Swamplandia!

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. Kiwi Takes to the Skies

Vijay and Kiwi were ripping Moo Cow creamers for their coffees at the Burger Burger. They kept tossing the crenellated pink containers onto the restaurant table until it looked like a Ken doll had gone on some unmanly daiquiri bender. They’d both ordered the A.M. Delicious! Dollar Breakfast Combo #2: cheddar, sausage, and egg sandwiches. You got what you paid for in this life, said Vijay through a nuclear yellow mouthful of fast-food cheese.

“Sure hope you don’t crash today, Bigtree.”

“Okay, are you serious? Can we talk about anything else? That is unduly ominous for daybreak.”

Kiwi pronounced “ominous” so that it rhymed with “dominoes.”

“Huh? You’re om-in-ohs, bitch. Bro, you’re jumping the whole table. Bigtree: is a shark eating you below the waist or something? Calm it down. It’s going to be fine.”

Kiwi saw that his long legs were indeed bucking the half-moon of their Formica table. The salt and pepper shakers were doing little NBA jumps.

Kiwi was wearing Leo’s oxford shirt, even though it was 90 degrees out, to disguise the bruises he’d gotten from his grandfather. He’d thought about trying to pass them off as hickeys from Emily Barton, but he had several on his arms.

Kiwi wished that he could tell Vijay about Grandpa Sawtooth. He kept thinking about the moment when he’d lifted the old man by his frail shoulders and his eyes had widened, full of an animal pain. Even then Kiwi hadn’t released him.

They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, as if they were copilots of the fast-food rocket ship, Kiwi said, to indigestion and Grade D regret. Kiwi found a crack in the upholstery and started pinching up curly stuffing.

Outside the restaurant window, a bag lady of an advanced, indeterminate age marched forward in front of their window, her face lost in a glassy tangle of curls. Her hair was shockingly white. Red and yellow flags of cloth waved all along her shopping cart like a little parade. She had such an accumulation of crap in there, none of it particularly eyecatching: Kiwi’s gaze snagged on a clock radio, a doll with a gouged cheek in a gray and red-ribboned party dress. Enough metal rods to build a really crappy organ. Things so generic that they caused Kiwi a pang; at first he thought he’d recognized them. Bigtree tribal artifacts! he’d thought — really, it was the same junk that every family had.

There was a story that traveled around the islands about a woman named Mama Weeds. A swamp witch. But now Kiwi saw that there were witches everywhere in the world. Witches lining up for free grocery bags of battered tuna cans and half-rotted carrots at the downtown Loomis Army of Mercy. At the bus station, witches telling spells to walls. Only the luckiest ones got to live inside stories. The rest were homeless, pushing carts like this one. They sank out of sight, like the European witches clutching their stones.

“What are you staring at? Are you checking her out?” He peered at the bag lady. “She’s a little old for you, Bigtree.”

“Bro! No. I’m staring at the, ah. The rods. Sure are a lot of rods in there.”

“Rods!” Vijay did his mimicry of a persnickety white man. He started out seriously and then shifted into sniggers, a speech habit of Vijay’s where he dropped the mic midsentence and became his own audience. “If you love rods, son, you go right ahead. That’s your lifestyle choice …”

“Huh? Oh, right. I forgot. I’m gay. Ha-ha. Very funny.”

If you really were gay, Kiwi thought for maybe the thousandth time since he’d arrived at Loomis County, how could you possibly live here in Loomis County? If you were a bookworm, a Mormon, an albino, a virgin; if you were a “reffy” ([n] Loomis slang for a recent immigrant, derivative of “refugee” and used in Loomis night schools as a shorthand for kids with bad clothes, dental afflictions, accents as pure as grain alcohol); if you had any kind of unusual hairstyle, evangelical religion, a gene for altruism or obesity; if you wrestled monsters on an island, like Ava, or conjugated Latin, like he did, or dated the motherfucking dead, how could you survive to age eighteen in an LCPS high school?

Ava and Ossie: how would his sisters survive a trip to a high school bathroom, even?

