CHAPTER NINE. The Dredgeman’s Revelation

When the Chief called us on the kitchen telephone to see how we were doing, I said, “Fine, Dad.” And when he asked me about the Seths, I said the same. Everything was fine, everyone was gone. The park was still “temporarily closed” with green tarps drawn over all the airboats and picnic tables. The park was all ours. Without a show to perform, the whole island had become our backstage. The Seths grinned up at us, our only audience. One afternoon Osceola and I fed cookies and whipped cream to the Seths to see what would happen. Nothing happened. I wrote M-O-M? on the Ouija wood, wishing for dark vegetables, punishments.

A few times I walked out to the original gator hole. The baby Seth rode in my coveralls with her fingerling jaws taped up, a little coal in my pocket. My face in the water looked ugly, I thought, bulbous and freckled like some red-spotted frog. Even the gator hole was derelict that summer — algae covered its surface. No mama gator and no hatchlings. Unmenaced, all the fish inside the hole had grown huge and lippy. The bass turned in a thick circle, a clock of gloating life. You guys think you’re safe? The buzzards are going to come and eat you next, you stupid fish. This time when I ate the saw-grass buds I got a bad stomachache.

Osceola was barely talking to me. I’d trot after her toward the Last Ditch until she turned and shouted at me to leave her alone. One time she sprayed insect repellent at me.

“Ava, please. Quit spying on me! He won’t come if you’re here.”

“I can’t visit the ditch? It’s a free country. Hey, slow down!”

But I’d stop at the end of the boardwalk, frozen in place. “Just tell me, Ossie — who are you going to see?”

One night I finally made her crazy enough to turn and face me. It was twilight, and we were halfway down the shadowy path behind the Gator Pit, my flashlight beam chasing hers along the sticks and rocks.

“I’m going to see Louis Thanksgiving, Ava. His ghost. My boyfriend. That’s who. One of the crew of dredgemen who never made it to the Gulf.”

“Yeah, right.” The lamps glowed. “Your boyfriend.” Saw grass bent westward on either side of the boardwalk. Neither of us moved.

“So what happened, exactly?” I finally asked. “Will you tell it to me?”

“What? Tell you what?”

“How it … how the Dredgeman became a ghost?”

“Okay,” she said after a long pause. “But it’s a secret. And it’s not a happy story, Ava. Obviously. You sure you’re ready? Sit,” she said, and the lights seemed to tremble with her voice.

I thought she sounded a little relieved, and I wonder now if the Dredgeman’s Revelation wasn’t also a kind of burden, a weight that my sister needed my help to carry. His death story seemed very heavy to me, in whatever unit death stories get measured.


The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss; but on the dredge barge he preferred to think of himself as a profession. For the past six months, he’d spent each day and half the night pushing deep into the alien interior of the Florida swamp, elbow-to-elbow with twelve other crewmen, the “muck rat” employees of the Model Land Company. They were the human engine of a floating dredge, a forty-foot barge accompanied by two auxiliary boats — the cook shack and, for sleeping, the houseboat. The Model Land Company was digging a canal through the central mangle of the swamp and the dredge clanged toward the Gulf amid blasts of smoke and whining cables, tearing up roots and bedrock and excavating hundreds of thousands of gallons of bubbling soil. In sunlight and in moonlight, everybody on the barge had to work under billowing capes of mosquito netting — and the weave of that finely stitched protection was what the word “dredgeman” felt like to Louis. Like soft armor, a flexible screen. As a dredgeman, Louis was the same as anyone on deck. And on the floating machine, in this strange and humid swamp, every yellow morning was like a new skin that you could slip into.

At seventeen, Louis was the youngest member of the crew. It was the height of the Depression, and sometimes the men turned to the past for distraction — talking about the girlfriends they’d left mooning after them in red diner booths in Decatur, or their high school teachers, somebody’s family store in Rascal Mountain, Georgia, or their army stints, the dogs and the children that they’d left on terra firma, the debts they’d gleefully abandoned. Inside the suck of these other guys’ nostalgia, Louis became almost unbearably nervous.

“What about you, Lou?” somebody eventually asked. “How did you get washed down here?”

“Oh, not much to tell …” he mumbled. Very little of his childhood before the dredge felt real anymore. In fact, the vast and empty floodplain that spread for miles in every direction around the dredge’s gunwales seemed to mock the notion that a childhood had ever happened. Two skies floated past them — one above and one below on the water, whole clouds perfectly preserved. “One thing about me, though,” Louis said, coughing, trying like the other guys to make his past into good theater. “One sort of interesting thing, I guess, is that I was born dead.”

“Well, goddamnit, Louis, you don’t need to brag about it.” Gideon Thomas, the engine man, laughed. “Born dead — shit, son, everybody is!”

Of all the men on the dredge, Gid was probably Louis’s best friend, although it wasn’t exactly a symmetrical relationship, since Gid teased Louis without mercy and “borrowed” things from the kid that he couldn’t really return, like food.

“I’m not bragging,” Louis said, and he wasn’t bullshitting the crew, either. He was just repeating a fact that he’d heard from his adopted father—“born dead” was an epithet that he had used to needle Louis whenever he moved too quickly for the old man’s fists. And although the old man had boiled the boy’s birthday story down to two cruel words, they both happened to be true — Louis Thanksgiving had very nearly been a nobody.

At birth, his skull had looked like a little violin, cinched and silent. The doctor who had uncorked the baby from his dead mother in the chilly belly of the New York Foundling Hospital had begun shaking it to a despondent meter, thinking, Ah, what a truly rude awakening! Because this tiny baby — holding its breath, refusing to wiggle — was failing at the planet’s etiquette. He did not blink. He was resolute and blue in the doc’s blood-soaked arms.

“A stillborn,” the doc told a nurse. “And the woman’s dead, uterine rupture, terrible …” So this kid had missed it totally, then, his windy little interval between birth and death. His life. And the unwed mother, lying naked on a table in the Foundling Hospital, was now no one’s mother or daughter.

The doctor lit a Turkish cigarette and let out a little cry, a sadness that registered in decibels somewhere between a gambler’s sigh and the poor woman’s grief-mad wailing at the end of her labor — and then another cry joined the doctor’s. The stillborn’s blue face opened like a flower and he started crying even harder, unequivocally alive now, unabashedly breathing, making good progress toward becoming Louis. The baby’s face kept reddening by the second, and the doctor plucked the cigarette from his lips like a tar carnation. He would have liked to keep on smoking, and drinking, too, but babies — you could not just stand there and toast their voyage back to nothingness! Although. If the room had been emptied of witnesses, no nurses, no mother, just this baby’s squalling eyes, and your own …? Could you maybe then …? No, the better doctor inside the doctor insisted. We can’t do that. So the doc put on his self-prescribed green eyeglasses and massaged air into the baby’s chest with the flats of his hands; and when blood and air started to work in tandem and the midnight pigments in Louis’s bunched-sock face brightened to a yellowish pink, the doc stared down at the baby and said, “Well, pal, I think you made the right choice.” The mother’s cracked heels were by this time cooling to putty on the table.

Exhausted, the doctor left the birth certificate blank. L-O-U-I-S read the alphabeads that two nuns strung on a little black bracelet for the baby, because the doctor remembered or imagined he remembered that the dead mother had at one point whispered this American name to him. Louis’s mother was an immigrant from a country that Louis could not have pronounced or found on a map — and if Louis ever did hear its name when he was growing up, well, it could have been Oz or the moon to him, an imaginary place.

One of the Children’s Aid nuns at the New York Foundling Society came in to retrieve the newborn orphan. Louis lost his true past in a few squeaks of her nun shoes on the linoleum. Carrying him away, leaving that widening blank of a woman behind him, this wimpled stranger wound the clock of Louis’s life. The nun (who sometimes dreamed she was a man in advertising, writing copy for Hollywood movies) tucked a paper with a short description of his delivery into his blanket, thinking that this might help him to be adopted by a Christian family at the train station: MISLABELED STILLBORN MIRACLE BABY ALIVE PRAISE GOD FOR LOUIS, THANKSGIVING!

Somewhere down the line the nun’s purple comma got smudged and then Louis had a surname.

When he was three days old, Louis Thanksgiving was added to a group of eleven orphans, accompanied by one nun, one priest, and one mustachioed western agent who really did not care for children at all. He became one of those unfortunates who grew up in the Midwest, part of the human sediment deposited by the orphan train that ran from New York to Clarinda, Iowa; and while plenty of boys and girls found their way to loving adoptive families, such was not the case for Louis. The New York Foundling Society had placed a melodramatic advertisement in the newspapers of each of the towns along the railroad route, and dozens of farm families had gathered under a striped awning at the Clarinda station to size up the scabby knees from New York City. Louis was picked up at the station by Mr. Frederick K. Auschenbliss, a German dairy farmer who treated him worse than the livestock — at least the dairy cows got to stand still and swat flies; Louis was up to milk the cows at 2:30 a.m., spreading manure on the flat fields at sunup. Mr. Frederick K. Auschenbliss was not an affectionate father. Picture instead a slave driver who grew into the hard hiss of that name — a hog-necked man with a high Sunday collar, his eyes a colorless sizzle like grease in a pan, half his face erased by the dark barn. Louis was zero when he arrived at the Auschenblisses’ farm, sixteen when he escaped it — and even Death, judging by the gaps in Osceola’s story, had not yet afforded Louis T. enough time and distance to permit him to tell the story of those lost years.

