The alligator’s hole was eight feet across. It divided the saw grass prairie that had nearly killed me from the sweet dark shapes of the bay trees. The hole was round as an open manhole, a large brown eye of water. A gator had dredged this lake with her claws and was probably swimming invisibly inside it. Flowers like chopped onions covered the surface of the water, which was turbid with mud — a tell that a hole is gator-occupied. I heard a wet swishing in the saw grass behind me and jumped; some warm-blooded, snouty thing that might have been a bear cub or a wild hog was disappearing into the willow scrub. But I was happy, my heart was bursting with happiness at all the ordinary threats. Pigs and alligators seemed like heaven to me. Creatures of the same mud that we had grown up in, Ossie and Kiwi and I, like our snouty cousins. To my left, a ghostly logger’s road looped backward through the mud in the direction I had just come from, a road that I knew better than to walk.
And then I heard my name: “Ava!”
Through the palmetto screen I glimpsed his skin and his hands and his long nose, his shoulder blades, oh I recognized him, dragging our skiff overland. He was wearing the undershirt from the hammock, no coat, and his face looked whiskery and profoundly unmatched to me, indecently arranged, as if his features were floating in jelly. If he was wearing the whistle I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t get a fix on the gray lights of his eyes, he was still that far away. I ran to the edge of the alligator hole and stopped on my heels. The dark water rippled away from me; the Bird Man was approaching from the treeline, I could hear him; there were no other shadows for miles, nowhere else nearby for me to hide.
“Kid!” he said, and it seemed clear that he had seen me now because he was really moving. His long legs flew through the grasses. He was using his machete to hack through the mangle of palmetto scrub. He was — could this be true? — grinning at me. Without thinking I held my nose and jumped.
There have been only eighteen confirmed fatal alligator attacks in Florida since 1948. Nothing to worry about, the Chief tells our tourists. You stay out of a Seth’s domain and the Seth leaves you alone. I swam through a brown bloom of mud. I swam hard, my eyes shut against the thick silt, expecting at any moment to graze an alligator’s scales with my outstretched hands. I was expecting to hear a splash above me at any minute, the Bird Man diving into the alligator hole. I thought I could hear him calling in a shrunken, watery voice somewhere high above me. This was a true cave in the limestone, nothing that the gator had dug for itself. Now I was maybe six or seven feet below the light pinwheeling on the surface of the hole. I could see a dimmer squint of light at the cave’s far end and I swam for it; my reach ended in a wall of mud and decaying plant matter. Long brown grasses swayed in front of me. My hands expected to find the softening carcasses of birds and deer in that mess, or else a sheath of earth — but when I pushed into the decaying weeds, they yielded. Grass brushed everywhere against my skin. For a second I felt nothing but slimy green fingers, and then with an ease that shocked me I was clear of them. What I’d thought was a wall was a natural portal, a hole. An aperture in the limestone cave — these holes explain how the largemouth bass and the spade-sized black gambusia can sneak inside an alligator’s den. This one was large enough for a small Seth to squiggle into and out of. Weeds and soft rock crumbled around me.
Louis’s WPA coat was waterlogged and I couldn’t swim well with it on; I ducked my arms out of it, gathered it to my side. I had a new problem now: with the heavy jacket pinned beneath my right arm, I was flailing, kicking frenziedly into the underwater grasses, struggling to find my rhythm. The bundle was becoming so heavy, impossibly heavy, all the drenched clothes dragging at my side like a wing I couldn’t beat. And my lungs, my lungs were bursting.
The surface was only a few feet above my head, maddeningly close, but still I couldn’t reach it. The heavier the bundle got, the more tightly I held on to it, a wrestling instinct. I watched my sister’s ribbon flutter up my wrist. Let it drown me, I remember thinking. This cloth was it, I thought, this was the one thing I’d saved. But my arm felt like it was caught in a vise of water and being sucked inexorably down and down and down and then snapped painfully backward. I dove a little myself and tightened my grip on the bundled rags that belonged to my family, to Mom and to Ossie. I couldn’t have held on to their real bodies more forcefully. At no point do I remember wanting to let go. When I flipped onto my side, making a panicked grab for my mother’s yellow cloth and Louis’s sinking coat, I saw the alligator.
