Swamplandia!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. Ava’s Eclipse

There 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.

“Come on, kid, put some real muscle into it.”

The Bird Man’s hair was hanging in his eyes and I didn’t understand the expression on his face. Maybe he’s scared, or angry? Because he’s been this way before, I thought, because he knows … but I couldn’t begin to imagine what he might know. We paddled hard against the wind and current and yet we weren’t making any progress; it felt as if our skiff were pinned beneath the wind’s great thumb.

“You think we can get through that?” I shouted. “Shouldn’t we find a place to wait this out?”

We paddled into the chop with spray flying at our faces. An easterly knocked us sideways and we aimed our bow for a blue breath between the rocks that I did not think we could make.

“This is our window, kid.”

The humps of broken shells rose around us. We had to pull ourselves through the passage with our hands — if the bow had twisted a few inches to the right or left we would have gotten hung up. The Bird Man put on his helmet and switched on the headlamp, it had gotten that dark. Shells glittered on either side of us like defunct treasure, washed a pearly rose and dish blue that glowed against the sky. The water was as narrow as a hallway, lapping the tall white walls of shells, and the green column of air on the other side of the tunnel stood open like a door. The underworld is coming next, I thought, and the muscles in my stomach tensed the way they did before a show. “Where is my SISTER?” I moaned through my teeth, too tired now for real hysteria but more determined than I’d ever been to find her.

Probably if I had waited even a few seconds longer to glance at the sky, I wouldn’t have seen her ribbon: a flag of purple snagged amid the toothy piles of whelk. “Ossie!” I shouted out loud, but the Bird Man didn’t hear me over the wind. I imagined the ribbon catching there as she tried to squeeze through, her hair flying out in a white fan around her face. I stood up, keeping my arms on the shell mound so that I didn’t overturn the skiff, and I reached onto my toes to grab it; in the process I nearly fell out of the shallow hull, and the Bird Man had to grab my waist and jerk me down again.

“Have you gone crazy? Sit down, sit down!”

I gaped up at him.

“I said sit,” he screamed over the wind. “This is nowhere to capsize!”

“I just wanted a souvenir,” I called, and showed him the opal fragments of shell that I’d dislodged into my palm when I went for the ribbon. The ribbon itself I stuffed quickly into my pocket and didn’t explain. I still don’t know why I did this; somehow it seemed a smart secret to keep for the moment. I thought this ribbon must be a message from Ossie and I wanted time to puzzle it out on my own — it could be an arrow pointing me toward her, I thought. Or a new kind of map. It didn’t occur to me then that there might be a darker explanation for my discovery.

“Ava! Ship your paddle, kid, use your hands …”

He seemed angry with me but there was no time for a lecture: we were midway through the Eye. There was no space to row anymore so we were pushing our way forward with our palms on the brittle sides of the middens. Behind me I could hear the Bird Man’s pole striking shell. The air gushing into my throat felt hot as exhaust, and it was all I could do to keep my hands moving along the walls.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it began. After five minutes we were totally clear of it. In the clarifying light that spilled between the live oaks I looked for proof that we had arrived in the underworld.

“I keep telling you, kid, this is the shallow end.” The Bird Man rubbed at the creases on his forehead. Why did adults always do that? I wondered. What if a face really worked like that, like rumpled trousers, and you could smooth out your bad thoughts from the outside in? I had thought he might share my happiness — we had made it through, and now we could find Ossie! Wasn’t that right? I crumpled a little; we’d arrived but there was no celebration or encouragement in his pale eyes.

“I got cut really bad,” I said, to say something. “On my hands.” Wordlessly he tipped a few drops from his bottle of green medicine onto our deepest cuts and we watched the white bubbles open like a million tiny mouths. This time I did not say one word about love.

“The freak show happens inside the circus tent, kid; we’re just at the entrance to the fairgrounds. No ghosts, not yet. Does that hurt you?”

I shook my head. He petted my hair and I smiled back at him helplessly, Ossie momentarily forgotten. With a twinge of shame I mussed up my hair again, hoping he’d lean in once more and smooth it. But the Bird Man did not touch or look at me again; he stretched the knit of his fingers and returned to his poling platform. I placed the red Seth on my lap and let her sun, soothed by her small weight there. Her sides collapsed dramatically with each exhalation and her belly felt cool and dry.

Already I had seen a few gars in the water, and tiny green herons. They had all looked conventionally alive to me, although who knew what the rules of this underworld were? I’d expected the weather to be icy, or at least a few degrees colder. I touched my hand to the rocky beach where we were resting and let a golden bug crawl onto my thumb. Dozens of legs combed up my bare arm, and for a second I felt almost joyful.

