Swamplandia!

CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Welcome to Stiltsville

Are we there yet, Bird Man?”

“Kid, you are making me crazy. New rule: you are not allowed to ask me that question.”

The Bird Man sank his pole into the river with a furious curl to his lips and I flinched, instinctively drumming my knuckles on the red Seth’s carrier. I’d been doing that all morning, a request for luck.

“Okay. Sorry. I was just trying to make a joke.” I tried grinning at him. “But what should I be looking for, Bird Man?”

“Hell’s a special place, kid. You’ll know it when you get there. Everybody does.”

We were poling through the glitter of high noon, and even the Bird Man’s voice sounded sweaty. Still he insisted on wearing his coat, on straddling the poling platform with his elbows bent, the black hood of his coat looming like a gloomy sun over the gunwales.

“I’m going to pay you when we get back, you know …,” I mumbled, to make myself feel better. I felt guilty imagining how tired my friend must be — the Bird Man had been standing ramrod straight on the poling platform for three hours now. He didn’t take breaks. I sat in the bow seat and paddled hard around the strainers. No sign of my sister on the river — no sign of any vessel, really, besides a bleached dinghy hung up in a swamp oak, a beard of vines and flowers tumbling out of it. But for some reason I wasn’t worrying anymore; in fact a small, indecipherable part of me hoped that we wouldn’t find Ossie right away. On Swamplandia! I wrestled alligators for hundreds and maybe thousands of tourists, men and women from fourteen countries and every U.S. state (except, weirdly, Oklahoma — the Okies had other vacation plans, I guess). But the Bird Man was the first adult besides Grandpa Sawtooth or Chief Bigtree or my mother who’d spent more than an hour with me.

At one o’clock, we poled into a place where the water level suddenly rose again, a channel glutted with rain, and the Bird Man had to climb down and sat behind me in the stern seat. We moved our gear forward to bring the bow down. The skiff was well built and didn’t tip. We both rowed for a while, passing islands of lightwood — the old pine stumps west of my house — and sundews. It was deep enough here to dip our oars through the golden brown algal mats without scraping bottom.

At three o’clock there was still no sign of Ossie.

At four o’clock we broke clear of the mangroves and now the horizons seemed to speed away from our boat, receding in both directions. A fuzzy black cloud line striped the bayheads. At five thirty the red Seth was agitating in her wooden crate, and I felt guilty for bringing her, and also glad she was there. As we poled deeper, I used my rain slicker to seine minnows and wiggly, translucent cricket frogs the size of my thumbnail for her.

Around six o’clock we got doused by a nasty chop on the narrow bay. A strong wind was blowing in out of the northeast and sending four-inch swells over the skiff’s low gunwales. The Bird Man showed me how to roll the boat with each wave, keeping our hull as parallel as possible to the waves. We couldn’t tack straight and the Bird Man took the brunt of the swells; within minutes his coat was soaked through, its outer feathers slimily adhered to his arms. He grimaced when the waves hit but he didn’t complain.

“Drink some water, kid. We’ll have to stop soon,” the Bird Man said from the poling platform.

“Thank you so much for doing this, Bird Man.”

“Sit down.”

“Thank you for taking me to find her. Thank you. Are you tired?”

“No.”

“If you’re tired I can pole, I’m much stronger than I look.” I waited two minutes and then I was spitting words at him again. Fits of grateful or fearful language kept rising in my throat, embarrassing but unstoppable — they felt almost like knots of phlegm that I had to cough up.

“Really, thank you so much. You’re sure you’re not tired? If you hadn’t showed up, I don’t even like to think about …”

“Sit down, kid. Calm down. If your sister’s smart she’s not on the water now. She and her friend are making camp somewhere.”

“But did she come this way, you think?”

I leaned into the hull: I saw nothing. Rain fizzing in the near distance. A vague red sun behind the trees.

Seven o’clock: we were on a drift slough now, small oak trees and cocoplums rising along the water’s edge. Butterflies flecked the air in pale triangles, so pretty that I concluded we must still be a long ways off from the underworld. The sun was lowering itself behind the tree line at an angle, as carefully as a round man descending a ladder. Two bullnose turtles craned their black caramel necks at us from a rock.

