Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Here!” I screamed, thrusting the crushed orchid at Ossie. “Your ghost is a jerk. Do you want me to die and haunt you? Because I swear I will.”

If I were a ghost I would ride that pointer around her Ouija like a little white Cadillac, giving her so much grief! I would—

Something flashed inside the dredge cabin — half a man’s face. His nose and neck and lips were plume-thin. Then he disappeared into the glare on the porthole.

“Did you see that?” I asked softly.

“Yeah, wow. That fall looked like it hurt. You okay?” She gave me a squeeze and dropped my hand. “Thank you for doing that. But look, the spell said we needed tree-growing orchids. See? Nothing terrestrial.” She tapped at a line from a torn page of The Spiritist’s Telegraph .

I looked back at the dredge porthole and saw nothing and no one behind the dirty glass.

“Ava, will you hold these for me?” she asked, handing me a bunch of loose spells with titles that seemed to have come straight from the headlines of a woman’s magazine (sleep enchantments, 479; a spell for happiness in marriage, 124; magic herbs to enhance beauty, 77). Ossie lifted and winged the hem of her dress so that her yellow orchids slid into the middle. Fat raindrops were sliding down both our noses now.

“Okay, Ava. I have to go.”

“It’s time for your date?”

Ossie nodded. In the compromised light of the Last Ditch my sister’s skin took on a watery, greenish cast, like the palest rings around a watermelon.

“Don’t wait here, okay?” she said.

“Okay,” I said, as I leaned against a swamp oak to wait for her.

“Ava …”

“You go. I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll save your place here,” I said, and drew a little X with my sneaker toe where she had just been standing.

“Ava, listen. You have the Chief’s number? You remember where he left the money for us?”

I nodded. I thought we were talking about this Bird Man’s debt and I was annoyed that Ossie was going to leave me to deal with that.

“I—”

Then she swooped in and hugged me. Coming from Ossie, a hug like this was very unusual, but I think it’s hard to ever hear your own happiness as an alarm bell. All that I suspected in that moment was that we loved each other, and that things between us might soon return to what they’d been before. I threw my arms around her neck. Stay in your body, Ossie . She kissed my cheek and then released me with a little push.

“Go already, please? Ava, he’s waiting on me …”

She set off across the muck as briskly as a mainland woman who is late for her ferry. Her footprints filled with groundwater and as I watched a dozen tiny lakes opened between us. Rain blew in from the east while out west the sun burned through a V in the trees, bright and gluey-gold as marmalade.

Halfway across the ditch, Osceola reached a hand up to her braid, tightening her purple ribbon; then, just when I imagined she was possessed again and had forgotten all about me, she turned back and waved at me. Her face didn’t look so happy any longer — she looked old to me, older in age than our grandmother’s picture, and scared. A mood could age you a hundred years in a finger snap, I now saw.

I was still standing there when my sister Osceola pulled herself across the brown canal and into the dredge barge, and shut the door.

* * *

Quiet rode outward like wildfire after that, engulfing the ditch and me inside it. I held on to the flashlight with both hands. I listened for my sister’s movements inside the dredge; instead, I heard the creaklings of quick, hunted life inside the ditch and the groans of the taller trees in the center of the dome. When you wrestled Seths it was clear when something was going wrong — even indoor people knew what to do when they saw blood, heard screams. But if Louis was at all, he was invisible, and I wouldn’t know from where I was standing if Ossie needed my help.

I swung the flashlight like a little sword, made a combat hiss. Kshhh! Kshh-kshh! No moon tonight.

“Ossie?” I called once, after fifteen minutes. The dredge hunched motionless on the canal. My throat felt raw and I wondered if I was maybe getting sick. Yes, I decided, I definitely was. I concocted an elaborate fantasy about how I’d break it to Ossie that I’d gotten pneumonia while standing in the rain, waiting for her to reappear. The leaves opened a low green heaven above me. Next I made up a language with my flashlight, a sort of luminous pidgin tongue, a battery-powered Morse code for my mom or whichever of the ghosts was watching me. The day was peppery with rain and darkening. I held the flashlight under my chin, the plastic ridges against my throat feeling somehow deeply comforting, a fuzzy portal opening onto my sneakers. There were eyes in the grass down there, lizards and bugs. I tried to wiggle my goofus slicker on — one of Mom’s picks, a Goodwill special with off-brand cartoon rats dancing on it — and when I looked up again I saw something high in the trees: two shoes. Two burgundy boot toes, brightly polished with rain, the long thin laces wagging down below the cypress leaves. These boots, when tracked backward with my flashlight beam, sprouted two thin legs. Above these I found a feathered torso, and added to this a puffy white face on which — compared to the boots and the patchwork outfit — looked almost ordinary. The man was blinking violently down at me, caught in the light, his pale lips twisted in a grimace. I could calculate a Seth’s age from its battle scars or the girth of its tail, but I was bad with adults generally and this man’s age was impossible for me to guess. He was younger than my grandfather and older than my brother. His eyes were something terrifying.

“Jesus, kid, get that out of my face.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” I lowered the light a few inches and tried not to gape at him. “You’re lucky I didn’t scream. I didn’t know you were up there.”

“Did I frighten you?” He smiled. “Well, shoot, kid, you scared me, too. I was just getting to the last of your buzzards.”

“Huh?”

Droplets of rain seemed to tremble singly along a thin wire between us. I tracked up the tree with my flashlight but I didn’t see any birds.

“I cleared out those buzzards for you. Strange, the numbers of them out here.” He lowered himself delicately from the tree, pushing up from the branches as easily as a mainlander lifting out of an armchair. “Chief Bigtree pays me every year. It’s a service I’m providing for you islanders.”

I know what you are! I thought, triumphant. I should have guessed it right away. The heavy, tussocked coat, the black wooden whistle for birdcalls, the bright eyes in a shingled face. He was a gypsy Bird Man. There are several such men who travel around Florida’s parks and backwaters, following the seasonal migrations of various species of birds. These men are like avian pied pipers, or aerial fumigators. They call your problem birds out of the trees and send them spiraling over the sloughs; then they wait for them to alight on another person’s property and repeat this service. It’s rumored that even the Florida Wildlife Commission employs them when the more traditional methods of animal control are attempted, fail.

“Did the Chief call you to get rid of them?”

“No. What’s your name?”

“Ava.”

“Ava.” He shook my hand. “Can you keep a secret?” He reached his gloved hand out and pressed two fingers against my lips. “Listen to this.”

The first three sounds he made were familiar to me. A green-backed heron, a feral peacock, a bevy of coots. Then he made another, much deeper noise, as close to an alligator bellow as I have heard a human make but not quite that, exactly. It flew up octaves into an otherworldly keen. A braided sound, a rainbow sound. I stepped closer, and closer still, in spite of myself. I tried to imagine what species of bird could make a sound like that. A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning.