Incredibly, Mom stayed dead but the sky changed. Rains fell. Alligators dug and tenanted new lakes. It became (how?) early April. We were doing four or five shows a week, at most, for pitiful numbers of people. Some audiences were in the single digits. I read my comics and memorized the speech bubbles of heroes. I dusted our Seth clock, a gruesome and fantastic timepiece the Chief had made: just an ordinary dishlike kitchen clock set inside a real alligator’s pale stomach. The clock hung from a hook next to the blackboard menu in our Swamp Café. TIME TO EAT! somebody — probably Grandpa — had scratched into the boards above it. Water overflowed the sloughs and combed the black mudflats. Mangroves hugged soil and vegetation into pond-lily islands; gales tore the infant matter apart along the Gulf. Our swamp got blown to green bits and reassembled, daily, hourly. The wet season was a series of land-versus-water skirmishes: marl turned to chowder and shunted the baby-green cocoplums into the sea; tides maniacally revised the coastlines. Whole islands caught fire from lightning strikes, and you could sometimes watch deer and marsh rabbits leaping into the sea of saw grass on gasps of smoke.
Some days Gus Waddell — our fat angel at the ferry’s helm — was our only visitor. Of course, we couldn’t tally Gus as a Swamplandia! tourist because he didn’t pay money to see us. Gus Waddell was the ferryboat captain, as per his monogrammed life vest and his little captain’s hat and his squishy-foam I’M THE CAPTAIN drink cozy. Uncle Gus brought us mainland provisions: bagged butcher-shop meats and various zoo supplies and gallons of whole milk, big sandbags of rice. Several boxes of our favorite mainland cereal, Peanut Butter Boos. For the Chief, a rubber-banded roll of emerald Win This Lotto! tickets and the “Ziggurat”-size carton of Sir Puffsters cigarettes.
Back when Mom was healthy, we’d see the flash of orange paint behind the mangroves that meant the ferry had arrived and go scrambling for our staff positions, like mainland kids who hear a school bell. And then all day my siblings and I would barely see each other — we’d be too busy busing tables in the Swamp Café or selling tickets or giving a tram tour. Sometimes the first minute that we spent together didn’t come until 3:30 p.m., when we met onstage for the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular. But now Kiwi and Ossie and I were always lumping up in the Gator Pit, trying to figure out: what are we supposed to do? When Gus showed up with supplies and no people he gave us an uneasy gift: time. Free time. Many blank, untouristed hours of it. That’s how my sister’s metamorphosis started to happen, I think — inside that white cocoon.
We started spending the no-tourist days on the Library Boat — even Ossie, who had never been what you would call a bookworm. We boarded an airboat and motored over to the long bottleneck cove of a nameless pine island about a quarter mile west of Swamplandia! A coppery green twenty-foot schooner was at permanent anchor there, listing in the rocks. This was the Library Boat. Like Gus’s ferry, the Library Boat was another link to the mainland, although this boat never moved. It held a cargo of books. In the thirties and forties, Harrel M. Crow, a fisherman and bibliophile, had piloted the schooner around our part of the swamp delivering books to the scattered islanders. Then Harrel M. Crow died and I guess that was it for the door-to-door service. But his Library Boat, miraculously, had survived on the rocky island, unscavenged and undestroyed by hurricanes. It was an open secret, utilized by all our neighbors. You could row over to the site of the wreck, descend into H. M. Crow’s hold, return with an armload of semidamp reading material. People contributed newer books, too — the bottom shelves had filled with trashy romance novels, mysteries, somebody’s underlined Bible, a mostly filled-in book of jumble puzzles, the plays of Shakespeare. So the collection was always evolving.
I can’t remember when I first saw The Spiritist’s Telegraph lying around the house, but once I’d noticed the book it seemed to be everywhere — in our kitchen, facedown in the café. Ossie was never without it. I was surprised she’d found it out there. The Spiritist’s Telegraph looked old, ancient, centuries older than Harrel M. Crow. It was a spell book, Gideon-thick. We didn’t think it was from our country, even though the writing was English. Inside the print was so tiny — in places it was almost impossible to read — and Ossie said this was because each chapter had been written as a whisper to the reader.
