Swamplandia!

CHAPTER TWENTY. Out to Sea

Two days had passed since Kiwi had seen the Chief and he still hadn’t made a move to contact him. But he would! Today maybe. He’d mentally scripted the whole encounter — first he would reveal his many mainland accomplishments to his dad. He was a local Loomis hero, surely the Chief had heard something about that? He had saved a girl’s life inside the Leviathan, wasn’t that something? He’d earned one of four positions in the World of Darkness as an Apocalyptic Pilot; in September he would get his GED.

In Kiwi’s fantasy of this meeting, the Chief didn’t say much. Really, he didn’t say anything — maybe he would be overcome and just sort of paternally beam? Conveniently choked by pride, or joy? Or, failing those ambitious emotions, perhaps they could at least achieve a food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions? Kiwi prayed that was how it would go down, anyway, because when he tried to imagine having an actual conversation in the English language with his father in that casino: that was the end of the tape.

Okay, new version: the Chief doesn’t say anything, but he takes Kiwi upstairs and they eat everything that isn’t nailed down in the All U Can Eat Buffet. They shovel it in. At the end of the meal, they plunge their Bigtree fists into the tank and tear apart and eat that final lobster. It would be a moment of savage forgiveness. No words required. It would be barbaric and a little gross, eating that lobster, but it would have the transformative effect of a new ritual on them. After the meal, they would be reconciled. They would make plans to return to Ava and Ossie and Swamplandia! They would bring Grandpa Sawtooth home, possibly they would go downstairs and gamble together, and win.

Kiwi didn’t go back to the casino. He didn’t look up any bus routes. He didn’t call the listed number for Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming and ask for Sam. He didn’t ask Vijay for a ride to Pa-Hay-Okee, or thumb up the number in the Loomis Yellow Pages. Kiwi’s best conjecture was that the Chief had rented a room at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, as he always did on his Loomis trips. (THE BOWL-A-BED! WEEKLY RATES. MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED, YOUR PRIVACY=RESPECTED!!)

But he didn’t call there.

Instead, he used the bag of change to dial the house at Swamplandia! on his breaks. The phone buzzed and buzzed, a noise that was starting to really frighten him. Were the girls in Loomis County, too?

I have to go back there today, Kiwi thought. I have to talk to the Chief. When he picked up the telephone, he fully intended to ask Vijay to drive him back to the casino. On the second ring, the third ring, this remained his intention.

Vijay wanted to know why he was dropping Kiwi off at a fucking marina. On Hangover Sunday, no less. Why he was awake at all before dusk — Kiwi had once overheard Vijay having a screaming argument with his mother in which he claimed that getting up before noon made him feel dizzy. Vijay was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses and eating Advil in Halloween fistfuls.

“I’ll put the mace into your face, bitch!” he sang along with the radio.

They pulled into a space between two whiskery palms, both boys shading their eyes from the sun’s rays off the white quartzite. Dirty water lapped at a honeycomb of rock; beyond this, the listing masts of all the junker ships at anchor here made the ocean look like a blue pincushion.

“What is this place? Is it a junkyard for boats?”

“And people. Hey, thanks for the ride. I can get the bus back.”

“For real? You sure you want to dip into your savings account for that? I think the fare is, like, a whole dollar.”

“Shut up.”

Vijay’s voice brightened theatrically: “Or maybe you want to have your rich girlfriend come get you? You can, like, save her from the ocean this time?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend, V. Emily Barton is not my girlfriend.”

“Is that you telling me in your moon language that you’re, like, still a virgin?”

“Fuck you.”

“Nice, son. You’re getting so much quicker at the trigger! Smoother, too,” he added generously.

Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he’d called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak. Now he could tell any man in the World to go fuck himself with a baseball bat. Progress was being made, he guessed.

“Thanks. I try.”

Kiwi had arrived at the Out to Sea Retirement Community eleven minutes early. Through the Out to Sea portholes, Kiwi could hear TV laughter and silence.