“Ossie!” I called. “Ossie?”

You be alive, too, I told her. I looked down until my vision blurred and watched the beetle crawling onto my shoulder.

“Do you think we’ll run into the rest of the dredge crew out here?” I asked. I had just seen something squatting on all fours behind the cabbage palms. A crocodile, I thought. You can tell from the teeth.

The Bird Man pulled his hat down. “It’s possible, kid. Stranger things have happened.”

“Do you think we might run into my mother?”

I picked up a clot of moss with my paddle, dunked it. I hated how little my voice sounded when I asked the question.

The Bird Man gave me a look I couldn’t read and then nodded once, quickly. “I told you, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. Right now we’re only in the shallows of the underworld, the threshold …”

After that we didn’t speak again for a long time. The underworld was unbelievably fecund. I saw snail kites, which I hadn’t seen in such numbers since I was nine or ten, and a virgin stand of mahogany. Wood storks’ heads appeared like ancient doorknobs along the branches. We are in the underworld now, I thought, kneeing forward in the skiff and looking around. We have crossed over; we could at any moment find my sister! But the pink sun was so hot here, and this landscape was not the landscape promised in the book. This landscape looked like our backyard. I saw lonely pine keys, cormorants, broken rock.

We stopped in a brush-filled cove, drank from the canteens. A Seth blinked incuriously at us, curled on the dark sand amid the palmetto fronds.

You could become a fossil in your lifetime, I’d discovered. I’d seen the eerie correspondence between the living Seths in our Pit and their taxidermied brothers in our museum. The Chief could achieve an ossified quality, too, with his headdress skeletally flattened against the sofa back, drunk and asleep.

“Is that one alive or dead, Bird Man?”

He was busy with the baling bucket and he didn’t hear me, or maybe chose to ignore me. I threaded all my fingers through the wooden holes in the crate carrier; the red Seth regarded me from a triangle of shadow. The wedge of our bow pushed into a dark spot on the water, where rain came shaking off the trees. I’d tied Osceola’s purple ribbon around my wrist — so tightly, the Bird Man grumbled, that it looked like a tourniquet. I waited for him to ask where the ribbon had come from but he seemed to think it was one of mine, original to our journey.

Somewhere, possibly just a few hundred yards to the east or the west of us on one of these tree islands, Ossie’s hair was blowing in this same wind that rippled the water at our bow. The Land of the Dead was windier than I had expected and as flat as a cracker and I had so many bug bites on my shins that the bumps overlapped. Mosquitoes were just as vicious here. I’d have to remember to tell that to my brother, I thought dizzily … I stared at the black mush on my ruby bruise where I’d slapped one and felt myself beginning to be sick. Kiwi would be taking assiduous Field Notes on the shallows of the underworld. He’d be skimming specimens off the water, or sketching the wings of undead mosquitoes. But why were the mosquitoes in the Land of the Dead so thirsty and noisy? Why did the fish jump just as high here as they did anywhere?

“Everything is alive here, Bird Man,” I whispered, not wanting to offend anyone — it seemed a funny thing to mention if there were ghosts around.

“So far. Watch out that we don’t get hung up on that—” The Bird Man pushed his pole against a submerged rock. “You’ll find a mix of the living and the dead in the shallows.”

“Oh. Right. That makes sense.”

There are estuaries near Swamplandia! where salt water and freshwater mingle, and it’s a crazy party down there: manatees and ten-foot saltwater crocodiles and freshwater alligators, bottlenose dolphins and bluegill, soft-shell turtles.

“Hey, do you want to play twenty questions or something?” I called over my shoulder. At this point we were twenty minutes beyond the Eye. “Do you want to, uh, to talk?”

The Bird Man shook his head and held the thick finger of his falconer’s glove to his lips. He seemed jumpy to me. Once I turned to look at him: we were paddling in a deep lake into fierce open sun, and sweat slid down the closed window of his face.

I am almost there, Osceola, I thought, as the little waves imploded. Keep breathing.

Five o’clock and we were still on the river. Now the Caloosahatchee had become the Styx. The water here was clear as a blue lozenge. Large, brilliantly winged moths trailed our oar handles for a mile. We moved through a labyrinth of canals that felt identical to the route we’d taken yesterday, just as shallow and confusing, just as chokingly hot. Occasionally you would see something new: on one tree island, for example, hundreds of cabbage palms felled by a storm covered the ground. Ferns had swallowed the stumps: resurrection ferns and saw palmettos, hundreds upon hundreds of waxy blooms with a brilliant red center. I told the Bird Man they looked like dwarfs in tuxedos and he smiled. Then I thought I saw a shape moving behind a screen of vines — it was two-legged, short but humanoid — and I hollered at the Bird Man to stop our boat.

