CHAPTER FIFTEEN. Help Arrives, Then Departs

Stiltsville was miles behind us and there was as yet no sign of my sister. We were traveling southwest with the current, alligators sprawled on either bank. My oar head was white and scummy with grass. A skipjack landed in our bow and I cleaned it and fed it to the red Seth. Behind me, the Bird Man’s pole kept clanging against limestone bedrock. Was the Bird Man angry with me? His hood hid the clue of his face.

Touch me again, Bird Man, I thought urgently. Tell a joke, say anything—because I was having the convection feeling. As if my skin were rippling, dissolving. Kiwi describes this phenomenon, “convection” [n], in his Field Notes: the rapid cooling of a body in the absence of all tourists. Even Kiwi, King of Stage Fright, admitted to feeling it on Sunday nights. Convection caused your thoughts to develop an alarming blue tinge and required touch or speech with another human as its antidote (Seths didn’t work, not even my red Seth, I’d tried). Sweating could feel dangerous if you were alone in the swamp, as if droplet by droplet your body might get whisked into the sun.

When I baled water I leaned sideways and grazed the edges of the Bird Man’s black coat. My fingers came back wet, with tiny black feathers stuck to them, which reassured me that neither one of us was a figment. At noon the basking lizards slid into the water to cool off. The river began to pick up speed.

At twelve thirty we ate lunch inside a Park Services chickee hut to avoid the mosquitoes. When you rowed into a cloud of skeeters it was loud as a tractor but there was nothing there, just these tiny molecules of sound. Some ranger had borrowed the Seminole design and erected a modern chickee here to use as a campsite, since there was nowhere high enough on the surrounding tree islands to pitch a tent. The inside smelled clean and dry, like a hollowed-out stump. We weren’t the first people to use this shelter, either — overnighters’ trash filled the corners. Their beers and soda bottles looked shiny as treasure. On the back platform I found a dead anhinga furred in mosquitoes, and a single, mysterious crutch. The poor bird had a broken left wing. The crutch belonged to a human invalid, presumably. Someone on our same mission, maybe, limping toward a wife or daughter in the underworld.

“Uh-oh,” the Bird Man said, shaking the crutch at me. “A bad thing to forget, huh? Wonder what the story was there.”

“Can you talk to that one?” I asked the Bird Man, indicating the dead anhinga, and he looked at me with an adult’s generic formula of pity and irritation; I was disappointed in him. Given where we were headed, I thought my question was a good one. We made our tuna sandwiches and scooted under the palm window.

“There are lots of Seminole ghosts out here, did you know that, Bird Man? My sister told me.”

“Of course,” he nodded, as if I’d just told him there were lots of sheepshead minnows. “We might see them later.”

“My sister is named for a Seminole chieftain. The whites killed him with malaria. He died in Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. Do you think he’s in this part of the underworld?”

“Who knows, kid? Maybe we’ll meet him.”

After the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830, the Seminole people were hunted like animals. They built the palm-thatched chickees for use as temporary shelters, hiding places. President Jackson sent a letter to the Seminoles that we reproduced in our museum, the last line of which reads:

“But should you listen to the bad birds that are always flying about you, and refuse to remove, I have directed the commanding officer to remove you by force.”

Few mainlanders know that the Seminole Wars lasted longer than any other U.S. conflict, longer than the Vietnam War and the American Revolution. By the time Colonel Loomis declared the end of the Third Seminole War in 1858, thousands of Seminoles had been slaughtered or “removed” to the western territories. My sister was named for the Seminoles’ famous warrior and freedom fighter, War Chief Osceola, who, legend has it, said, at a time when General Jesup was upon them, and all seemed lost:

“If the Great Spirit will show me how, I will make the white man red with blood; and then blacken him in the sun and rain … and the buzzard live upon his flesh.”

Ossie said the spirits of Seminole babies killed by Major Francis L. Dade’s men still haunted the swamp, as did the ghosts of hundreds of army regulars who were murdered out here. So our home was actually a very crowded place.

These Seminoles, the “real” Indians that the Chief envied in a filial and loving way, were in fact the descendants of many displaced tribes from the Creek Confederacy. This swamp was not their ancestral home either, not by any stretch — they had been pushed further and further into the swamp by President Jackson’s Tennessee boys and a company of scarecrows from Atlanta, a militia that was starved and half-crazed. We Bigtrees were an “indigenous species” of swamp dweller, according to the Chief and our catalogs, but it turned out that every human in the Ten Thousand Islands was a recent arrival. The Calusa, the shell builders — they were Paleo-Indians, the closest thing our swamp had to an indigenous people. But the Calusa vanished from all maps hundreds of years ago, and it was not until the late 1800s that our swamp was recolonized by freed slaves and by fugitive Indians and, decades later, by the shocked, drenched white pioneers shaking out wet deeds, true sitting ducks, the patsies of the land barons who had sold these gullible snowbirds farms that were six feet underwater. And then by “eccentrics” like the Bird Man and my parents.

