Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

I nodded. The fan was blowing at the Chief’s headdress, flattening every feather so that they waved in place, like a school of fishes needling into a strong current. Something lunged in me then, receded. A giggle or a sob. A noise. I thought: You look very stupid, Dad .

“You’d better not let me catch you writing to any grown assholes in jail, kid. Or dead guys.” The smile crumpled on his face. “Please.”

My still-secret plan was to enter and win the same national championship that Miss Hilola Bigtree swept before she was a mother or even a newlywed, when she was eighteen years old and had first started dating my father. I loved staring at the bend of my own shadowy features in Mom’s trophies, and this was the largest one: NATIONAL CHAMPION, 1971. AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF ALLIGATOR WRESTLERS. This trophy even looked a little like my mom to me: a busty golden lady with skinny arms and fists on hips.

“How come you never got to be the national champion again?” I asked my mother once when I was nine or ten. She’d won the other trophies here, on our island — the Chief had given them to her. This was still impressive to me. But I wondered: why didn’t she want to beat the Seminole wrestlers, to show the Miccosukee alligator handlers what we Bigtrees were made of? We were pinning up laundry on the clothesline near the dandelion wash, and she’d laughed at me from behind a wailing wall of bedsheets. Only a square of forehead and her dark eyes were visible:

“Because I am your mother now, Ava. Because I have important things to do right here, on our island. Honey, did I leave that box of clothespins over by you? This wind!”

That day a category 2 hurricane was coming; truly, it was a strange time to try to pin up laundry, with the swamp wind whipping our hair at each other across the clothesline like a weird game of tennis. We had the same kind of hair, a black coffee shade with ruddy glinting, thick and ursine like Judy the bear’s fur — a big point of pride for me.

Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she’d have to “take a rest” in the house, but she’d always emerge from these spells with a smile for us. Until she got sick, I can’t remember our mother ever missing a show.

“Honestly, can you imagine me without your father!” She used to say this all the time. With a sort of vacant, sticky violence, she’d kiss the forehead of whichever of her children was nearest.

Even as a kid I understood that she was kissing us to answer some question that she was putting to herself. Was she happy? we wondered. Were we the right answer? My mother married the Chief and gave birth to Kiwi at age nineteen; she started her career as an alligator wrestler that same year.

“She married him too young,” Kiwi told me once in a sad, knowing voice. But when I told Mom what he’d said, she laughed herself dizzy. Then she repeated it to the Chief and they both roared.

“Listen: your brother is an unkissed thirteen, Ava,” she told me. “He is just a boy. His judgments are like green fruit. He doesn’t have any idea about that stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Well, love!” she said, exasperated but not with me, I didn’t think. “Your father and I were sweethearts, you tell me what’s too ‘too’ about that! Without Sam I’d still be on the mainland!”

But one night, the eve of their tenth wedding anniversary, she woke my sister and I and made us come out to the museum. It was very late at night — she’d been drinking rum and soda with the Chief and some of our neighbors. Nobody looked up from the porch as we crossed the lawn. Her palms were damp and she was a little wobbly on her feet, giggling like a girl herself as she let us guide her through the wet grass. We entered the main room of the museum holding hands. “Shh,” she said. “No lights. We don’t want your father coming out here, this is just girls. ” I held the flashlight and let the light settle on one of her posters. In it, she wore her shrug of a smile and her dark hair in a bun. Half her body was submerged in the lake; behind her you could see the orange sun on the Seths’ back plates.

“Turn the light off please, Ava,” she whispered, and I remember her breath hot and rummy on our cheeks. To this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult’s breath turned the big world as small and dark as a boat hold. Our mother took each of us by the hand and we shuffled awkwardly forward. Then she did a strange thing. She led us to the exhibit my father had made of their wedding day. Her dress, a long, simple gown in a mollusk shade of old lace, was behind glass. Her orchid headpiece, too, a ring of tiny, silvery blooms that looked like a halo with all the light crushed out of it. She made my sister and me put our palms on the glass, and then she made us each promise to wait until we were thirty years old to marry, if we married … We had both nodded very somberly. Mom was twenty-nine that year. In seven years she would be dead. We were six and nine at the time. I used to think the promise would make more sense when I got older, but I was thirteen now and that night in the museum seemed even more mysterious to me with each passing year, a memory too baffling to even broach with my sister. If we ever did succeed at locating Mom on the Ouija board, I thought, I had a list of important questions for her.

Where was the contest held? How did you enter? I didn’t know. When I asked Grandpa Sawtooth about it, he’d raised an eyebrow at my father and squinted down at me for a long minute; then he snorted and told me that the contest was held in a top-secret location, where the judges threw you into seven feet of water, and you had thirty seconds to pull your alligator ashore and tape her jaws up. Bleeding too much disqualified you. Plenty of contestants died every year. A pipsqueak like me shouldn’t enter, he said; I’d be gone in two bites.

I researched the Kentucky Derby on the Library Boat — the purse was one million dollars! And those leprechauns were only riding horses. Obviously my mother had not been a millionaire. My heroic logic was as follows: if I was the champion, like her, our fame would be a perennial draw.

You had to be eighteen to compete — that’s what my mother told me at nine when I begged to be a contender. So in a typewritten letter that took me three drafts to compose, I asked the commission to make an exception and allow me to wrestle at age thirteen. I explained about my mother’s cancer and Swamplandia!’s many troubles. My own feats with the Seths I tried to describe modestly but candidly. I didn’t brag exactly, but I made sure the commissioners understood that I was the real deal; I wasn’t some unserious church girl from Nebraska who had only ever handled pet-store geckos, or some inlander, “Rebecca” or “Mary,” a pigtailed zoo volunteer. The kind of girl who liked to do those drugstore paint-by-number watercolors of horses. Shetland ponies. Palominos . I bet the Marys were really excellent at that.

“I am a Bigtree wrestler” was the first line of my letter, and as insurance I’d enclosed a famous key-chain picture of my mother. It sold for $4.99 in the gift shop, and you could also get it on a cozy or a magnet. My mother looks a little older than Osceola, maybe eighteen or nineteen, her hair is shining like mahogany; she’s sort of studious-looking in thick eyeglasses (contact lenses and chaste emerald bathing suits came later, as a concession to our modern tourists); she’s got an eight-foot alligator’s jaws in her bare hands. HILOLA BIGTREE AND HER SETH I wrote carefully on the bottom, and added in parentheses (MY MOTHER).