Swamplandia! (44 page)

I was pulling Ossie’s skirt from the line when a woman appeared around the side of the house. The occupant! I started to open my mouth to call for help, stopped.

She was huge—not fat so much as absolutely solid. She might have seemed ugly in a run-of-the-mill way to me if she’d been a tourist on our boardwalk. I had seen plenty of out-of-the-way women who looked like her before; she wasn’t covered in pigweed, there was no panting hound named Luke beside her. She had big dimpled arms, a dizzying profusion of gray-and-black hair. She was wearing a dress that looked ready to burst off her. It was too delicate for her, with its short puffed sleeves and its color, a faded yellow with tiny heart-shaped white flowers. My mother used to wear a dress like that, with a very similar look. No, I thought with a slow and brain-penetrating chill, she used to wear
this
dress. I was certain now that I was staring at Mama Weeds.

“What are you doing here, girl?”

She looked like a woman but I wouldn’t be fooled. I saw my mother’s dress hanging off her and I knew this creature was a thief, a monster.

“How did you get these things?” I yelled. “What did you do with my sister?”

“Your sister!”

And then her big hand was on my shoulder and I ducked away from her. Her breath felt moist on my cheeks. She grabbed at me and I raked my nails down her arm; she screamed and I twisted away.

“What on God’s earth are you talking about? Where’s your mother, girl? Are you out here alone? You got a sister with you?”

At the mention of my mother I shuddered out of her grasp. This creature was teasing me. “You can’t have her!” I screamed. I tried to wrench the dress off her.

Our eyes met. I looked up, still swaying from my fistfuls of the stolen dress. What I saw inside them was all landscape: no pupil or colored hoop of iris but the great swamp—the islands, the saw-grass prairies. Long grasses seemed to push onward for miles inside the depths of her eyes. Inside each oval I saw a world of saw grass and no people. Believe me—I know how that must sound. But I stood there and I watched as feathery clouds blew from her left eye behind the bridge of her nose and appeared again in her right socket. I saw a nothing that rolled forward forcefully forever. There was nobody in the ether of either white sky.

I heard the wind on the pond all around us, a deep clay smell rising from her skin. When she blinked again, her eyes looked black and oily, ordinary. For years I’ve wondered if this person I met was only a woman.

“You’re a monster,” I said quietly. “I wish you’d give me back my mother.”

“Girl, you are not making a lick of sense now …”

“Get away from me!” I screamed. “You can’t have these! My sister is
alive.
” I used the Bigtree maneuvers to get away from her, dodging the hand that snaked out for me as quickly as I’d leap away from a Seth’s thrashing tail, lunging at a spot above her calf where the dress hung loose. I had to get my family away from her.

“What are you talking about, your sister? You need to calm down. My God, you look like some rabid animal! How old are you, girl? How did you get way out here?”

Her voice made me think of the Bird Man’s voice, bright with a false kindness. I held Osceola’s and Louis’s clothing and began to back away from her, a snarl clawing its way up my throat. I had rescued their clothes and a two-inch triangle of my mother’s dress.

“Hey, girl!” the monster shouted. “You need help! Girl, get back here!”

When I got to a small drift slough I drank more of the water. I ate saw-grass buds, peeled sticks between my teeth. No longer did I think that drinking the water was a bad idea—I didn’t have any ideas left in my head, I was all clouds. A burning thirst was unraveling my stitching from the inside. I held the clothing to my chest and tried in a fuzzy way to figure out what this jumble of fabrics meant—that my sister was alive out here? That my sister was dead? I clutched what I’d managed to salvage: a small ball. After my battle with Mama Weeds I was tired, tired. Thinking felt like lifting spadefuls of heavy dirt.

As I walked I kept seeing the monster’s face: the spheres of grass blown inward and split as easily as bubbles. Her eyes as pure holes. I felt I’d glimpsed then what would happen at the world’s end when the stars cracked open. It was not a picture of heaven this Mama Weeds fixed on me like a gaze but something much bigger: a breaking apart, a mindcrush, a red smear pulsing where two black tunnels met; I found I actually couldn’t think about it.

I hadn’t traveled very far at all when I saw signs of a human presence. Cracked sticks, an empty plastic bottle still dewed with juice. This made sense, I thought, remembering the woman and her nearby shack. But then I saw a black feather, and another. Tiny feathers clinging to a gray net of moss on a trunk.

