Swamplandia!

CHAPTER TEN. Kiwi Climbs the Ladder

From the roof of the World, the pigeons looked like falling stars. It was a shame you couldn’t relax and enjoy the Olympic splendor of this, Kiwi thought, on account of how the pigeons kept shitting on everything. Their timing was uncanny, malevolent — the pigeons had gotten him twice this week, down his open work-shirt collar and splat across the back, and the King Suds Laundromat off I-95 was yet another mainland luxury that Kiwi couldn’t afford. Kiwi didn’t even have the bus fare to get to the King Suds Laundromat. He did not have sufficient quarters to pay tribute to King Suds, the mustachioed monarch who ran it. Instead, he took his uniform shirts and his losery boxer shorts into the dormitory showers and washed them with Leo’s dark green dandruff shampoo, which burned like acid on your skin. Somehow it had gotten onto his balls and into the webbing between his fingers and the shit just hunkered there like cold fire. He had developed a rash or a pox, something purplish and specklesome on his bony thighs that he was determined to ignore until it went away, or killed him.

“Ahh, Leo,” Kiwi moaned into the mildewed nave of the showers, “why is this shampoo so thick?”

Was Leo trying to regrow hair or something? In the break room his colleagues plugged their noses and made a big show of asking, “What smells like formaldehyde, yo?”

During their break hour, Vijay sighed and tugged at Kiwi’s slimy shirt hem. “I told you, I will lend you quarters to do your fucking laundry, you retard.”

“Laundry is my last priority right now, V.”

“Shit, I’d rethink that! Have you smelled you? I will, like, sneak your laundry into my house, bro. My mom loves doing laundry, it’s like this Immigrant Mother disorder? She uses Lluvia de las Montañas detergent — it’s so badass. You’ll smell like Costa Rica!”

The last thing Kiwi wanted was some other kid’s mother doting on him. Just the word “mom” still made his stomach flip.

“Ha-ha. Yeah. I am none to be fucked with.”

“Vijay. I need another job.”

“Yeah, I hear you.” He sighed happily and rolled his pant legs up. “Who don’t?”

The boys were sitting on the sooty edge of the roof overlooking the eastern side of the main lot, watching someone in a BMW double-park. An awesomely jawed man in chinos got out of the car, took a furtive look around, then sprinted on his loafer toes for the park entrance. Banker/lawyer, Kiwi thought, ticking down his taxonomic chart. Silk tie, comb-over, tassels. Something about his gait made the double-parker seem almost jolly; it was like watching an elf leave a Christmas surprise.

“Sing it with me now, Margie: what a d-d-douche.” Vijay was smiling his breaktime smile. You could tell time by that smile—5:45 must be just around the corner.

“D-d-d …”

Far below them, the Loomis traffic roared. A pigeon waddled along a pipe, lifting its mauve wings like an acrobat. Kiwi felt a stab of the unpredictable homesickness.

“How much do they make over there?” he asked quietly. He was pointing at the row of businesses that abutted the Leviathan hangar, which looked small as a ring of petrified rocks. As if someone had planted them around the World of Darkness, Kiwi thought, thinking for some reason of The Spiritist Telegraph. Those diagrams in the appendix of sacerdotal magic.

“Where? What are you talking about? The gas station? Don’t you read like every newspaper that was ever invented? Don’t you know the facts? People who work at gas stations get shot. They get capped, Marge.”

“No, no. The restaurant.” Kiwi pointed through the scrim of pigeons to a neon B.

“The Burger Burger? I would not really call that place a restaurant, bro. You can buy a cheeseburger there for a fucking quarter. You think the Burger Burger is going to pay you big money? Leo calls it the E. coli factory!”

“Leo eats there all the time.”

“They pay a dollar less than here and you smell like dead cow forever and all the girls are skanks, which is fine with me, but I swear to God they all got herpes.”

“Oh. I see.”

Kiwi wasn’t 100 percent on what that meant. What was the use of talking about anything? He needed to make a thousand dollars this month and he didn’t see how that was possible.

“Check their lips, bro.”

“Okay. I will. Poor girls.” Kiwi was sure he’d read about this ailment somewhere but he couldn’t quite recall the etiology — he would have to do some research later. Regardless of my findings, I am going to wolf like twelve of those burgers. Kiwi stared at the neon B and felt his mouth flood. Hellspawn Hoagies were eight dollars and he had thirty-two cents on his employee card.

Vijay was looking at him strangely.

“You cannot work there. Not to sound arrogant, bro? But without me around, they will destroy you.”

“What are you talking about?” Who could he mean, “they”? The skanks?

Vijay blew hair out of his left eye and looked at Kiwi darkly. “Everybody. The people who hear you talk.”

“Oh.”

