Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

I didn’t try to write the commission again, but I did begin a letter to my brother.

Dear Kiwi,

I tapped the pencil against my lips. How to explain Louis Thanksgiving? Already I had amassed a stack of Bigtree postcards that I planned to send to him in bulk just as soon as he wrote with his new address. Weeks and weeks of postcards, our mother’s face on most of them. I liked the satisfying clack the stack made against the edge of our dresser, like I’d collected Time itself for my brother. Kiwi could just read these, come back to the swamp, and pick up where he left off.

Dear Kiwi,

How are you? Good, I hope. Are you in a college yet? I wanted to tell you something: last night I met Ossie’s boyfriend. His name is Louis, and he is a dredgeman. I don’t know, Kiwi. I think I maybe believe in this one? You know what, as far as ghosts go he is really not so bad. He sure got a raw deal in his first lifetime. Ossie is saying that he’s “the One,” which means that we could have a ghost for a brother-in-law, haha. Poor Ossie. I guess I’ll have to tell you the rest in person … hint hint. We miss you.

Your sister,

Ava Bigtree

Now that the Chief was gone I left the TV news on all the time. I knew about the gas hike in Loomis County and the famine in Uganda, the mayor’s “fiscal indiscretions.” Kiwi’s bulb burned like a lighthouse at the top of our stairs. In the new emptiness I’d made a series of discoveries. For example, if you stared out our bedroom window you could see a forest of dark, inverted trees in the pond beyond the kapok. Pop ash, the kapok, mahoganies, all draped with the irregular lace of Spanish moss — the pond was about fifty feet wide, but it repeated every leaf and branch in a deep layer of endless colors. This second forest had a watery, independent life. Where did the real woods begin? you’d start to wonder after a while.

Two cinnamon lizards blinked at me from behind Ossie’s unmated work boot. Earlier I’d searched the park for her and then given up to read my Bandits of the West comics. Cowboys were still the closest things to alligator wrestlers I had found in kids’ literature — they lassoed the killing horns of steers and smoked like Dad, drank like Grandpa, wore Mom’s secret smile. That night I gave myself fifteen pumps of Mom’s perfume. Then I let the whole bottle drop onto the floor. Glass flew everywhere. Our bedroom became a terrible canopy of artificial roses. The glass shards I left alone until the thought of my sister cutting her feet on one grew unbearable and I swept them into the dustbin. Ossie is going to really lay into me , I thought. But dawn broke and my sister’s bed was still made. She strolled up to the house at noon, smiling cheerfully, with huge bags under her eyes.

“Where were you?” I asked dully. I felt exhausted just looking at her. After hours of pumping up for a big speech my anger turned tail on me, slinking away.

“A secret. But don’t worry, Ava,” she smiled. “Louis takes care of me out there.”

Wednesday was the same, and Thursday — she stayed out all night. When she came home she slept through most of the day. On Friday, I did the usual: fed our gharials, visited the red Seth and brought her fresh water, checked on the incubators, gave Judy Garland her raw tarpon and berries, went back to the house to make myself a jam and jam sandwich. When I got to the kitchen I saw a white paper rolled small as a cigarette — someone had pushed a note through a rip in our screen door:

PAYMENT FOR SERVICES RENDERED REQUESTED—

Yrs, The Bird Man

“You don’t think some tourist left it?”

“A tourist from what planet? Ossie, the ferry hasn’t even been here today.”

We were in the cypress dome, gathering petals and roots for one of her spells. The interior trees in a cypress dome are one hundred feet tall, with roots, or “knees,” that stick out of the water and breathe for them; with their veins of vines they look like petrified rain. Really, it feels like you’re walking through the weather of the dinosaurs. The gray-blue fossil of a storm, now dropping small leaves. I watched my sister stand The Spiritist’s Telegraph against a live oak, her mouth full of flowers.

“Anyways, that doesn’t make sense, Os. Why would a tourist want payment from us?”

“Well, Gus will probably know what to do.” My sister yawned. Her eyes watered behind a flume of swamp violets and orchids.

“Hey, P.S., you look super really ugly,” I said. Ossie was wearing all of our mom’s makeup at once. “Your eyelashes look like spider legs.”

“You don’t own her, Ava. Anyway, you’re too young to wear mascara.” She blinked her clotted eyelids and shook the note. “ ‘The Bird Man,’ ” she laughed. “How silly. Maybe Uncle Gus is playing a trick on us.” She handed it to me. “Write one back.” She shrugged. “Put the Chief’s mainland phone number on it, let him deal with this.”

Once you exited the cypress dome, you followed a little dip in the elevation of the island and wound up in a swampy meadow on the banks of a brown canal that was often more mud than water, a place we called the Last Ditch. It was about two miles from the touristed park, at the extreme end of our wanderings; you couldn’t penetrate the mangrove scrawl on the opposite side of that canal without a machete. Osceola was wandering around the Last Ditch, picking a bouquet for herself. She kept reaching up to them on her tiptoes, huffing like those ladies in neon unitards we sometimes watched doing Stretch for the Stars! on Grandpa Sawtooth’s rabbit-eared TV. She’d amassed an armful of cowhorn orchids, an epiphyte species that grew on the sunlit side of these trunks.

We’d been collecting the orchids all afternoon and we were both panting and crosshatched with scratches when Ossie spotted a cowhorn orchid wrapped serpentlike around the uppermost branch of a live oak.

“That one,” Ossie said, pointing at the lone blossom on a spindle of raveling bark almost twenty feet above our heads. “That’s the one the ghost wants.”

“Of course it is,” I muttered, wedging my sneaker into the crotch of the tree and hoisting myself onto one of the strongest-looking branches near the trunk’s base.

“Hey,” I hollered. “Tell the ghost to pick another one. That branch won’t hold me.”

“I didn’t ask you to do it,” she called up to me. “He did.” And here she jerked her thumb at the black wreck of the Model Land Company dredge.

“Ossie, I can’t, ” I yelled, already halfway up the bald cypress. A fist of wood broke off under my hand, and for a second I saw long stripes of ants run like wet paint; I swung my leg horizontally as high as I could manage, huffing air. A prong of little ants went running over my left hand. The world swooned below me.

Now I made the time-honored, biblical and mythical and TV mountain-climbing movie mistake of looking down: my sister was small as a rag doll. Birds whirled like paper scraps around the bottom of the trunk. I saw where a long metal blade from some quartered machine was sunk into the earth like an ax head buried in some giant’s green scalp. The dredge rocked gently on the canal.

I tipped my chin skyward: the yellow orchid was two feet above my outstretched hand. The wind lifted the tiniest hairs on the back of my neck and I was reaching blindly, clumsily for the yellow orchid, hugging the trunk with one arm and swinging wildly with the other, scraping the same tough nub of bark and getting fistfuls of air. On the third grab I got it. Something shuffled the air below my feet and a cormorant streaked cobalt mere inches from my face, upsetting my balance; I righted myself, panting.

“I almost fell,” I screamed down at Ossie, wanting to get credit for this. It had started to rain lightly. Below me, I could hear it landing on the roof of the dredge barge with a tinny drub-drubdrub . I began my one-handed descent down the tree. Lightning cracked the sky and then I did fall, crashing down the tree. My T-shirt rolled up as branches snapped, Ossie squealing at me at top volume. For a crazy second I worried that my belly was going to peel away, torn off by the rough bark. Then it was over; I was a jumble of limbs in the marl. Somehow I managed to hang on to the thin stem all the way to the bottom.