Louis T., now grown into a bruised and illiterate young man, the brother to no one in that house of twelve, escaped the farm as soon as flight seemed possible. He rode the rails southward on a voyage that had the fitful logic of a sleep interrupted: suns set and suns rose. Forests dispersed into beaches and regrouped again in mountain passes. Lightning sent down its white spider legs outside the dining-car windows and crawled up the pine trunks, trailing fires. He hopped trains that crisscrossed the Midwest, touching golden millet fields and the black corners of the Atlantic before he finally pushed beyond the Florida Panhandle.

Florida, in those days, was a very odd place: a peninsula where the sky itself rode overland like a blue locomotive, clouds chuffing across marshes; where orange trees and orderly rows of vegetables gave way to deep woods and then, further south, broke into an endless acreage of ten-foot grass. This, finally, was the vision that reached Louis T. through the train window: a prairie that looked as vast as the African savanna. A strange weed or wild corn shifted restlessly in the afternoon winds—saw grass, said a fellow passenger beneath the slouch of his hat. That was the name for the long stalks that swallowed the WPA men up to the waists of their coveralls. Teams of lumbermen and government surveyors were working up and down the train rides, an eerie counterpoint to the dozens of herons and deer that Louis saw standing in the marshes. Then the dizzying height of the trees in the pinewoods, the thin millions of them extending as far as the eye could see. They were called slash pines for the cat-face scars left by the gum tappers — already thousands of acres had been tapped for turpentine. The slash pines reminded Louis of a stark daguerreotype he had once seen as a child of Lee’s emaciated Confederate forces.

These woods were deep but they were neither peaceful nor quiet — they were full of men. Axes swung and fell, a blue glinting on the edges of the woods, and Louis followed the blade handles to the stout arms and the square, heat-flattened faces of the Civilian Conservation Corps lumbermen. It was the Depression, and thirteen million job seekers were surging southward, westward, eastward and massing like locust clouds in the cities. But few of these money hunters had made it to the deep glade. From Louis’s window seat in the train, he saw just a smattering of humans. When the train had some mechanical problem outside the Crooked Lake National Forest, they cut the engine and the metal moaned to a full stop in the middle of a wrinkled wood. Out here you could hear the beginning of the wind, the hiss of the air plants and the crimson bromeliads. Oak toads chorused incessantly. If he could hear his own death in all that lively hubbub, he ignored it. Home, home, home, sang the rails, and the train lurched back to life.

Louis disembarked in Titusville and signed a six-month contract with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He wrote his name out LOUIS THANKSGIVING, dropped the Auschenbliss, and then looked up and down the dusty street as if he’d just gotten away with a crime. Why did anybody fool with guns, he wondered, when he had just dispatched Mr. Auschenbliss and the cat-eyed Mrs. Auschenbliss with one bloodless swipe?

“There’s Indians, but they got their own camp,” the recruiter told him in a patient voice, as if this were a concern he frequently allayed. “There’s coloreds here, though, we haven’t segregated your camp yet …” He glanced up from Louis’s paperwork to see if this would be a problem. Louis stared incredulously back at him. He wanted to tell the man that he had spent the last sixteen years living with animals and a pack of brothers whose great entertainment on the Iowa weekends was to devise practical jokes with bulls and farm machinery that had nearly killed Louis in the fields. Louis had no problems with any man alive, black, white, or Indian, so long as his surname was not Auschenbliss.

On his first stint he got deployed with fifteen other men, who were introduced to him by their professions (“This here is the cook, the cap, the civil engineer, the lieutenant, the scout …”). He was now part of a government team surveying the woods around Ocala. Thirty dollars a month for income and try as you might, you couldn’t spend more than five dollars of that unless you were a serious and self-hating gambler — what could you buy on the swamp besides cigarettes, penny stamps, camp equipment? Louis bought a mess kit for fifteen cents. He slept in a tent with five other men, their legs tangled together, the odor of sweat and cigarettes percolating inside the tent’s bubble. Outside their tent, rising out of the scraped stone like the earth’s own exhalation, came the odor of peat, a great seawall of it, nothing so subtle or evanescent as a fragrance — no, this was stuff with a true stink. In open sunlight the peat became an olfactory roar that recalled to Louis Thanksgiving the feculence that hung over Clarinda. Cow pies, Louis T. thought, wrinkling his nose, farm perfume; but out here the air was salted, the feculence quadrupled. He complained about it good-naturedly, happy to have something to say to the other men at night. Our legs are tangled, he realized that first night and every night thereafter, saying nothing and moving not one inch once he found his bedroll, the tent humid with the other men’s careful closeness. Every man had to maintain his fixed position; you had to train your body until even in sleep it remained a tethered boat that wouldn’t rock. There was news that a surveyor for the train company had been beaten to death south of Tallahassee after climbing into another man’s bedroll stark naked—a fairy, a funny one, the men hissed.

Nights came and the moon was so bright that it penetrated the tent cloth. Louis was often awake until the filmy predawn, listening to the hum of the mosquitoes as if even this were something holy. He was in love with everybody, with the heat and the stink and the foul teakettle dredge that had cut a channel so far from his childhood. He was in love with the crushed oyster beds and the uprooted trees. He was smart enough, too, to keep these feelings to himself. Osceola described the way that Louis liked to hoard a hairy kiwi all day and then waited until the other laborers were snoring to open it. He’d pushed a thumb through the furry skin and released the kiwi’s subliminal perfume through the tent. The first time Louis had done this, he’d watched as the men smiled in their sleep; after that he did it nightly, smiling himself as he imagined pleasant dreams wafting over them. His good mood spilled over into the mornings, and a few of the more taciturn crewmen grumbled that this farm kid must have a screw loose — who woke up whistling in 102-degree heat? What sort of special asshole kept right on beaming at you when his cheeks were flecked with dead mosquitoes and his own pink blood?

“Look who’s grinning like an imbecile in the dead heat of noon,” the lieutenant said, shaking his head. “You are the most good-natured boy I have ever met, Louis — honestly, it’s a little worrisome. You just better not snap and kill us in our sleep! I could tell you stories. Strange things happen to personalities this far out, you know.”

Every so often, the captain passed around a flask of purple apple moonshine, joking that he hoped it didn’t blind the men. Louis thought the captain’s hooch tasted like a mixture of Christmas cider and gasoline — it didn’t make his personality any stranger or corrupt his vision, but his smile shrank, and often he had to excuse himself very politely to run and puke over the stern. Louis still had a kid’s broad face, a farm face, but with a sharp nascent handsomeness lurking around his cheekbones — he had what you’ll hear described as a “lantern jawline,” with its presidential thrust, its hint of bedroom avarice. It would have been irresistible to a woman, had there been any such creature in the general environs. The last one Louis T. had seen was the cook’s wife, who had a tall and mannish figure with a dishlike face and mean little eyes, a dirty cloud of yellow hair. That must be the cook’s older brother, Louis T. had thought as he watched them embrace at Fort Watson. Why is the cook’s older brother wearing a dress?

“She’s stately, you bastards,” the cook had said, correcting for gossip.

So there was no woman around to tell Louis T. that he had become, quite suddenly, a handsome man. This had not been a foregone conclusion: in childhood, in Clarinda, he had been a bland, doughy creature. The only things that had foreshadowed this turn were Louis’s hazel eyes and the promising size of him. Louis T. wouldn’t know that he was in possession of this beauty until after his death, when he first appeared to my sister inside a pool of water and she told him so.

The dredge clanked downstream with the dipper handle swinging. For the first time in his short life, Louis had real friends, all sorts walking alongside him into the long glade — calm men, family men, bachelors, ex-preachers, hellions, white men, black men, the childen of Indians and freed slaves; Adams, who had kicked a coral snake away from Louis’s naked big toe and saved his life with a casual grunt; ex-army boys who followed the deer into damp hammocks; drunks who took potshots at the queer golden cats that stalked the perimeter of their camp, and missed; gamblers who took all of Louis’s money with a pair of jacks and then gave (some of) it back to him at the day’s end; all of them, every man was Louis’s friend. When there was light in the sky they waded forward. They surveyed the old section lines of the national forest during the workweek, and during the weekends they “rambled,” as LaVerl, the buck sergeant said: shooting, fishing, sometimes even gator hunting along the nests that filled the unused railway bed. The cook told Louis to collect two dozen leathery eggs from these alligator nests, and then he made the whole crew a dinner of fishy-tasting omelettes.