Kiwi pushed greasy hair out of his own eyes — he couldn’t afford a haircut at the moment, either. On Swamplandia! Ossie had taken this duty over from his mother, surprising the other Bigtrees with the steadiness of her hands. Their compliments had irritated her—“Well, I’m not a chimpanzee, you guys. I can use scissors. I can cut in a straight line.” Now Kiwi had hanks of red hair that crimped in the heat like sea serpents.

Yvans had offered to shave Kiwi’s skull bald for him (“For free, Margaret!”), but that seemed to Kiwi like a move of premature despair. Possibly he would bleed to death from lacerations on his head, or more likely he would be exposed to the cruel hail of female mockery. Also Yvans had more than once confessed to suffering weird ailments like “the shakes,” which didn’t seem, as the girls of the World would say, so super compatible with a razor.

“Do you know any way I could, uh, supplement my income?” Kiwi asked. I’m going to save the park, he beamed out across the parking lot toward his sisters, in a direction that he believed led to their water — he could see one small bird rowing its wings into the sun over the interstate, centered up there like the face on a coin.

Vijay was staring at him. “Are you asking me to rob a bank with you? Maybe you want me to pimp you out as an erotic dancer by the airport?”

“Exotic.”

“Erotic. Whatever, bro. Same thing.”

Was it? Vijay lifted his shirt and rippled his abdomen like a belly dancer. Kiwi watched Vijay’s belly button pinch inward and roll sinuously back into existence, which was mesmerizing.

“Quit acting gay, Vijay,” said Kiwi. “I’m serious here. I’m in trouble.”

“How much do you think I could make, Marge? With moves like this?”

“Zero dollars and zero cents.” (Bro! Kiwi remembered, too late now.) “Hey, I really don’t think you should be touching your abdomen to this roof like that? Because you will notice there is glass everywhere and you’re putting yourself at risk for tetanus …?”

A seaplane made a noisy loop above them, fangs painted on its black nose in a simulacrum of an alligator’s grin. Don’t scream, he heard in Ava’s small growl. For a moment they were in the shadow of its wings, the roar of engines sucking their speech upward.

“What is that?” he managed.

“New ride. You didn’t hear about it?”

Kiwi’s heart was in his throat — the seaplane was landing on the moat that surrounded the World, coming in so close that Kiwi thought its propeller would crash through the Leviathan windows. He dropped his head in anticipation of a phantom shower of glass, but when he looked again, the seaplane was skimming the surface of the moat. A heavy spray exploded around the seaplane’s fixed wings. Something about the way it landed, floats first, gave Kiwi the impression of teeth entering the water, the jet floats biting into the red-dyed water like two bright fangs. Probably just the effect the World of D. is going for here, Kiwi thought. Part of the grand theme.

The seaplane blew red jets of foam across the water for another hundred yards or so, stopped with the whiskers of its propellers trembling near the Leviathan.

“Oh my God,” said Kiwi.

“Right? Say. You know who makes bank, Marge? Those pilots.”

The World of Darkness had its own flight school, Vijay said. The managers were recruiting from inside the World, instead of doing outside hiring, because then they could pay the pilots less—$45,000 a year, said Vijay. Kiwi would have to sell his greenhorn sperm and platelets for a decade to make anywhere near that.

“It’s not even that hard, supposedly. It’s like driving a bus of the sky.”

As far as driving was concerned, Kiwi had once driven the tram into the side of Grandpa Sawtooth’s house. Sky-wise, he’d fallen out of Ava’s kapok tree house at age ten and broken both arms.

“Huh. Forty-five thousand dollars. And how does one enroll in the, uh, the flight school?”

Kiwi should have guessed that some new ride was under way. For weeks he’d heard the ear-splitting construction on the northern lot. From the roof he’d seen Caterpillars pushing the moat into an artificial harbor, the crews installing a slate dock on floating supports that looked like huge gray boxing gloves. The attraction was called the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse: a play on the Bible’s book of Revelations, of course, but also an allusion to a real event. In the 1940s, the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse were heralded as Loomis County heroes. They were young men, out-of-work supply pilots contracted by a private millionaire who had purchased great tracts of swamp from Henry Disston, the potbellied Florida land baron, whose baronial hairstyle was as black and wavy as charred bacon. The Four Pilots carried the granules of their particular plague in restaurant salt and pepper shakers. They dumped thousands of Australian melaleuca seeds from the windows of low-flying Cessnas, shaking them all over the salt marshes and the saw-grass prairies and the tree islands. Would-be farmers dreamed of nights lit by fragrant globes of citrus, yellow fields of corn, and Angus cattle black as jackboots, the worthless saw grass vanquished, the alligators dead, the water drained.