Florida itself was a newcomer to these parts, you could argue. Kiwi did — he said that Florida was the “suture” between Africa and North America three hundred million years ago, when all the continents were fused. According to the geologic clock, our state was an infant. Our soils contained the fossils of endemic African species — my brother said these feathery stencils of the past in our bedrock sort of gave the lie to the Chief’s ideas about the purity of our isolation.

“So, is your sister like the war chief Osceola?”

“Oh, no! She wears barrettes and stuff. She’s a real girl-girl. She’s not like us.” I paused. “Hey, Bird Man?” I watched a bead of sweat travel down his neck and disappear below his collar of feathers. “Why do you always wear that coat?”

“This old thing?” The Bird Man smiled and ruffled a sleeve as if he’d never really considered it, fanned his grimy leather glove at me with a funny coquetry. I didn’t laugh — I didn’t know if I was supposed to — and his face soured.

“Oh, habit, I guess. I’ve been wearing it for so long that I feel naked without it.”

“Okay, wait, I have another one. Where did you get your, ah … that?” I pointed at his black whistle. We were two days into our journey and the Bird Man had yet to use it.

“My birdcall?” He picked it up and held it between his lips, took a long suck of air; for a moment I felt my own belly muscles contract. Then he spit it out and laughed.

“It’s just a whistle, kid. I made it.”

“When?”

“I was even younger than you when I started up with the birdcalls. Ten, eleven.”

I tried to picture the Bird Man as a child — just some runty kid whistling into the leaves. Already odd enough at eleven to give women misgivings.

“When did the song change so that you heard it as words?”

“I don’t hear birdsong as words.”

I had pictured the birds’ strident calls trembling through the air and dying, and then all of a sudden those same cries taking on a coloring — red, black, blue — until what had previously been an empty hissing splintered into a hundred separate dramas: males squabbling over carrion, a lover’s quarrel, a chick and its four siblings protesting their hunger.

“That’s beautiful,” the Bird Man said. “I wish it had been that way.” He sounded tired. All the dark storyteller’s charisma in his voice had vanished, and now his eyes had the absent sheen of my dolls’ eyes. “Really, kid, I couldn’t tell you. It’s still birdsong. One day I heard patterns, that’s all. I’d row out to Black Gum Rookery and I could hear a logic under all that shrieking. Peaks and valleys. Once I could use their calls to get them out of trees, I started to tour the swamp.”

“So you don’t—”

“No.”

“But do you—”

“No more questions for a while, Ava.”

We ate the rest of lunch in silence: tinned ham and little pinkie-length fishes packed in oil, most of which I fed to the red Seth. Our food was running low now. We had, what? Cooler 1 contained six hard-boiled eggs. Crackers, we still had two greasy brown tubes of those. At the bottom of the dry-foods box I found a jar of blackberry jam that had been left for Mom by the Pick Up Club, the little green ribbon still tied to it. Some lady had used scissors to curlicue the ends.

(Q: Why did those good Christian women volunteer to ornament a loss? With their terrible pity, a glittery pity, as if Death were a holiday like Christmas? We kids got a load of gifts and sweets from the neighbor women, all wrapped up in paper and bows. My brother told me that he was only “intermittently certain” that their intentions were good …)

“I’ll pass,” I said, but the Bird Man wanted some jam. With his coat on, and hunched over the tin jar lid like that, the Bird Man looked like a huge crow intelligently attacking a piece of metal.

“You should try some,” he said, extending a black spoonful. “It’s sweet. Tasty.”

Stands of pond-apple trees were adorned with long nets of golden moss and shadowed a kind of briary sapling I didn’t recognize. Air plants hung like hairy stars. We poled through forests. Twinkling lakes. Estuaries, where freshwater and salt water mixed and you could sometimes spot small dolphins. A rotten-egg smell rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangroves’ stilted roots. If Osceola was out here, even with the ghost helping her, I thought she must be so tired by now — she would be thirsty, and very hungry, blood-sucked by all the chizzywinks and mosquitoes, she’d be aching, she’d be wondering why she ever left our island in the first place …

“Can we take another break, Bird Man?”