“No,” he said, poling us evenly forward.

“What do you mean, no?” The island was curving away from us.

“I mean no. We’re not stopping. Not there.”

“But I saw somebody back there. What if it’s my sister?”

“It’s not her. Pick up your paddle, Ava.”

I caught my muscles making sly preparations to jump out and swim up current.

“Ossie!” I yelled behind me. “Please, we have to at least check …”

The Bird Man’s hand flew out and retreated so nimbly that at first I didn’t know what had happened; I saw colors, felt my teeth snag on my lower lip; I touched my cheek, confused; He hit you, explained the smart voice that narrates pain to your animal parts; on the platform he resumed poling forward. The skiff turned away from the tree island. He hadn’t done it to hurt me, he said angrily. The last thing he wanted was to hurt me, but what the hell was he supposed to do if he couldn’t trust me to keep quiet?

“You better start paying attention, if you want to get out of this place alive. That wasn’t your sister, believe me. That’s not a good island to stop at. We have a very small window to find her and we can’t waste time chasing some shadow, kid.”

“It wasn’t a shadow. What I saw—”

“You can get stranded out here, kid. Did you know that? Did your sister’s book include a tide table for the underworld?”

The Bird Man turned my chin to face him.

“Look: have you ever heard of someone getting trapped on a sandbar?” I stared at him. My mouth stung. “Trust me on this one. Remember the rules? Remember what I said about the riptides?”

I nodded. The water was five feet deep here and clear to the bottom and my muscles twitched to jump. Believe him, I thought. He’s gotten you this far. But then who was that girl? As he poled forward I craned around to watch the island recede, wanting very badly to see her shadow — but this time there was nothing. Just a wall of leaves and a cradle of water, shining. The Bird Man was struggling mightily to keep the skiff straight — it had become so narrow in the mangrove tunnel that when we got turned even a few inches sideways we hung up on the brambles. At one point a felled mahogany blocked a channel, a huge tree with shaggy roots, thirty or forty feet tall, and he had to pole us out stern first.

“Ossie!” I screamed one last time at the bend in the river, and the Bird Man shot me a warning look. Two buzzards swung through the silk of the rain. It was six o’clock by my watch, the underworld becoming muggy and preternaturally dark.

Dusk again. The pig frogs were throating their joy in the cattails. Sometimes I forgot for whole minutes what we were doing out here, who we were looking for.

Through her cage slats the red Seth blinked up at my face with florid eyes.

We wove through a long ridge of pinnacle rock. The sun glittered behind what sounded like the roar of the surf, as if the twisted pines hid a long seabed, a tidal hum so convincing that you could almost make out the Gulf foaming behind the trees — mosquitoes, the ocean’s tiniest mimics. I swabbed their iridescent green-and-silver corpses out of my ears and crusted nose and continued to peer into the scrub, my heart pounding.

I was baling water in the bow seat, the Bird Man poling behind me, when I heard the crackle of a song I recognized and shot up.

“… bye, bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry …”

Somebody on the tree island was listening to a radio! There was no mistaking the moody AM crackle — it was a station I knew, WCAM, Glen Winter’s Golden Oldies show. Who had a radio out here? I saw tall shapes moving between the black mangroves: gator hunters. I guessed this from their canvas gear, the steaklike crimson of their faces beneath their hats. I knew a fair amount about that messy business, not from the Chief but from Grandpa Sawtooth, who used to hunt everything without discrimination before Park Services took over. I’d watched him cutting out the brain cap, salting it, stripping the skin before the scales slipped. “Hornbacking” meant taking everything, the whole hide. During the worst years of the Great Depression, hunters sold even the heads and claws to the seaside artisans who turned them into pocketbooks. “People were tacky in those days,” Grandpa Sawtooth grunted by way of explanation.

Through the holes in the trees, I saw something flashing. Long and scythe-bright: knives. Handles that connected to fists. Two men were cutting at something splayed on the ground that I couldn’t see, a radio bleating fuzzily behind them. I rotated by careful half degrees in the skiff. I didn’t want to upset our equilibrium — who knew the rules of this place? — but if there were other living people in this underworld I wanted to know if they’d seen Ossie. And these guys seemed like happy drunks, not ghosts.