It’s not him
, I told myself. There are about a thousand species of birds in our swamp. I didn’t run now but pushed forward through the thickets very quickly. I was still hugging what I’d saved from the line. This little yellow triangle of flowers from Mom’s old dress. When I looked at it now I wasn’t so sure that it had belonged to her dress at all—anyhow, the scrap was so tiny that it just had half a flower on it, the pattern didn’t even get a chance to repeat itself. I slid it into one fist and held on to it, punched against the trunks.

In the east the sky throbbed with recurring heat lightning. It was some o’clock. I put on Louis Thanksgiving’s jacket, which reached below the crusts of my knees; I unscrolled the old veil that I found in his pocket and tied it around my face. I did this for pragmatic reasons:
an afternoon thundershower was sweeping the prairie and the bugs were all over. I figured the veil would work just as well for me as it had for the early Florida dredgemen to keep the bugs out of my nose and mouth. Out here the mosquitoes were after me for red gallons—you could see clouds of them hanging above the grassland. I’m sure they are still out there hovering like that, like tiny particles of an old, dissolved appetite, something prehistoric and very scary that saturates the air of that swamp. A force that could drain you in sips without ever knowing what you had been, or seeing your face.

Ahead of me, through the tiny squares of the veil, I viewed saw grass for aeons, saw grass with no end in sight. These were the deadlands, the flatlands, I assumed now, the place that the Bird Man had been referring to all along. The plants grew razor-straight, and they were almost twice my height, nine feet tall and fingered with so many tiny knives. Ghost gray or yellowish gray or a dull waspy brown, the colors shifting subtly as clouds passed over them; there was no other variation in any direction on the monotone prairie. The stalks grew out of a calcareous marl, hidden under three feet of water, a soil that crumbles under your weight. My heart sank; my life wasn’t going to be long enough to reach the end of this place.

But I walked anyways. I tried not to know that I wasn’t going to make it, to undo that knowledge like a knot.

I buttoned Louis Thanksgiving’s shirt right up to the collar.

I tightened Ossie’s ribbon and I double-knotted the mosquito veil.

I squeezed my mom’s scraplet into my fist.

As I walked I told myself a story—I imagined myself as Louis Thanksgiving. I mean I actually pictured myself inside of him. Black hair and swinging elbows. When I closed my eyes I pretended I was Louis, being carried. I could see him rising like a limp balloon into the clouds beneath the birds’ beating wings. Through Louis’s eyes I saw the dark green tops of the trees, the Argus eyes of the secret lakes and sloughs opening for us as we drifted up. Then Louis Thanksgiving was carried so high that he couldn’t see anything besides his own sun-freckled hands. They swung beneath him in two pale green cones of space. The trees vanished. Ice lands whispered up in sulfur curls. The world below him had no rocks, no terrestrial scars, it was fathoms of air and evening blue. The last lakes looked small as stars. Two sets of
iron-gray talons dug like prongs into the meat of his shoulders. And I could feel them, under the jacket, eight points of pressure against my sternum.

This wasn’t a real possession: I could also feel the mud squeeze into my sneakers, hear thunder. I could fold Louis’s thin collar under my fingers and inhale the chalky mosquito wire. I wasn’t Ossie, lost in my big trance—I was just myself telling myself a story. But I wouldn’t have made it very far without the Dredgeman’s Revelation, which distracted me from the pain of sunburn and thirst. If I looked up and saw the buzzards wheeling in the thermals like black motes in a blue eye, I forced myself to relocate my gaze to my sneakers and start again:
The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving …
My own thoughts were like bad food, so instead I told myself the story of Louis Thanksgiving fishing for bowfin on the deck of the dredge barge, and Louis Thanksgiving lost and happy in the Black Woods, Louis swimming under the wheel with the captain’s knife in his mouth, until I became Louis, walking.

Rain began and ended, I don’t know how many times. Light faded like water draining into a hole. Through the mosquito veil the endless prairie ordered itself into tiny squares and I kept moving through them. Who knows how long I spent wading through those serrated grasses? I must have recited the Dredgeman’s Revelation at least a hundred times forward and backward. I added a new ending: in my version, the dredgeman escaped, and lived. The little hand of a clock sprung back, and Louis Thanksgiving drew breath. The engine room gasped its flames into the wood, and the explosion never happened. Birds shrank away into a fatal yellow moon. Everybody, all the dredgemen, they survived.