“Not a chance,” he said with his grave cheer. “No more breaks, my friend. Not if you want to come to a rescue.”

All day the horizon was inches from our noses. We’d been poling the leafy catacombs of the mangrove tunnels for hours. Any changes — palings of the sun that dropped the temperature a degree or two, or a brilliant lizard hugging the bark — felt like progress. More than once I’d think a tunnel was truly impenetrable. We’d pole into a green cone of water lapping at the trees’ wickery roots: the end of our journey! I’d think. And then we’d slide through a stew of crimson propagules, duck through a wishbonelike mangrove root, pop out. At one point an osprey’s nest crashed onto the poor red Seth’s carrier, knocked loose by our boat; that time we had to pole out stern first.

The Bird Man could always find us a way through. Often it took several tries: a tunnel would appear to be plumb shut and he would lift a branch, pull the skiff into sudden darkness, and slingshot us forward into the undergrowth. Blossoms dropped in a delicate static around us. The mosquitoes hid in wait for us, even in these shadows.

“You don’t see her, right?” I kept asking. “You don’t see anything yet?”


Eventually I stopped asking when we were going to get there. I stopped studying the buzzards, or worrying about whatever future was snaking upstream to meet us. At first it alarmed me to watch the buzzards drop into the thick palms; our map to the underworld kept rewriting itself, and how could anybody read a map like that? Half the black atlas would vanish into a hardwood hammock.

“Bird Man?” I asked at one point. “There goes our map again …”

But the Bird Man snapped in a tired voice that I should leave the navigation up to him. (The buzzards are our stars …) I took his advice; I didn’t let my mind wander anymore. Too dangerous. Instead I sent my thoughts flying backward. Certain memories I could reenter like safe rooms, and I had this one in particular I liked to turn the knob on: once when my sister was fourteen she had led the afternoon tour of the Bigtree Family Museum. The Chief was away on a business trip, and Mom was taking some Lithuanian schoolkids with weird haircuts backstage to see the alligators’ incubators. I was in a mood. I told Ossie that I was sick, and convinced her to do the tour. You used to be able to get Ossie to do anything for you — Ossie was the kindest member of our tribe. Privately I thought my big sister was weak and pitied her a little, for her softness and her status as a nonwrestler. She used to be so very quiet, back before her possessions started up. During these tours she read from a script that the Chief typed up for her. She stuttered t’s and said her s’s adenoidally. Her hands would shake. I still made her cover for me. I was passing by the museum window, eating a lemon ice and feeling like an expert deceiver, when I heard her voice float out:

“Ava Bigtree is only eleven years old. But she is already one of the best-t-t alligator wrestlers in the history of Swamplandia! She is Hilola Bigtree’s daughter and my sister. Remember her name, because one day she will be the best alligator wrestler in the world.”

Maybe Ossie was already home? I pictured Ossie sitting Indian style on the burgundy sofa in her polka-dotted pajamas. Watching TV, the mainland stations. News programs. Cartoons. Ossie eating popcorn while Tom and Jerry beaned each other with mallets. And then the TV went black, and the house was empty again. My giggle turned into something raw and terrible — accidentally, I’d just met this part of myself that no longer believed my sister was alive. Your sister, an old voice told me, as frank as noonlight, is lost forever. You’re too late. There’s not a shadow left for you to chase. You’ll go home and you won’t have a sister.

“Stay put, Osceola!” I’d put in the note pinned to our refrigerator. “If you beat me back home, sit tight. Don’t come looking for me now …”


“Look out, kid—”

I watched a water moccasin wrinkle slowly across the river. We passed her; we were gaining speed. Gray and rustling branchways arced above the skiff like dried-out rainbows. The magnolia leaves turned green or black with the always-changing light.

“Al-most,” the Bird Man whistled. He sank his pole into the water near an enormous frizz of roots. A hundred-year cypress lay on its side in the middle of the water. Roots shot outward from the hollow at the base like desiccated sun rays. Bright leaves like butterflies impaled there. Closer and closer, I thought, we are getting closer and closer to the land of the dead. The Bird Man pointed at the buzzards, then turned our bow until our boat was nearly facing upstream. We poled hard against the grain of the river.

The current grew stronger. It wove our skiff in an S-shaped path. In certain places now, the river was so narrow that trees on opposite banks could touch.

* * *

Some hours later I realized that we hadn’t seen a melaleuca in miles. No more threat of “monoculture,” as the scientists called it. The trees out here were a dark variety.