At four, Kiwi walked the gangplank to his grandfather’s boat. A translucent glass-blue crab went skittering behind one of the bolts. Possibly-Robina was sitting there in her civilian clothes — a striped T-shirt with a cartoon cat in a top hat on it, shiny purple leggings. She was watching a soap opera on the boat’s biggest television. All around her the elderly residents were involved in their own dramas: smaller televisions glowed and crackled along the rows of portholes.

“Howdy, ma’am … okay to visit with Sawtooth Bigtree?”

“Mmh.” Robina’s chin was sunk behind her big fists. Kiwi bent and scribbled his name on the blank clipboard.

“Good show, huh?”

Possibly-Robina sucked a diet soda through a straw.

Kiwi had to flip back two weeks to find the name he was looking for: Samuel Bigtree. The Chief had last been here two weeks ago. Was the Chief planning to visit today? Kiwi wondered. He thought about erasing his signature from the sheet, then decided to leave it there.

Everyone besides Robina was asleep, or tortoised deeply into their own world; one Russian man with burning cerulean eyes was leaning in to watch an infomercial, his great knuckles bunched like red grape skins on his slacks. On the TV screen, a woman smeared pink jelly on her crow’s-feet and became young. “Miracle formula: Mariana diatoms. $69.99 in three payments!” a voiceover announced.

“What she saying?” the Russian man kept repeating. “What she doing? Wheel me closer!”

Soledad, a ninety-something Cuban woman with moist eyes, started screaming at Kiwi in Spanish. She had been Grandpa Sawtooth’s friend on the last visit, but maybe Grandpa had bitten her since then.

“Your grandfather is never going to be the prom king of Out to Sea, okay?” Robina had informed them when they’d first moved Sawtooth in. “You guys better give up that dream. He is not a people person.”

“Hiya, Soledad. How’s my grandpa? What’s news?”

Possibly this was an insensitive question. “News” for these retirees no longer meant “events” but instead seemed to describe the lisping voices of the tides. From every corner of the schooner patients blinked down at him, quietly magnetized to the boat’s surfaces. Like the swamp’s red-toed lizards, they seemed stuck to their bed rails and their chairs’ handlebars by the pads of their fingers.

Kiwi walked into the galley. “Hi, Harold.”

Harold no longer remembered him. He was sitting on one of a dozen plastic stools, eating a banana very, very slowly in a pair of new pajamas. White ducklings marched up the pant legs on an alarming voyage toward Harold’s crotch. A patch was affixed to his chest and he kept scratching at it.

“Do you have a cigarette?” he asked Kiwi. “I could really use a cigarette.” When Kiwi did not answer he returned to his contemplation of the banana.

“Harold, have you seen my grandfather?”

“I’m right here, you damn fool!” came a familiar croak from the deck outside the central cabin. Kiwi moved through a blinding square of sun and found his grandfather out on the starboard deck, barefoot in a puddle of the filtered seawater. His feet were bloated and shiny as custard, with curled, wintry toenails.

“Hi, Grandpa.”

His face was stubbornly set in its Bigtree crags.

“Grandpa Sawtooth, it’s me, Kiwi.”

Not a flicker.

“Like a fruit.” Grandpa Sawtooth smiled evilly. “That’s a damn fool name.”

Kiwi moved into the shade of the cabin’s roof and took a breath. Behind his grandfather’s head, he could see to where the seawall curved and enclosed the entire marina. He didn’t know how the residents of Out to Sea could bear to look at it — the future closing its circle on them and the sun dribbling down into the sea behind it.

“So. I saw Dad two days ago.”

Kiwi sat down in one of the blue deck chairs and his grandfather followed.

“Grandpa!” Kiwi looked to see if anyone was listening; there were a few dark clouds and one enormous gull leisurely devouring sea bugs on the boom. “Grandpa, the Chief is working at a casino. The one they call the Jesus in the Temple Casino, over by the new penitentiary. Did you know that? I bet you knew that, huh?”

“Look at that big sucker.” His grunt sounded satisfied. He was pointing at the feasting gull on the ropes. “Hungry.”

“Grandpa, can you tell me, has the Chief been working at the casino for a long time? Has he had other jobs? Did you know about his other jobs?” He paused. “Did Mom know?”