Then in 1981, at the crest of a fitful wave of public interest in the swamp, the famous late-night talk-show host J. P. Twomey had done a series called The Four Pilots of the Apocalypse about the unwitting villains who had planted the seeds of the swamp’s destruction. It still got screened on channel 2, Loomis’s “cultural” station. J. P. Twomey had interviewed the surviving pilot, Mickey Hotchkiss, now a white-haired man with a voice as small as Michael Jackson’s wearing what appeared to be women’s palazzo pants. Mickey Hotchkiss was no longer entirely with it, was the implication of his wardrobe choices. He seemed shy but also happy to be on TV. After denouncing him for nixing a unique ecosystem—“putting the whammy on the wetlands,” as Twomey put it — J.P. forced Mickey to look at photographs of the melaleuca’s conquest. A haunting slide show commenced: acres and acres of new forests composed of a single multiplying tree, the melaleuca; fires burning on the drained land in northern Florida, where blue-green sheets of water used to flow from Lake Okeechobee all the way to the Gulf of Mexico; a final grim view of the swamp from above, silver corridors of melaleucas flattening whole islands into one color like a trick involving mirrors. Mickey’s smile faltered but remained in place. Once or twice the old pilot had clucked politely, as if he were being shown photographs of grandchildren whose names he had forgotten.

“I did this?” he’d asked in a sly, guilty voice, like a child trying to figure out why he was about to get punished. “When?”

Kiwi had watched the Four Pilots program with his dad twice. The Chief had railed against the advance of the melaleuca woods the entire time, even during commercials, but he wasn’t angry at this pilot. They’d agreed (Kiwi and his father could sometimes meet at the intersection of their two angers, like neighbors drawing up to the barbed stars of a fence) that the old guy looked like the original scapegoat, Grecian almost, with his wispy beard and baffled ovine eyes.

Vijay explained that the new ride was a tour of ecological devastation. You could take aerial pictures, with a fancy rental camera, of “the Floridian Styx.” You could murmur over the gray blight and eat a sack lunch. You could ache for lost species of flowers and trees for twenty minutes and touch your forehead to the cockpit window’s glass to find “Swamp Acheron” and “New Lethe,” and then fly back.

“That’s my home,” Kiwi mumbled. “That’s where I grew up.”

“Yeah, right?” Vijay sighed and rolled over on his side. “That ride sounds pretty fucking lame to me, but Carl says the Carpathian Corporation is ‘capitalizing on a local fear’ or some dumb shit. Same stuff they make us watch the videos about. They’re only running the Four Pilots tours in Loomis, though. Like a test run.” Vijay was lying half in shadow with the sun on his chin and his eyes shut. His chest rose and fell like an old cat’s. Even stoned and half-asleep, Vijay could somehow roll sideways and, like a bird-shit clairvoyant, avoid getting bombed by the pigeons.

“If it goes good they’re going to do one in Fairbanks. Bush pilots are going to fly Lost Souls to the melting ice caps, so they can, like, cry like babies and get competitive about how sad they are and shit. Get photos of those snow bears. Be like, ‘Hey, bear! Sorry we fucked up your summer, bro!’ ”

“You mean polar bears,” Kiwi corrected automatically. “Or possibly the Kodiak bear. Ursus arctos middendorffi. Hey, how come you know about this ride already?”

“You didn’t get the memos? Look around your locker,” Vijay told him. (Kiwi had been avoiding his locker, where ASSFUCKER still glowed lithium white against the metal.)

“Oh, okay. Right-o.”

Vijay cracked one reddened eye at him.

“Right-o? Are you Sherlock Holmes? Have I taught you nothing?”

“I meant, right on. I mean, thank you.” He kept his eyes on the sun. “Really.” A cloud moved and light poured over them. It suddenly occurred to Kiwi that he and Vijay both looked bronzed and goofy, sitting up here in their Thinking Man poses. Like statue rejects that some sculptor had in a paroxysm of shame hidden on the roof.

“No problem, Margie. I hope you get it.” Vijay waggled his bare toes at Kiwi in farewell, one arm flung across his face. Break had ended fifteen minutes ago. He giggled into the crook of one elbow: “Take it to the skies, Margaret!”

Kiwi stood. He spent a final minute staring at the black seaplanes with their torpid propellers, now drowsing like huge dragonflies on the bloodshot moat. Time to go find Carl before he could second-guess himself. His body prickled with dull anticipation, cell memory — it would be freezing on the stairwell. Often Kiwi felt like he was eavesdropping on the conversations of his own body, committee meetings of muscles and ligaments that didn’t seem to include him. Whenever he’d gone onstage to wrestle the alligators, he’d always felt like the last to know about his own terror. It was a disorienting lag. Even the behatted, popcorn-munching tourists in the stadium got the scoop on him. His parents, his grandfather, his sisters, the alligators, his own deep tissues — everybody had him figured for a coward, but Kiwi wouldn’t catch on until he heard his own scream.