“You sure this is the river to hell? This place would be heaven to my father, all the hammocks out here.” I pointed at a stand of bearded trees whose flowers gave off a syrupy perfume as we paddled beneath them. “I don’t even know the names of some of these twisty ones …”

“Hey, kid, look where we’re going …”

We had to go onto our backs, flat as water moccasins, to pull our skiff through the next tunnel. My head was on the Bird Man’s lean stomach as we entered a net of branches. I could feel him breathing in a careful way under my damp scalp; each exhalation sank me a little. A black maze of branches moved over the sun. Leaves, round as pucks, waggled their tongues at us.


“What happened here?” The Bird Man touched the flaky spot on my knee where I’d scraped hard against the chickee ladder. “Poor kid. You okay?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. I don’t even remember how I got that one.”

He kneed forward in the skiff with his black feathers moving in wavelets, slid something from an interior pocket. The next thing I knew the Bird Man was uncapping a jar of green fluid. He drizzled a cool ointment over me and crisscrossed a bandage on my cut.

“There. Home remedy. ‘Home’ being a fluid terminology, in my special case.” He smiled. “There you go. Nomad medicine. Works better than anything in a first-aid kit, that’s for sure.”

Love.

“I love you,” I blurted out. The Bird Man laughed; for once I had succeeded in startling him.

“Are you feeling okay, kid? Do you need some water?”

I shook my head. “Sorry …” My eyes were burning. “I, uh, I thought …”

We ducked the subject of love by swapping water from the canteen. But now I had an embarrassed feeling and I wanted to explain myself to him; I didn’t want him thinking I was some idiot kid. So between sips of water I started telling him about my mother’s show. That show was my model for love, the onstage and the backstage parts. In this goony kid way, I think I must have been hoping that my story might get the Bird Man to love me the way my mother was loved by the Chief.

“You know, my father trained himself to be my mother’s sun, electrically speaking.”

That was exactly how my dad described the job of love. The Chief rigged the lights for Mom’s act years and years ago, on their fourth date — he dreamed up the lights and the choreography for her show before she’d ever so much as touched an alligator. This was a popular story on our island (Bigtree Museum, Exhibit 12). After she became a wrestler and started doing evening performances, he operated the follow spot. I’d always try to find a way to be backstage for this part. Love, as practiced on our island, was tough work: the blind eye of the follow spot took all your strength to direct and turn. Every night the Chief ratcheted its yellow-white iris around my mother’s muscular back on the diving board. The follow spot we used was decades old, heavy, with poor maneuverability, and the Chief struggled to hold the beam steady. I remember his hands better than his face (I was a short kid): the square nails discolored against the metal, his big knuckles popping from the pressure of his grip like ten white valentines.

My mother did her breaststroke inside the spot’s golden circle of light, growing smaller and smaller as she headed for the deep end. “Now watch this,” my father would say, smiling at me as he changed the color filter and adjusted the iris diaphragm. By the end of her performance his shirt was soaked with sweat.

Now I mopped my own brow and stared at the Bird Man with my knees stowed under my chin, waiting to see if the story had worked.

“Sounds like a nice show,” he coughed.

“I saw posters of your mother all over the islands, you know,” the Bird Man offered almost an hour later, breaking a long silence. He said this like we’d been in steady conversation, like he was answering my question. “She was a beautiful woman. You look just like her, Ava.”

I burned in the bow seat. I thought this was the kindest lie anybody had ever told me.

* * *

On the skiff I made up a little credo for myself:

I believe the Bird Man knows a passage to the underworld.

I believe that I am brave enough to do this.

I have faith that we are going to rescue Ossie.

Every doubt got pushed away. Kiwi’s voice (There are no such things as ghosts) I ignored. Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.

When I shut my eyes I could see the underworld: a blue wave in front of us. The painting from Ossie’s book sprawled behind my eyelids—Winter on the River Styx—and if I really concentrated I could get this painting to snow. Dark flakes falling into our near future. It was hard work to keep believing that we were going to get there, but I persisted. Faith cupped and kept the future like leaves on the hidden water that (I believed) we were rowing toward. Where Ossie was waiting for me, and maybe my mom.

We kids cultivated a faith in all the Bigtree legends — I’d heard them so often from my parents that they seemed to me like memories I’d made myself. At the time, I also had faith that my pet Seth and I would be champions — how could it be otherwise? In fact I sort of thought this future must exist somewhere, the year of our triumph floating in utero in outer space, as small as the pinheads of stars.