“No,” the Bird Man said before I could ask. “Better keep your mouth shut. Those men are dead, kid.”

Dead? “Are you sure?” Already the river was hurrying us away from them. “They looked just like ordinary people. Like any hunters.” My voice broke into agitation like a rash. “They’ve got a radio …,” I whined.

“Do they?” the Bird Man hissed. “Did you see if they had knives, also? Did you see, with your superior vision, what they were skinning behind the trees?”

“Alligators.” My voice sounded faint.

The Bird Man sped us downriver. But I could still hear the chorus of the radio song and the men’s cheerful voices shouting the lyrics above it, sloppy with drink:

“… and them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singin’, ‘This’ll be the day that I dieee, this’ll be the day …’ ”

“Sit tight. Don’t mess this up now, Ava. This is the dangerous stretch. We’ll tie off soon. We’ll get there before midnight.”

I swam my oar head through the river and watched a fist of brown moss dimple and sink. We were already in the underworld, right? So his promise didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Where would we be before midnight? But I saw the Bird Man’s face and knew better than to ask. For what felt like a long time I could hear the perfect radio version and also the drunk overlay of the hunters’ voices, and I could see it, the dry levee, and for some reason the picture made me very afraid for my sister. Those men are alive, Ava. I heard the stern, tiny rudder of her voice, my mother’s voice. You know they are.

“Help!” I hollered, scaring myself worse with my own screaming. “Help, can you hear me? If you’re real, come help me! We’re over here on the water …”

I was fumbling for the cooler and trying to get the red Seth inside my bib pocket; I wasn’t going to jump without her. Then the Bird Man was covering my mouth.

“Oh shut up, shut up,” he groaned. “Now why would you do that?” His glove tasted like sour fur.

He clamped hard against my mouth to smother my second scream and I thought dizzily that this was how our Seths felt. Like a Seth I was too weak to do anything, to bite down or force my jaws open. When it was clear that the men weren’t coming he loosened his grip. His eyes were full of a funny sadness, like a disgust — disappointment. I couldn’t slow my breaths enough to get air down. Air looped shallowly through my nostrils. My vision darkened. For just a second, black snow shook across the sun, and I thought with a misled excitement about the painting Winter on the River Styx.

“If I let go,” he said directly into my ear, “can I trust you to keep your mouth shut? Please, I am trying to help you here. Jesus H. You cannot go screaming around the underworld, kid.”

This felt like one of Kiwi’s English tests: was the Bird Man scared of me or for me?

If it was the first one I knew that I should probably bite down or scream again. If it was the second one I needed to stay quiet. Oh but Kiwi, I can’t guess the answer from his voice.

“Kid, pull another stunt like that one and you will get yourself killed.”

I nodded my chin into his hand. For an alligator wrestler this posture is very humiliating. It didn’t seem like I should move though, or really even could have.

“You’re going to get the both of us killed …,” he pretended to repeat, but I knew this was different from what he’d said the first time. The first time, I was alone in the sentence.

I sat in the boat, mouth shut now, and balanced the oar on my knees as he poled us toward a soft little piney key. The mud was a loamy red-violet color. Pines and magnolias waved their flags at an elevation of six or seven feet. We flipped and dragged the boat onto the deep beach, our feet sinking a few inches. I got out the taped-up alligator and I was holding her with her claws scrabbling on my shoulder, all twelve inches of her fighting toward the floor of the skiff. She flipped and clawed and twisted redly, almost slipping out of my grip as she dug heavily into my knees, but I nabbed her. As if my heart had sprouted claws and was trying to escape my body. I pocketed her. Right next to my heart, the poor Seth kept it company while it boomed.

The Bird Man squatted and asked if I was okay.

I was.

Was I going to scream like that again?

I was not.

He sighed heavily and told me to relax and get myself together, that he was going to take a piss. Re-lax, Ava, he said, watching me struggle with the writhing alligator. He hung his hat and his coat on a pronged branch — both of us were sweating hard. The whistle dropped from the branch’s spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around. I thought, Make my call again, be the Bird Man. If he repeated the call from our first meeting, I knew I could get back into the boat.

But if I observed my friend and ferryman from a different perch in my brain, I saw that the Bird Man could be an anybody. He could blend quite easily into the crowd of panhandlers and businessmen on the streets of Loomis: a tanned, middle-aged man with a few scars on his knuckles. Just a fleck of foam on that sea, as my dad would say. My dad would want me to get a good description of him. I sat on a rock and watched him remove his coat behind the saw palmetto. Okay: How would he look to a ranger, or a mainland person? Okay: he weighed a skinny number like my brother’s, whatever that might be. He had brown hair with gunmetal streaks in it. Scars on his palms and arms. A thin outdoorsman’s face. “Off the grid,” my dad might have added with his chieftain’s squint — because there was in fact something unwashed and wobbly about the Bird Man when you got up close.