The den was rising in front of me again; the thing had gotten ahold of my calf. Dark orange pigment rose everywhere and soon it was too cloudy to see, although I tried — my eyes stung inside a fog that I realized must be plumes of my own blood. Grasses seemed to burst from the rocks, growing feet longer in one blink as I descended. Waving away from me. The alligator was trying to roll me, pulling me backward toward the entrance of the gator hole. I kicked but my calf was still caught — skin tore but I couldn’t get loose. Any wrestler knows that once an alligator closes its jaws it’s almost impossible to get them open again. Something entered me then and began to swell. My mother, before she died, really was training me to be her understudy, and every Sunday we’d practice the beginning of the Swimming with the Seths act. So I tried to remember what we’d rehearsed in our own Pit, the smooth strokes that carry you to the surface. There is a way to still your body and then slingshot forward in a surprise frog-legged stroke, a Bigtree escape maneuver. Blindly I did this, played possum underwater and then flew forward with a strength that felt far beyond the limits of my small body. I kicked and I was allowed to kick, the pressure vanished, and when I looked the alligator’s tail was disappearing into the cave. My calf was freed. Petals of red pain shot through me until my ribs ached, the agonizing pressure expanding in my chest, as round as a sky, and I began to rise like one bubble in a chain. My skin, I thought, is coming apart …
Somehow my body’s stitching held. I broke the skin of the water and started breathing again. The deep bright air of our world, I gulped, the scouring air, I kept on gasping. I had never tasted the scattered light in the air before, or pulled it into my mouth with my entire body, even my cycling feet. It felt like the sky had descended to my eye level. Air floated toward me, ghostly and wet, and turned to fire the instant it hit my raw lungs. For a long time the whole world was just oxygen — the lowered heaven of this sky and the explosions of my breath. Then the buoyant and obliterating force inside me began to wane, and my own thoughts crept back in around its edges. I saw that I was bobbing in a gray lake I didn’t recognize. Ferns dripped onto its surface. At a certain point I realized that my two hands must be empty, because I was swimming.
The Bird Man, if he’d seen me, didn’t follow me through the underwater tunnel. For close to an hour I hid on a mangrove island, hunched next to ibis and anhingas, waiting to see if he’d swim up. After that, I crawled forward on the branches until I found land that would hold my weight.
I checked myself for damage: I had a shallow bite on my calf, that was all. I’d gotten hurt far worse during our staged fights in the Pit. (In fact, the wound looked so relatively puny to me that I didn’t treat it; it’s a wonder I escaped infection.) It bled a lot at first, but I elevated it on a rock, rested. Adrenaline cured the sting of it. I wasn’t scared now; my insides still held the space of the shape my mom had filled. I’d lost everything, all the clothes, even the ribbon on my wrist.
I’d been following a gator haul because I couldn’t find any other road out of the slough and the matted brush gave me the easiest passage. Everywhere I felt sore and cruddy, my crotch was burning, the skin on my face came off in white peels when I rubbed at it. When I exited the slough and stood in the grasses I began shivering everywhere, as if my skin were doing its own jolly imitation of the wind-bucked water. Getting my shoes to move on land felt like lifting buckets. Yellowish gray clouds of palmetto scrub wasped away to sticks beneath me. The gator haul petered into water and then I heard them, I heard snatches of a human conversation. Someone real on a walkie-talkie. Two wood storks watched incuriously from a high branch as I crashed through a pitch pond of water lilies and hurtled toward what I hoped were real voices. Through the leaves I could see the distinctive dun and olive braid of a ranger’s uniform.
Frogs pushed their buffoon throats at me from various heights in the trees in their primordial vaudeville, and I remembered to call back to the voices: “Here! I’m over here!”
As it turned out, I’d been right about one thing: the men I’d seen on the tree island were very much alive. When I’d screamed two days ago on the slough, before the Bird Man got my jaws shut, these men had heard me. The ranger who found me brought me to meet them at the station, my heroes, so that I could thank them: two peckerwood guys sitting on the hard chairs, their cheeks flushed and stubbled. One of them had a haircut like a mushroom cap and nervous snowpea eyes and a cleft chin that made him look a little like Superman, or Superman’s sort of squirrelly twin. His friend was about a decade older and balding, with a kind, turkey-wattled face, a shirt so thin and gray it looked like dried sweat to me — not that I was in a position to judge anybody’s fashion or hygiene.
“Here she is, boys!” said the ranger (whose name I can’t remember now — he was a new recruit, decades younger than Whip). The way he said it, I felt a little like a trophy alligator he had just trussed and dropped onto the blond wood of his desk for these hunters’ perusal, a creature routed from its hole. I must have looked like one, too, with my soaked and torn clothing and the reddish mud that had rinsed even my teeth and gums.