Sawtooth was watching the ocean. Wave after wave covered the sandy bottom of the marina. Jade squiggles alternated with blue and black inky ones wherever the sun hit depth. Something about watching this made Kiwi feel for an instant that he was staring into his grandfather’s mind: memories like these bright schools of mullet, abandoning his grandfather in leaps.

“Why did you guys hide it from us, Grandpa? Is the Chief angry that he has to do it? Is it our fault — I mean, the money part?”

Sawtooth was still frowning into the ocean, as if something magnificent were about to occur there. All those small flickers dispersing, unschooling.

“Okay. Fine. Can I please tell you something?” Kiwi’s voice tapered to a point. “Can I tell you something? Your daughter-in-law, Hilola?”

At Out to Sea, Sawtooth’s lifelong tan had faded to the color of creamed corn. He regarded his grandson warily, as if he were about to lose a privilege. Kiwi imagined that typically if a stranger came to talk to you at Out to Sea, this could portend nothing good.

“I am so sorry to be the one …” Kiwi cleared his throat. In a quieter voice, he told Sawtooth what had happened to Hilola Bigtree.

“Dead,” Sawtooth croaked. “Hah.”

The word had a dull thwack to it, like a fat raindrop hitting tarp. The drop rolled away and vanished. Nothing at all registered on his grandfather’s face.

“Mom died a whole year ago, Grandpa. More, now.”

For some reason he told him the exact date in a whisper. He could hear Harold coughing up banana inside the cabin; another resident was cycling through her television channels.

“We didn’t tell you, I don’t know, we didn’t want to …”

Sawtooth smoothed a finger over his otterish whiskers. He met Kiwi’s gaze with bald, staring eyes, the same depth and shape as the Chief’s eyes, Kiwi’s own eyes. The family had heard from Robina that Sawtooth suffered crying spells, at night—“like a schoolchild!” This was impossible for Kiwi to imagine, his granddad weeping; on Swamplandia! Sawtooth would pry the Mesozoic splinters of an alligator’s teeth from his skin with black doll’s eyes, unblinking, glassy with pain.

Well, he sure wasn’t crying over Mom. His eyes were perfectly calm. Sea light pulsed in them.

“Dead,” he repeated. A whisper, conspiratorial. “Huh. Did you tell Robina? Dead is bad, boy. You could get in trouble.”

Behind Kiwi’s head, a TV audience broke into raucous laughter and applause. Kiwi leaned in until his long nose was almost touching Grandpa Sawtooth. He moved forward, scooting to the edge of the blue-and-white deck chair, until their foreheads were touching. He dunked his own dim form into Sawtooth’s pupils and waited for a “Hello, Kiwi.” Sawtooth held his gaze patiently. Sawtooth Bigtree’s hands looked big as lobster claws on his meager thighs; all of the man’s ligaments looked to be in some state of bad flux, bulging or withering on the vine. “Normal aging” the textbooks would say, but “normal” seemed an injustice when it described this. Sawtooth’s wrists were the width of a child’s again. Kiwi took a breath.

“After Mom died, we lost most of the tourists …”

Kiwi had a sudden urge to topple his grandfather, to dump the elder overboard — maybe that would shake something loose in there or reconnect a wire. What was the point of growing so aged and limp that your mind couldn’t make a fist around a name? He wanted Sawtooth Bigtree to hurt, to ache, to mourn, to howl, to push with the cooling poker of his mind into the old ash heap of what he had lost and scrape bottom. He wanted the old man to be depleted to that limit. Like the rest of us, Kiwi thought angrily. Like family.

“I’m a traitor, Grandpa. Think Benedict Arnold. I’m working at the World of Darkness. You know I’ve been away from home for months now, Grandpa,” he heard himself saying. “Not quite as long as you’ve been away, but a long time. So I don’t have any news to share about your GRANDDAUGHTERS, AVA or OSCEOLA.”

“What the Christ are you shouting for, son? People are trying to catch fish out here. You’re going to scare all the damn fish away.”