Sometimes when I caught the sun sinking and felt a rinse of panic, I risked a look back at the Bird Man. Imagine the thousands of birds this man can summon! I told myself. Armies of birds, whole rookeries. Colors on their underwings that I thought were the prettiest part of our universe and here this man could paint the skies with them. Most incredibly, he had called me.

“Ava.” The Bird Man’s voice sounded preoccupied; he was trying to backferry us around some rocks. “Tell you what, kid, I’m going to sit and paddle for a while. You’re tired, why don’t you rest here? Lean back, huh? Put your head on my lap if you want. I’ll wake you if I see signs of your sister.”

I shook my head. This kindness was so sudden and extravagant that it made me, for some reason, want to cry. In a very different context, I had responded the same way when Mrs. Gianetti on Gallinule Key had offered me fancy chocolates once and I’d declined to eat even one, intimidated by the blue satin ribbon around the box. The Bird Man’s gaze rippled over me, calm as clouds.

“Suit yourself.”

We were traveling so slowly through the mangrove keys. The bark on the trunks here wove together brilliant magentas and silvers, which reminded me for some reason of the old tourist women’s dye jobs, that funny mix of rubies and milk, age and vanity.

“Those tourists are sure going to love you,” I told the red Seth in her crate. It was three, I noted, the time of our Swamplandia! matinee. “When we get home …”

The red Seth squirmed unhappily in my palm, like a little dinosaur dreaming of amber.

Where was the dredge right now? I wondered. Where was the fisherman who claimed to have seen it?

Waves of feeling seemed to heave and smooth in me to the tempo of the actual waves. Big-mouthed fishes sucked whirlpools between the prop roots.

“Ossie?” I called into miles of trees. “Ossie, it’s me …”


At some point, our waterway disappeared, dried up, and we had to carry the boat overland. In The Spiritist’s Telegraph, Lethe was described as a deep, reliable channel. Well, that was not the situation we encountered in the Ten Thousand Islands. The sun was a white hole. I was walking with the wet prow of a boat on my head through waist-high marsh grass and the hundreds, the thousands, very possibly the millions of mosquitoes.

“Hey, can you use your whistle to call these bugs off?”

We were seeing a part of the swamp that I was unfamiliar with. The distant saw grass waved like wheat that silvered at its tips. I was grumpy, then scared: what wind could it possibly be moving in? Sweat covered my forearms; the clouds hung motionless.

It was a terrible portage — the Bird Man stood beneath the skiff’s rough yoke and my job was just to steer us, and it turned out I couldn’t even do that well, mud everywhere and flies in my eyes and my nostrils. I imagined we made a strange insect, our four feet moving beneath the boat’s flipped hull.

Very suddenly we drew up to the ruins of a bridge. Wooden trestles spanned a canal that was fifteen feet wide — it looked like part of a skeletal roller coaster. The Bird Man told me that wild-cotton crews employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture built this bridge in the 1920s. They were hired to eradicate the red cotton borer, a wild species of cotton that threatened the commercial plantations in northern Florida; they’d been working on a network of roads and bridges through the swamp to get their trucks and equipment out here before the infamous Labor Day hurricane of 1935 struck. Hundreds of World War I veterans died when the train sent to rescue them departed too late and every car — all but the locomotive — got swept into the sea. Broward, Bolles, the private contractors, they all ran out of money. Money appeared to be the one species that couldn’t take root in the swamp — and this blight was a killer of dreams, the Chief said, more potent than the red cotton borer.

I nodded hard to indicate that I knew my history well. (Please! Ladies and gentlemen of the mainland, I cleaned the history, I dusted dead mosquitoes off the history on summer mornings.)

“Sure, I know all about that. My grandfather survived the Labor Day hurricane. He took photographs of all the bodies.”

Black laborers had drowned by the thousands in the vegetable fields, and, because they were black, the laborers’ deaths never got recorded in the official tallies. Few tourists lingered over the framed pictures of their bloated bodies in Taylor Slough, 1935, that floated on our museum wall, preferring instead the photos Mom had taken of obese baby Kiwi in his water wings.

Most mainlanders hear “homeschooled” and they get the wrong impression. There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, “disappeared” boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the “official, historical” Florida records we found in books. “Prejudice,” as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic — a “damn fool math”—in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery on Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.

At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. Grandpa ate rat snakes and alligator meat even after grocery stores made frozen dinners available; he bit that one guy, Mr. Arkansas; but I don’t think these facts disqualify him from being a true historian, a true egalitarian. Tragedies, too, struck blindly and you had to count everyone. Grandpa taught us more than any LCPS Teach Your Child …! book about Florida hurricanes, Florida wars. From his stories we learned as children how to fire our astonishment at death into a bright outrage.

After the carnage in the marshlands, the federal government took over the Swamp Reclamation project: its new stated mission was “flood control.” Nobody was trying to drain the swamp anymore, although the Army Corps’ new system of hydrological controls seemed just as shortsighted and failure-prone as their original plans. We had an exhibit in the Family Museum called The Era of Swamp Reclamation, which seemed to give strangers the impression that this era was over — as if the Army Corps weren’t still turning those faucets on and off, sponging phosphorous for Big Sugar, opening the canal locks for the farmers in October and telling the water where to go.

“It’s a wonder this bridge is still standing, isn’t it, Ava?”

The Bird Man looked like he had just crawled out of a lake, he was sweating so badly. We leaned the skiff on the ant-covered bridge supports while he toweled water from his brow.

“I guess.” I was proud of myself for feeling no surprise — I’d been instructed by the Chief to think of mercy as “the wind’s oversight” and miraculous survivals as “a lucky malfunction; a fluke in the weather system.” Streamers of pale marine grass had swallowed the trestles.

“Did the cotton pickers know they were in hell?” I huffed. It was close to five o’clock now, and sweat trickled down my hairline; I could feel a splinter worming inside my palm. The sky above us was a pure and cloudless blue.

“Oh,” the Bird Man said. “I imagine so.”

Forty minutes later we were back on the water, poling around the glacial spires of a long oyster bed. At first I didn’t hear anything; the Bird Man flinched before I did. He whipped around with his burnished eyes dimming. “Go flat,” he hissed, and then he was pushing me down.

After a moment I heard the buzz of an approaching outboard. A beige-and-black Park Services boat pulled around the grass-fringed slough, water spudding off the boat’s rigging, and then abruptly the engine cut out. When I saw who it was, I nearly shouted at the happy shock of a familiar face: Whip Jeters, a park ranger who often patrolled the waters around Swamplandia! was standing in the stern with his hand on the sputtering Evinrude. Whip Jeters was a tall, once-fat man who wore his uniform khakis in a size that swallowed his new frame. He had a painful sunburn, and when he removed his sunglasses I saw a raccoon pallor ringing both eyes. Then I felt hands on my shoulders and my eyes were level with the tackle box, my cheekbone pushed against the wood.

The Bird Man, still seated in the stern, turned and waved. “Howdy, friend!” His voice was unrecognizable. “How’s the fishing over yonder?”

“Kid.” Without looking my way, he murmured in a cold monotone, “If you tell this man where we are going he will take you away from me. He could arrest me — he has the grounds to do that. We are almost to the Eye of the Needle, but this man will not believe you if you tell him the truth about what we are doing. We need to be smart about this …”

Whip began to motor over; above me, the Bird Man put on a big grin that made his face unrecognizable to me. It rejiggered his features so that they were at their most ordinary; even his eyes seemed pale and normal. Who had I been traveling with this great while? How could you change so completely when another person showed up, like a chameleon shifting trees? I was impressed. I didn’t want to be the one who screwed this up.

“Who’s hiding down there? You running aliens, sir? Illegals?”

“This is my young cousin.” He touched my back with the butt of his oar. “We are on a fishing trip.”

“I’d like to see your permit for that. Your cousin, huh? Well what’s wrong with her? She sick or something?”

“She’s taking a nap,” the Bird Man said in an avuncular voice I barely recognized, patting my knotty hair.

“I’m taking a nap,” I confirmed, sitting up.

“Why, you’re one of the Chief’s! One of the Bigtree kids!”

I am, I am! I nodded so hard my teeth hit. Hearing my tribe’s name spoken out here felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket. Mr. Jeters had known me since birth, he had been a childhood friend of the Chief’s, and I think he would have been shocked to know how grateful I felt at that moment. Just his friendly gaze was clothing me.

“I hear from Gus that your brother’s living on the mainland now? You believe that?” He shook his head with mock amazement, and I loved him for making Kiwi’s defection sound dumb and temporary. “I bet the Chief said jack-crap to that. And how’s he liking it, your brother?”

“I don’t know, Warden Jeters. He doesn’t call us.”

“Well, that’ll change. What is he now, seventeen? He’s probably too proud to call, wants to wait until he’s got something good to report. Listen, hon,” Whip said, his voice still casual but his eyes cutting over at the Bird Man, “it’s a funny question, I know, but I got to ask: is this guy your for-real cousin?”