The men nodded; the younger one shifted on his tailbone, and the larger, older hunter kept frowning slightly and repeatedly wetting his lips. I crossed my blood- and filth-encrusted arms over my chest and stared back at them. The ranger had offered me a shower on the boat ride over and I’d said no without thinking. He’d seemed surprised, so I’d explained myself — showers were hated chores for me at home, I said, where I had been a kid.
“Who are you?” I said, although I’d meant to say “thank you.”
“Trumbull,” said the older one.
“Harry,” said the younger one.
“Ava,” I said, pointing at myself, and the herky rhythms of this exchange felt a little like a show I’d seen on Grandpa’s TV about apes who’d learned to fingerpaint the alphabet.
When they weren’t hunting Harry and Trumbull worked the graveyard shift in a prosthetics plant in Ocala. They’d dabbled in greyhound racing, hibiscus farming, migrant strawberry picking, the military, fairground “barbering.” Gator hunting was something they’d done together since they were runts. Trumbull was the engine for their twosome, the talker, and his talk kept picking up speed, as if his big voice were on a downhill slope. Harry, who kept glancing at him, seemed to be the brakes.
They had a camp they returned to every July over on the rock glades about a mile before the Calusa shell mounds, and they wouldn’t have been out nearly so far if they hadn’t found their usual campsite’s water pump bent like a hairpin and decided to press on. Not once had they seen another person out that way, not ever in their fifteen years of rambling. We kept exchanging this fact between us until it gleamed gold and I was almost blinded in that tiny room, I felt so lucky.
“It was just the purest coincidence …,” Harry, the younger one, kept saying. “When Trumbull tells me he thought he seen a little girl out there, well …!”
Trumbull and Harry started shaking their heads in alternating rhythms. I felt my head beginning to join in, stopped it. I was still shocked by the cool and even feel of tile under my bare feet; the ranger had taken my ruined shoes from me, and was making some quiet arrangement on the telephone in the next room.
“You guys surprised me, too. I thought you guys were ghosts,” I offered. I stood on the fault line of the men’s laughter and everybody seemed surprised when I started laughing along with them. For a second I had a flutter of the old after-show feeling and I thought, Oh my God, what if it’s really over?
At that juncture, I wasn’t talking about the Bird Man. The ranger didn’t ask me any questions about how I’d wound up on the drift slough, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to volunteer.
“When you go back to your camp,” I asked them, “will you keep an eye out for a red alligator? She’s a Seth from my family’s alligator-wrestling park. She has this, ah, this special condition, I don’t think it’s a mutation, exactly, my brother will know …”
Harry made a little noise in his throat and looked around the room, like he wished the ranger would come back.
“Now you are not going to believe this …” The ranger returned from his desk with two more water bottles for me and a funny expression, a grimace that kept itching up toward a grin and collapsing. It made me think of a bent fishing rod, as if his mood were some monster fish that he couldn’t reel in.
“You said your name is Ava Bigtree? Do you by any chance have a relative named Oh-see-oh-la? Because she got picked up not five miles from where we found you, kid. They got her just this morning …”
He slid a paper toward me: NOTICE JULY 29 SEARCH AND RESCUE UPDATE, BIGTREE, OSCEOLA RECOVERED BY SEAPLANE PILOT …
My eyes flew down the column and came to rest on the little ledges of their names: “Bigtree, Osceola” and “Bigtree, Kiwi.”
“I would love to hear what you girls thought you were doing out there,” the pale ranger said, raising a scabby eyebrow at the gator hunters. Harry stared at Trumbull with a hangdog expression, as if to say that he’d been ready before they even got here to go, and Trumbull, who was eating a bag of white potato straws that he’d purchased from the vending machine near the latrine, didn’t have a lot to add. He read a few lines and shrugged.
“That’s a funny name,” said Trumbull, jawing on a potato straw. “Bigtree. What were you all doing way out here? Family vacay-shun, or something?”
Kiwi, Ossie, and an older white couple named Mr. and Mrs. Pelkis were waiting for me at the ferry dock. We talked over one another while the older couple watched from the dock’s edge, babbling about Seths and Louis Thanksgiving and the Chief in what must have sounded like a foreign language — behind us, Mrs. Pelkis started sobbing for some reason, her husband loudly shushing her. And I folded into my sister’s grief and heat. My brother’s wet face. I kept closing my fingers around the secret, enfleshed stones of their wrist bones and breathing in the strange smells of them — Ossie’s mangrove dank and Kiwi’s hotel scent of aftershave and shampoo — to verify that they were truly alive.