Instead of camping on a hammock, the Bird Man said we were going to spend the night in a “sky house” at Stiltsville. “Stiltsville is our Swamp Roanoke,” the Chief liked to say, giving the place a black-ice twinkle for the tourists. (“Stephen, did you hear that! Everybody disappeared. Oh, it gives me the chills to think about it! What a morbid riddle!”) The truth is a lot less interesting: Stiltsville emptied out when Park Services took over this part of the swamp. Residents of Stiltsville abandoned their platform houses and moved to townships on the sloping rock of the continent. The sky people had mailboxes now, elms and gardens; their houses no longer resembled arks. The last family moved out of Stiltsville in the dry season of 1952; in the intervening decades it devolved into a wooden rookery. The name “Stiltsville” had always made me picture a cloudland of these acrobatic palaces, but the reality was pretty modest: just a collection of ten or twelve houses mounted on fourteen-foot support pilings.

“Do you think anybody lives here anymore?” I asked the Bird Man. “Do you think there are any ghosts here?”

“We’ll find out.”

Each house had a shadow beneath it, a sort of liquid basement. Small waves rose midway up the platform supports and collapsed into a thin foam. The temperature dropped tens of degrees whenever we poled beneath a house. Above us, the rotted planks and greenish white cross-boards looked like they’d been nailed shut by some lunatic carpenter — I saw the glint of what seemed at a distance to be hundreds and hundreds of nailheads. Barnacles. Not nails but shells, dark red horns spiraling out of every surface. Some of the houses had disintegrating dinghies tethered in their “garages.” Some had holes in the floor that aligned with holes in the ceiling, and you could see the sun pinwheeling cheerfully above the ruined kitchens and bedrooms.

“Know any good knock-knock jokes, kid?” the Bird Man asked, and for some reason this made me laugh hysterically. “This whole place looks like a joke that got knocked over, doesn’t it?” He touched a support where tiny brown-and-red crabs clung like bottle caps to the wood.

Be alive, Ossie, I beamed over the monotony of water. Be safe.

We poled under a porch where a bobcat was shouldering through a cracked blue door frame. For a second it paused to look at us. Ancient blue and red flowerpots sat all over the deck, heavy enough to have survived who knows what. I saw spiders, the long absence of flowers. The bobcat slunk around the maze of ceramics, broke free, leapt through a gray space in the porch slats, and easily cleared the six-foot channel between two of the houses, its white belly fur flying above our skiff. The creature landed soundlessly in front of a second doorway, bulled its flat head through the screen, disappeared into another house. All told this took maybe twelve seconds tops.

The Bird Man sucked air between his teeth.

“We’ll make sure to find an empty house tonight, kid. No ghosts or cats.”

Above us a hundred birds screamed. I watched a snow cloud, a pale blue cloud, a black and crimson-edged cloud, a green cloud, a nickel cloud explode into the sky.

“Are you making them do that?” I asked the Bird Man. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

The Bird Man didn’t answer me and I hadn’t heard him chirrup or whistle, as he’d done back on Swamplandia! but the birds danced in a weird clockwork above us and I guessed that he had something to do with it. The sun was a low, red ball behind gray clouds. I felt scared, watching the cormorants and the ibis obey his secret commands, but this was a wonderful kind of fear. It was nothing like the metal-in-your-mouth terror I got thinking about Ossie and Louis. It was an exhilaration, the way you feel when you are wrestling a Seth and it nearly knocks you loose. Kiwi, my smug brother — I wanted to tell him that I was watching real magic.

We paddled zags through Stiltsville until the Bird Man found a house he said was good for us to sleep in. He tied off on one of the southern pilings. Wooden steps rose eleven or twelve feet to the front door.

“Okay, pal. Up, up, and such.”

“You first. Please.” I was still thinking about the bobcat.

Inside the house was bare wood. Smells bloomed in the dark, a mix of salt and bird droppings and deep rot, but the structure itself was in surprisingly good condition. No Seths, no hawks, no raccoons, no trespassing felines. The main room was about three hundred square feet, and the roof was low enough to scrape back the Bird Man’s hat. There was almost no furniture, but what remained was arranged in the patterns you’d expect: a dining table, twin beds bunked in an alcove that opened like a walnut mouth behind what had been the kitchen, a small black desk that looked so weak that I didn’t even like to rest my eyes on it. Black and white specklings covered the walls, these grim starbursts of mold on the pale wood that made me miss with a random stab my acned brother. A huge hole in the middle of the ceiling opened onto a clear night sky: it looked as if some great predator had peeled the thatched roof back, sniffed once, and lost interest.

Immediately the Bird Man began setting small smudge fires in pots along the holes in the wall to smoke the mosquitoes out. I climbed down to the river again to change out my Seth’s water dish. Outside I watched clouds sail over the neighboring houses, which stood on tall and lemon-gray legs like a flock of herons in the shallows. From the bottom of the ladder I watched the sun fall behind the many wooden legs of Stiltsville; you could almost hear the splash. Soon afterward the river became a looking glass for stars. Now it was our first night on the water. I climbed the ladder to a plank where I could see the Bird Man hunched over our Coleman in a yellow round of light, his shadow flung far back against the wall. I paused there for a while, watching him.

