Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“What does it look like I’m doing, Ava?” She shook a box at me. “I’m starving .”

“But why are you dressed like that? Did you run out of clean clothes to wear?”

“This is my boyfriend’s shirt. He asked me to wear it.”

I recognized the canary checks, the stains on the collar that had probably set in the spring of 1936. She’d pushed the green cuffs up above her elbows and left the long shirttails flowing over her knees, which looked small and white as clams beneath this big guy’s shirt. My eyes settled on the mole just above her wristbone. Ossie had complained about this dumb mole her whole life and it was a relief to rest my eyes on it; I had the disorienting suspicion that this black mole must be where my real sister was hiding. My real sister had gotten sucked inward and in her place was this weird stranger.

“You’re probably going to get smallpox from that shirt,” I frowned. “Malaria. You’ll probably die now, too.”

Ossie rolled her eyes. A weak film of light rinsed the stairwell and I could see our shadows bending upward on the far wall like candle flames. At a certain point the tall women of our shadows intersected, became the blank upstairs.

When we were younger, two or three years earlier, we used to play a stupid game called Mountaineering on this stairwell, Osceola on the bottom step and me belaying her with the bedsheets on top. We crumpled Kiwi’s looseleaf to make the avalanche; if as a super bonus a pissed-off Kiwi emerged from his study cave, he got cast as our Yeti. It was very life-or-death.

“Remember Mountaineering?”

“Oh, Ava. ”

“That was a fun game.”

Ossie looked stricken.

“Remember End of the World, how mad Mom got when we ruined her towels? Remember that time we got Mom to play, too?” I paused. “The Chief says you’re lovesick. He says it’s just a phase.”

“What? It’s nothing like that. This isn’t some dumb crush. It isn’t … I really can’t …”

Ossie was anguished, or just insulted, I couldn’t tell. I was watching her hands move up and down, as if they might be reaching for something the words could not touch.

“And afterward, when I’m coming out of it? When he leaves me …?” she tried to explain.

“Uh-huh.” I pictured this withdrawal as something invisible, painful, autonomic, a reflexive ejection, like a Seth disgorging feathers.

“Oh, it’s much worse than that stuff you hear on the radio. Your heart breaks, too, but that’s just kid’s stuff, Ava. Heartbreak is just for starters, for mortals …”

Ossie pushed the white apples of her fists into her stomach, as if she were trying to find a new way to feed herself. After a possession came a condition called Spellbreak ( The Spiritist’s Telegraph , page 206). This was when your ghost left you, the end of your séance experience. Ossie said the loss of contact with her ghost was absolute.

“Every time I get afraid he won’t come back, Ava. He’s my same age, can you believe that? He’s a teenager. He’s like us.”

“Oh boy. I bet we have so much in common.” I knew what our brother would say: Way to pick a winner, Osceola .

Don’t come back, ghost , I thought in a shout. Leave her alone. Whoever you are, stay lost .

Ossie thumped the cabinets for more dry food, and I thought of the Chief drumming up a Seth. A jar of gherkin pickles got passed down to me, followed by a brown tin of these prehistoric Little Cheddars, a discontinued brand of cracker. Ossie’s hands puffed huge and white behind the aqua light of the jar. I used my alligator-wrestling muscles to open it.

“He needs me to live, ” she said mournfully, crunching into a pickle. “He needs me to hold on to his memories, and to move around the world … Death kidnapped him, Ava.” She stared at me with dry, serious eyes; for one second she looked exactly like Mom if you netted her offstage and unawares. “He was so young.”

I touched her arm through the soft cage of the dead boy’s plaids. I had just brushed my teeth but I ate these disgusting foods to keep her company. (That was my grand sacrifice — I ate miniature pickles with my sister. In retrospect, it seems that I might have done a little more for her.)

“Are we playing a game, Ossie?”

“It’s no game with him. He’s sincere . Serious about me. You know what I mean?”

“I know,” I said, sick with questions. “Were we playing a game before, though?”

Ossie ignored me. “We are a couple now. We live together here—” She touched her heart through the thin cotton. I noticed two initials embroidered on the shirt pocket in raspberry thread: L.T.

“You and the ghost.”

“Me and Louis.”

And then she gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shoot! I wasn’t supposed to tell you his real name.”

“Louis,” I said slowly. Got it. That was easy: the L of the L.T. I didn’t like this. Something was changing here, speeding up like a heartbeat.

“Okay. And when can I meet him?”

“My ghost is on the move, Ava,” she said — as if her ghost were some prowling scoundrel or a moon on the wane. She smiled at me, her eyes raw and wet. “I think I’d like for you to meet him.”

I loved my sister, so it was with some discomfort that I realized I didn’t want her to be happy. Not like this, anyways, because of some ghost.

She let slip that her new boyfriend Louis’s earthly title had been “the Dredgeman,” but she wouldn’t tell me any more about him. Who was this guy? When she dated the morgue-fresh dead of Loomis County, she taped their newspaper obituaries above her bed. These were recent tragedies: local sons our age like Camden Walsh, the handsome brunette prom king from Jupiter High, who had drowned in a canal, or Julio Sáenz, a football star and galumphing freckle-spattered sophomore in Fort Pierce who got struck by lightning on the forty-yard line. But I couldn’t find Louis’s papers in our bedroom or folded inside The Spiritist’s Telegraph . He wasn’t in her binders or pinned up on her headboard. His name didn’t seem to exist anywhere outside of my sister.

At noon I did my sleuthing on the Library Boat. Again I couldn’t find any trace of him, his origins — no books, no pictures. Possibly she had found something hidden inside the dredge itself, an engineering manual or another Model Land contract? A diary? Old letters from the cook’s wife?

“The Dredgeman???” I wrote on a café napkin. Probably Sherlock Holmes carried a pad with him. Fans creaked and spun to life in the quiet café. The generators hummed. Moths were sparkling around our ceiling in patterns that seemed almost meaningful, stitching a violet-brown lace between the blades, and I mopped my face with the blank side of the napkin and waited for more clues to accumulate.

For a week the Model Land dredge barge didn’t budge an inch. It remained pinched between the clothespin trees along the canal’s eastern bank. It was a delicate and temporary-looking captivity, and I bet the next major storm would wash it further downriver. The boat was always covered in twenty-odd buzzards, and mysteriously denuded of the swamp birds you usually saw out here: anhingas and cormorants and a beautiful variety of heron. The buzzards continued to pour over Swamplandia! in clothy waves; on the radio, the university scientists speculated that the unusual migration had something to do with the late frosts in the Midwest. Disturbances in the raptors’ diurnal cues.

That may have been the case, but once these birds got to Swamplandia! it was hard not to take their presence personally. Bundles of feathers quivered all along the Pit walls and the tramway railings, sprouting bright doll’s eyes and talons as you drew closer. The flock of them watched over our doings like disinterested angels; at that point the buzzards probably knew more than I did about my sister’s nighttime activities. They saw more of her than I did.