Nobody spoke on the car ride into Loomis. Kiwi had written out directions to the place where our dad was staying, the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, on a card from Mrs. Pelkis’s purse. After that brief exchange with us, she’d slammed a cassette of classical music into the tape deck with the attitude of someone turning a door lock. The huband, Dennis Pelkis, was snapping blue gum like he was trying to generate electricity or something. I’d been testing him: every time I asked a question he put another stick of blue gum in his mouth, which meant he had four sticks in there right now. Which was fine by me — nobody seemed capable of speech just then. Ossie and Kiwi watched the rainfall through their respective windows, and because I was squeezed in the middle and I didn’t have a window I watched the changes on their faces.
The farms came first. The Seths’ country gave way to green and yellow tractors that looked like imperial carriages on their huge tires, and great gusty sprinklers throwing water everywhere. We passed the last gas station before the city began in earnest and Osceola started to cry a little. I leaned over her and pushed the lock down on the car door.
The whole time I was thinking about the buoyancy that saved me. I know that I am a pretty biased interpreter of the events that led to my escape, but I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water. Her courage. In the cave I think she must have lent me some of it, because the strength I felt then was as huge as the sun. The yellow inside you that makes you want to live. I believe that she was the pulse and bloom that forced me toward the surface. She was the water that eased the clothes from my fingers. She was the muscular current that rode me through the water away from the den, and she was the victory howl that at last opened my mouth and filled my lungs. I didn’t want to tell my sister anything about this in the Pelkises’ car — I didn’t see how I could manage it with words — but I wished I could at least give Ossie a picture of where I had been, what had been in me. I wished she could bob with me for one second in that air. Black bay trees had lined the sky behind the lake and I was furiously alive around the bubble of our mother.
Was that fullness what Ossie had meant when she talked about her possessions? If so then I had been very wrong, I decided. I was wrong to have laughed at her in our bedroom, in the beginning, back when we’d said that her ghosts weren’t real, or her love.
The road spun behind us like something the car was secreting, yards and yards of black filament. I reached over and squeezed my sister’s hand.
“Hey,” I said. “I believe you.”
The bowling lanes at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel stay open until 2:00 a.m. From the lobby, you could hear the belly-growl of the balls hurtling down the lanes and the clatter of the pins. The Bowl-a-Bed’s bellhop and concierge was a ghoulish young man wearing orange-and-ruby bowling shoes on his size 13 feet. He was a kid, younger than Kiwi, with braces and thick black eyebrows, eyebrows so muscular and expressive they looked almost prehensile to me. They shot up when he saw us.
Ossie and I stood before him with mud-stiffened hair falling into our burned faces. I was shivering inside the ranger’s long T-shirt, and she had on one of Mrs. Pelkis’s kitten-printed nightgowns. Our faces in the lanes 1–9 scoreboard glass looked sewn onto our necks with scratches. Kiwi at least was wearing zippered pants.
“No bags?” the bellhop asked us with a practiced little smirk. His big shoes waggled on the desk.
“Fuck you, clown,” said my brother with astonishing ease. Ossie and I exchanged glances; he’d lost his accent. “Tell us where Samuel Bigtree is staying.”
The Chief was in room 11, just behind the last gutter-ball alley. This would have warranted a joke at some earlier Bigtree epoch but we were BE now, Beyond Exhaustion, and I just wanted to see my dad. The stunned bellhop had given Kiwi a little key, which he turned in the pale blue door to room 11 with a just-audible click.
“Stee-rike!” Kiwi whispered. Then he called out, “Dad. It’s us.”
On the car ride over, Kiwi had told me in a slow and urgent voice that he was sure the park would go into foreclosure. We would lose our home, the Seths. But it was going to be okay, he kept saying, it would really be okay, because he was almost a pilot and the Chief had a job and we would find an apartment on the mainland …
My father’s face filled the door frame and his shock was a wonderful thing to behold. The whole hotel was filled with bowlers’ thunder at that hour. Pins were falling everywhere around us and I watched my dad’s eyes widen to take us in. When my father stepped forward it didn’t matter that we were nowhere near our island. All of us, the four of us — the five of us if you counted Mom inside us — we were home. We were a family again, a love that made the roomiest privacy that I have ever occupied.
“Good night, Ossie.”
“Good night, Ava.”