“Well? So what the heck kind of machine is the Spiritist Telegraph?”
“I think,” Osceola said wonderingly, turning a page, “that it’s supposed to be your body?”
There were dozens of drawings in the appendix. Ossie showed me an old anatomical sketch of a woman floating with her arms akimbo, her private parts inked in. Her eyes were pupilless, serene, like the Egyptian sculptures I had recently discovered in a kid’s World Wonders book of my own. THE SPIRITIST RECEIVES A MESSAGE, read an ornate scroll of Bookman type that furred her collarbone.
“Can I read it?”
“You’re too little.” She saw my face and relented. “You can flip through it. You can flip through it once, and fast.”
Together we spun through a hundred chapters: foxed pages, strange drawings, an appendix of gibberish. All these witchy psalms about a place called the underworld, which was neither the heaven nor the hell that I had learned about from Little Rabbit cartoons and Bandits of the West comics and the Bible. It sounded instead like a vague blue woods:
In the Underworld, all suns and lanterns are unwelcome. The transfer of light is an unforgivable breach from Acheron to Lethe. One matchstick, one fingersnap of light, can feast on those shadows and blaze into a conflagration. Young Spiritists: you must gag your vision.
Do not even say the word “sun” here, Aspiring Spiritists, or the trees of the Underworld will punish you for it: to do so would be like telling kindling the epic of fire, or whispering lamp to the dark.
— from The Spiritist’s Telegraph, pages ix — x
“There’s no such place, honey,” said my father when I asked him about this underworld. His voice was like a shell with something oozing and alive inside it. “There’s no such thing as heaven, no hell. That’s a Christian fantasy. That’s a very old fairy tale that your sister is reading.”
“It’s a book for witches, Dad. And the underworld isn’t heaven or hell, it’s like a whole separate country. Like a, a Germany under the world.” I frowned; this description was nothing like the painting in my mind, which was like a woods but also in some uncommunicable way not like a woods at all. I defaulted to: “Like a woods, Dad. You can visit dead people there. It’s always nighttime and the trees get angry if you bring flashlights or candles …”
“You girls want an underworld?” The Chief’s booming laugh was directed at our sofa; there were no other adults in the house to echo it back to him. Our parents used to find each other this way, via laughs and gasps, an echolocation of incredulity and horror. “How deep do you want to go? You tell Osceola this: we are already underwater. Okay? Tell her that we live below sea level.”
“Da-ad. That’s not what the underworld is. The book says …”
“Ava Bigtree, why not let your sister have her hobby, huh?” His voice was wry and ordinary, but he looked at me with real pleading: “You and I, we’ve got the Seths, we’ve got the whole park to run, right?”
One picture in The Spiritist’s Telegraph I stared at for hours, until I could see it fork behind my eyelids: a river cut a lightning shape through jagged, enormous boulders. Strange creatures lived in the margins of the mountains. The artist’s brushstrokes had added shapes into the clouds: snouts and wings and eyes, a long whiplike tail. Obsidian flakes snowed over the entire range. This painting was titled Winter on the River Styx.
About this time, Ossie and I started playing Ouija every afternoon. We made the board ourselves. It had a blue painted alphabet and little suns and moons modeled on a picture from The Spiritist’s Telegraph.
“ ‘The language of the living rains down on the dead,’ ” Ossie read to me from The Spiritist’s Telegraph, “ ‘and often our communications can overwhelm them. The hailstorm of our words can be too intense for them to bear …’ ”
SO GET AN UMBRELLA, MOM, I wrote to her a little angrily.
Weeks passed and we didn’t hear back. Sometimes to make me feel better Ossie would pretend to be our mother — I LUV U, DOTER, she’d write, or U ARE PREITY, AVA. I MIS U.
