Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Where? What are you talking about? The gas station? Don’t you read like every newspaper that was ever invented? Don’t you know the facts? People who work at gas stations get shot . They get capped , Marge.”

“No, no. The restaurant.” Kiwi pointed through the scrim of pigeons to a neon B .

“The Burger Burger? I would not really call that place a restaurant, bro. You can buy a cheeseburger there for a fucking quarter . You think the Burger Burger is going to pay you big money? Leo calls it the E. coli factory!”

“Leo eats there all the time.”

“They pay a dollar less than here and you smell like dead cow forever and all the girls are skanks, which is fine with me, but I swear to God they all got herpes.”

“Oh. I see.”

Kiwi wasn’t 100 percent on what that meant. What was the use of talking about anything? He needed to make a thousand dollars this month and he didn’t see how that was possible.

“Check their lips, bro.”

“Okay. I will. Poor girls.” Kiwi was sure he’d read about this ailment somewhere but he couldn’t quite recall the etiology — he would have to do some research later. Regardless of my findings, I am going to wolf like twelve of those burgers . Kiwi stared at the neon B and felt his mouth flood. Hellspawn Hoagies were eight dollars and he had thirty-two cents on his employee card.

Vijay was looking at him strangely.

“You cannot work there. Not to sound arrogant, bro? But without me around, they will destroy you.”

“What are you talking about?” Who could he mean, “they”? The skanks?

Vijay blew hair out of his left eye and looked at Kiwi darkly. “ Everybody . The people who hear you talk.”

“Oh.”

Kiwi pushed greasy hair out of his own eyes — he couldn’t afford a haircut at the moment, either. On Swamplandia! Ossie had taken this duty over from his mother, surprising the other Bigtrees with the steadiness of her hands. Their compliments had irritated her—“Well, I’m not a chimpanzee, you guys. I can use scissors. I can cut in a straight line.” Now Kiwi had hanks of red hair that crimped in the heat like sea serpents.

Yvans had offered to shave Kiwi’s skull bald for him (“For free, Margaret!”), but that seemed to Kiwi like a move of premature despair. Possibly he would bleed to death from lacerations on his head, or more likely he would be exposed to the cruel hail of female mockery. Also Yvans had more than once confessed to suffering weird ailments like “the shakes,” which didn’t seem, as the girls of the World would say, so super compatible with a razor.

“Do you know any way I could, uh, supplement my income?” Kiwi asked. I’m going to save the park , he beamed out across the parking lot toward his sisters, in a direction that he believed led to their water — he could see one small bird rowing its wings into the sun over the interstate, centered up there like the face on a coin.

Vijay was staring at him. “Are you asking me to rob a bank with you? Maybe you want me to pimp you out as an erotic dancer by the airport?”

“Exotic.”

“Erotic. Whatever, bro. Same thing.”

Was it? Vijay lifted his shirt and rippled his abdomen like a belly dancer. Kiwi watched Vijay’s belly button pinch inward and roll sinuously back into existence, which was mesmerizing.

“Quit acting gay, Vijay,” said Kiwi. “I’m serious here. I’m in trouble.”

“How much do you think I could make, Marge? With moves like this?”

“Zero dollars and zero cents.” ( Bro! Kiwi remembered, too late now.) “Hey, I really don’t think you should be touching your abdomen to this roof like that? Because you will notice there is glass everywhere and you’re putting yourself at risk for tetanus …?”

A seaplane made a noisy loop above them, fangs painted on its black nose in a simulacrum of an alligator’s grin. Don’t scream , he heard in Ava’s small growl. For a moment they were in the shadow of its wings, the roar of engines sucking their speech upward.

“What is that?” he managed.

“New ride. You didn’t hear about it?”

Kiwi’s heart was in his throat — the seaplane was landing on the moat that surrounded the World, coming in so close that Kiwi thought its propeller would crash through the Leviathan windows. He dropped his head in anticipation of a phantom shower of glass, but when he looked again, the seaplane was skimming the surface of the moat. A heavy spray exploded around the seaplane’s fixed wings. Something about the way it landed, floats first, gave Kiwi the impression of teeth entering the water, the jet floats biting into the red-dyed water like two bright fangs. Probably just the effect the World of D. is going for here , Kiwi thought. Part of the grand theme.

The seaplane blew red jets of foam across the water for another hundred yards or so, stopped with the whiskers of its propellers trembling near the Leviathan.

“Oh my God,” said Kiwi.

“Right? Say. You know who makes bank, Marge? Those pilots.”

The World of Darkness had its own flight school, Vijay said. The managers were recruiting from inside the World, instead of doing outside hiring, because then they could pay the pilots less—$45,000 a year, said Vijay. Kiwi would have to sell his greenhorn sperm and platelets for a decade to make anywhere near that.

“It’s not even that hard, supposedly . It’s like driving a bus of the sky.”

As far as driving was concerned, Kiwi had once driven the tram into the side of Grandpa Sawtooth’s house. Sky-wise, he’d fallen out of Ava’s kapok tree house at age ten and broken both arms.

“Huh. Forty-five thousand dollars. And how does one enroll in the, uh, the flight school?”

Kiwi should have guessed that some new ride was under way. For weeks he’d heard the ear-splitting construction on the northern lot. From the roof he’d seen Caterpillars pushing the moat into an artificial harbor, the crews installing a slate dock on floating supports that looked like huge gray boxing gloves. The attraction was called the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse: a play on the Bible’s book of Revelations, of course, but also an allusion to a real event. In the 1940s, the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse were heralded as Loomis County heroes. They were young men, out-of-work supply pilots contracted by a private millionaire who had purchased great tracts of swamp from Henry Disston, the potbellied Florida land baron, whose baronial hairstyle was as black and wavy as charred bacon. The Four Pilots carried the granules of their particular plague in restaurant salt and pepper shakers. They dumped thousands of Australian melaleuca seeds from the windows of low-flying Cessnas, shaking them all over the salt marshes and the saw-grass prairies and the tree islands. Would-be farmers dreamed of nights lit by fragrant globes of citrus, yellow fields of corn, and Angus cattle black as jackboots, the worthless saw grass vanquished, the alligators dead, the water drained.

Then in 1981, at the crest of a fitful wave of public interest in the swamp, the famous late-night talk-show host J. P. Twomey had done a series called The Four Pilots of the Apocalypse about the unwitting villains who had planted the seeds of the swamp’s destruction. It still got screened on channel 2, Loomis’s “cultural” station. J. P. Twomey had interviewed the surviving pilot, Mickey Hotchkiss, now a white-haired man with a voice as small as Michael Jackson’s wearing what appeared to be women’s palazzo pants. Mickey Hotchkiss was no longer entirely with it, was the implication of his wardrobe choices. He seemed shy but also happy to be on TV. After denouncing him for nixing a unique ecosystem—“putting the whammy on the wetlands,” as Twomey put it — J.P. forced Mickey to look at photographs of the melaleuca’s conquest. A haunting slide show commenced: acres and acres of new forests composed of a single multiplying tree, the melaleuca; fires burning on the drained land in northern Florida, where blue-green sheets of water used to flow from Lake Okeechobee all the way to the Gulf of Mexico; a final grim view of the swamp from above, silver corridors of melaleucas flattening whole islands into one color like a trick involving mirrors. Mickey’s smile faltered but remained in place. Once or twice the old pilot had clucked politely, as if he were being shown photographs of grandchildren whose names he had forgotten.