After a little while I could hear my sister breathing beside me. My father and my brother were snoring in a duel or a duet on the other side of the wall. There had been, as you might imagine, quite a scene between them. Kiwi told us that he’d been working at the World of Darkness for two months and this fact didn’t make a dent. The Chief, holding Osceola, had thanked and thanked my brother for finding her until Kiwi grew embarrassed. He pretended to hawk up a wad of phlegm so that he had an excuse to grab tissues for his eyes.
I’d told the Chief about a dream I’d had on Swamplandia! — a great tree had swallowed him, his knuckles sunk into the tree bark — and he listened with such a frightened, pained expression that I stopped talking. So I didn’t tell my dad about the Bird Man, or Louis Thanksgiving, or the red Seth, or Mama Weeds. What we did talk about was Mom: “I found her dress out there, Dad. I found it, but I lost it again. I think Mom was with me when I battled the Seth …”
The Chief gave me an anguished look. His hand gripped my forearm too tightly, as if he were afraid that any one of us might flash without warning from the room.
“That’s okay. That’s okay, Ava. They found you, your brother found your sister, that’s much better than an old dress, I’m sure.”
But that night the Chief wasn’t in a talking mood. He looked huge and sad on the horned edge of the hotel bed, which had that goofy look of all “fancy” motel furnishings, cheap wood with stupid designs. The wallpaper nudged its quiet spirals upward toward the ceiling fan. We all looked caged in that hotel room. We watched a sitcom on TV and whenever the canned laughter tumbled into the silence of the room, I wanted to roar. Turn it off, I thought, but we were all a little afraid to. We watched the TV family speak their lines to one another as if we were trying to remember how to do it, talk. One on one we probably could have spoken, but the four of us together went mute.
“Did you want to go bowling, girls?” the Chief said at one point, his voice unnaturally loud and cheerful. “Ten free frames. There’s a coupon for a game on the desk, comes with the room …”
“No thanks,” we said in one voice. Ossie didn’t have a change of clothes, she said.
“Where’s your purple skirt?” I asked, gulping against an icy vision of the clothesline. “Where’s Louis’s jacket?”
“I don’t know.” She looked at me strangely. “Back in the swamp, I guess — I lost a bag overboard on the second day.” I started to tell her about Mama Weeds, stopped. Now that I was fed and watered and sitting on bedsheets, that whole part of my journey seemed filmy, impossible. Already I’d lost my pet alligator, Louis’s jacket, Ossie’s ribbon, Mom’s dress; I was afraid that if I shared this out loud I’d lose even the story.
The Chief made many weary, angry phone calls about the day’s events to “straighten these mainlanders out.” News stations were desperate to talk to my brother, Dennis Pelkis said on the telephone—“Hell’s Angel strikes again!”—but Dennis reported proudly that he wasn’t giving them our number. Then the Chief had to set up a meeting with the ranger who found me and a social worker for Monday, at some foreboding address inside the cold stones of downtown Loomis.
No, it turned out the Chief wasn’t angry at me at all. Not for a second, he said, not even when I lowered my voice and explained to him that I had lost Ossie. When I asked him about Swamplandia! and foreclosure and the Seths and his mainland job, he didn’t exactly answer. He was very proud of us, was his reply, the tribe of us. “We are going to the island tomorrow,” he promised. “We’ll put everything in order.”
The Chief borrowed forty dollars from Kiwi and rented an adjacent room for me and Ossie, lucky 13, where we were supposed to shower and then sleep, impossibly, in beds. An hour after we turned out the lights, I woke myself up. I stared around the featureless space with my heartbeat stinging me and tried to figure out where I was. I watched a body stand and raise one curtain to half-mast, so that the dark rolled out of the room. The curtains turned the color of weak tea, one droning hallway bulb behind them. My sister! I couldn’t quit rubbing at my eyes.
“You okay?” Ossie walked over to my bed. Like me, she was quilted with rashes and burn; she’d showered for close to an hour and her skin had a scoured look. She had lost weight in her arms and her cheeks, which gave her face a crop of new hollows.
“You were laughing in your sleep, Ava.”
I reached out and grabbed her warm wrist with Bigtree Wrestling Grip 7. Slowly I remembered that I wasn’t in the swamp anymore, that we had made it to the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, a place with color TVs and a confectionery of miniature, jewel-colored soaps and shampoo-plus-conditioners and comforters that smelled reassuringly of ordinary vices: old pepperoni pizza, draft beer, Vaseline, cigarettes.
“It’s okay now, Ava. I’m right here, all right?”