This is a true fact: my brother gave himself report cards. He modeled them after a Rocklands Middle School report card, which he had purchased from his obese mainland associate, Cubby Wallach. Cubby Wallach was complected like a bowl of oatmeal and yet carried himself as if he were wearing a top hat and spats. He had the bellicose dignity of a kid who refuses to excuse or even to acknowledge his own extreme ugliness. I admired this trait. It reminded me of the Seths, with their scarred, alien faces and their beautiful oblivion. Like a Seth, Cubby Wallach would let you stare at his face without apologizing for it. No red cheeks or downcast eyes, just a cool, invulnerable stare. In this way his ugliness got transmuted into a powerful hypnosis. Ossie used to have a bad crush on him, and I pretended to hate him. “What an asshole,” I’d say, but it came out as sort of a giggle.
Whenever he came to Swamplandia! Cubby Wallach brought a gigantic shopping bag filled with other kids’ colorful graded homework and purloined protractors and sold this haul to Kiwi at an incredible markup.
Kiwi insisted that he was our homeschool’s valedictorian. I was the salutatorian. Ossie mostly read magazines. Years ago, Mom enrolled us in Teach Your Child … in the Wild! a vestigial statewide initiative from the early days of white settlement — we got a whole “substitute curriculum” for free in the mail. Every month some functionary at the Loomis County Public Schools sent us stapled booklets with titles like Your Federal Government Is a Tree with Three Branches and Mighty Fungi: The Third Kingdom. Several times a year we mailed back a stack of tests and completed worksheets, I guess to prove that we were learning something.
This stuff was too easy for my brother. He said that he was going to leapfrog over the LCPS high school requirements and go directly to college. He was studying for the Scholastic Aptitude Test — the SAT. If you put the fan on high in his bedroom these little powder blue cards with funny words on them flew everywhere: FATIDIC [adj], OPPROBRIUM [n]. My brother always had a pack of study cards with him. He would rather conjugate Latin than do any of the chores the park required of him. He was in charge of concessions. When the park was open, Kiwi would sit next to the trapped snowfall inside the popcorn machine at the top of the stadium steps, waving mechanically, his face making a funny pucker beneath the paper cone of his hat. Cubby Wallach had sold him these dark-rinse jeans, and they fit him like a puddle.
Now Kiwi was free to spend most of every day mossed inside the Library Boat, where the portholes gave his face a Frankenstein gleam. He got this aura of expectancy about him that confused me. It wasn’t dread, not exactly, but you could not call it hope.
“What little test are you studying for?” I asked him once, and he looked up with clouds for eyes and said, “My future.”
I think that Kiwi resented my sister’s new scholarly ways a little, because up until this point he had always been the bookworm, the captain of the Library Boat. But Ossie applied herself to The Spiritist’s Telegraph with the same diligence with which Kiwi studied science and philosophy — she wouldn’t meet our eyes anymore, she was lost in her book.
On April 29, we threw Osceola a sweet sixteen party. Without Mom and Grandpa the party felt dazed and sad. The guest list was us. The Chief and I thawed out an ancient cake from the Swamp Café freezer (“Let’s hope this doesn’t kill us, Chief!” I said, the absolute wrong joke to make). Our presents for her that year, not to put too fine a point on it, really sucked. The Chief walked over to the Bigtree Family Museum and returned with a pair of tawny moccasins. I had to remind him that the moccasins didn’t fit Osceola anymore; that’s why we’d moved them to the museum in the first place.
“Well, it’s the thought that counts, Ava,” he told me in an almost-shout.
The Bigtree Family Museum, next door to the gift shop, contained all kinds of crap from our house that the Chief had relabeled as BIGTREE ARTIFACTS. The entryway to the palmetto-thatched museum burned green in daylight: WELCOME TO THE “LOUVRE” OF THE SWAMP ISLANDS! Sometimes you’d find a disoriented tourist in there, sucking a Fine Lime through a straw and looking mournfully for a bathroom. Ladies liked to change their babies’ diapers on our glass cases. On one wall, the Chief had framed the flyers that had lured Grandpa Sawtooth away from Ohio in 1932. He named this exhibit Antique Promises. Each flyer featured an artist’s sketch of the Florida islands “post-drainage”: our swamp as farmland, complete with milk cows, orange groves, a heaven of clover “where the sea beasts once roamed.”