When the light expired, they slept. White-tailed deer sprinted like loosed hallucinations between the tree islands. Sometimes Louis fell asleep watching them from the deck and it worried him that he couldn’t pinpoint when the dream began: deer rent the mist with their tiny hooves, a spotted contagion of dreams galloping inside Louis. There were bad fires that blurred the world; in the summer months you could see smoke rising almost daily, wherever lightning struck the pure peat beds.

Louis heard from the other surveyors that men all over the country were “hunting a week for one day’s work.” Sometimes when he thought about this he felt so lucky that it almost made him sick to his stomach. Happiness could be felt as a pressure, too, Louis realized, more hard-edged and solid than longing, even. In Clarinda he had yearned for better in a formless way, desire like a gray milk churn; in fact he’d been so poor in Iowa that he couldn’t settle on one concrete noun to wish for — a real father? A girl in town? A thousand acres? A single friend? In contrast, this new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it. Well, Louis Thanksgiving determined that he was not going to lose it, and he was never going back. The Depression was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He had a crisp stack of dollars, a uniform with his initials stitched in raspberry thread on the pocket, pig and grits in his belly.

Elated, wanting never to leave, he signed another contract, this time to dredge a canal clear across the swamp to the Gulf Coast for the Model Land Company. They were going to drain the swamp and develop and sell it, and they needed a team of skilled muck rats to do it.

But nobody had explained to Louis just how deep into the swamp they would have to go now, and how quickly their bosses at the Model Land headquarters in St. Augustine, Florida, would expect the crew to drain the floodplains with a single bucket arm — a Herculean task for any machine, especially for the ancient and fumey Model Land dredge, which made the government vessel look like some futuristic spaceship by comparison.

The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, and spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through twenty-four feet of peat before hitting stabilizing rock.

And the crew had changed, too — none of the CCC boys had signed on with him. LaVerl was going back to his family’s horse farm in Savannah, and the lone Indian on the crew, Euphon Tigertail, who had survived subhuman conditions while working on the Panama Canal, decided that he couldn’t work in the swamp any longer. He’d been undone by minuscule foes, the chizzywinks, and the deer flies. “You sure you want to be a dredgeman for this outfit, Lou?” Euphon had whispered, both of them staring at the hulk of the dredge. Its digger arm was as tall as a house and sunk deep into a quagmire. A pair of enormous cast-steel feet gave the contraption a drunken, donkey-legged appearance. The stack slumped toward the saw-grass prairie, which looked like a drowned and shimmering field of wheat. For a second Louis thought of the distant Auschenbliss pastures and shuddered.

“You’d be better off gum tapping in the turpentine woods. It’s all soup doodly in those prairies, it ain’t like the pine rocklands. There’s nothing piney about it. No elevation, Lou. No lakes or trees or breaks. It’s just saw grass till you want to scream. You won’t have a dry day again for months. You’ll go in there and never come out.”

How could you make a mistake when you had one option? Louis felt that his hellish past exempted him from all regrets. But he was humbled by his friends’ defection — and a little shocked, hearing their complaints about the last months. Ultimately, Louis felt an almost romantic embarrassment, listening to the grizzled guys talk — it turned out that the same nights and routes that he recalled as heavenly had been, to the other CCC men, “godawful months, a nightmare” and “the valley of the shadow — only full of mosquitoes!” When the dredge anchor hit at Chokoloskee their whole CCC fraternity came loose like a knot, and he and Euphon and LaVerl all parted at the dock like strangers.

His first job on the dredge was described by the splinter-toothed captain as “involved”: he had to dive overboard with a knife clenched in his teeth and cut the slimy ropes of cattails away from the dredge’s wheel and shaft. “Removing detritus” was what the captain called this labor, which tasted like brine and sour blood. Dee-tree-tus. A name from a book, Louis T. figured as he removed the knife from his mouth and spit copper. He had split his lower lip. Five times his first day he’d had to jump overboard into that stinking gator marinade and hack at the weedy ropes.

“What do I do if there’s a gator?” Louis asked the first night at supper.

“You put that knife between the blamed scaly-back’s eyes, he’ll lay offa you. Or get the base of his neck, sever his spinal cord.” Ferguson, one of the cranemen, had gone gator hunting with some white glade crackers once and now claimed to be the crocodile expert.

“Don’tcha go for the eyes themselves, though. The crocs can retract those.”

He held up two gnarled fingers and jerked them back into his fist.

“Thanks for the advice,” said Louis. He imagined screaming underwater and the tiny needles of salt against his gums and eyeballs. Louis, curiously modest, refused to strip before diving. He jumped in with his pants and cotton underwear on and kicked beneath the dross of slimy marine plants. His legs floated like two planks behind him, every muscle tensed, ready to jerk away from an alligator’s teeth.

The dredge was there to dynamite the marl, spud down into the blasted muck, spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this task in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through twenty-four feet of peat before hitting stabilizing rock!

Louis T. wasn’t a particularly quick learner, but he was strong and docile and within one month he was doing all sorts of jobs on the dredge: trimming greenish fat off the pork in the cookhouse, helping the sweating firemen to keep up steam. The men looked like beekeepers in their cotton gloves and mosquito veils, their lungs filling with black mangrove smoke from the smudge fires they burned constantly to keep the insects away.

“Line up, boys! Take your medicine,” the cap said, pressing indigo flecks of charcoal and sulfur into Louis’s cupped hands. Every time you asked what they were for you got a different answer: ear infections, hay fever, styes, skin lesions. Gideon Tom said the pills were placebos, although Louis noticed that he still queued up to receive them like a good Catholic boy in line for communion.

“Ahhh,” Gideon said, extending his chaw-stained tongue.

“Stick out your palm, you jackass, I’m not your damn mother!” the cap howled. If the pills were making a difference, it was hard to imagine how bad you could go without them. Men held their fallen orangey scabs up to the sun and cataloged them like entomologists. Week 1: Men couldn’t sleep for the bug bites; scratching at them, and fending off new ones, was an eight-hour endeavor. The insects had been a chronic irritation on the CCC barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they felt pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men’s own thirst. Their dense bodies put a fur on the steel hull of the Model Land dredge. More mosquitoes rose out of the cattails at dusk like tiny vampires. Theodore Glyde, the dredge’s dour engineer, grumbled that he was working back-to-back shifts on the dredge, quitting the deck at sundown to work a second job as a bug killer. Week 2: Everybody’s legs acquired the cracked sheen of cockroach wings. Louis, who had hosted much more colorful bruises back in Auschenbliss country, poured a little vial of alcohol over his shins and returned to work. Back on the CCC barge, they had never been more than twelve miles from a port with a doctor, but now they had entered an unmapped part of the swamp where wounds had the opportunity to fester. Week 3: Sores began to ooze. Of all the dredgemen, only Louis T. was indefatigably happy. He volunteered to haul water off-shift and shared his larded fried eggs with whomever.

“Louis, are you on a diet or what?” Gideon Tom grumbled; he was leaning against the starboard railing next to Louis, gobbling down a plate of Louis’s eggs with a guilt-racked expression. “You should eat, kid. It’s not good to share the way you do out here. What the heck are you always staring at?”

“The landscape.”

“The landscape!” Gid snorted. His broad nose wrinkled as it often did when someone said something he didn’t like, as if he were trying to sniff out what was wrong with their reply. “There’s something … something womanly about watching that, Lou.”

Louis grinned over at Gideon Tom, shrugged; even the other men’s ribbing made him happy. Daybreak, sunset: he liked to watch the red sun pour through the tiny doors of his mosquito screen until his blue eyes filled. Behind the screen he had the face of a man in church.

“Hey, Gid?” he asked his friend when they were baling wastewater later, the sun a pinhead of color behind the green trees. “Gid … are you anxious to get back?”

Warily his friend turned to him. “Get back where?”

And what Louis really meant was Anywhere. Back to land. Back to themselves, back to their names without jobs, back to any motionless, dirty place — or back to either of the twin poles that the swamp road they’d been digging was meant to connect. He had heard of hydrophobes, and he wondered if there was another word like that, for him. Or for what he was becoming. Terraphobia? It was a fear of the rooted, urban world, of cars and towns and years on calendars. He wouldn’t be the dredgeman there, that was for sure. Sometimes, at night, Louis thought in a dreamy way about becoming the dredge’s saboteur — plucking parts like flowers from the engine room. It was only a thought, and a crazy one; but the closer they got to the Gulf the sicker he felt. His sweats got worse when he pictured the dawn horizon solidifying — a sudden break in the mangroves that revealed the swallowing saltwater ocean, the big success for which the bosses of the Model Land Company had hired the dredge and her crew.

“Jesus, Louis, you’re just like what’s-his-name? Greek guy. Narcissus! Just making puppy eyes down at your face in that bucket.”