Grandpa’s jaw muscles sagged and twitched. His eyes were lively, but it was like the empty animation of a fireplace. “I’m hot. I don’t like your tone. I’m going inside.”

“Mom’s dead. Our park is bankrupt. Your son works in a casino now. Ossie went batshit this summer, and I’m pretty sure she thinks she’s having sex with ghosts. Ava is alone with her on the island. Do you like that?”

With a look of infantile craftiness, Grandpa Sawtooth reared back and spit in his face.

Sawtooth swung first. Kiwi was still wiping the foamy spittle from his face with his shirt hem when his head snapped back, the old man punching his left cheek. Later, Kiwi would tell Robina and the Loomis EMT that he had provoked his grandfather — which might have even been true. Maybe the pitch of Kiwi’s voice tripped an old wire of antagonism in Grandpa Sawtooth’s brain, his outburst a limbic accident. Whatever the case, both men threw themselves into the fight. The deck chairs clattered as they fell away from them. Kiwi’s eyes widened: He’s choking me. The moment arrived when he would have killed his grandfather if he could have. He couldn’t break the hold, though, and his grandfather tightened his grip around Kiwi’s windpipe. With an obscene clarity of mind Kiwi recognized what Sawtooth was doing: this was a Bigtree maneuver, a way to get a Seth to open its jaws.

“You damn fool,” he muttered. Kiwi had no air to respond.

They crashed against the railing on the starboard side of the boat; Kiwi’s head got swung into the porthole; someone’s wrinkled face floated into view there, disappeared. A carousel of faces passed by, deathpale and unfamiliar faces. It was just the other residents. Seniors with no clue what was going on outside the cabin. An anhinga that had been drying its wings on a mile marker shot into the sky. Kiwi was trying to steer his grandfather toward a coil of heavy rope that he hoped the old man might trip on.

“Jaw up,” Grandpa Sawtooth used to shout at Kiwi on the Pit stage when he was five, eight, eleven. “Step up. Man up.”

Kiwi shut his eyes then. Felt his grandfather’s thick hands around his throat. He saw colors and they were slow and round as bubbles: black as bad purpose. Red as purpose (his fists were flailing now, falling down on Sawtooth, he could hear the old man cry out in pain). Blood trickled into his mouth from a cut on his upper lip. Kiwi opened his eyes and he didn’t know what he was doing, the whole stereoscopic world having flattened into brilliance. All he knew for certain was that he was fighting back. He could breathe again. He could scream again. He swiped at the old man’s wet shirt and closed on a handle of skin. His left hand squeezed down, and Sawtooth screamed with pain. Kiwi banged into a deck chair, howling, and he grabbed at whatever he could and he twisted. Both men looked down at Kiwi’s hands around the base of Sawtooth’s neck, as if equally surprised to find them there.

“Huh!” gargled his grandfather.

Kiwi could feel the man’s birdy veins. His fingers were long enough to stitch a mitt around his grandfather’s throat. His grandfather was hissing now, a coarse, inhuman sound. So this was the only answer the old man could give him, the only explanation — a nonsense hiss. The Seths know more about our family than you do, Kiwi thought furiously. He squeezed. Instinct drove him forward like a nail and he kept squeezing.

You are squeezing too hard, a small, milk-neutral voice inside Kiwi noted. You might actually kill him. The voice didn’t have the shrillness of a conscience; it was bored and old, content to let Death happen.

Kiwi let go.

Robina tried to get him to go to the emergency room but he refused; he watched with fascination as welts rose in archipelagos on his skin. Kiwi touched one gingerly and winced, blinked tears back into his eyes. Robina was asking him in a worried hiss if he was going to press charges; she didn’t specify who these charges would be pressed against, Sawtooth Bigtree or Out to Sea or her personally, and for a disorienting moment Kiwi thought she was asking him to turn himself in to the police.