Just that morning Kiwi had found a fanciful lilac Post-it stuck above the faucets of the dormitory john: TO THE ASSHOLE WHO KEEPS BLEEDING IN THE SINK …

“You need to have something in your stomach, bro,” said Vijay, with the weird brotherly solicitousness that cropped up between them sometimes when nobody else was around. If other dudes were present they stayed gruff and neutral; when girls were in the backseat Vijay treated Kiwi like his mentally challenged ten-year-old cousin, giving him slow, emphatic instructions (Put the tape in the tape deck, bro … Thank you!), which Kiwi pretended to hate but somehow didn’t exactly mind. We are brothers, he’d think sometimes in the middle of a volley of “bro”s, pleased that he knew enough about the mainlanders’ culture by now to keep this happiness a secret.

“I can’t eat,” Kiwi said, staring at his thin hands. “I’m going to vomit. What if you do everything right but you vomit your Burger Burger special in the cockpit, do you still pass the test?”

“You’ll be fucking fantastic, Bigtree,” Vijay said, lying badly and kindly.

“Look, if I go down in flames, turn in my homework for me, okay?”

“Okay.” Vijay chewed. “That would suck, though. Who do I give it to?”

“It’s under my bed. My night school instructor won’t accept late assignments. Miss Voila Arenas — she’s kind of a hard-ass. But I bet she will accept it if it’s posthumous. Be careful with the toll plaza. I spent, like, sixteen hours on it.”

Kiwi had created a scale model of the Golden Gate Bridge out of dry fettuccine. This was a supplement to the actual assignment. The actual assignment had been to describe the Golden Gate Bridge in three paragraphs.

“Good luck up there, Margarita!” Vijay said an hour later when he dropped Kiwi off at the airfield. “Remember you don’t got insurance and I’m not going to be the one to spoon-feed you baby food and change your diapers when you shit so don’t crash.”

“Yeah.” Kiwi grinned lamely. “See you.”

He would do this, he would get this done. To get a pilot’s salary you had to fly a plane. There was no way out but up.

In a Cessna you were soaring, sailing above everything, and a new sense entered the world. All the irregularities retreated into surfaces. Dennis was letting Kiwi do everything this time.

“Okay. Carb heat off, area clear, water rudders up, stick aft.

“Going good. Full power now, watch your nose come up, ease off the back pressure, now you’re going to want to accelerate to taxi speed … good … you ready?”

Kiwi eased the stick forward until it hit 70 and let the plane climb. At 1,000 MSL they hit the cloud bottom. The wind was light and from the north. The sky today was a sea of blues and they flew through cloud wall after cloud wall, bulleting right through the white banks. Tints shifted; the world slid away from them at an angle. The sun made the wings flash tin and gold. Kiwi watched the swell of Coral City, a place he’d never visited. West of Loomis, way out. Rooftops out there made a uniform field of squares as the plane soared higher — brown and mustard and flecks of green quilted the suburbs, while the downtown was mostly eel-flashes of steel and cement white; in the drab center of the city, Kiwi recognized the striking tangerine rooftop of a famous luxury hotel, the Coral Castillo — and everywhere glass flashed, cars moved up the freeway like sluggish blood cells.

His nausea was gone, he realized. His stomach had settled itself somehow, miles above the ground. And then it was happening — Kiwi stared at his two hands moving over the control panel. He was flying.

Tailwinds, minor turbulence. The plane sheared gently to the left and clouds veiled the sun; when they emerged the city had vanished. Now they were flying over the saw-grass prairie.

Kiwi was shocked to see how beautiful his home was. This beauty was a secret that the trees had been keeping — the islands looked so different from this altitude. Shining green, shining blue. The sun webbed the mangrove jungle in inky red. Where was Swamplandia!? Kiwi wondered. Distance turned all the tree islands into identical green teardrop shapes — at this altitude you could see how the current’s hand had shaped them. You could also see the melaleuca stands, which looked like mildew on bread, gray trees grouped so thickly there was not a breath between them.

They were flying very low — five hundred feet, “dragging the river,” Denny called it, to check for sunken logs or boats or other obstructions “that could cause us to swim on a landing, son.” Now Kiwi could see the network of Army Corps dams and dikes and levees, which cut up the natural flow of the floodplains from Lake Okeechobee. They looked like Tinkertoys, a small and ambitious child’s game — it amazed Kiwi to see the way the river scissored off course or dropped out of sight because of these dikes. He saw hunters’ cabins on the banks of remote islands. Kiwi couldn’t see any actual alligators, but he sighted dozens of their hairy nests along the bayheads. Now they sheared right and Kiwi saw two Calusa shell middens rising out of the river.