“Sorry. I was getting a little … homesick, I guess. So you’re excited for the end? For the Gulf side of things?”

“Fool, of course I am!” Gideon laughed, pouring the black water over the railing onto the head of a small and outraged alligator. “Am I excited for a paycheck and a woman and a bed? Am I excited to climb out of this soggy hell and get a pair of pants that’s not infested with forty kinds of insects, and get a pair of shoes where I can’t count my toes? Goddamn, Lou, I’ll be singing ‘Ave Marias’! I’ll be diving for land!”

Louis spent the morning of his death beating himself at hand after hand of solitaire with Gideon Tom’s faded deck. He was off-duty, and free to ruminate. He did not have any headaches that day or dark presentiments. At noon he felt a little hungry, ate some ibis jerky, considered rowing over to the houseboat to bathe. He lit sticks of dynamite and lobbed them into the marl, watched as the white-tailed deer shot off through the elevated hammocks. For every ten hours of work, the canal grew eighty feet longer; they were still months away from the Gulf and the end of their contract.

Louis T. was sitting on the starboard side of the dredge barge with his bare feet swinging, his calves hot against the metal rail, watching a pair of otters mock-dueling in the cattails. When next they appeared they were lovers, their bodies turning in a silly ballet, black volutes beneath the lily pads and the purple swamphens. He was maybe twenty-five feet from the engine room when a roar like a tidal wave rolled forward and nearly knocked him loose from the deck. He turned and watched flames engulf the roof of the engine room in one spectacular red spasm; within seconds a thick smoke swallowed the entire port side of the deck and shrouded acres of the sunlit saw-grass prairie to the southeast.

What Louis saw next came filtered redly through one slitted eye:

A stencil of a man — Ira, Louis thought sleepily, or maybe Jackson — went flailing off the fantail. Louis heard him hit his head on the way down; another man jumped in after him. To save him, Louis thought, proud to have finally made the connection. Foggily, it occurred to him that he should perhaps do a thing, too. This fog seemed to have penetrated his brain from the outer world, because the whole deck of the dredge was lost in a roar of escaping steam. The boiler head has burst, Louis thought, and felt his pulse jump. That’s what shook the deck. He pushed himself up and started to make his way toward the smoking engine room, where the other men were already hauling water.

Louis held a hand to his face and found it came away sticky. Blood was trickling out of one of his eyes and the other didn’t like to open. Suddenly he felt tired, a terribly heavy tiredness. I could fall asleep right here, he thought. His own square face surprised him in the water below the barge; he had at some point pitched forward on the railing. His reflection blinked up at him, as if the boy below was trying to remember how they knew each other. The otters, he noticed, had vanished.

“Gideon needs a hospital!” Hector screamed. “He’s killed, he’s killed!”

Apparently Hector had forgotten the usual chronology of death and medicine as it worked on the mainland, Louis thought grimly — if Gid was killed then it was late now for the hospital. It was almost impossible to push through the wall of steam, and when he finally located the door to the engine room Louis found the scalded body of Gideon Tom. Gid was lying on the floor with his right hand wrapped around his throat. Dead, Louis thought — the steam from the exploded boiler and the still-burning fire must have seared his eyes and lungs. But then as Louis watched the hand began to move, massaging Gid’s black skin. His eye opened like a blue crack of sky and his other hand pushed flat against the metal wall — and then, impossibly, he was standing up, staring abstractedly at Louis, half his face a sputtering blank. His mouth was moving but no words came. His jaw made convulsive chewing motions, and above this his right eye regarded the deck incuriously, full of a blue ancient calm. The Mariner, Louis thought — this line bubbled up to him from some long-forgotten event, a poetry recitation that the youngest Auschenbliss had given at a church assembly many winters ago. The bright-eyed Mariner

Somehow Gid had gotten upright and was now lurching toward them, trying to retch up smoke. This is a bad miracle, Louis thought as he watched Gid trying to move. Go to him! — but Louis was frozen, staring. Gideon took a step toward Louis and then said, with a grievous eloquence, “I believe my lungs are all burnt up, Louie. I do believe …,” before crumpling.

“A hos-pee-tal! A—”

“Goddamn you, Heck, shut up,” Louis said with the first true viciousness of his life. “Hos-pee-tal” sounded like an imbecile’s taunt. What place could they take Gid to? There were no places here. That was the point of the crew’s continued presence, that’s what they’d all been hired by the Modern Land Company to accomplish: to turn this morass into a real place. The swamp was a waste and men had built the machines to fix it.

Something was happening down below. The whole deck had begun to vibrate. Elsewhere the other cranemen were racing around, hauling water to put out the small fires that had spread now to the houseboat. Flames licked at the bleached planks of the cook shack. The smell of burning metal stung Louis’s lungs, throat. Lights rocketed up in the deep swamp like a July fireworks show, and then every bulb burned out at once — the governor belt on the steam engine must have broken, Louis thought, letting the engine run wild and burning out all the lights. This would be an interesting problem come nighttime, assuming everybody calmed down sufficiently to make repairs. The cattails hushed around the dredge, shushing each other and brushing close to the ship like alien observers. That’s what Louis remembered, the purple sky and the grasses winding upward — the world felt as though it were a bubble curving in on itself.

“Pop, pop,” Louis mumbled. Trees stood wide-armed in the river. He felt as though his thoughts were drifting loose from him and popping on the skeletal branches. Something or someone came crashing down onto the work deck on the stern of the dredge and Louis didn’t turn to look. The blood on his hands had become the blood in his brown hair, he noticed, the blood on his neck, on his dungaree jacket. Hector came to tell him that the backing drum was reeling in its cable; Hector’s scream had dropped into his shoes and now he was staring at Louis with a goggle-eyed, just-awakened look. He pointed at the engine room, where two coal lumps — two feet, Louis realized, Gideon’s boots — were sticking out. His legs were limp, and the soles of his shoes flopped outward from the heel in a heart shape. From the waist down he looked like a man relaxing on deck.

“Take his shoes off,” Louis said. “Please, goddamnit, just somebody take them off …,” but the other men stared at him and moved to give the flailing Louis space, as if afraid to get contaminated by his raving. Several of the crew had gathered now. Nobody knew what had caused the accident — corrosion, the captain speculated. He’d seen a two-inch rent in the boiler head. “It was Gid, it was Gid’s fault!” Hector said, then made the sign of the cross as if in apology to Gideon. “May he rest in peace,” he mumbled, staring down at Gid’s shoe soles.

As the men stood huddled on the starboard side of the barge, a now-familiar shape began to populate the sky: buzzards appeared and dotted the watery horizon in twos and threes, dozens more behind these. They moved so swiftly they looked like pure holes advancing through the air, a snowfall of inky holes. Talons began to hail down on Gid. The first batch dove and took Gid’s hat, tore at the buttoned collar of his shirt. Hector shot wildly at them and a bullet grazed the captain. “Put the gun away,” the cap screamed. “You’re liable to kill somebody …”

Everyone was watching the buzzards. These buzzards were nothing like the red-headed turkey vultures they’d been seeing since Long Glade; these were huge birds, black and wattled, and with their wings folded they made Louis think of the funeral umbrellas dripping rain along the stone walls of the St. Agnes Church in Clarinda. Several of them formed a heaving circle around Gid; within moments one had flown off with his cigarettes and another had torn his shirtsleeve loose from the elbow. Two buzzards worked industriously to tug the black shoe off his foot. Louis couldn’t move or think: his mind was helium light. The taste of screws and pennies pumped into his mouth until Louis felt sick with it. Around him the cranemen were hollering Fire! at a pitch that canopied the dredge.

What rolled through Louis’s mind were like the shells of thoughts, a series of O!s, round and empty, like the discarded rinds of screams. A fine tooth of purplish glass marked the spot on the deck where Gid’s eyeglasses had been and Louis got down on his knees to retrieve it; when he felt a prickling on his neck, he looked up.

In a scene that seemed as plausible and horrifying as Louis’s worst dreams, the birds descended on Gideon Tom and hooked the prongs of their talons into his skin; perhaps a dozen of them lifted him into the sky. Gid’s body shrank into the cloudless expanse. The sky that day was a bright sapphire, better weather than they’d had in weeks; for a long time, the men could still see the shrinking pinpoint of Gid’s black head. It was the only part of Gid that was not held by talons, and it lolled below his shoulders as if Gid were trying to work out a bad crick in his neck.

A strangled quiet came over the men after that. It felt like hours before anybody moved.

“You boys ever seen birds do anything like that?” Hector asked, close to sunset. His voice was a child’s squeak, and Louis thought there was real bravery in the act of speech. Louis’s own throat was a desert and he couldn’t have gotten a word out for one million dollars. No, Louis thought, you saw a thing like that and you went deep inward, you didn’t want to make a single ripple in the air.