“What? Criminal charges? No, I don’t think that’s necessary, okay? I just want to go. I’m really sorry …”

He’d left Grandpa Sawtooth watching Cheers reruns with Harold, both men sipping at Vital Light shakes that looked like peed-on snow. The “Heeeere’s … Cliffy!” episode was on. Grandpa Sawtooth had just two bruises that Kiwi could see — the dark blue-red stain of hemoglobin into bilirubin on his shrunken biceps, and a purpling of ruptured vessels on his cheek. The EMT had given him a clean bill of health.

“You got off extremely lucky,” the EMT had told him with relish. “He’s an old man”—the EMT kept repeating this to Kiwi, as if it were a controversial diagnosis. “An old, old man. You could have suffocated him. How would you like that, huh? How would you like to do jail time for killing your own grandfather?”

Kiwi shook his head, to indicate that he would probably not like that.

“You got off lucky this time, but I wouldn’t bet on it again.”

Now Kiwi nodded. He was afraid to talk. Two violet thumbprints were darkening at the front of his neck, a tier of ghostly fingerprints at the nape.

When Kiwi returned to the World dormitories, the elevator doors opened on faint sniggering, the TV screen drumming softly with pale light — the lounge was empty, but somebody was inside his dorm room. The Chief! Kiwi thought for a crazy moment. Then he heard the phlegmy rocket of Leo’s guffaw.

Leo and Vijay were standing in the middle of his room, wearing big shit-eating grins from ear to ear. They both had frozen, red-handed postures.

“What are you dudes doing in here?” Kiwi hated the pitch of his voice.

“Vijay says you’re broke, Bigtree,” Leo said. “So we decided to get you a little something. Think of it as an early birthday present, like …”

He swung the closet door open and Kiwi’s heart stopped.

The boys had put up a poster: a shiny centerfold from a porn magazine. Her face was an absolute blank but Kiwi returned the gaze of her enormous brown nipples, which seemed somehow sorrowful and frank, alert to a great sadness behind the pornographer’s camera, while the boys smirked.

“Look, he loves it!”

“Ha-ha,” Kiwi heard himself say. “Thanks, guys.”

Next followed innuendo of the conventionally scatalogical variety and Saturday insults, “cocksuckers” and “pussylickers” raining down on him like blows, and each time Kiwi spoke a word it felt like raising an arm to cover his face: “Fuck you, fuck you, shut up.”

Kiwi elbowed past them and tried to shut the closet door with a growl of laughter. Then he saw what they had done to the poster of his mother.

“Oh, sorry, bro.” Leo let out a buzzy laugh but then changed tone when he saw Kiwi’s face, pinching at his earlobe. The mood in the room became cinder-flecked. “That was like an accident? We were trying to get that ugly one off the wall, that’s some seventies shit right there …”

They had split her down her middle. SWA and MP CENTAUR read two halves of it. Half her face regarded him with its dusk intelligence, and he pushed the scraps of her into his fists. Kiwi wanted to scream at everyone to get out of his room, to die slow and go right to hell; out loud he could hear his dull, persistent chuckle.

What he could hear as clearly as if it were still happening was the blare of the Chief’s banter through the Pit’s loudspeakers:

“Hilola Bigtree has more talent in her pinkie finger than any other wrestler on the planet!

“Hilola Bigtree can tape up a twelve-foot gator in the time it takes you mainlanders to haul your lard asses up to the fridge!”

All day long the Chief’s good publicity funneled into the blue sky inside Kiwi, scattering birds.

Patched together the poster would have read HILOLA BIGTREE, SWAMP CENTAUR. Kiwi had always been embarrassed by this particular epithet for her — more of the Chief’s lame publicity — but it was a name that his mother was growing into, apparently. Because here she was: a real centaur on the door. The closet wood showed through half a dozen rips in the poster and blanked out one cheek. You could touch the grain of the wood through her torn forehead. A crescent of her smile hung on a little fang of green paper. Death was speeding her evolution into this monster: half woman and half invention. Kiwi couldn’t remember the real color of his mother’s hair anymore, her nascent wrinkles like the first cracks in an eggshell, her voice, her beautiful scowl, because the poster had papered over her third dimension and now even it was ruined.

“Kiwi? Learn to take a fucking joke, bro …”

“No, it’s fine.”

He touched the paper of her face and shut the door.