Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

After cleaning the pit, the Chief disappeared into the Isolation Tank to do some work with a recalcitrant bull gator, a one-eyed, indiscriminately nasty fellow that kept biting not only the other alligators but also any driftwood or pond lily that floated up against his blind spot, attacks which were scary but somehow also very embarrassing to watch. I hung around inside the empty stadium. It was a hot day, and the Seths slid through periphyton, a brownish-orange algae that reproduced explosively in the Florida heat and could draw its pumpkin lace across the entire Pit overnight. Everything else was pretty still.

“The gators are not your pets, Ava,” the Chief was always reminding me. “That creature is pure appetite in a leather case. A Seth can’t love you back.”

But I loved them , the dark tapering mass of them; I feared them, too, their alien eyes and sudden bursts of speed. Chief Bigtree hung wooden memos bragging on them all over our park, many of them accurate:

ALLIGATORS CAN RUN FASTER THAN ARABIAN HORSES ON LAND!

THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!

A SETH IS A 180 MILLION YEAR VETERAN OF OUR PLANET!

“There’s no show today, you dummies,” I told the alligators over the railing. I rained out a bag of marbles and watched the planetary spin of them off the Seths’ black shoulders. The Chief said I could do this because the Seths used these marbles as gastroliths —they used them to grind up prey in their gizzards the way chickens use grit. And gastroliths allow crocodilians to float better — to settle their weight in the water. Our gators were born knowing exactly how much weight to swallow to find and keep their balance.

I checked my watch: on an ordinary day, we would be five minutes into our show by now. My dad would have waded into the Pit water, carrying a gator harness that he made out of old airplane cables. He would have selected a sparring partner, “a big respectable sucker,” and slid the rusty harness over the Seth’s snout. The Seth, dripping and black, would fight like a fish inside that harness while the other gators continued switching through the sludgy Pit, slow and pitiless inside their Seth-oblivion.

Once the Chief hauled his Seth onto the stage, the real fight began. The Seth would immediately lurch forward, yanking the Chief back into the water. The Chief would pull him out again, and this tug-of-war would continue for a foamy length of time while the crowd whooped and wahooed, cheering for our species. To officially win an alligator wresling match, you have to close both your hands around the gator’s jaws. That was the hard part, getting your Seth’s mouth to shut. Mom said that we girls were at a natural disadvantage because our hands were small — they could barely span a piano octave.

But one curious fact about Seth physiognomy is this: while a Seth can close its jaws with 2,125 pounds per square inch of cubic force, the force of a guillotine, the musculature that opens those same jaws is extremely weak. This is the secret a wrestler exploits to beat her adversaries — if you can get your Seth’s jaws shut up in your fist, it is next to impossible for the creature to open them again. A girl’s Goody ribbon can tie off the jaws of a four-hundred-pound bull gator.

But we didn’t just tape up the Seth’s jaws and declare ourselves the victors — our Bigtree show was special because we did tricks, too, and practiced some of the more dangerous holds. Before she died, Mom was in the middle of teaching me her advanced moves. The Chin Thrust, for example, a Bigtree standard. To do the Chin Thrust, you make a latch out of your chin against the purselike U of a Seth’s jaws, tucking its broad snout against your throat like a botched kiss. Another good one was the Silent Night, where you covered the alligator’s eyes with your hands, fastened its snout with the tape, and then enlisted the help of Mom or the Chief or Grandpa to flip it onto its back. This was a sorcery that “put the alligator to sleep.” Years later, I would learn that we were disrupting the alligators’ otoliths, tiny sacs that connect the inner ear with the brain. We blacked them out.

If you are an animal lover, I can tell you what the Chief told us: that it was never a fair fight; that even taped and flipped, even “sleeping,” its legs churning toward an ultimate befuddlement and stillness, the alligator had all the real advantages; that an alligator can hoard its violence for millions and millions of years. A Seth could trick you into thinking it had died with a days-long freeze, a mortuary pose on a rock, and then do a lickety-split lunge and snatch an unwary turtle or a tiny ibis. The Seths had a ferocity that no wrestler could snuff for very long. The first and last time I’d tried to do a Silent Night, the alligator managed to right itself and bruised my entire right side with its thrashing tail, and Mom told the Chief that I was still too young to perform the trick. I felt older now, though. Looking out at all the vacant stands, I felt like I had better become ready.

What the tourists paid to watch, the Chief always said, was an unequal fight. A little seesaw action: death/life. The Chief had long ago taught me a Bigtree strategy called “peacocking weakness.” All the best Seminole wrestlers used this strategy, too. The true champions handicapped themselves, the Chief said, blindfolding their eyes or binding their dominant hand. Weakness was the feather with which you tickled your tourists; it was your weakness that pinned the tourists to their seats. They saw the puny size of you versus your alligator. They saw that you could lose . If you exploited this fact, you could float the outcome of your battle into the air over the stadium, like a balloon. During the really scary family shows, the electric, something-goes-awry times, I would picture it up there just like the Chief had said, our fate, a translucent black balloon wombling between the palm trees.

“You got to remind the mainlanders that your alligator is a no-shit dinosaur, Ava,” the Chief used to lecture me. “Those bored, dead drylanders. They act like they think they’re watching robots up here!” He’d shake his head. “Prove to them that you can lose, so you can surprise people, honey, and win .”

Now I wondered: Would we ever do a show like that again? What if yesterday had been my last-ever chance to wrestle? To surprise the mainland people? I leaned over the railing to the Gator Pit. The little bag felt weightless and I realized that I was almost out of marbles. Oh for heaven’s sake, Ava Bigtree, don’t be so melodramatic! Of course you will wrestle again. Today is a fluke; of course the tourists will be back! I tried to give myself a lecture in my mother’s stern voice. Then I used her same voice on the gators, who were blinking up at me so stupidly from the Pit:

“Eat up, you fools, because no one is coming,” I hissed. Blue and gray marbles caught in their scales like stubborn bubbles. The big yellow shooter rolled around one Seth’s scaly shoulders like a dollhouse sun. They all sank into the water and turned into gastroliths.

“Ava? What are you doing?” Ossie’s voice erupted through the speaker hooked up to the ticketing booth. “Ha-ha — did you lose your marbles?”

Two weeks passed. The Chief discovered that we couldn’t even sell out the once-a-day wrestling show. We started performing for whoever showed up, whenever they came (we were still getting a few confused Europeans, clutching these expired travel guides with hydrangea-pink spines and greeting my father with ¿Qué ? and Quoi? ). The Chief and I cut twenty minutes from the show, but you could feel the tourists’ pity first and then their distraction, their attention wandering the skies of the open stadium like kites. Without Mom and Grandpa Sawtooth the whole show felt horribly incomplete to me. “The tourists can’t tell,” the Chief assured us, but it seemed like even the expressionless Seths had to know that something was missing. One Thursday when the Chief was in a black mood and caught a tourist yawning during his wrestling demonstration, he groaned loudly and released the Seth back into the water with a slap: “Ta-da,” he growled, standing up. “That’s all, folks.”