“Never,” the launchman said behind him. “Never seen a bird behave that way.” His tone was mild and genial, as though he were discussing unseasonably cold weather, or food with a peculiar taste. Hector, in his panic, didn’t seem to hear the answer. Some of the men were still staring at the spot in the sky where Gid had disappeared into a bone-white ridge of cloud; some, including Louis, had fixed their attention on the spots of blood on the deck. The moon was rising. Louis, able at last to overcome his vast, black speechlessness, noticed something interesting that he pointed out to the other men — the buzzards were returning.

People began screaming, babbling obscurely; someone went splashing overboard. Louis heard the wet, frantic beats of arms on water. The birds had completely swallowed the dredge now. They were perched all along the trusses and gunwales and the cabin roof so that the whole structure looked upholstered in black velvet; it didn’t seem possible to Louis that there could be so many birds in all the world. Louis saw a buzzard that looked as large as a man lift and stretch its wings; some part of Gid went winking from its beak and fell into the water. Finally Louis felt a scream tear loose from his throat.

“Oh, shut up. They’re just birds,” Theodore Glyde, the tall, sallow engineer, kept repeating crossly next to him, gesticulating at no one. “They’re just filthy buzzards, they shouldn’t hurt us at all, anyhow, men, we’re alive …” He went on and on like this as the buzzards grew in size and definition — how could more be coming? Louis wondered. Hundreds more were coming. He stood there and waited with a pale, uplifted face. He might have looked courageous from the outside. Theodore Glyde was still throwing his arms around as if he could argue his death back into the hole of the moon.

“Here they come, fellas,” Louis T. said quietly, and beside him Theodore snorted with disgust and crossed his long arms in their slate-blue sleeves as if he were impatient to prove a point.

Oh God, Louis thought. He didn’t feel any more horror — just pure sadness, because he was seventeen that summer and he didn’t want to go. His real life had begun less than a year ago. I’m next.


And, Osceola told me in a whisper, he was. We sat there for a full minute listening to a wild gator clawing through the brush that lined the boardwalk. Afterward, she swore me to secrecy.

“You cannot tell anybody, Ava Bigtree.”

“Gee, okay. I’ll try …”

I pointed backward at the dark windows of our house and for some reason we both broke up, laughing and laughing. I made binoculars with my hands and pretended to scan the boardwalk for tourists.

“Got that, everybody?” I said. “It’s a secret!”

But then I saw, through the open fists of my binoculars, that Ossie’s pale eyes above her laughing mouth were filling with tears. It was strange to watch a face having that kind of secret disagreement with itself. For some reason I flashed to a dry, sunny day last year outside the hospital, to the Chief’s deadcalm eyes over his screaming red mouth.

We walked up the steps to the Bigtree Swamp Café and ate two pistachio cones while a storm rolled in. The longer I thought about the Dredgeman’s story, the more convinced I became that Louis was or had been real. How else could Ossie know about his death in such detail? My sister could memorize obituaries but tonight’s performance had been different. She hadn’t stuttered at all, she’d used words I thought she couldn’t possibly know. And then there was her face as she told it — she had reacted to her own recitation of the Dredgeman’s Revelation like a first-time listener. My sister’s eyes had turned melty and black as the cook shack fire spread. We’d both gasped when Gid died, and when the white sky had swallowed him cold. When the dredge wrecked, we’d been truly afraid.

Now Ossie crunched into her cone. “You want more ice cream, Ava?”

A tumor-headed buzzard cocked its head and looked at us from behind the café glass, not quizzically like a sparrow or a gull, but with a buzzard’s bored wisdom, and I imagined then that this bird, too, must also know the story, and that all the quiet trees and clouds had always known the story. I ate the second stale cone my sister handed me, licked green drops from the back of my palm. We polished off a tub of sprinkles. They covered our hands like magnetic shavings, and we were still giggling about our “gloves” when the power went out.

“Ava? That’s you, right? Don’t move. It’s okay. I’ll get candles.”

“Why not ask your boyfriend to do it?” I whispered, waiting to see if the café light would flicker on again. Louis Thanksgiving could be just outside the café windows. He could be inside this room with us, I shivered, riding out the storm. Ossie, I almost screamed, until it occurred to me that the ghost could also be inside of her.


Later, back in our bedroom, my sister unscrolled another, smaller map. She said she’d found it in the cuddy cabin on one of her dates.

“Look, Ava,” she whispered. “Louis says this is where the door to the underworld opens …”

“Na-uh.” I squinted at the map. “That’s the Eye of the Needle.”

I recognized the coordinates she was pointing to — we labeled this place on our own souvenir Swamplandia! maps and place mats. The Eye of the Needle was an Indian landmark. Grandpa Sawtooth had been fishing out there. Good red snapper hole.

“Of course it’s a real place, silly. But it’s also one of the thruways to the underworld. A gateway to the world of the ghosts.”

“The underworld? You mean, like, hell?” Just the word made my mouth go dry; I didn’t even like living this close to Loomis County. “Does the Chief know?”

The Eye of the Needle was a full day’s journey by airboat from our island — at least that, given how difficult it was to navigate the narrow mangrove tunnels between Swamplandia! and the Gulf-side shell mounds. Tourists certainly couldn’t get there, and we kids had never been. Grandpa Sawtooth took a photograph of the Eye of the Needle passageway during his rambles in the forties: a gray channel cut between two twenty-acre islands made entirely of shells. These islands looked like twin boulders to me, or like one island that lived next to its echo. Two intricate skulls rising out of the river. They are hundreds or maybe even thousands of years old — the Calusa Indians contructed the mounds out of clay and every kind of local shell: oysters and conchs and whelks. The Calusa Indians were well established in our swamp when Ponce de León arrived in 1513, and they probably hugged the shoreline of Florida for hundreds of years before the European contact; by the late 1700s their tribe had disappeared, undone by Spanish warfare and enslavement, and by microbes: smallpox and measles. The Calusa shell mounds, these seashell archipelagos, had outlasted their architects by at least five hundred years. You can find them scattered throughout the Ten Thousand Islands; visitors will drag their kayaks up a shell mound’s glittery shores and picnic there. On the Gulf side a 150-acre shell mound supports a modern township. But the Eye of the Needle was a special landmark, known only to locals, and very remote.

“The Chief doesn’t know a thing about this passage to the underworld,” said Ossie. “Nobody living does, except for me, and I only know because Louis told me on the Ouija board.”

“So how come Louis knows?”

“Uh, because he’s a ghost? It’s a doorway to the underworld, Ava. The whole dredge crew is there. It’s where Louis goes when he’s not with me — he crosses over.”

Ossie pronounced the word “underworld” with great authority, as if we were talking about Cincinnati or Peru.

I got excited then. “Have you been there, Os? To the, ah, the underworld?”

“Not yet.”

“So you don’t know what it’s like … down there?”

“Not really. Louis can’t describe it to me. Louis says it’s the kind of place you have to see to believe.”

“Okay.” I was thinking that we might find our mother in this place, and I was also thinking that my sister was officially nuts. “You’d think Grandpa Sawtooth would have mentioned something about all this, though.”

Ossie smoothed a wrinkle in the old map and met my gaze with clear, violet eyes.

Grandpa? He’s a great wrestler but he’s no Spiritist. I’m sure he thought the Eye was just a pile of rocks. He didn’t have a clue what he was looking at.”


Weekend 3: The Chief is still gone.

Seths: Ninety-eight.

Sisters: Two.

Brothers: Zero.

Tourists: Zero.

Ghosts: One.

Park Hours:?

Mom:???


Gus Waddell came by late Saturday to see how we were doing.

“Most awesome, Uncle Gus,” I said from the kitchen table, not looking up. The mail crashed onto the dark sea of wood around me — I was coloring. Even I knew that I was years too old for this baby activity. Next I’d be playing dolls like some mainland girl. Using my gator noose as a jump rope. Well, somebody stop me, I frowned, snapping a blue crayon.

“Whatcha drawing there, Ava Bigtree? That sure is — huh.”

I had filled in a dozen sheets with single colors, our Bigtree tribal colors: Indian red and heron blue. The whole time I was coloring, I lived a second life in my head. I’d glance up at the kitchen clock every minute or so and think: Now is when our matinee should begin. Now is when the Chief flips on the blue lights. Gold, clap! Orange, clap! Red lights. Now here comes the song — ba-da-dum! Now Hilola Bigtree is climbing the ladder, waving at all the tiny cheering people; now she is running down the diving board; and here, ladies and gentlemen, she hits the water! …

Behind me, Uncle Gus coughed.

“I see you, ah, you like the color blue there.”

“Yup.”

Uncle Gus smelled like eggs and diesel and I wished that he would please go away. We had our food, our mail, we were all set. Uncle Gus seemed to want to pat my back, but perhaps couldn’t figure out how or where to touch a kid for sympathy purposes; his large hand hovered near my right ear, then dropped back to his side.

“You sure you’re all right? You know, I told your old man this already, but you girls are welcome to spend the night at our place, anytime. Mrs. Waddell would love to have you over.”

“Thanks. Maybe next week. We’re going good, Gus. I fed the Seths a few hours ago. Ossie is good, Judy Garland is good. It’s good here. Quiet.”

That morning I’d found a half-dead gator in our Pit. She looked like the drowned gators that wash up after storms, their blond tongues glittering with hundreds of decaying minnows. She was alive but I couldn’t tell what was wrong with her — disease was so infrequent among our alligators that scientists from the University of Florida came out once a year to take samples of their blood. I’d let her rest her leathery head against my shoulder while I touched the saffron plates of her neck. The Chief says it’s a terrible sign when a monster gives you this kind of access.

On Tuesday, it seemed that good news had come at last! Gus brought me another letter. This one came in an envelope with Loomis University’s orange-and-green seal on it.

Dear Ms. Bigtree:

Thank you for your inquiry. I have done some research on your behalf; unfortunately no such Commission or Committee or alligator-wrestling competition has ever existed. You might visit the Miccosukee Indian Reservation to watch a live alligator show.



Regards,


Amalia Curtis


Secretary to the President


University of Loomis

I tore up this letter within seconds of finishing it, put the bits of it into a plastic bag, and shook the bad news out over the Gator Pit. Later I caught some sunfish for the red Seth — she was eleven and three-quarter inches now, and very healthy-seeming, not sluggish or inappeteant or anything, a few more centimeters and maybe it would be safe to share her with Ossie and the Chief. Not tourists, though, I frowned; I really did not want strangers to see her yet, even though I knew that was the ultimate point of our training. I practiced with her for two hours. I had her to where she would walk this perfect debutante circle around my Swamplandia! ball cap. She would bite my finger with a precocious viciousness. We were going to get famous and save the park. My dream kicked painfully inside of me, and I was surprised to find how easy it was to go on working toward it as if I’d never heard from Mrs. Amalia Curtis.

I didn’t try to write the commission again, but I did begin a letter to my brother.

Dear Kiwi,

I tapped the pencil against my lips. How to explain Louis Thanksgiving? Already I had amassed a stack of Bigtree postcards that I planned to send to him in bulk just as soon as he wrote with his new address. Weeks and weeks of postcards, our mother’s face on most of them. I liked the satisfying clack the stack made against the edge of our dresser, like I’d collected Time itself for my brother. Kiwi could just read these, come back to the swamp, and pick up where he left off.

Dear Kiwi,

How are you? Good, I hope. Are you in a college yet? I wanted to tell you something: last night I met Ossie’s boyfriend. His name is Louis, and he is a dredgeman. I don’t know, Kiwi. I think I maybe believe in this one? You know what, as far as ghosts go he is really not so bad. He sure got a raw deal in his first lifetime. Ossie is saying that he’s “the One,” which means that we could have a ghost for a brother-in-law, haha. Poor Ossie. I guess I’ll have to tell you the rest in person … hint hint. We miss you.

Your sister,


Ava Bigtree

Now that the Chief was gone I left the TV news on all the time. I knew about the gas hike in Loomis County and the famine in Uganda, the mayor’s “fiscal indiscretions.” Kiwi’s bulb burned like a lighthouse at the top of our stairs. In the new emptiness I’d made a series of discoveries. For example, if you stared out our bedroom window you could see a forest of dark, inverted trees in the pond beyond the kapok. Pop ash, the kapok, mahoganies, all draped with the irregular lace of Spanish moss — the pond was about fifty feet wide, but it repeated every leaf and branch in a deep layer of endless colors. This second forest had a watery, independent life. Where did the real woods begin? you’d start to wonder after a while.

Two cinnamon lizards blinked at me from behind Ossie’s unmated work boot. Earlier I’d searched the park for her and then given up to read my Bandits of the West comics. Cowboys were still the closest things to alligator wrestlers I had found in kids’ literature — they lassoed the killing horns of steers and smoked like Dad, drank like Grandpa, wore Mom’s secret smile. That night I gave myself fifteen pumps of Mom’s perfume. Then I let the whole bottle drop onto the floor. Glass flew everywhere. Our bedroom became a terrible canopy of artificial roses. The glass shards I left alone until the thought of my sister cutting her feet on one grew unbearable and I swept them into the dustbin. Ossie is going to really lay into me, I thought. But dawn broke and my sister’s bed was still made. She strolled up to the house at noon, smiling cheerfully, with huge bags under her eyes.

“Where were you?” I asked dully. I felt exhausted just looking at her. After hours of pumping up for a big speech my anger turned tail on me, slinking away.

“A secret. But don’t worry, Ava,” she smiled. “Louis takes care of me out there.”

Wednesday was the same, and Thursday — she stayed out all night. When she came home she slept through most of the day. On Friday, I did the usual: fed our gharials, visited the red Seth and brought her fresh water, checked on the incubators, gave Judy Garland her raw tarpon and berries, went back to the house to make myself a jam and jam sandwich. When I got to the kitchen I saw a white paper rolled small as a cigarette — someone had pushed a note through a rip in our screen door:

PAYMENT FOR SERVICES RENDERED REQUESTED—

Yrs, The Bird Man

“You don’t think some tourist left it?”

“A tourist from what planet? Ossie, the ferry hasn’t even been here today.”

We were in the cypress dome, gathering petals and roots for one of her spells. The interior trees in a cypress dome are one hundred feet tall, with roots, or “knees,” that stick out of the water and breathe for them; with their veins of vines they look like petrified rain. Really, it feels like you’re walking through the weather of the dinosaurs. The gray-blue fossil of a storm, now dropping small leaves. I watched my sister stand The Spiritist’s Telegraph against a live oak, her mouth full of flowers.

“Anyways, that doesn’t make sense, Os. Why would a tourist want payment from us?”

“Well, Gus will probably know what to do.” My sister yawned. Her eyes watered behind a flume of swamp violets and orchids.

“Hey, P.S., you look super really ugly,” I said. Ossie was wearing all of our mom’s makeup at once. “Your eyelashes look like spider legs.”

“You don’t own her, Ava. Anyway, you’re too young to wear mascara.” She blinked her clotted eyelids and shook the note. “ ‘The Bird Man,’ ” she laughed. “How silly. Maybe Uncle Gus is playing a trick on us.” She handed it to me. “Write one back.” She shrugged. “Put the Chief’s mainland phone number on it, let him deal with this.”

Once you exited the cypress dome, you followed a little dip in the elevation of the island and wound up in a swampy meadow on the banks of a brown canal that was often more mud than water, a place we called the Last Ditch. It was about two miles from the touristed park, at the extreme end of our wanderings; you couldn’t penetrate the mangrove scrawl on the opposite side of that canal without a machete. Osceola was wandering around the Last Ditch, picking a bouquet for herself. She kept reaching up to them on her tiptoes, huffing like those ladies in neon unitards we sometimes watched doing Stretch for the Stars! on Grandpa Sawtooth’s rabbit-eared TV. She’d amassed an armful of cowhorn orchids, an epiphyte species that grew on the sunlit side of these trunks.

We’d been collecting the orchids all afternoon and we were both panting and crosshatched with scratches when Ossie spotted a cowhorn orchid wrapped serpentlike around the uppermost branch of a live oak.

“That one,” Ossie said, pointing at the lone blossom on a spindle of raveling bark almost twenty feet above our heads. “That’s the one the ghost wants.”

“Of course it is,” I muttered, wedging my sneaker into the crotch of the tree and hoisting myself onto one of the strongest-looking branches near the trunk’s base.

“Hey,” I hollered. “Tell the ghost to pick another one. That branch won’t hold me.”

“I didn’t ask you to do it,” she called up to me. “He did.” And here she jerked her thumb at the black wreck of the Model Land Company dredge.

“Ossie, I can’t,” I yelled, already halfway up the bald cypress. A fist of wood broke off under my hand, and for a second I saw long stripes of ants run like wet paint; I swung my leg horizontally as high as I could manage, huffing air. A prong of little ants went running over my left hand. The world swooned below me.

Now I made the time-honored, biblical and mythical and TV mountain-climbing movie mistake of looking down: my sister was small as a rag doll. Birds whirled like paper scraps around the bottom of the trunk. I saw where a long metal blade from some quartered machine was sunk into the earth like an ax head buried in some giant’s green scalp. The dredge rocked gently on the canal.

I tipped my chin skyward: the yellow orchid was two feet above my outstretched hand. The wind lifted the tiniest hairs on the back of my neck and I was reaching blindly, clumsily for the yellow orchid, hugging the trunk with one arm and swinging wildly with the other, scraping the same tough nub of bark and getting fistfuls of air. On the third grab I got it. Something shuffled the air below my feet and a cormorant streaked cobalt mere inches from my face, upsetting my balance; I righted myself, panting.