For dinner, the Bird Man cooked up some fatty hamburger meat on his one-burner camper stove and sliced two small, golden onions into the oil. “Eat up, kid,” he said, “because this stuff will spoil rotten by tomorrow night.” (Tomorrow night?) We ate in silence at a gimpy three-legged table. It was the only piece of furniture left in the kitchen. The original chairs were long gone but the Bird Man had scavenged two from the adjacent house and they were unexpectedly beautiful, a matched set with swirly black rails painted with pink roses. We both sat down gingerly at opposite ends of the table; when the chairs held our weight our eyes met, surprised. Maybe he will dance with me later, I thought out of nowhere, and felt a quick flulike joy. Back home I never got to dance during our mock proms that we girls held after hours in the café; Ossie always made me be the disc jockey. Being the DJ meant feeding a black poker chip on a string to the jukebox. Ossie and her invisible partner twirled in front of the windows, her purple skirt going full as a balloon as she spun around the empty tables. Once a ghost had tried to dip her near the fryer and she’d fallen and given herself a shiner.

“Hey, Bird Man?” I asked him abruptly. “Do you have another name that I could call you? Like, I don’t know, Alan or Paul or something? Stanley? A regular name?”

The Bird Man glanced up as if this were a shockingly rude question. “I had a name when I was your age. Not anymore. I guess I don’t see enough people in my line of work that I feel a name is necessary, kid. Who would I need to distinguish myself from?”

“I don’t know. Other men?”

“Not too many other men out here in the first place, and my customers aren’t much interested in getting to know me. Generally speaking, I mean.” He gave me a small smile. He was garnishing a third hamburger with slick onions and green slices of tomato. “So I don’t mind being the Bird Man to them.”

I nodded, but I felt hurt — here he had a name like an ace in his pocket and he didn’t want to show it to me. Didn’t he know that a Bigtree alligator wrestler was trustworthy?

But I guess the Bird Man was right to keep the secret of his name from me, because later that night I broke my promise to Ossie. I told him the story of the Dredgeman’s Revelation. It happened by accident — I was only planning on asking him if he knew or had known a man named Louis Thanksgiving, and then I watched as one sentence after another exited my mouth like those knotted magician’s scarves. Louis’s death story came out unstoppably; I didn’t even feel so guilty about breaking Ossie’s trust. As I babbled onward the Bird Man removed his gloves and settled his warm, bald hands on my knees, as if this were the polite thing to do. The whole time I spoke his slate eyes were liquid and dog-kind above the camp lantern. He didn’t tease me like my brother would have done but instead regarded me with an attentiveness that felt wonderful, like relaxing into a net over a wide ocean. When I got to the part about the buzzards he whistled softly and began to nod, and it occurred to me with a cold wonderment that he might have seen this species of bird himself; in the underworld he might have sailed beneath the very flock that got Louis.

“What an ending,” the Bird Man said when I finished. “A vanishing point. And what do you think the Dredgeman’s Revelation means, kid?”

I paused. Is he testing me? I wondered, and wished that I could crane around and peek at what the Bird Man knew, as if he might have an answer card hidden behind his back.

“Oh, I think it means that …”

I thought about Louis Thanksgiving’s hands, Louis’s freckled knuckles curled around the dredge railing at the end of his story. I could see the black dredge in greenish storm light, and how brave he’d been then, staring down that darkness. I thought of how he’d left his surname “Auschenbliss” floating miles behind him like molt feathers or snakeskin.

“My mom had a name that she tore off, too,” I heard myself saying. “Like Louis. She had a mainland name — her maiden name, it’s called. She used to be Hilola Owens. So she wasn’t always a Bigtree. And then she only got to be a Bigtree for eighteen years, you know, and now she’s nothing.”

Why had Louis died so young, before he could even become anybody? On Swamplandia! my sister and I found the dredge crane’s bucket frozen at a noon tilt, filling with sunlight and moonlight. That light, I felt like it belonged to Louis Thanksgiving. The world owed it to him, it was his child’s inheritance. He should get to drink that pink light through every pore and every follicle, every cell, the way our basking Seths ate the sun through their wet skin! Death is a theft, a crime, a cry in the sky, that’s what the story means to me, Bird Man. But as soon as I opened my mouth I sounded like a dumb kid again.

