Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

So I did believe, finally, in the ghost of Louis Thanksgiving. I believed, in a waterfall rush, in the world of the ghosts. An underworld — I pictured blue mist, rocks so huge the dredge barge rolled between them like a marble.

“I know where the ghost is taking her, too!” I blurted out. “The Calusa shell mounds. The Eye of the Needle. That’s how she says you can get to the underworld — you go between those shell islands.”

The Bird Man got a funny smile on his face. “Right. The underworld.”

“Stop that,” I said angrily, surprising myself again. “What I’m telling you is real.”

But the Bird Man didn’t say — as I’d expected him to—“That’s ridiculous. Your sister is lying to you, or else she’s crazy.” He didn’t tell me what I’d been secretly hoping to hear: “I believe in ghosts.” Instead he ground a pale fleck of butter into a piece of burned toast and smiled sadly at me. Belief didn’t even come up.

“Oh, I know it is, Ava. I know it’s real. It’s just that your sister is pretty young to make that trip.”

Then the Bird Man sipped cold coffee and told me that there was a real underworld.

“This whole swamp is haunted, kid.”

I felt my mouth go slack as a fish. “Haunted? Really?”

“Sure. Your sister is right. I’m sure you folks have sensed it yourselves, wrestling the alligators, living way out. And there are thousands of openings in the limestone and the eastern mangrove tunnels. What the old gator hunters and plumers called the Black Woods.”

I nodded reflexively. We called these tunnels the Mangle or the Walking Woods. Far south of our island the mangroves grew in impenetrable tangles. Their prop roots lifted balletically out of the mud, as if each tree were about to take a step forward into the water.

“Way out there, that’s where you’ll find those shell islands. Most people go from one side to the other and they never get to the underworld. If you’re a first-timer — if you’re alive — and if you want to make the return trip, well, kid, you need a guide.”

I looked down and saw that I was holding on to our kitchen table with my strongest wrestling grip. I nearly gagged at the sight of milk clouding the coffee cup. The whole world was funneling through a crack and reconstituting itself: this ghost was real, my sister had vanished with him, there was an underworld, just like Ossie’s book had claimed — and this stranger knew how to get there. Was it possible for girls like us to get there? Living people? I remembered the map that my sister and I had pasted to the dredge porthole: a wide empty southwest. The sun splashed through a blank grid. But maybe a Bird Man had a special gift for reading blanks? If he could understand the birds’ silence, maybe he could find a country in that emptiness.

The Bird Man had turned to face our door. Was he going to leave soon? I couldn’t let him do that. I couldn’t tell the telephone what I’d done — losing Ossie to an invisible kidnapper, losing her when I was supposed to be the boss of Swamplandia! I felt a grogginess and a terrible, terrible lightness, as if I might let go of the table’s edge and blow away. The clock and the telephone stared at each other from their opposite walls, like parents who refused to advise me. To teach me a lesson. To make me decide this for myself.

“We should call someone?” I pointed at the phone, in case a Bird Man was not familiar with house technology. “I have Chief Bigtree’s number here. Or Gus Waddell, he could search from the ferry. Park Services …”

I frowned down at my fingers. I didn’t want to call them.

“Yes, you can call the mainlanders. Your decision …” His forehead creased beneath his hood. He reached into the feathers and produced a brown cigarette, lit it. “What I’m afraid of, kid … Well, look, they are not going to believe you. Not Park Services, not anybody who you contact on the mainland. And their technologies aren’t going to find her, either.” He ashed into his coffee with the serene sadness of a man accustomed to the worst news. “Not if she is heading to the underworld with this ghost.”

“Louis.”

“With this Louis.”

What would the Chief say, if he could hear me now? What would my brother do? Kiwi would be on the phone to the ranger Whip Jeters and Park Services, using Latin words to describe the crisis. (But Kiwi hadn’t heard this Bird Man calling to me in the woods, I thought, and just the memory of that sound caused many bright fibers I had not known existed inside me to tighten.)

“So she won’t be found, you mean?”

“Oh, they might find her. Of course they might find her.”

The Bird Man’s voice got too gentle. He sounded genuinely sorry for me, like our tourists used to when I explained about my mom. “I can’t tell the future. But if they do find her, well … I might worry about that, too. I might prefer to find her myself if I were you.”

The Bird Man explained to me that mainland authorities remove children from their families — that this was not uncommon. If the family or the child was deemed “unstable.” (He hissed this word like a buzzard, like the wind in feathers.) “Eloping” would be a red flag for the government agents, he said, and “eloping with a ghost” sounded much, much worse. The Bird Man gave me a look of odd complicity above his feathered collar.

“Ask Chief Bigtree. Your father can tell you: the mainland authorities are no friends of ours. Swamp people are this country’s last outlaws, kid. We have to stick together.”

I grinned back at him, happy in spite of everything to be bundled into the word “we.”

“Okay,” I told the Bird Man. “When the mainlanders ask me why my sister ran, I’ll lie. I won’t mention Louis. I won’t breathe a word about the underworld.”

I wasn’t going to lose Ossie a second time. Not to a government agency. On the Library Boat, Kiwi once showed me a mustard-yellow tome, Child Psychiatric Medicine , Vol. A-4. What struck me was a black-and-white photograph of a teenage girl in an asylum, bare-kneed in a claw-footed tub with her hair in a kind of translucent cap, like a shower cap but tight to her scalp. She had unblemished skin and these wafer-light eyes. You could see her blond hair through the cap, wrapped around metal curlers like waves of leashed, disciplined thoughts. The scary part was that you couldn’t tell, from this girl’s scrubbed and ordinary face, that anything was the matter with her. “That place is an asylum, Ava,” Kiwi had told me, explaining the word’s several contrary-seeming definitions. And now this Bird Man told me such prisons for girls still existed: There is a place on the mainland where they hide girls like your sister .

“Well,” he said, following my gaze to the phone. “The thing about that plan, you see …”

His voice took on that cushiony layer that adults use to pad the worst news, a kind of sonic insulation, as if they are afraid their words might otherwise electrocute a child. “The problem, Ava, is that if your sister has already crossed over to the underworld, they won’t find her.” He coughed amiably, continued. “Park Services will be useless to your sister. None of their dogs and helicopters can track a ghost.”

“Why can’t we help them find her? Can’t we show them how to get there?”

“Who? The rangers? The dogs, maybe.” He laughed. “You think we can direct the Coast Guard’s ships to the underworld? No, kid. That’s impossible.”

“But you said you did know how to find it once …?” My cheeks felt feverish. “You could draw those guys a map …”

“But I can’t — kid, the paths are always changing. Even if I could help them, it wouldn’t make any difference. Nobody at Search and Rescue is going to listen to a Bird Man’s directions to the underworld — they’d probably drag me to the loony bin. They’d take you with me, kid.”