“I almost fell,” I screamed down at Ossie, wanting to get credit for this. It had started to rain lightly. Below me, I could hear it landing on the roof of the dredge barge with a tinny drub-drubdrub. I began my one-handed descent down the tree. Lightning cracked the sky and then I did fall, crashing down the tree. My T-shirt rolled up as branches snapped, Ossie squealing at me at top volume. For a crazy second I worried that my belly was going to peel away, torn off by the rough bark. Then it was over; I was a jumble of limbs in the marl. Somehow I managed to hang on to the thin stem all the way to the bottom.

“Here!” I screamed, thrusting the crushed orchid at Ossie. “Your ghost is a jerk. Do you want me to die and haunt you? Because I swear I will.”

If I were a ghost I would ride that pointer around her Ouija like a little white Cadillac, giving her so much grief! I would—

Something flashed inside the dredge cabin — half a man’s face. His nose and neck and lips were plume-thin. Then he disappeared into the glare on the porthole.

“Did you see that?” I asked softly.

“Yeah, wow. That fall looked like it hurt. You okay?” She gave me a squeeze and dropped my hand. “Thank you for doing that. But look, the spell said we needed tree-growing orchids. See? Nothing terrestrial.” She tapped at a line from a torn page of The Spiritist’s Telegraph.

I looked back at the dredge porthole and saw nothing and no one behind the dirty glass.

“Ava, will you hold these for me?” she asked, handing me a bunch of loose spells with titles that seemed to have come straight from the headlines of a woman’s magazine (sleep enchantments, 479; a spell for happiness in marriage, 124; magic herbs to enhance beauty, 77). Ossie lifted and winged the hem of her dress so that her yellow orchids slid into the middle. Fat raindrops were sliding down both our noses now.

“Okay, Ava. I have to go.”

“It’s time for your date?”

Ossie nodded. In the compromised light of the Last Ditch my sister’s skin took on a watery, greenish cast, like the palest rings around a watermelon.

“Don’t wait here, okay?” she said.

“Okay,” I said, as I leaned against a swamp oak to wait for her.

“Ava …”

“You go. I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll save your place here,” I said, and drew a little X with my sneaker toe where she had just been standing.

“Ava, listen. You have the Chief’s number? You remember where he left the money for us?”

I nodded. I thought we were talking about this Bird Man’s debt and I was annoyed that Ossie was going to leave me to deal with that.

“I—”

Then she swooped in and hugged me. Coming from Ossie, a hug like this was very unusual, but I think it’s hard to ever hear your own happiness as an alarm bell. All that I suspected in that moment was that we loved each other, and that things between us might soon return to what they’d been before. I threw my arms around her neck. Stay in your body, Ossie. She kissed my cheek and then released me with a little push.

“Go already, please? Ava, he’s waiting on me …”

She set off across the muck as briskly as a mainland woman who is late for her ferry. Her footprints filled with groundwater and as I watched a dozen tiny lakes opened between us. Rain blew in from the east while out west the sun burned through a V in the trees, bright and gluey-gold as marmalade.

Halfway across the ditch, Osceola reached a hand up to her braid, tightening her purple ribbon; then, just when I imagined she was possessed again and had forgotten all about me, she turned back and waved at me. Her face didn’t look so happy any longer — she looked old to me, older in age than our grandmother’s picture, and scared. A mood could age you a hundred years in a finger snap, I now saw.

I was still standing there when my sister Osceola pulled herself across the brown canal and into the dredge barge, and shut the door.

* * *

Quiet rode outward like wildfire after that, engulfing the ditch and me inside it. I held on to the flashlight with both hands. I listened for my sister’s movements inside the dredge; instead, I heard the creaklings of quick, hunted life inside the ditch and the groans of the taller trees in the center of the dome. When you wrestled Seths it was clear when something was going wrong — even indoor people knew what to do when they saw blood, heard screams. But if Louis was at all, he was invisible, and I wouldn’t know from where I was standing if Ossie needed my help.

I swung the flashlight like a little sword, made a combat hiss. Kshhh! Kshh-kshh! No moon tonight.

“Ossie?” I called once, after fifteen minutes. The dredge hunched motionless on the canal. My throat felt raw and I wondered if I was maybe getting sick. Yes, I decided, I definitely was. I concocted an elaborate fantasy about how I’d break it to Ossie that I’d gotten pneumonia while standing in the rain, waiting for her to reappear. The leaves opened a low green heaven above me. Next I made up a language with my flashlight, a sort of luminous pidgin tongue, a battery-powered Morse code for my mom or whichever of the ghosts was watching me. The day was peppery with rain and darkening. I held the flashlight under my chin, the plastic ridges against my throat feeling somehow deeply comforting, a fuzzy portal opening onto my sneakers. There were eyes in the grass down there, lizards and bugs. I tried to wiggle my goofus slicker on — one of Mom’s picks, a Goodwill special with off-brand cartoon rats dancing on it — and when I looked up again I saw something high in the trees: two shoes. Two burgundy boot toes, brightly polished with rain, the long thin laces wagging down below the cypress leaves. These boots, when tracked backward with my flashlight beam, sprouted two thin legs. Above these I found a feathered torso, and added to this a puffy white face on which — compared to the boots and the patchwork outfit — looked almost ordinary. The man was blinking violently down at me, caught in the light, his pale lips twisted in a grimace. I could calculate a Seth’s age from its battle scars or the girth of its tail, but I was bad with adults generally and this man’s age was impossible for me to guess. He was younger than my grandfather and older than my brother. His eyes were something terrifying.

“Jesus, kid, get that out of my face.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” I lowered the light a few inches and tried not to gape at him. “You’re lucky I didn’t scream. I didn’t know you were up there.”

“Did I frighten you?” He smiled. “Well, shoot, kid, you scared me, too. I was just getting to the last of your buzzards.”

“Huh?”

Droplets of rain seemed to tremble singly along a thin wire between us. I tracked up the tree with my flashlight but I didn’t see any birds.

“I cleared out those buzzards for you. Strange, the numbers of them out here.” He lowered himself delicately from the tree, pushing up from the branches as easily as a mainlander lifting out of an armchair. “Chief Bigtree pays me every year. It’s a service I’m providing for you islanders.”

I know what you are! I thought, triumphant. I should have guessed it right away. The heavy, tussocked coat, the black wooden whistle for birdcalls, the bright eyes in a shingled face. He was a gypsy Bird Man. There are several such men who travel around Florida’s parks and backwaters, following the seasonal migrations of various species of birds. These men are like avian pied pipers, or aerial fumigators. They call your problem birds out of the trees and send them spiraling over the sloughs; then they wait for them to alight on another person’s property and repeat this service. It’s rumored that even the Florida Wildlife Commission employs them when the more traditional methods of animal control are attempted, fail.

“Did the Chief call you to get rid of them?”

“No. What’s your name?”

“Ava.”

“Ava.” He shook my hand. “Can you keep a secret?” He reached his gloved hand out and pressed two fingers against my lips. “Listen to this.”

The first three sounds he made were familiar to me. A green-backed heron, a feral peacock, a bevy of coots. Then he made another, much deeper noise, as close to an alligator bellow as I have heard a human make but not quite that, exactly. It flew up octaves into an otherworldly keen. A braided sound, a rainbow sound. I stepped closer, and closer still, in spite of myself. I tried to imagine what species of bird could make a sound like that. A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning.

“What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer.

The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth.

“You.”

The Bird Man told me that he’d be leaving our island in the morning, now that the buzzards were cleared. “I saw that you folks could use some help,” he said, his feathered shoulders heaving up and down in a shrug. That was how he operated these days, he explained. He wasn’t one for drawing up contracts.

“You’re welcome to stay the night at our house,” I heard myself tell him. “At the moment we have plenty of room.”

I was an alligator wrestler, accustomed to bold movements. On the walk back I took this Bird Man’s hand in my own without looking up at his face and was shocked and pleased when he didn’t release me. Now we are friends, I thought hopefully as we slid sideways over the muck-soils. My roof was a stern-looking triangle above the trees. I’d left every upstairs light on; behind the palm trees our house looked like a fat man taking little yellow breaths in the dark. The Bird Man let me squeeze the empty thumbtip of his leather glove. He’d heard about our shows, he said. The Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular, Swimming with the Seths. I had to explain to him about Mom’s death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.

“I’m very sorry about your mother. What is your performance like without her?”

“Oh, we haven’t been wrestling much lately,” I said. “Our show is really famous, though. It’s gotten written up in a bunch of newspapers and we were on the seven o’clock news once, the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular …”

The Bird Man soared vertically above me, taller than the Chief, six three or six four, and thin as a scarecrow, and walking next to him I felt like a yapping dog, each of my stories about my family and the Seths like a tug at the stranger’s trouser cuff. He didn’t ask many questions, but he slowed down so that I could keep up with him and he smiled as I babbled about the Seth of Seths, my grandparents, my favorite alligator-wrestling victories. He was such an interested listener that I wondered if it was possible that this Bird Man had been lonely, too.