Grandpa, who was born Ernest Schedrach, the white son of a white coal miner in Ohio, bought the land after losing his job at the Archer Road Pulp Mill, which was just as well because he was tired of the pitiful wages, tired of his ears ringing like Sunday church bells all shift and of his bleached vision caused by blinking into the chemicals. He changed his name to outwit his old boss. It turned out he owed a sizable amount of money to the mill foreman. He picked “Sawtooth” in homage to the sedge that surrounded his island; “Bigtree,” because he liked its root-strong sound.
The farmland he’d bought, sight unseen, at the Bowles and Beaver Co. Land Lottery in Martins Ferry, Ohio, turned out to be covered by six feet of crystal water. Stalks of nine-foot saw grass glittered in the wind, in every direction, the drowned sentinels of an eternal slough. The only real habitable “property” in sight was the island he later named Swamplandia!: a hundred-acre waste. What the cheerful northern realtors were calling — with a greed that aspired to poetry — the American Eden.
Grandpa Sawtooth and Grandma Risa took the train from Ohio to Florida and then traveled by glade skiff to their new home. When they first docked on the lee side of the island, my grandparents’ feet sank a few inches before touching the limestone bedrock. Sawtooth cursed the realtors for the length of an aria. A tiny crab scuttled over Risa’s high buttoned shoe—“and when she didn’t scream,” Sawtooth liked to say, “that’s when I knew we were staying.”
According to Bigtree legend, it was that same day that Grandma Risa got her first-ever glimpse of a Florida alligator, the Seth of Seths, lolling in a gator hole near the cove where they had stowed their boat — and she later swore that as soon as they locked eyes, they recognized each other. That monster’s surge, said our grandfather, sent up a tidal wave of black water that soaked Grandma Risa’s dress. The prim china-dots on her skirt got erased in one instant, what we called in our museum Risa’s Chameleon Baptism.
Alongside this bit of Bigtree history, the Chief kept an ever-changing carousel of objects from our lives, accompanied by little explanatory cards that he typed up and framed himself. Often the deck of our past got reshuffled overnight. He took down Grandpa’s old army medallions, which did not fit with his image of our free and ancient swamp tribe. And nowhere did his posted descriptions of Hilola Bigtree’s many accomplishments mention her maiden name — Owens — or her mainland birthplace. Certain artifacts appeared or vanished, dates changed and old events appeared in fresh blue ink on new cards beneath the dusty exhibits, and you couldn’t say one word about these changes in the morning. You had to pretend like the Bigtree story had always read that way.
So it was with precedent that the Chief vandalized the Bigtree Family Museum, looting from my sister’s past to find her a birthday present. Kiwi and I just grabbed some stuff from the clearance bin in the Bigtree Gift Shop: a variety pack of hats and this XXL version of a puffy-logo Seth sweatshirt that she already owned and hated. This is what the sweatshirt said: STOP IN THE NAME OF SETH, BEFORE HE EATS YOUR HEART. The Chief had ordered dozens of these. So far as I knew, nobody in the history of our gift store transactions had ever exchanged legal tender for one.
“Thanks, guys,” Osceola said drily.
The Chief unwrapped Osceola’s old shoes for her, hog-tied together in our mom’s red ribbon.
“Remember how much you liked these moccasins?”
Ossie did not really remember, no.
“Do you want to do a birthday show, honey?” The Chief was smiling and smiling at her, pop-eyed with the strain, a smile that looked almost frightening in the dim Swamp Café. “Do you want to … what do you want? More cake?”
My sister shook her white head very slowly behind the tiny fence of birthday candles.
Ossie was polite, licking icing off the twisty candle stripes, pretending this was exactly the sixteenth birthday party she’d wanted. But I knew better — I thought she must be pretty lonely. I’d seen her on the ferry docks, trying to talk to the small knots of mainland teenagers. The only boys her age we’d ever met were tourists. Sometimes, to impress them, Os would corner a posse of older boys and play them her favorite songs in the blue iceberg glow of our jukebox. Yet this jukebox had not been updated since Dwight D. Eisenhower ruled the land.
“Cooool.” The boys would drone, catting their eyes at one another. “Who sings that one? The, ah, the Scroobie Brothers, huh? Never heard of them …”
In fact, those Scroobie Brothers were playing right now, song after song off their only album, Scroobing the Tub, Ossie’s jukebox pick. I think Ossie liked them because they sang about things that were exotic to us, like corn and car accidents. Between bites of cake I caught her mouthing along the words, but even these hokey songs weren’t cheering her much. After the presents were opened nobody could think of what to say, so the Chief cut us second helpings of the rock-hard cake.
“What, you don’t like your presents?” the Chief asked out of the blue, his voice alive and crackling. “Is that it? You don’t think that sweatshirt is going to fit you?”
We all looked up. The thin whine of the jukebox seeped into the crater his voice had dug into the café dining room.
“No, Chief. It’s great.”
Ossie stretched the shirt between them like a fence.
“Try it on.”
“Dad?”
“You’re right, it looks too small to me. Kiwi, go get your sister the next size up.”
Osceola stood. “Dad, I’ll be back in a little while,” she said. She tightened the ends of her long white braids. She’d smoothed three different shades of Mom’s powder onto her eyelids. My sister, I realized with a funny dip in my gut, looked very beautiful. I think the Chief must have noticed this, too, because his face did something funny.
“What are you talking about?” He glanced down at his watch. “It’s nine o’clock.”
“I know. I’m going on a walk.”
“Now? Baby, sit down. As long as we’re all together I thought we could have a tribal meeting. We’ve got some important business to discuss …”
But Ossie took a step toward the door, where a fat green anole was clinging to the metal hinge and silently watching everything.
“I want to. Walk.” She paused. “It’s my birthday.”
Ossie made it across the room. When her hand closed around the doorknob he finally spoke.
“Well, you’re going to miss some really good news, Osceola.”
“Okay. Ava can catch me up.” She smiled at him sweetly. Her sweatshirt, all her birthday stuff, was still on the table. “Good night, guys. Thanks for a good party.”
And then the door closed, and somehow we were not allowed to ask: where is she going? The Chief turned his attention back to us.
“As you may have noticed,” he said, in his booming chieftain’s voice, “we Bigtrees have a serious enemy. We have a new battle to win.”
“Oh my God,” said Kiwi. “Dad. This isn’t a show. We are all sitting in the same room.”
My brother had tugged the brim of his Swamplandia! hat as far down as it would go, practically to the freckles on his nose, which meant that we had to stare at our own cartoon images to talk to him. I think he did this on purpose, to mock us. (I really hated that particular hat — there had been a mistake at the factory and the whole family came out looking hydrocephalic and evil. Tourists would regularly mistake the bump-eyed alligator on the brim for me. They would tap at the grinning alligator on the hat and say, “And who could that one be, young lady?” like they were giving me an excellent present.
“Don’t you take that tone with me, son,” the Chief bellowed again.
“Don’t be an asshole, Kiwi,” I said.
The Chief nodded at me, pleased. “Ava? You want to contribute?”
I shook my head. I had been working on my plan to save Swamplandia! but I didn’t want to talk about it yet; I worried that I would jinx it, or that my brother would kill it dead with one joke. It had to stay in my head for now.
“What’s everybody so damn glum about?” the Chief mumbled. He swallowed his humongous second serving of cake in three bites, and then he quickly finished the half piece that Ossie had left on her plate, his shoulders glugging up and down like an anhinga swallowing a fish. Then he left the dining room and returned with the little blackboard that rested on a tripod outside the Swamp Café. He wiped it clean and stared to write:
Island tameness is the tendency of many populations and species of animals living on isolated islands to lose their wariness of potential predators.
“We Bigtrees are an island species,” he told us. “I’ve been reading your brother’s textbook here.” He hoisted an antiquarian-looking book with the faded coin of a Library Boat sticker on its spine. “Turns out we islanders are very special. A bunch of new and wonderful crap can evolve here because we’re off to ourselves. But there are also trade-offs. Island species get complacent.”
NEW PREDATOR: WORLD OF DARKNESS
he wrote, and beneath this:
OUR EVOLUTION: CARNIVAL DARWINISM
Kiwi chuckled. He could manufacture laughter as joyless as flat cola. “How are we going to adapt, exactly?” he asked the Chief from inside the cave of his hat. “Are we going to hike prices again? ’Cause if we only have two tourists in the stands, Dad, it doesn’t matter how much we charge them. We’ll never break even …”
The Chief continued to write:
REVENUE FOR MARCH: $1,230
OUTSTANDING DEBT: $52,560*
When the Chief put an asterisk next to something, it meant that he was only telling you the best part of the truth. He wasn’t being dishonest, he explained — he was only letting us know that our debt was “evolving.” Just like everything else in this universe. The asterisk, the Chief taught us, was the special punctuation that God gave us for neutralizing lies. One recent example would be “Your mother’s cancer is getting better.*”
“What about the county taxes?” Kiwi asked, very quiet now. “What about Mom’s medical bills?”
“Son, you need to quit on that. You think you’re some kind of detective?”
“What about Mom’s funeral bills?”
“We don’t need to tally those. Those are being taken care of.”
“Dad? I’ve been running some numbers myself … Admittedly, I’m not privy to all your records here …” Kiwi’s voice was as monotonous as a sleepwalk. “For starters, you need to sell some of the equipment. Maintenance costs are going to crush us without tourists. The follow spot, the Seths’ incubators …” Kiwi blinked, as if he’d woken from his sleepwalk on a cliff. “Think big. You could sell the whole park.”
The Chief set his chalk on the little ledge. He stared at our brother.
“Think of what you could get for the airboats,” Kiwi said. “And there are those alligator farms in central Florida, they would buy the Seths I bet. We can finish out school at Rocklands High, I’ll get a job to help out, we can all enroll for the fall …”
Rocklands High. Ossie would be, what, in mainland nomenclature? A high school junior. I would be a freshman, assuming they didn’t put me in some duncey catch-up school. I tried to picture myself in a Rocklands classroom: the place rapidly filled with swamp water, all its desks and books floating away until it became our Gator Pit. We were the Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty. Kiwi wanted to give up our whole future for — what? A sack of cafeteria fries? A school locker?
The Chief echoed my thoughts:
“That’s what you want? To sell your mother’s home? To let some damn Cajun factory farmers butcher our Seths for fifty bucks a head? What’s that? Oh! Less! Have you been doing a little research? To live in the city,” he snarled. “To go to school …”
While they fought, I frowned and studied the blackboard. The eraser had left a ghostly square on the front of the Chief’s Dijon-golden vest, which was unfortunate because nobody was really doing laundry anymore. Balls of socks and underwear banked like snow around the corners of our bedrooms.
I don’t know what Kiwi was doing for clean clothing during that period; for months my sister and I had been spraying our undershirts and shorts with Mom’s perfume. A strong rose scent. It was in a heart-shaped bottle beveled in tiny gold and pink hexagons with a black rubber pump. It was the fanciest thing in our house by a big margin — tinted and glamorous, foreign enough to feel a little sinister. (We thought of it as an ancient formula; it was a scent called Fox, discontinued in the early 1970s.) Ossie and I had worked out a rationing system: two pumps, per sister, per day. We were using Mom up, I worried, and for some reason that fear made me want to spray on more and more. The perfume worked like a liquid clock for us: half a bottle drained to a quarter, that was winter.
Both my parents had denied that my mother’s illness was serious, not just our father. They claimed that she was getting better right up until the moment that she left for the hospice. Dr. Gautman, her oncologist, was the first to show my brother and sister and me “the chart,” to say “T3c” to us, and to translate this alphanumeric code into the frightening coda of “your mother’s final days.” Dr. Gautman gave us plastic glasses of water with lemon from the nurses’ station before he broke the news to us: “The Malig-Nancy has spread beyond her, ah, her ovaries, I’m afraid …”
And into your mother’s liver, and to the pleural fluid of her lungs. As a kid I heard the word malignancy as “Malig-Nancy,” like an evil woman’s name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her.
“Nobody is going to a Loomis school. We are not abandoning your mother’s dream here, do you understand that? We are the Bigtree Tribe, son, and we have a business to run …”
Meanwhile the list beneath Carnival Darwinism kept growing:
ADAPTATION 1: INVEST IN SALTWATER CROCS
ADAPTATION 2: WE BECOME AMPHIBIOUS — NEW WET-SUIT COSTUMES FOR THE GIRLS? SCUBA WITH THE SETHS?