I followed Whip’s gaze to the Bird Man and of course I understood why he had asked. Black feathers shirred along the ruff of his coat and he licked a long finger to tamp them. Behind him the slough had turned the same mix of iron and wine purple as the sky and the wind was blowing the plants apart. “Storm’s coming,” the Bird Man said politely, picking at his teeth.

I nodded. “He is, Whip. The Chief thought it would be good for me to get off the island. We’ve had a tough summer over there.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“My mother’s,” I said.

“Her father’s,” said the Bird Man. We all looked at one another. “The Chief’s,” I corrected myself. “Sorry, I got confused, I’ve been thinking about Mom a lot today …”

The warden said nothing but let his eyes roll over the length of our skiff.

“No offense to you, sir, but you’re an odd sight on the water …”

Whip Jeters was some intermediary age between the Chief and Grandpa Sawtooth, and he had been a friend of our family’s for so long that there was a picture of him on our museum wall under the heading Honorary Bigtrees. It’s really him, it’s Whip Jeters, I kept thinking. I smiled at the zippered life jacket he was wearing — we’d been forced to pole our way for half a mile because the water was only three feet deep. I was so grateful to see his big ears and red bulbous nose that I worried I might start crying. Whip, misinterpreting my look, rubbed at the floury stripe around his eyes. “Yes, well, I guess I had a little accident involving a nap and the sun. But it doesn’t hurt nearly so bad as it looks, although that’s not saying much, is it? Ha-ha …”

Whip patted the seam of his mouth with his checkered collar. He politely squelched a burp.

“Pardon me.” He gave me a wink and a slightly goofy grin, and I realized with a pang that he was embarrassed. “Say, why don’t you come over here for a minute, Ava, stretch your legs on my boat?” The Bird Man gave me a curt nod and so I stood, placing my hands on Whip’s broad shoulders and letting him swing me on board. We were floating beneath black clouds shaped like anvils and I hoped the rain would hold.

“Have you folks eaten?” Whip offered me a red canister of a mainland brand of crackers. He bit into a cheddar round. He chewed into the terrible quiet between our boats.

“You know, these things are delicious? The wife made me switch over from the potato chips, for my cholesterol, but now I actually prefer them. You want to try one, Ava? Sir? Cracker?” He was staring at the Bird Man’s greatcoat.

Whip, I’d noticed, was sidling around the Bird Man with a strange formality, and when he addressed my “cousin” his voice shot an octave higher than his usual genial baritone. After a few minutes I put together that this stiffness was not the product of Mr. Jeters’s natural awkwardness. He was jumpy around me, too, and when his pant leg snagged on his engine he let out a little yelp. He was very polite — I guess he saw no cause to deviate from marine etiquette — but I could tell that something about this encounter had him miserably flustered. He listened to me talk with his knuckles pressed into his red cheek, and when he removed them I saw they’d left a pale indent.

The Bird Man was watching us talk from the skiff, mining his grimace with a toothpick with his legs flat in front of him. At one point he raised an eyebrow in my direction and clicked his teeth against the tiny splinter of wood—He wants you to be quiet, I understood. The buzzards hung in such eerie patterns in the thermals that I felt as if they had paused, too, waiting to see what would happen next. I heard myself telling Whip about Carnival Darwinism and Grandpa Sawtooth’s new home and the Chief’s departure.

“Say,” said Whip. When he spoke his tone was very studiously nonchalant despite the fact that he’d just interrupted me midsentence. “Just curious, where do you and your cousin keep all your fishing poles and whatnot?”

“At our fishing camp,” the Bird Man snapped from the stern of our skiff. He had drifted maybe twenty feet from us. “Been in the family for years. You know Mammoth Key?”

“Sure.” Whip scratched dead skin from one wrinkled knuckle.

“Want some cortisone? Some aloe vera?” I heard myself offer in a stranger’s hospitality voice.

“Nah, honey, thank you. So your cousin here has got a camp over on Mammoth! I haven’t been out there in five years. Good bass fishing over there.”

We all watched as single droplets of rain hit the water. Duckweed dragged like a wedding train behind our transom. I had seen a small alligator following us earlier, I told Whip, just half a snout and the olive bumps of her eyes visible, but she had disappeared.

“They’re a lot more skittish out here than your folks’ gators, that’s for sure.” Whip coughed. The Bird Man was plucking white bits of down from his coat sleeves and flicking them onto the water—He was bullying Whip! I realized. He had picked up on his fear and now he was tailoring the show for him. “My cousin has been telling me stories about her mother. I never knew her, regrettably — wrong side of the family,” the Bird Man said.