At first I didn’t understand the scene in front of me: forty-odd yards from where I was standing the line of saw grass ended, and I could see beyond it to maple and bay trees and the brown water of an alligator hole. I was within sight of a sudden elevation—six or seven feet, a spectacular height in this part of the swamp—where the ten-foot-tall stalks sheared away quite suddenly and became dimpled rock. The eternity I’d seen ended as cleanly as if someone had run a scythe through it. I chanced a look at the sky: towering clouds were moving swiftly toward me, as big as white ships. The skies were beautiful here, and empty.

V
ijay and Kiwi were ripping Moo Cow creamers for their coffees at the Burger Burger. They kept tossing the crenellated pink containers onto the restaurant table until it looked like a Ken doll had gone on some unmanly daiquiri bender. They’d both ordered the A.M. Delicious! Dollar Breakfast Combo #2: cheddar, sausage, and egg sandwiches. You got what you paid for in this life, said Vijay through a nuclear yellow mouthful of fast-food cheese.

“Sure hope you don’t crash today, Bigtree.”

“Okay, are you serious? Can we talk about anything else? That is unduly ominous for daybreak.”

Kiwi pronounced “ominous” so that it rhymed with “dominoes.”

“Huh?
You’re
om-in-ohs, bitch. Bro, you’re jumping the whole table. Bigtree: is a shark eating you below the waist or something? Calm it down. It’s going to be fine.”

Kiwi saw that his long legs were indeed bucking the half-moon of their Formica table. The salt and pepper shakers were doing little NBA jumps.

Kiwi was wearing Leo’s oxford shirt, even though it was 90 degrees out, to disguise the bruises he’d gotten from his grandfather. He’d thought about trying to pass them off as hickeys from Emily Barton, but he had several on his arms.

Kiwi wished that he could tell Vijay about Grandpa Sawtooth. He
kept thinking about the moment when he’d lifted the old man by his frail shoulders and his eyes had widened, full of an animal pain. Even then Kiwi hadn’t released him.

They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, as if
they
were copilots of the fast-food rocket ship, Kiwi said, to indigestion and Grade D regret. Kiwi found a crack in the upholstery and started pinching up curly stuffing.

Outside the restaurant window, a bag lady of an advanced, indeterminate age marched forward in front of their window, her face lost in a glassy tangle of curls. Her hair was shockingly white. Red and yellow flags of cloth waved all along her shopping cart like a little parade. She had such an accumulation of crap in there, none of it particularly eyecatching: Kiwi’s gaze snagged on a clock radio, a doll with a gouged cheek in a gray and red-ribboned party dress. Enough metal rods to build a really crappy organ. Things so generic that they caused Kiwi a pang; at first he thought he’d recognized them. Bigtree tribal artifacts! he’d thought—really, it was the same junk that every family had.

There was a story that traveled around the islands about a woman named Mama Weeds. A swamp witch. But now Kiwi saw that there were witches everywhere in the world. Witches lining up for free grocery bags of battered tuna cans and half-rotted carrots at the downtown Loomis Army of Mercy. At the bus station, witches telling spells to walls. Only the luckiest ones got to live inside stories. The rest were homeless, pushing carts like this one. They sank out of sight, like the European witches clutching their stones.

“What are you staring at? Are you checking her out?” He peered at the bag lady. “She’s a little old for you, Bigtree.”

“Bro! No. I’m staring at the, ah. The rods. Sure are a lot of rods in there.”

“Rods!” Vijay did his mimicry of a persnickety white man. He started out seriously and then shifted into sniggers, a speech habit of Vijay’s where he dropped the mic midsentence and became his own audience. “If you love
rods
, son, you go right ahead. That’s your
lifestyle choice …
”

“Huh? Oh, right. I forgot. I’m gay. Ha-ha. Very funny.”

If you really were gay, Kiwi thought for maybe the thousandth time since he’d arrived at Loomis County, how could you
possibly
live here in
Loomis County? If you were a bookworm, a Mormon, an albino, a virgin; if you were a “reffy” ([n] Loomis slang for a recent immigrant, derivative of “refugee” and used in Loomis night schools as a shorthand for kids with bad clothes, dental afflictions, accents as pure as grain alcohol); if you had any kind of unusual hairstyle, evangelical religion, a gene for altruism or obesity; if you wrestled monsters on an island, like Ava, or conjugated Latin, like he did, or dated the
motherfucking dead
, how could you survive to age eighteen in an LCPS high school?