ADAPTATION 3: MODERNIZE THE GATOR PIT — ILLUMINATED DIVING BOARD, BUBBLE JETS
The Chief pulled out a booklet of photographs of the saltwater crocs he was interested in acquiring: horned and sad-looking, these crocs did not seem like gods of the Nile. They resembled partially deflated tires. The seller was a retired breeder in Myrtle City, South Carolina, who wanted twenty-five thousand dollars for them. Kiwi flipped the booklet over without looking at it.
* * *
That night Osceola never came home from her walk. When I woke up at midnight her bed was neatly made. Nothing like this had ever happened before; Ossie didn’t even like to go to the tree house alone. I lay awake waiting for her return until 3:22 a.m. When you are waiting for somebody for that long, your ceiling fan can whip ordinary air into a torture. I must have finally nodded off, because when I woke again there was Ossie, snoring lightly in her black cotton dress. She had collapsed facedown on the pillow. Her puffy white arms were flung in a T over the mattress. Wet mangrove leaves clung to every clothed and unclothed inch of her, even her fingers, even the line of her scalp. Where had she been? In a gator hole? Crawling around a tunnel? Osceola was smiling, some good dream rippling over her.
The next day Ossie stalked downstairs without apology, as self-possessed as a cat, and slid the obituaries section out of the Chief’s paper. She spooned eggs out of the frying pan, opened the obituaries on the countertop like this was all very normal. She still had on screwy lipstick and was wearing a pair of Mom’s fishnet stockings, her legs pale and unshaven.
Your legs look like Sasquatches in nets, I considered saying. They look nothing like our mother’s. I kept waiting for the Chief to make a comment.
Kiwi came downstairs and did a double take.
“Well, you look weird. New pajamas? Did somebody exhume you last night?”
Kiwi looked exhausted, too, with his baggy eyes and his dirty hair, the top half of his red scalp greased to a wet-looking brown, as if somebody had tried to put out a fire on Kiwi’s head with a rag. He sat down and gaped at Ossie.
“You’re the one who’s been wearing that same shirt since, like, Christmas,” Ossie mumbled. She left her toast and her runny eggs untouched and shoved past him, the stockings making an itchy noise as she opened and shut the door. Outside it was a beautiful sunny morning. For a second the sky yawned blue at us, then disappeared. The Chief looked blankly up from the newspaper. An ad on the front page read: WORLD OF DARKNESS TO HOST INFERNAL LIGHT SHOW. It was a hologram ad. If you let your eyes unfocus, a laser shot out of a whale’s blowhole and fractaled into columns of fire.
“Well?” Our dad shuffled Kiwi’s hair. “What’s your problem today, son?”
“Ossie is talking to the dead people again, Chief,” I told him.
My father was sipping at a third cup of black coffee. He glanced up at us with the dreamy look of a mutt leashed to a tree.
“It’s a stage, Ava. We’ve been over this. You want me to talk to her?”
“Cancer happens in stages,” my brother grunted, “and guess what the last one is?”
I stirred crumbs into a puddle of ketchup. Sometimes the word “cancer” was like a hinge we could swing onto a conversation about Mom, but not that day. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something crawling along the bottom of the Chief’s newspaper. Just the advertisement again, lifting fizzily away from the paper.
Lasers! We didn’t have anything close to a laser. I felt queasy with a new kind of embarrassment. Until 1977, Swamplandia! had used crank generators. The caimans had eaten or destroyed most of the eraser-size bulbs in their terrarium. The poor bear was eating her fish heads under strings of five-and-dime Christmas lights.
“I need to go change some things, you guys,” I mumbled.
Outside our porch had become a cauldron of pale brown moths and the bigger ivory moths with sapphire-tipped wings, a sky-flood of them. They entered a large rip in our screen. They had fixed wings like sharp little bones, these moths, and it was astonishingly sad when you accidentally killed one.
“Ossie!” I called. “Ossie, wait for me!”