“Ava,” the Bird Man barked — to let me know he could see me, I thought with a little shiver. “Keep an eye out. Stay with the skiff.”

The Bird Man was a bone-thin shape behind the willow head. His magic dulled and swirled beyond my ability to recall it, like an island that shrinks to a point behind your boat. All of a sudden the dimensions of my problems changed on me, like rocks coming out of the darkness: Now I was lost. Now I hoped that my sister would find me. Mentally I called out to her: Ossie? Louis? Help me.

Why, there isn’t any ghost of Louis, the frank adult voice informed me. This voice was very primitive. It was some amalgam of the Chief and my mom and a much, much older creature. A dry rasp like a fingernail, a scale. You are both alone out here, you and Osceola, if your sister is alive out here.

I stared down at the purple ribbon and felt a sour rise in my throat.

I could hear the Bird Man zipping up behind the leaves maybe fifty yards from where I was sitting. I walked over to the tree where the whistle was swinging. I caught it, held it to my own lips, winced in preparation for the shattering sound. I’m not sure what I was expecting to summon — a gale of birds, an army of birds. I could see one great blue heron watching me from the river with her slate feathers blown smooth. I inhaled hard, I emptied my lungs into the whistle. Not a sound came out of it.

Oh no, I thought in a tiny voice. Oh-oh.

When the man returned he stooped and peeled a tiny stray feather off my collarbone. He was smiling at me — his grin was very gentle, wide enough to frighten. His eyes reminded me of two sweating water glasses. I pictured a stalk of cold water running from the burgundy toes of his boots to his scalp. Then his gaze deadened on me — like he could still see me but he wasn’t really looking anymore, some plug knocked loose — and his new eyes went rummaging around the green corridor behind me, where saw palmettos squeaked along the water.

“Don’t sulk,” he said, and there was an elastic snap in his voice as his mood turned on me. “You’ve been a good sport this whole trip, why ruin it?”

His voice surprised me. Inside it I could hear a wounded note, like a dog’s keen, almost, but not only hurt. Something else in it, too. Our dog Yallo used to howl when it got its big paw caught in our doorjamb, and you could hear his feelings waffle: rage-pain-rage. But I didn’t understand what doorjamb the Bird Man could be caught in — we were safe now, weren’t we? Those men weren’t coming.

“Why would you do that to me?” he mumbled. “Aw, kid, you’re going to screw it all up. Do you know what I’m risking here? For you. Ava. Do you know what could happen to me, if they find me with you …?” His voice was half a growl now. “Do you have any idea?”

I was thinking that those hunters had been real and that we might have missed our chance to save my sister. I was really quaking with anger now, gathering breath — and then I saw his eyes and immediately shut up my face. Something bad here, I thought. Something going awry. The air between us felt like dry powder.

“Come on, kid,” he said, and his voice had changed completely; it was charged with something that was almost kindness, that quivered like a finger of syrup. “I sure wish you had not done that. Do you want to find your sister or not? Come on. We’re wasting time.”

On this shoreline I couldn’t hear any voices but ours. No radio song. All the little umbilicals to the world collapsed.

“Let’s get you dried.”

I was crying now. I stared down at the purple ribbon on my wrist, all that I had to show for two days on the water.

The Bird Man’s hat hung from the branch above him, swinging slightly on the breeze; beneath it the coat opened its magnanimous arms. Feathers swirled out of its plumy mat. Black sleeves hung unwizardly almost a head above me, ballooning with wind. Birds moved above it by their own power. Nobody was controlling them.

This coat was just a rag, I realized. My heart froze. A crazy person’s disguise.

“You were lying to me,” I said dully. “There isn’t any such thing as the underworld, is there? This is just the ordinary swamp.”

“Aw, kid, don’t say that.” The man shocked me by pouting, his face bunching into a childish purse. When it smoothed I was scared worse than before. “Don’t be ungrateful. Didn’t I get you through the Eye? Aren’t we having a little adventure? We can even keep looking for your sister if you want, why not?”

He took a step toward me and I watched his hand swing through space and come to rest on my shoulder. He crouched low and his pale lips sprouted teeth and I couldn’t remember how to see this face as friendly.

Who are you?

Somebody was grinning at me. I could hear the wind fluttering his empty sleeves.