“Ossie?” For a second I didn’t believe it was really her. She touched my forehead. She touched me as if she were Mom, as if I were a child again back on the island and sick with fever, or even just pretending. Our mom, as stern and all-seeing as she could often seem, would do us this great favor of pretending to be credulous when we faked sick. Mom cooed sincerely over our theatrical moanings and coughs. She would push our hair back from our cool liar’s scalps and bring us noodles and icy mainland colas as if happy for an excuse to love us like this.
“Was the ghost real, Ossie?” I asked her sleepily.
“I thought so.”
“Okay. Is the ghost back, though?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she told me that night. But until we are old ladies — a cypress age, a Sawtooth age — I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.
I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, either. Not the kind from Ossie’s book. I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulable than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in The Spiritist’s Telegraph. Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.
After my mom died, I used to have these dreams where I arrived to clean out the Pit and found a stadium filled with hissing, booing tourists. Nothing was right about this show: the Seths were gone and the Pit itself had mutated into an opaque, roiling pool. I realized that I had scheduled Mom’s show and forgotten to cancel it. Now she was dead and the crowd was enraged. Some people threw bottles. With the irrefutable logic of dreams I knew that I would have to replace Mom on the board. As I climbed the ladder I had the worst case of stage fright because what was I supposed to do after diving? What would happen to me when I followed her down the pickled stars on the green board, and jumped? The next moment was unimaginable. The water bulged beneath me and even in dreams my mind failed to tell my mind what was inside it.
Sometimes I worry that what I did with the Bird Man happened because I really wanted it to. And what if it happens forever, Ossie, I’d ask my sister, the bad laughter of that summer? Like a faucet we left running, a sound we have forgotten we are making. Sometimes I hear the crying of strange birds outside the grates of my apartment window and I wonder. Even deep inland, I still worry that he might be one empty lot over. For our first six months in Loomis County I couldn’t sleep.
“It’s over,” the Chief kept saying when we found each other in the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, his showman’s voice partially whited out by the falling pins, “period, the end.”
And on a calendar that summer really is over, I guess. Full stop. Ossie and I attended a public school in the fall where they made us wear uniforms in the dull sepias and dark crimsons of fall leaves, these colors that were nothing like the fire of my alligator’s skin. But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me. Kiwi is sympathetic, but Ossie is the only one who I can really talk to about this particular descent.
Unlike me, Osceola spent that first year on the mainland sleeping like a paralytic in our new apartment bedroom and going nowhere at night, never entertaining a single ghost. Her “powers” did not interest her anymore, because she was drugged. When we started at Rocklands High, a psychiatrist put Ossie on a variety of helpful, beekeeping-type medications, yellow and root-beer brown tablets that were supposed to thin the ghostly voices in her head to a pleasant drone. “Let’s try Osceola on this prescription,” he said confidently. “I get great results with patients I try on this medication.” And I remember that the verb “to try” in relation to my sister really bothered me, as if the psychiatrist had magical dice that he could keep rolling until we got a saner version of Ossie. I remember her doctor’s office as a logged woods of glossy oak end tables, sofas, “antique” chairs. It did not strike me or impress me in the least. Loomis was just like this. Our new apartment was carpeted and wallpapered in rusty browns, a palette that reminded me of dead squirrels. I don’t know if those pills helped my sister. Like me, I think that eventually Ossie simply figured out how to occult her own deep weirdness, to shuffle quietly down the chutes of our school hallways.
One regret that I still keep alive is that I never showed anybody the red Seth. Not even Ossie; why didn’t I tell Ossie or Kiwi about the miraculous hatchling right away? Sometimes I’ll let myself wonder: Where might she be right now, if she survived? In what cave or slough, on what grassless island? It’s an unlikely idea but it’s not impossible. Alligators in the wild can live for seventy years, and possibly even longer. By now she would have reached her full adult weight and length. Maybe she swam back to the island that we used to call Swamplandia! and is floating her scarlet eyes around our old canals. When I’m awake, I can’t seem to draw a stable picture of the red Seth in my mind’s eye anymore — it feels like trying to light a candle on a rainy night, your hands cupped and your cheeks puffed and the whole wet world conspiring to snatch the flame away from you. But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.
I think the Chief was right about one thing: the show really must go on. Our Seths are still thrashing inside us in an endless loop. I like to think our family is winning. But my brother and my sister and I rarely talk about it anymore — that would be as pointless as making a telephone call to say, “Kiwi, are you there? Listen: my blood is circulating,” or, “Howdy, Ossie, it’s today, are you breathing?” We used to have this cardboard clock on Swamplandia! and you could move the tiny red hands to whatever time you wanted, NEXT SHOW AT ___:___ O’CLOCK!