Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

There had been a dramatic buildup to Grandpa Sawtooth’s eviction from Swamplandia!

First he’d gotten confused during a tram tour and driven the whole train of eight cars in tight doughnuts around the stilted foundation of the Bigtree Swamp Café, his tramload of twelve strawberry blond Utah tourists waving at everybody in polite despair to please come help them?

Eight days later, Grandpa bit a man. On his face and neck, mostly. Just hanging there from the screaming man’s cheek like a grinning eel until the Chief wrestled him loose. “Oh shit!” shouted the Chief. “Ossie, babe, get some napkins!”

The bitten guy turned out to be a soupy-eyed lawyer from Arkansas. Now as a punishment for his forgetfulness Grandpa had to live at the Out to Sea Retirement Community, in a peeling umber cabin, on this refurbished and possibly haunted houseboat that he shared with a bunch of pissed-off septuagenarians. Grandpa’s bunkmate, Harold Clink, was ninety-two years old and almost entirely deaf and yet he would talk to you only in song, songs without rhythms, songs that he made up; we Bigtrees had all worried (some of us hoped!) that Grandpa would kill this person in the night. The houseboat was retired, too, at permanent anchor in the marina. The seniors got issued these pastel pajamas that made them look like Easter eggs in wheelchairs. If you went to visit, that’s what you saw: Easter eggs in these adult cribs, Easter eggs on toilets with guardrails. Black curtains closed the portholes.

We all sat down in unison on the crinkly sofa. Flat red flowers crept up the wall. A nurse was mixing medicines in the galley, humming some jaunty tune — I could see her big brown arm stirring orange powder through a carafe. Grandpa called this woman Robina, although that didn’t necessarily mean this was her name. We liked possibly-Robina because she brought us orange juice with flexistraws and teased Grandpa with a humor that he tolerated well.

“These your grandkids! No! You produced these beauties, Mr. Bigtree?” Robina’s laughter rose like the bubbles in the aquarium of coffee behind her, rich and automatic. “They must take after their grandmother, eh?”

Ossie and I touched our crazy hair, flattered. Without consulting one another, we’d both worn our dresses. We smelled churchy, like Mom’s bottled roses. Kiwi did most of the talking; the Chief grew small-mouthed and uneasy on the undulating boat. It was like he’d caught Grandpa Sawtooth’s sickness — those two kept staring at each other as if they’d never before met. On our last visit to Out to Sea, the Chief hung the Seth of Seths skull on the wall, next to the steel clock, a gift that Grandpa failed to appreciate or even understand.

“It was your first Seth, Dad!” The Chief didn’t start yelling until the second hour of our visit; you could almost watch his anger rising stealthily, like sweat stiffening on fur. “The Seth of Seths! The first alligator that you and Mama ever kept on the island. You’re going to tell me you don’t remember that ?”

Possibly-Robina was waiting for us at the cabin door. She had wrapped the Seth of Seths skull in two Hefty trash bags, the twist tie done up like a bow, like this monster was her gift to us now. Robina ordered us to take the skull back home because all of a sudden it frightened Grandpa; he’d point at it and mewl, his eyes wet.

“It’s his own damn alligator, ma’am,” the Chief sighed, accepting the trash bag. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”

Nobody had told Grandpa Sawtooth that our mother was dead. I could feel the secret rolling between the four of us like an egg in a towel. We never talked about why we kept this a secret from him — the secret just happened. Somebody should tell him before he dies , I frowned. I pictured Grandpa meeting my mom at a red-lit intersection in the afterlife, his cry of sad surprise.

“Why don’t you kids go wait outside?” the Chief asked. “Head over to the bus stop. I need to talk to your grandfather.”

Kiwi raised his eyebrows at me and Ossie. He stood and pulled his ball cap down, sharked around our father, and Ossie and I scrambled after him. Sunlight burst into the gently rocking room and dazzled my pupils. We exited on the aft side of the vessel. I was happy to leave the perfume of medication and bedpans that filled the cabin. We debarked and sat on the pier, watching the ripples of our sneakers on the oily water. I was prepared for a long wait, but then fifteen minutes later we watched the Chief burst out of Sawtooth’s cabin door. He waved us toward the bus stop, looking flushed and upset.

I didn’t try to talk to him until an hour later, when we’d boarded the ferry.

“Chief Bigtree?” I used Dad’s formal title, hoping to make up a little bit for the indignity of his having to carry the Seth of Seths in a Hefty bag. “Gross,” Ossie had whispered on the long city bus ride to the ferry dock. “Poor Dad.” It did not even look like Robina had given us a fresh bag.

“Ava Bigtree?” The Chief stared down at me. It was a long time before he could smile.

“What did you want to ask Grandpa for?”

“For money, dummy,” snickered Kiwi. “Where’s the treasure buried, Dad?”

“For advice,” the Chief snarled, in a nastier voice than he ever used on family.

Kiwi was still laughing softly to himself, but with these big alarmed eyes, as if only the lower half of his face were getting the joke. Then the ferryboat hit a bumpy stretch of water that splashed everybody’s faces; on the starboard side, a few little kids swallowed up to the knees by their humongous orange life vests screamed in joyful terror; when Kiwi looked over at me his eyes were bulging, his cheeks wet. Over the groan of the ferry’s engine I could hear him laughing and laughing. The entire time he had not stopped laughing.

“Dad,” he mimicked, “I need to buy these saltwater crocodiles, see, it’s for my quack business model called Carnival Darwinism …”

The Chief leaned in and grabbed the scruff of Kiwi’s T-shirt, spoke low and close: “Don’t mouth off again, son. That’s my fatherly advice to you.” Kiwi’s mouth opened like a doll’s, exposing a white paste of chewed gum. Ossie crammed a fist into her own mouth and craned around to find me. The moment passed.

The rest of our ferry ride home was a silent one. I remember it now as a turning point, one of our last “normal” days as a family together, and maybe the last time that we assembled as a tribe on Swamplandia! although at the time I just wanted to get home to pee and watch TV. Ossie hid behind the trunk of children’s life vests and ate fistfuls of these golden dietetic candies that she’d stolen from the nurse’s bowl at Out to Sea. Kiwi and I played cards, Go Fish and Walla-Walla, and he let me win every game. The Chief held the black bag on his lap. As soon as we left the harbor, he lifted the Seth of Seths out of the Hefty bag, cradling the skull with an air of sorrowful apology. The Chief loved that Seth — it wasn’t part of any act.

Two passengers from Loomis County kept staring over and whispering. The Chief was wearing his faded yellow “visiting” shirt, which was older than Kiwi, buttoned up to his collar ( Why , Dad?); he had his big hands folded on the Seth of Seth’s squamosal bone. It sat on his lap like a briefcase. These Loomis men were wealthy, or wealthy to me: they wore belts with shiny buckles, and their khakied laps held fancy red double-decker tackle boxes. They were most likely on their way to play Injun for a weekend at the Red Eagle Key Fishing Camp; they didn’t know my father was a Bigtree, and you could see the sneer in their eyes.

These mainland men debarked at Red Eagle. The Seth of Seths grinned over at us from our father’s lap. The Chief sat like that, starfish-lipped, until the sky paled — and then we were home.