—or if the Chief and Mom paid for it; I suppose that’s not impossible—but the packages showed up every September via Gus’s ferry, addressed to our parents. Once, on a rainy day in Grandpa’s shack, Kiwi and Ossie and I watched a 1950s nature slide show called
The Silently Screaming World
. White letters scrolled across a black screen: “When the world screams in its sleep, we rarely hear it. Sheets of lightning fall across the empty prairies. Earthquakes echo at depths that would burst a human eardrum. High on the Altiplano, canyons cave inward like mouths.”

The footage was grainy, and the black-and-white palette gave the slides an eerie, immutable feel: a wall of solid flame in the Andes, Alaskan glacial collisions, the great thumbprint of an old comet in the Yucatán. What frightened me more than the images was the silence that accompanied the jumpy stills. Kiwi made us after-hours caramel popcorn and we screened these cataclysms on the hairy tiki walls of the Swamp Café, the three of us crunching loudly.

“Lie down, Ava,” this man said, spreading a green tarp for us, and I did.

Lying flat, I could see plants with leaves that flared outward like living Victrolas. Their throats were a pale green that winnowed into organlike tubes and disappeared. Ants crawled out of the throats of these plants. At first there were just two or three of them, dotting the broad leaves.

Then ants came streaming onto the leaves in the black millions. A hard root was poking into the top of my spine. I closed my eyes, and waited, and when I opened them again the man was still on top of me. I couldn’t speak. I blinked my eyes and the ants streamed wetly, then spiraled into a black kaleidoscope. Above me the yellow moon kept traveling behind clouds, and the mosquitoes filled the clearing with their static. Leaves lost their transparency for whole minutes. I stiffened and my eyes flew open and when the pressure eased I could hear my breath again. The man cupped a dry hand under my neck and said something that I didn’t understand. I stared up at him; my fingers fidgeted, my wrestling hand cramping nervously, filtering dirt on the other side of the tarp. He smiled at me, pushing the hair from my face, and automatically I smiled back.

Even after I realized what was happening, I held very still.
Oh, this
, I thought, and got a counterfeit déjà vu from the stories I had read and overheard. He pulled me forward along the crackling plastic, sliding the birds of his hands under my back. You could get my type of coveralls off by unhooking the two bottom snaps and sliding the straps down, but I was too embarrassed to tell the man this and so I watched as he popped all of them, even the useless little latches. Then I kicked when he needed me to help again.

The Bird Man coughed once and I felt a wetness on my cheeks. His wrist bone was level with my eye. I had never seen his arms naked from wrist to shoulder before; they looked like anybody’s arms. His undershirt smelled like deep July. Little belly hairs crushed into the sweat on my belly. Now the Bird Man was breathing funny. He wouldn’t look at me at all, not at my face, and this made me feel a little lonely, as if we were rooms away from one another. All I could see was the gray slice of one cheek.

My eyes rolled toward the blank sockets of the plants. Inside they were washed green, so pale, I thought, too pale to really qualify as a color. Blind light, luminous. Tiny blind bulbs at the funnel’s end. Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this pain but somehow I
could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness. How strange, I thought, frowning into the plants. Once I saw a police car in Loomis with the sound cut and this feeling was like that, just a sweep over the grass: blue-red, red-blue, a mute bleat.