We were a quarter mile from the house when the Bird Man asked to see my show. To see me, specifically, wrestle an alligator.

“Oh! Sure! You mean … now?”

With my ears buzzing, I led the Bird Man (a tourist!) toward the Gator Pit. When we reached the stadium, I showed the Bird Man to an orange seat in one of the middle rows. Out of habit I began to set up as usual but my heart was thumping. I didn’t know how to work the follow spot or start the music; I was too short to reach the rack of gator nooses. I turned the popcorn machine on. I pulled on a wrinkled brown bathing suit I found backstage, its leg holes very loose on me, the material shivery and dank, and then I climbed the ladder to the diving board. I did not tell the Bird Man that while I had watched Hilola Bigtree’s Swimming with the Seths act hundreds of times, and even practiced swimming in the Pit with her, tonight was going to be my first dive. I stared at my bare feet on the stenciled stars and took a jittery breath.

I peered down into the water — I couldn’t see any of the alligators. I’d figured out how to work the control panel for the auxiliary lamps that glowed along the edges of the Gator Pit and lit the stairs up the stadium rows, but backstage the follow spot sat lidded and dark.

I took a final breath and I was flying. Water flooded my nostrils. When I opened my eyes, I could see the Seths’ dim shapes from below, their great bellies that look like prehistoric pinecones and their dinosaur feet. I could see the glint of a Seth’s claws, curled motionless at the mountains of its sides — an alligator’s tail does all the work of swimming. Little starbursts of teeth, pebbles over lips. A three- or four-hundred-pound Seth sailed over my head, and I watched a thin jet of bubbles rising from my own nostrils. Far above me peach ovals opened on the water — a column of milky illumination from the stadium lamps. They seemed to gasp back their light as I swam for them, like good dreams on waking.

I swam as smoothly as I could for the edge of the Pit. My palms scooped through little nets of algae and something thicker. (Don’t look, don’t look, cautioned my mother’s voice inside me — often during shows I could hear her in my mind’s ear, directing me. She’d scream at you good if you goofed a move; she got protective at odd moments. Our mom was her most conventionally maternal when she was watching one of us fight the gators.) A Seth floated above me as serenely as a souring iceberg, its huge legs contracting. Bubbles fell like crystals of salt from its thrashing tail. I surfaced as far as I could get from the Seths and scrambled up the ladder rungs. “Ta-da!” I said lamely. Without the Chief to hit the switch, the end of the show was harder to pinpoint. I caught my breath, my hands on my knees; then I walked around the Gator Pit fence to find the Bird Man in the stadium. He was standing up in the middle row, giving me a kind ovation.

“Beautiful, kid.” The Bird Man clapped his gloves together as I shook the water from my hair and grinned.

I had a feeling like I was still moving, still flying up and up toward the next surface. The stars greeted me like a second challenge. After months of the bad feeling — months of the sensation that I was evaporating, of practicing for wrestling shows we were never going to perform again — I could taste the old Bigtree victory. Suddenly I remembered: I am an alligator wrestler. This Bird Man’s eyes were like new lamps for the old performance. He kept smiling and smiling at me, and when his gaze rolled over my skinny legs, the pins of my knees became twin suns.

The Bird Man waited for me to finish drying off with one of the grungy towels we kept slung over the pine railing.

“That was really something, kid. You say you learned that from your mother?”

“Yup.” I smiled happily and squeezed my toes against the pool ledge, feeling suddenly shy. I got dizzy looking into the pure whites of his eyes. The alligators slid through the murk beyond the railing: lamplight opened there in soft petals between the black water and the alligators’ sand mounds. I switched the lights off; I knelt and checked the temperature of the Pit water with one finger. Then I led my new friend to our house.

This Bird Man was not what I’d expected a Bird Man to be; for starters, he was very kind. He did not conform to any of the common stereotypes of his profession: redneck exterminators, mangrove gypsies, backwoods ornithologists, black magicians, feathered druids, scam artists. This Bird Man volunteered very little about himself, his age or where he came from, but he told me that he’d been working hard all spring on account of the unusual migration. I wanted to ask, but did not: You do kill them, right? Or is that a rumor? And if you don’t kill the buzzards, where do you take them?

“Want to see something else?” I asked him as we walked down the wood-chip trail and turned at the shed. “It’s a real miracle.”

My flashlight found her first, its beam falling through the crepe of the palmetto straw. At her new length of twelve inches, the red Seth was almost too big for the tank now. She twisted her head and let out a dry hiss in the light.

“Beautiful,” the Bird Man said. He said it exactly right, with the whistling wonder that I had dreamed the red Seth would elicit from a tourist. I thumbed her jaws open and flipped her over to display her checkering of belly scales, which tapered to the single row of scales down her tail (which was still fully half the length of her) as proud of her as if she were my own design.

“See? This is her palatal valve, the same fire-type color, pretty impressive, right? And these are her dorsal scutes …”

“Well,” he smiled, “I’ve never seen anything like her.”

He thanked me; he still hadn’t mentioned the money we Bigtrees owed to him for his avian removal services. This made me feel grateful and a little nervous. We couldn’t pay him, obviously. I was embarrassed, imagining handing him my dad’s voice on the phone. The Chief would offer him coupons instead of cash.

When we got to the house it was very quiet — Ossie hadn’t come home yet. I didn’t think she would tonight.

“I haven’t slept indoors in such a while,” the Bird Man told me absently from the bottom step. He touched our wall the way a child might touch the flesh of a strange animal, flattening his hand against the polished grain of the wood and frowning at it for a moment. The indoors was exotic to folks from the remote swamp, I guessed.

“Thanks again, kid.” He smiled at me. “Beds and linens. It’s like a little vacation.”

His coat made a shuffling sound against the wall of the stairwell.

“See you in the morning! The sixth step sags a little,” I called idiotically. “The towels are sort of dirty?”

I watched him disappear behind my brother’s bedroom door, trailing wispy blue-black feathers behind him. They floated on a slender flume of light from Kiwi’s bedroom, dreamy nicks suspended in the dimness, so small they seemed like molecules of night or visible scent. Should I offer him water, a toothbrush? Did he want a cookie or a sandwich before bed, like I did? For a swamp kid, a visit from a Bird Man was like a dark Christmas. I wished Mom or the Chief were there to help me work out the etiquette of the visit.

Within minutes I could hear our guest snoring behind the wall. I sank beneath a dirty cloud of sheets and lay open-eyed on the pillow. I tried to match my breaths with his snores. I had a feeling like I was dreaming although I was wide awake, staring at the beige cracks overhead and floating happily on my mattress. Maybe this was how a possession started? The Bird Man was no ghost, though, and I was grateful for his company. I had childish fantasies about this man: I wanted to hold his hand in the woods again. I wanted to put my ear on his chest, something I used to do with Mom. To listen to the thud-thud-thud of another heartbeat. For the first time in what felt like months, I slept all the way through a long furrow to dawn.

When I woke up from a dissolving dream of great happiness, Osceola was not in her bed. Light filtered through our window and when I read the clock I felt a little sick. I pulled on yesterday’s socks, my muck boots, and tied my grimy shoelaces. I tromped past the wax-fruit shine of the smaller reptiles’ plastic cage lids, still waking up. Searching for her from the crow’s nest of the kapok tree house, I felt chilled and annoyed. This time she wasn’t in the Gator Pit. I followed our old footsteps from yesterday’s trip to the ditch, which now felt like it had been a thousand years ago. Then our footsteps ran out, and fear unspooled through me as slowly as a yawn. The ditch that I returned to was empty. I remember it as being calm and wet, and very peaceful, flat as a pasture in the blue light.

As I approached the live oak in the center of the Last Ditch my heart began to pound — a glowing square was taped to peeling bark: a blank sheet of paper. No, I saw, hurrying forward, not blank, just white. There was a beautiful handwriting on it that I recognized:

Dear Ava,

I am eloping with Louis. That means we are going to the underworld to get married. Do not stay here by yourself. Get Gus to take you to the Chief. Ava I love you very much. Tell the Chief I love him too, and Grandpa and Kiwi. I will see you maybe.

— Ossie

All I could think was: Her spelling is perfect. I pictured Ossie in Kiwi’s empty room, looking up each word in his dictionary. Slowly I got up and walked to the bank of the canal, which that morning was swollen with rainwater and stained from the cypress roots. We’d checked our rivers against Louis Thanksgiving’s map, and it seemed possible that this canal in our backyard could be the very same artery that the Model Land Company dredge had dug out during the Great Depression. I peered around the river bend, saw only thin trees and moths.

Oh-no. Please-no. Mom …

Moths flapped in mute hysterics all along the canal. I counted hundreds, flying downriver like a second water.

The ditch is empty, I realized.

The dredge is gone.

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