Swamplandia!

CHAPTER FIVE. Prodigal Kiwi

When we got back to the island, Ossie and the Chief headed toward the house to get some grub, but I padded alongside Kiwi and grabbed ahold of his elbow. His arms surprised me with their thinness. Nobody was really eating right, and Kiwi wasn’t wrestling. I would never have guessed that the cessation of our alligator wrestling would make the least difference to him, to his body. But it had mattered to Kiwi; the changes on our island had robbed my brother of actual matter, had changed him in a way that I could touch. Skin bagged under his biceps. When I gripped his arm, I could feel how much we’d both weakened. Instead of feeling sad about this, I was for some reason teetering inside a wash of total joy. I squeezed down on the arm again, hard, to make sure that I was right, that we had both lost mass in the same place.

“Ow, Ava! You think that’s funny? No? What are you smiling for, then?”

It was a strange vise to be in, that feeling. I let go of Kiwi’s shrunken biceps and closed my left hand around my right arm. Too skinny! I thought, but this only stoked the joy in me. It didn’t matter. We’d go back to regular rehearsals. We’d be a team, me and Kiwi — we’d do it for Carnival Darwinism. We’d get strong again, build up together. Maybe we could even choreograph a brother-and-sister show, once Kiwi got back into the swing of things …

“Come with me to the museum,” I said sternly. “I want to show you something.”

We stepped off the wood-chip trail that led away from the touristed park to our house and walked to the museum. The Chief had forgotten to lock up again. Shapes nuzzled toward us. It took a few seconds of blinking before your memory filled each like paint — that rectangle to my left was Grandma Risa’s bedside table, that long and skinny geometry on the wall was Grandpa Sawtooth’s.22 Winchester rifle. Extinct and taxidermied objects to us kids. A small bat shot through the door; moonlight pricked at the strings of hanging sleeves.

Somebody — who else but Ossie? — had stolen our mom’s wedding dress. I’d discovered this theft while cleaning out the museum earlier in the day. I pointed my flashlight at Mom’s empty case to show Kiwi: there was a raisiny blot on the wall that yesterday had contained a froth of lace. The hook that used to hold her orchid headpiece was naked metal. It bounced light back at us, a frantic signal: something used to be here.

Kiwi sighed. “Okay, Ava. That’s what you brought me here to see.”

“Look at that! I think Ossie took it.”

“You think, Sherlock?”

“Should we tell on her? What do you think she stole it for? If she’s wearing Mom’s dress out there in the mud … Oh my gosh, Kiwi? If she ruins it …”

“I thought you hated that thing,” Kiwi mumbled.

“I do!” I said angrily. “That’s not the point, though …”

But my brother seemed distracted.

“I am finished with that man …” Kiwi was mumbling to himself.

“Who?” I let out a shocked laugh. “What man? Dad?”

“Do you know how much debt we’re actually in, Ava? Play Go Fish with the bills on our table. Go ahead. Open any letter addressed to Dad. Do you know how much money it would take to buy even one of the items for his Carnival Darwinism project? He really thinks we can compete with the World of Darkness …”

I wanted to say: Of course we can! I’d been practicing holds that only the Chief and the best Seminole wrestlers performed.

“Why do you talk like that, Kiwi? Only a traitor talks that way.”

“Why do you want to stay here so badly?”

I kicked a rock. Why save your own life?

“Because it’s our home, dummy.”

“But everybody moves, Ava. Mainlanders do it all the time. We could find a decent place on the Atlantic side of the city, I bet. I don’t think you’d hate it there. I mean, you could still come visit Swamplandia! It’s not like the island would just vanish without you. The alligators, you could still …”

He trailed off.

“I could still what? Take the ferry out to look at them, our Seths?”

“Ava,” my brother said in a careful tone, “if we get you into a Loomis high school, I bet you could go to college, too …”

“But I don’t want to leave.” I hated how small my voice sounded. A-va, my mom used to say when I cried tears after flubbing a move onstage, now you tell me, is that the octave of a Bigtree wrestler?