“Look at that.” Kiwi touched his forehead to the glass. “What is that thing?”

A woman was standing on the coastline, jumping up and down. Kiwi looked closer, startled: she was waving and waving at them, in some kind of real distress. All he could really make out was the frenzy of her beating arms. Later he’d wonder if something about her movements hadn’t seemed familiar to him, even then.

Privately, Kiwi always credited what he did next to Grandpa Sawtooth. If he hadn’t won his first fight just yesterday — if he hadn’t made a fist and connected with a throat — Kiwi didn’t think that the next action he took would ever have occurred to him. But today his body was full of new ideas. Without asking Denny, he began to cut the power.

It was a nerve-jangling ride down — the Cessna came within thirty feet of the treetops, S-turning all the way down to the lake’s surface. As the turbulence worsened Kiwi grew steadily calmer. The water he planned to land on was so glassy that he couldn’t gauge its depth, but he was going to use the woman as his LVP — the last visual point, the last thing he’d seen to judge his altitude before descending. Incredibly, it seemed like Dennis Pelkis was going to let him do this; Dennis Pelkis was talking him through it: “Seventy mph approach, fifteen hundred rpm — to idle — to LVP, slow to fifty mph, then power to sixteen hundred rpm until touchdown. Power way, way back now …” Pull up, pull up, something screamed in Kiwi, wanting to recover the view from the cockpit window — trees were spearing up outside the windows, becoming individual. Slashes of color became streaked and knobbed trunks. There were fish in the lake. Kiwi could see them, individual fish. He turned left just slightly and pulled his nose up when they went gliding onto the water’s surface. He straightened out and dropped the bottom rudders. Kiwi heard spray striking the floats, and then it was over: the plane drove hard across the slough, the sun kaleidoscoping through great wheels of water. Kiwi’s breathing stopped with the engine.

As soon as he cut the propeller, Kiwi jumped out the cockpit door and waded in front of the seaplane, splashing through water that soaked up to the thighs of his jeans. On the tree island in front of him he saw the wreck — this boat was an antique! It had gone crashing into the black mangroves with enough force to crack several trunks at the knees like scorpion legs; they stood on leafy tiptoe now on the marl. The twenty-foot crane was caught in the canopy, its yellow bucket peering cannily above the fronds. What was the woman screaming at him? It sounded like a foreign language: he heard “C-c-c,” and “eee—”

He froze in the water for a moment, trying to understand her. He was still fifty yards away from the shore. That’s my name, Kiwi realized. The woman was his sister. He went crashing through the mirror of the water toward her, each of them shouting out the other’s name like imperfect echoes.

“Terrific landing, son!” Denny was calling behind him. The skin around one eye was puffing tall as bread from where he’d hit the cockpit window while exiting the plane. “One of the best I’ve seen in my career! Just think of what the papers are going to call you now.”

“So let me get this straight — this girl is a relation of yours?”

Osceola was sitting on Denny’s cooler lid. A dirty crepe dress frothed over her knees, beneath which long vertical scratches skidded from shin to ankle. She didn’t remember how she’d gotten them. She downed half a gallon of water and ate all the candy bars and fruit that Mrs. Pelkis had packed for Denny and she was still hungry, she said, still thirsty.

Kiwi kept hugging her and whispering that everything was okay, wondering if this was true — Ossie looked very sick to him. That thing she had on was their mother’s wedding dress, Kiwi noted with a wandering horror. His eyes kept fixing on disturbing new pieces of the picture she made: Ossie’s hair was a muddy yellow from the mangrove tannins and her eyes were hollows. Her voice, when it came, was barely a whisper, as if she were afraid the mere act of speech might cause the pilot and her brother to vanish.

“No more water?”

“No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Os. We’ll get you more on the mainland.”

“I’m going to drink from the faucet. Kiwi, I’m going to drink water for an hour.”

“Sure. Come on, get in the shade.”

They were on a strip of rocky beach surrounded on all sides by mangroves and thin palms. Dennis “Denny” Pelkis, who seemed somewhat dazed, had waded out to do some kind of make-work maintenance on the plane.

“He left me,” she said quietly.

“Who left you? The Chief? What are you doing out here?”

“Louis Thanksgiving. He took me out here and then he left me at the altar.”

What she described to Kiwi was the story of a jilted bride: the ghost had proposed to her with a lavish sincerity. He had entered her — forever, she’d thought. When you married a ghost, she explained, you didn’t say “till death do us part.” Who or what could part you? There was nothing left to part you. No body left to be parted from.