“I guess I don’t know what it means.” I tugged on my shoelaces like tiny reins, embarrassed. My sense of it had dissolved back into the old hurt in my chest. “I wish that Louis had never died. I wish that Louis and Hector and Gideon Tom and all the rest of them could have finished digging their road to the Gulf of Mexico. Then Louis Thanksgiving could have gotten married, and had a wife and a son — not to my sister, you know? But maybe married to some nice lady from his, ah, his own time. And he’d grow up to know for sure that he was handsome and good. And he would be an old man now.”

I paused. I hadn’t known that I wanted all that for the ghost.

“So you wish that the dredgeman Louis was still flesh and blood?” the Bird Man asked. It was a serious question. He took me seriously, and I did feel taken up by his musing tone and carried, lifted onto the ledge of adults.

“Right. That’s not really a revelation though, is it?”

That night we unrolled our bright blue tarps onto the floor of the central room, which gave the wrecked wood a planetary look. I wanted to play the End of the World, a cheery game Ossie and I had invented in our bedroom, back when the worst threat we faced was Mom’s Spaghetti Surprise. We rolled blankets down the stairs and pretended that we were reupholstering the dead world. The towels were the grass and the seas. Ossie always wanted to be the Creator and fluff the prairies, and then I’d burst in as the Destroyer and kick at stuff and roll everything up again. Mom hated this game because all her towels ended up on the floor. Before the ghosts showed up, we played all kinds of silly games like that, doing a theater of personalities for each other. Ossie liked to be the sweet and kind one: saints, princesses, Vanna White. Not me! Even in games I liked to play myself: Ava Bigtree, World Champion Alligator Wrestler. I was as strong as ten men, ferocious. Ossie always let me be the hero.

The Bird Man grumbled that he wasn’t in a great mood for pretending. He shuffled inside the foil of his bedroll. On the sill behind him, the wind kept trying to pluck the orange petals of our fires. Mosquitoes waved angrily just beyond them. Through the saw-cut boards I could see the empty neighborhood of Stiltsville. Pilings bolted down the water, where the moon boiled.

“What the hell are you doing over there, kid?”

“Nothing. Can’t sleep. Just praying.”

“New rule, kid: don’t fall out.”

“Dear God,” I prayed awkwardly, unrolling the tongue of my bedroll, “let me not veer away from this darkness amen.”

Our mother grew up in a churchgoing family on the mainland, and Grandma Risa was an Italian Catholic who collected these truly spooky Virgin Marys carved out of raw abalone on her trips to Key West, but we kids were never raised to religion. “God” was a word I used as a spell-breaker. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. “God,” I’d whisper, feeling sometimes an emptiness and sometimes a spreading warmth. If a word is just a container for feeling, or a little matchstick that you strike against yourself — a tiny, fiery summons — then probably I could have said anything, called any name, who knows? I didn’t have a normal kid’s ideas of the Lord as an elderly mainland guy on a throne. The God I prayed to I thought of as the mother, the memory of love. She was my own mother sometimes, baggy-eyed and smiling in the Chief’s heavy canvas work clothes in the morning, one of the Chief’s cigarettes hanging from her mouth. The Our Father and the Hail Mary I’d picked up somehow by osmosis but it was her name I invoked out there, her memory I summoned like a wind I could lean into, and I liked this prayer much better:

Mom, please help me to find Ossie. Please help me to make the net.

The next thing I knew light was pouring through all the holes in Stiltsville: dawn light screaming through the doorways that hung on their hinges, the broken windows that birds could fly through, the plank lace, the cheesed metals. Red sunbeams burned through the tin panels above my head. Where am I? I sat up. In the daylight I saw that parts of the room were sprouting a fuzz the spring green of scallions. An empty bedroll on the floor was halfway into its stuff sack. Ossie? — and her name was like a trapdoor latch that brought the whole predicament tumbling down on me.

Across the room, the Bird Man’s antique boots were coming toward me, the toes addressing the air like sniffing noses, and slowly I gathered up the long length of him: trousered legs, brace of feathers, face, hat. Today the Bird Man wore a strange expression. He crouched inches from my bedroll, staring right into my face — he reminded me of a tourist touching his nose to the ferry porthole, his eyes coming slightly unglued and his breath on me. It gave me a little chill. Something about his gray eyes seemed urgent and vacant at once. We had known each other for hours and miles now, but I thought that he looked even stranger, even more like a stranger, as if the currents that governed such things were blowing him backward. Stubble peppered his cheeks and I missed my father.

“I just talked to a fisherman out of Chokoloskee. Says that yesterday he saw a strange ship at dusk. About two miles west of us.” His voice was as excited as I’d ever heard it. “Sunrise at six a.m., kid. We’re going now. We’ve got fifteen-knot winds against the tide.”