“But you will. You will want to. You don’t want to turn seventeen on this island, Ava, believe me.”

I would vanish on the mainland, dry up in that crush of cars and strangers, of flesh hidden inside metallic colors, the salt white of the sky over the interstate highway, the strange pink-and-white apartment complexes where mainlanders lived like cutlery in drawers. Well, Kiwi pointed out, but we had survived the tourists, hadn’t we? Hundreds of strangers at a time! But tourists’ faces were like these flumes of bubbles: they jetted over our island and disappeared. We stayed on the island past dusk; we waited until the moon rode up over the swamp and the only faces in the windows were our own. That’s what “home” and “family” meant, I thought: our four faces, our walls. If we left Swamplandia! for the mainland, what would happen? It was too strange to think about. In Loomis County my family would be the tourists, the bubbles.

“Ossie doesn’t want to go. She’s just one year younger than you and she wants to stay.”

“Ossie found a way to get out of here without leaving her bedroom.” Kiwi pushed at the bridge of his nose. “It’s pretty genius, actually.”

“Mom would hate it. Mom would feel responsible if we left; she would never forgive us. She would never get over it.”

“Huh. How do you figure, Ava? Because Mom’s dead.”

Kiwi kicked the rock at me and I whammed my right foot into it, not aiming at him exactly but also not aiming not to hit him, not 100 percent opposed to the possibility of hitting him; the rock flew high and wide of his left shoulder and pinged off the case of Grandma Risa’s gator-skinning knives.

“Jesus, watch it! Don’t do that indoors. Look, you can’t think like that, okay? Ava? Pay attention — you are using that pronoun erroneously. Because there is no ‘she’ anymore.”

Frogs were chorusing thickly, invisibly, somewhere under the dock. I heard a hunter’s splash and wondered what the Seth was after.

“Oh, God, Kiwi, I know that. I know she’s dead. I’m not like Ossie.”

But in fact I was like Ossie, in this one regard: I was consumed by a helpless, often furious love for a ghost. Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a sentence that I could read about my mother. All objects and events on our island, every single thing that you could see with your eyes, were like clues that I could use to reinvent her: would our mom love this thing, would she hate it? For a second I luxuriated in a real hatred of my brother.

“I hate him,” said Kiwi.

“Yup. I mean, I don’t.” I frowned. “But I can see how you—”

“He’s going to ruin everything. He thinks he’s being optimistic or something but it’s sick, Ava, what he’s doing. We won’t even have enough money to move.”

I found a knot to work out on my left sneaker. The light from my flashlight was drawing long fingers of pittering moths to us. They twittered on the museum screens. Their wing beats spooked me — so stupid, I knew, since moths are just a flying paper.

“Do you ever think that Ossie’s ghosts might be real, Kiwi?” I asked.

Kiwi groaned.

“But Ossie does have powers,” I blurted out. Hearing myself say this to my brother, I wondered if that was what I believed. Because Kiwi was shaking his head at me, I kept going: “Really, I swear it’s true, Kiwi — you haven’t seen her possessions. You don’t know about how bad they can be, like nightmares …”

I wasn’t sure how to explain what I meant to him; of course you can’t see anybody else’s actual dreams. But after my sister’s séances, when she rocked into her “love possessions”? I’d roll onto the edge of my bed and watch her face flicker open and shut. Who knows what was being shown to her? It was weird detective work, like trying to guess the plot of a movie from the twitching of a smile in the audience.

“Sometimes when the ghost shows up she starts … moving the bed and she moans, Kiwi, it sounds funny but it’s a little scary, too? That part’s supposed to be a secret. She told me she can’t stop it from happening …”

“She moans?” Kiwi said, making a face. “Jesus, Ossie …”

I bit my lip, as embarrassed as if I had just made the sound myself. “Kiwi? Do you think, when she has the bad dreams or the possessions, you could come and wake her up?”

“I’ll tell you a secret, Ava. When she’s tossing and turning that way? You are probably watching a good dream.”

