Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

Kiwi groaned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ossie made gentle waves in her cereal milk.

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

“Who took him there, Dad?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did not worry: what was Kiwi eating tonight?

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

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

“You’ll be okay?”

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

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

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