Kiwi stood for a moment longer outside the cherry-red door that led back into the World of Darkness, enjoying the feeling of the warm outside air against his back. The outermost rail of the overpass glowed in a thin gold parabola at this hour, like some interplanetary racetrack. Somewhere our Seths are clawing onto their rocks, he thought, staring out across lanes of Loomis traffic.

“Hey, don’t puss out, Marge!” Vijay called. “Threaten him! Tell Carl that if he doesn’t let you fly the plane, you’ll quit and leave for the Burger Burger.”

Kiwi found Carl Jenks spinning on his office chair. He frowned at the tiny cactus plant on his desk as Kiwi spoke.

“And I have excellent hand-eye coordination, sir,” he coughed, “and a good foundation in aeronautics, physics …”

Carl pressed his lips to near invisibility. Possibly Carl Jenks had at one time wanted to be a kind man, a decent and charitable man; and then puberty had come along and slapped this almost translucent blond mustache across his face. The mustache was Carl’s most distinctive feature — the hairs grew in achromatic and already bristling.

Kiwi heard himself speaking faster and faster; he resisted the urge to lean in and do spontaneous calculus for Carl on his clipboard.

“Are you crazy?” Carl said when he’d finished. “Two weeks ago you broke the vacuum. Nina Suárez complains that you’re sexually harassing her. Ephraim Lipmann says that you’re sexually harassing him. Every time I turn around you’re tripping over something, or coming down from the roof stoned out of your gourd. Shut up, Bigtree, I don’t want to hear it.”

Carl Jenks, who had started this disquisition in his usual wry tone, was suddenly breaking on his vowels. His voice shook. He seemed to have accidentally stirred himself to real fury, as if Kiwi’s request were the last in a long string of impossible ideas, inappropriate and painful ideas, that Carl Jenks been asked to entertain in his lifetime.

Carl said, “Scout, our payroll manager—”

“Scott.”

“Scotty tells me that you do not understand numbers. That you cannot do basic arithmetic. And we’re going to train you to fly a plane?”

“Yes?” said Kiwi.

“Tell you what, Bigtree. We’ll train you on the chair and see how that goes.”

“The electric chair?” Kiwi was picturing spikes, white forks of summer lightning running through a tin cap.

“The lifeguard chair. Down in the Lake of Fire.”

Carl Jenks sighed and reversed the direction of his chair-spins. He had an office chair, Kiwi noted, with cushy armrests to prevent strain and fatigue.

“Dale Bonilla is our lifeguard now, but I’m moving him. Tell me, Kiwi, can you lifeguard effectively if you are reading pornography? Can you safeguard the lives of preadolescent children if you are busy shooting half-human, half-tiger monsters in an imaginary jungle on your portable video console?”

Kiwi had played that game in the dormitory: Were-Cats Attack IV. The bad guys had tiger paws for running and human thumbs for guns. Kiwi made it to level 7 with Leonard one Tuesday morning in the dormitory, where they’d been defeated at last in an interspecies massacre outside the gray digitized ruins, ambushed by a roaring horde of bipedal tigers with machine guns and big clawed feet bursting out of their khaki pants. Silence on this topic seemed prudent.

“That sounds irresponsible, Carl. It’s against the World of Darkness policy to use personal electronics on the job.”

Carl rolled his pale eyes. “Quit being such a shoe-licker, Bigtree. What I’m saying is, does Dale Bonilla even know how to swim? Do you think Pam in HR asks the tough questions when she does new hires? I don’t think so, Kiwi, personally, because here you stand.”

“Okay.” Kiwi ran a hand through his hair. Violence was contemplated, then rejected by Kiwi as counterproductive to his larger financial stratagems. He thought, The Chief would have you by the neck, Carl Jenks.

“So I’m not going to be a pilot?”

“Nobody starts at the top, do they? You have to work your way up.” Carl was grinning now, a messy grin that spilled all over his face, his blue eyes sparkling with improved humor, as if this were a joke they could share: Kiwi climbing the ladder.

“You’ll need to get CPR certified.” Carl actually giggled, then relaxed into silence again, as if good humor were an athletic stretch he couldn’t hold. “And you can request your Rescue Stick and your little bathing suit from HR. The ladies are in for a treat, eh?”

At the mention of a bathing suit, Kiwi cinched Cubby’s jeans in his left hand.

“Is this a promotion, Mr. Jenks?”

“Sure.” Carl smiled magnanimously, swept a hand over his moon-white skull. “Why not think of it that way?”