I nodded, pantomiming understanding. The orange spot from my flashlight looked like a little dog sniffing along the floor. Through the museum window I could see a shattering of light that would become our house if we walked toward it.

“Let’s get out of here, Ava,” my brother said, pausing just before we reached the wooden archway of the SWAMPLANDIA! sign.

“Okay.” I hoped Ossie was back in our bedroom, reading a regular book or cloth-eyed in sleep and dreaming nothing. “Where do you want to go? The café?”

“Let’s get off of this stupid island.”

I nodded more warily. I had thought that my brother and I were communicating from more or less the same neighborhood of feelings, but I’d been wrong.

In the morning, and not totally surprisingly, the Chief had nothing to say about Kiwi’s absence. He looked right through the slats of his son’s empty chair, and then got up to pour another gloomy-looking glass of pond-apple juice. If you’ve ever tried this pee-colored stuff, you know of its vileness. Eve and Adam would have spit this stuff out and waited millennia until they could get a soda from the café. Pond apples taste like turpentine — we fed them to the Seths — and the Chief and old Sawtooth were the only humans I knew who could hold that stuff down. Kiwi said it was because the men in our family were “competitive masochists” [n]. He held that we kids were absolved from ever having to drink the poison inside a pond apple by Florida law and medical science.

“So, Kiwi is gone,” I said after a long silence, giving the words a little Kitty Hawk test run on the air. “Kiwi ran away or something. That’s pretty dumb, right?”

We had all seen the note on the refrigerator that morning, underneath the round Swamplandia! magnet of our own smiling faces, as if we Bigtrees and Seths were overjoyed to wish Kiwi a bon voyage. Kiwi had labeled the note for us: the VALEDICTORY NOTE — like he really believed we might otherwise mistake it for a dollar bill or a horoscope.

The VALEDICTORY NOTE informed us in Kiwi’s pretty lousy handwriting of his “insuperable horror at the mismanagement of Swamplandia! and the poverty of our island education.”

It explained: “I am relocating to Loomis County to raise funds to preclude what will otherwise result in a fiscal cataclysm for our family and certain penury and insolvency.”

About eight or nine synonyms for bankruptcy followed. It closed: “P.S. I will send cash to you guys as soon as I can. Please don’t come looking for me. I will be fine. Ava & Ossie, remind Dad that I’m almost eighteen.”

Osceola ate three bowls of corn cereal and pounded sugar like a horse. She said in a small voice that she thought he would be back later this week.

“Your brother stole from us,” the Chief said, his head busy in the refrigerator. He emerged with a mesh sack of oranges and kept talking to us in the same cheerful drawl. “Three hundred dollars missing from my wallet. Kid took the change, too. Took the goddamn nickels. Really. Go on, girls, have a look.”

Ossie made gentle waves in her cereal milk.

“Your brother thinks he’s going to help this family?” the Chief said in a smiling, genial voice that scared me. “Three hundred dollars. What a hero, huh? Stealing from his father while he’s asleep …”

“Who took him there, Dad?”

“Gus did. This morning. Motored him over on a private ride. Says he got a call from Kiwi late last night about some important errand that I needed your brother to run.” The Chief snorted. “Goes, ‘I wondered why the kid had two duffels with him.’ I guess he thought I might be sending him over to the pawnshop!”

The Chief made a noise that was not laughter. Something was ticking inside the Chief’s face. His jawbone thrust forward, and when he chewed he tensed his whole forehead. His brown eyes squeezed shut; his skull in profile took on the sharky definition of the Seth fossils.

“Kiwi is so stupid. He’ll be back tonight,” Ossie whispered to me.

“Sure. I’m not worried about it.” Had he been trying to invite me to go with him, that night by the cannon?

“I am. I’m worried about Dad,” she said.

“Shh, Ossie. He’s taking this news okay.” But at one point I looked up at him and saw a shock of orange. My father had put a whole small orange in his mouth, peel and all, and he was chewing it like a zombie. This was so horrible that I almost laughed out loud.