“I’m sorry that didn’t work,” Kiwi managed to choke out. “But also, I’m not really sorry, you know?”

Kiwi wondered if he could hug Ossie. He was very aware of Dennis Pelkis watching them from the shade of the patchy mangrove saplings, smoking his third or maybe fourth cigarette.

The ghost had taught her how to rig a 5.5-horsepower engine to the back of the dredge scow, how to open the tank vent and move the gearshift lever to neutral, how to set the choke between half and full, adjust the throttle, prime the fuel system by squeezing the flaccid gas-line bulb to firmness, how to tie a rope around the engine and pull. The ghost had used her hands to make sure that the dredge barge was firmly attached to the stern of the dredge scow. He had used Osceola’s hands to steer.

“You drove that thing by yourself?”

Ossie nodded. “But he was doing the driving through me”—as she spoke she flexed her fingers, her violet eyes squeezed into petals, unreadable—“he possessed my hands on the throttle. At first,” she added with the terrible new shyness. “We had an accident. The second day. I lost the bag that had our camp stuff, our food, Louis’s old machete, everything went overboard … I lost Louis’s shirt, the Model Land Company map. Everything, Kiwi. I had to put this dress on, I didn’t have anything else.”

The dredgeman’s ghost had helped her to pilot the boat all the way from Hermit Key to this island — Kiwi had no idea where they were in relation to their home, but Ossie said she’d been following his map toward the Calusa shell mounds. The ghost, she said, was retracing its route. They had been following the canal that the dredge crew had begun digging in 1935 and had failed to complete.

“And then, on our wedding day, Louis left me at the altar. I woke up here alone.” She wound what was left of her dress around her fist and shivered a little. “I woke up here so empty, Kiwi. I don’t know …”

“At the altar …,” Kiwi said slowly. He was looking past his sister; his eyes had caught on a frizzled length of rope hanging from the lowest branch of a sweet bay tree. Kiwi watched the rope swaying, almost but not quite sweeping the ground. A fat knot was camouflaged against the trunk, black as a bump on the wood.

Is that how you marry a ghost?

It occurred to him that he was looking at a small noose.

“He was gone and I couldn’t finish it …”

Ossie stopped talking and gave an angry little shrug, as if refusing to apologize for something she felt terribly about. Waves of wind were moving along the tree line and the rope twisted into complicated shapes, spun out of them.

“Look, I hate to interrupt this … this. But you want to tell me exactly what’s going on here?”

Denny drew himself up to his full height of five four. He had waded in with a map and a grease-blotched towel that he’d found wedged under the pilot’s seat. Outside the cockpit he looked a little like an evicted mole, blinking in the glass glare off the water, and Kiwi wondered what the Philosophy of Denny said about this particular eventuality: a student pilot finding his younger sister in a wedding dress, in the middle of the swamp.

Dennis Pelkis, forty-two-year veteran of the skies around Loomis County, stared at the Bigtrees with a face that flickered between its natural good humor and an uneasiness that was almost fear. Kiwi wondered if it was possible for a man to look less comfortable with a situation. He was wearing his sunglasses, and the swamp grass waved whitely inside them. Sunburn was coloring the lobes of his huge ears.

“My sister was trying to elope with her boyfriend,” Kiwi said, staring hard at Denny. “Louis Thanksgiving,” he said, because the name seemed to legitimize the scene. Everybody understood a jilting — a soured romance. Everybody liked to hate a pusillanimous groom. “It didn’t work out. He’s gone now.”

“Oh … well. Sorry to hear that, young lady. Help is on the way,” he mumbled somewhat unconvincingly.

A silence reasserted itself then for a period of seconds, until the air became a still, deepening pool. The rope was twisting and untwisting and whispering something dreadful inside the leaves. Osceola kept staring through the teardrop hoop on the rope into the trees with a vacancy that Kiwi remembered well.

“It’s okay,” Kiwi said. He kept staring at the rope. He could hear Dennis Pelkis talking in a low voice on his radio. “I promise, Ossie, it’s going to be all right. We’ll all go home now.”

“Kiwi,” Ossie said, her voice suddenly tack-sharp. Clouds moved and light caught on a tiny fishhook in her wedding lace. “Have you talked to Ava? Is Ava with the Chief?”