Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

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.