Oh, why aren’t you trying? I thought in his direction. Why aren’t you doing anything? Try. Pay attention. Be the Chief again.

Later that night, I hugged my knees on the bunchy sofa and I did not think about what Kiwi might be doing and I watched a TV program about Queen Elizabeth II while the Chief cursed and did a truly pathetic job of ironing his own slacks. Ironing had been a Mom job. He kept pausing to consult the crimson horseshoe ring around the iron’s edges, as if the appliance itself might offer him some advice on how to beat the wrinkles.

The TV documentary I was watching was so boring that it felt like taking medicine, a thick syrup of information, a good antidote to thoughts.

So that I did not think: where was Kiwi sleeping tonight?

I did not worry: what was Kiwi eating tonight?

It did not occur to me to wonder: How much money did he have left? Was he safe? Was he lost?

Without looking up from the ironing board, my dad began to talk to me. His voice was so low that at first I didn’t realize we were having a conversation over the drone of the television. He had some urgent business on the mainland, he said, that was going to require a jaunt to Loomis County. That was how he always put it to us when he left on business, “a jaunt.” When Mom was well these trips could last a month or more. His eyes looked watery and small behind the iron’s steam.

“You’ll be okay?”

“Sure. You do these trips all the time.” Which was true — the Chief went on three or four “jaunts” a year — although this would be the first time he’d left since Mom died.

“Gus Waddell is going to help you with the Seths, I got him on the horn today … think you can manage? Two weeks this time, I’m thinking, maybe three …”

I nodded. Inside the TV screen Elizabeth II was putting the millionth pin into her hair. DRAMATIC RE-CREATION! flashed across the bottom; truly I had never seen anything less dramatic in my life.

“Ossie is sixteen now, Chief. We’re not babies.”

The Chief didn’t go into much detail about his upcoming mainland trip, but I understood that it had something to do with raising more capital for his Carnival Darwinism ideas. He was seeking investors. New partners. Men with the foresight to invest in our family’s evolution!

“We don’t have generations to wait around, try things out, see: Does it work? Is it a good adaptation? None of that bullshit, Ava. We want to get this thing done soon.”

“Okay, Dad. Sounds good.”

He was going to buy us adaptations: wings and goggled eyes, skin suits, new tridents for hooking Seths. The crocs in the Carolinas could be shipped to us by Christmas. Soon the indigenous Bigtrees would be able to compete with our niche competitor, that exotic invasive species of business, the World of Darkness.

I mentioned that he might run into Kiwi on the streets of downtown Loomis, and he looked up at me through a fog.

“What’s that now, Ava?” he bellowed across the carpet. Steam came dreaming up from the little ark of the iron.

“Who?”

The last tourist we ever had that summer came on a Friday in June, four days after Kiwi left our island. It was raining, and I barely remember what she looked like. I remember her running up the boardwalk, screaming, had we seen her hat? She was worried about missing the ferry back.

Some things you know right away to be final — when you lose your last baby tooth, or when you go to sleep for the ultimate time as a twelve-year-old on the night before your thirteenth birthday. Other times, you have to work out the milestone later via subtraction, a math you do to assign significance, like when I figured out that I’d just blown through my last-ever Wednesday with Mom on the day after she died. “We do not have your hat, ma’am,” the Chief apologized to this tourist, and she was very upset. She jogged back toward the ferry dock in a huff and I remember that as being one of the few times after the End had begun that I was glad to see a tourist go. Later we did find the hat, a crinkly pink-and-white-striped visor, mall-fancy from some chain haberdashery, and the Chief put it up for sale in our Bigtree Gift Shop for sixteen dollars, similarly ignorant of the fact that we were not going to have any more customers. We must’ve had a last customer make a last purchase in the gift shop and completely missed that milestone, too.

Nobody came the following day, or the day after, and a week later the Chief would “temporarily suspend” all Swamplandia! shows and activities in preparation for his business trip to Loomis County.