Whip shot me a look. “Your mama was a great woman, honey. It’s a terrible, terrible shame what happened …”

What happened, Whip? Even the few facts I did have about her last weeks tended to float away from me like shining leaves on water the more I tried to get a picture together.

“We’re doing okay. We want to get the show up and running again next month, with that cannon. The Juggernaut. Did the Chief show you our cannon?”

“Not yet. Looking forward to seeing it.” Whip gave me what I guess you’d call a rueful smile, which I understood as a kid to be a smile without joy. A smile with a pretty bad joy: knowledge ratio.

The Bird Man was rustling behind me. His black coat went huge on a sudden gust of wind, and the feathered sleeves swelled big as balloons around his stringy, freckled arms in a way that might have seemed silly on anybody else, almost clownish. Whip’s face was very still.

“What in the hell is wrong with your cousin, honey?” Whip mumbled, almost to himself. “He thinks it’s Halloween or something? That’s some coat he’s got.” He munched another tiny cracker. I said nothing but crowded so closely to Whip’s elbow that the boat rocked. The Bird Man and I locked eyes across the channel. We both knew that it would take one sentence now to end our trip to the underworld. I felt suddenly powerful — I could say the Bird Man was my kidnapper, or worse, and I would be believed. Whip Jeters would take me home on his patrol boat. But none of that would help my sister.

“Hey, Whip?” I said, lowering my voice. “You haven’t seen anybody else out here, have you? Or a funny-looking boat?”

“Nope, I haven’t seen a soul. Funny how?”

“Just funny-looking. Almost like one of those old dredges from the 1930s …”

“A dredge! You’re more likely to see a Chinese junk in these flats than a dredge launch. Those old jalopies would have to be fifty, sixty years old now … Where’d you get it in your head you saw a thing like that out here?” Now he sounded worried. “Because a suspicious-looking vessel this far from Loomis don’t portend one good thing. It’s drugs or poachers would be my guess, human smugglers coming up from Cuba …”

“The Chief says I have a wild imagination, Mr. Jeters,” I babbled. “Poor eyesight. I wouldn’t worry, it was probably nothing.” I leaned in and touched his elbow. “But if you see a dredge scow, Mr. Jeters, will you stop it? Will you … will you grab whoever you find on it?”

“I will, I will do that. Believe me, if there’s a dredge out here that’s still seaworthy I will have some questions for its operators.” He made a noise in his throat, laughter or disbelief. “I’ll put out a call on our station. You have a good fishing trip with your cousin, Miss Bigtree,” he said with a wink. He winked again, like a friendly tic he couldn’t control. He didn’t look at the Bird Man again, and I got the sense that Whip didn’t want to see anything that would hinder his exit. He had decided to believe me, I guess, but I think it must have been the sort of believing that requires a special paradox, a vigilant blindness. Whip Jeters wouldn’t look at my face, and he quit sneaking glances at my “cousin” in the glade skiff. Behind him, the Bird Man lifted his chin at me. Now his eyes were shining in the familiar way but I don’t think Whip could see this.

The rain was coming on fast. Whip switched on the flashlight at his belt loop and flashed the beam of light rapidly, twice, onto the stern. He paused, and then lit it once more. The yellow circle of light covered my sneakers and shut again for good. I don’t know if this was just Whip fumbling with the flashlight or if he was trying to get a message to me. There was no time to ask him; the Bird Man had already rowed over to receive me.

(I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none. So who knows what sense Whip made of the pair of us? It’s just as likely that his blinking flashlight was a malfunction, an unlucky one, and not a signal I missed.)

Whip Jeters swung me back over to the Bird Man’s skiff, and my fingers sank into the oily feathers on his shoulders. The Bird Man got me settled in the bow seat with my paddle.

“Good-bye,” said Mr. Jeters, no longer disguising his desire to get away.

“Good-bye,” we sang out together, the Bird Man’s voice a gravelly accompaniment to my high whine. Rain had started blowing in from the east, and I wondered if we’d paddle through the afternoon showers or hunch in one of the little coves around the mangroves and wait them out.

I didn’t tell the Bird Man what Whip had said to me as we parted ways. Before he’d returned me to the Bird Man, Whip Jeters had done a curious thing. He’d leaned in and let his dry lips brush my cheek. It felt stiff and formal, less like a kiss than some strange benediction. He’d put a warm palm on my shoulder and gotten close enough to whisper:

“Be safe, Ava.”

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