Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Five minutes,” said Voila, turning the page of a bodybuilding magazine called Bulk Up . A woman with an Arctic-white smile and scary bauxite skin grinned out at him from the cover. Skinny Voila was underlining something, her face pensive.

When Kiwi got stuck, which happened every third question, he would stare up at this grinning bodybuilder. He felt as puny, as desperate as he ever had during the Bigtree shows. In his sweaty fingers his pencil kept slipping; he’d already broken one. Kiwi had taken many tests on Swamplandia! his pencil moving at a steady clip in the evergreen light of his own kitchen; he couldn’t understand why his intelligence wouldn’t make a fist now, and pound reliably, like his heart.

He couldn’t remember the quadratic equation, or which one the rhombus was, or whether the perimeter of Griswald Wallace’s fence would be fifty-four meters or seventy-two, given the area of his outhouse and the volume of his well. Where the Christ did Griswald Wallace live, anyhow? Why did Griswald Wallace need a fence around his outhouse? Kiwi couldn’t make sense of the reading comprehension portion, either: some excerpt from a poem about a sick dog and blueberries. “What is the theme of the passage about Rochester the dog?” “What do the blueberries symbolize for the dog named Rochester?” Kiwi’s eyes were swimming. He began to bubble in indiscriminate letters.

They had to sit at their desks while Voila graded the diagnostic tests. She put his scored test paper facedown on his desk: 38/100. She handed Kiwi a Remedial Algebra and English II , the same textbooks that the Cuban woman in the bomber jacket got. They eyed each other over the beet-orange covers of their books with the perfect contempt of equals.

Vijay showed up twenty minutes late, which gave Kiwi time to read and reread all his mistakes. At 11:33, Vijay came screeching into the parking lot with several greasy bags of fries and two girls in the backseat. Vijay had (hypocritically, Kiwi thought) seduced them away from their registers in the Burger Burger and now they were all going to see a movie. That new one, the box-office leader, starring a very popular obese gay Polynesian comic actor who, in this latest cinematic vehicle for his self-loathing, starred as a prince attending a royal ball in drag.

“That’s our plan? We’re going to pay six bucks to see Cinder-Ralphy ?”

“You’re not coming, Margie. These girls, see …”

“Good.” Kiwi chewed his lip and watched the Volvo make its way onto the highway. “Thank God. That film looks terrible.”

The two girls spent the whole ride whispering and doing horsey eye rolls and hand mannerisms in their mysterious female language. So far as Kiwi could tell, they managed to agree that Rollie, a mutual friend of theirs, was in fact a fat bitch and not their friend, and also that Enormous Gladys needed to get some self-esteem , stupid! But Kiwi assumed a second, secret conversation must be happening below this. Otherwise how to explain all the gesticulating? Wrists and elbows went flying through the air in some jujitsu of lady-empathy. Kiwi thought that he should take down Field Notes but he was still smarting from night school and his testing hand was actually cramping.

The girls never bothered to exchange names with him. But at a red light one of them poked Kiwi through the seat-back hole and asked: “Right that my friend is pretty? Right, nerd?”

Four intricately painted and lined eyes glared at him in the rearview mirror.

“You’re both pretty!” he gasped. “Equally pretty!”

The clock on the dash flashed 11:42. Vijay was bulleting down the freeway, talking to the girls in his Seductor Voice, a creamy baritone that made him sound like he was on muscle relaxants. Eleven forty-three. Eleven forty-four. I want to go home , a voice in Kiwi whispered, raggedy as a child. The Leviathan loomed in front of the Volvo; it seemed a miracle that Kiwi’s tiny staff key ring would let him into a place that size. As Vijay pulled into the World’s parking lot, Kiwi’s eyes found the bright blue door for late-night entry; the door led to the elevator that led down to his bedroom. All he wanted now was to study: he imagined sliding the contents of each of these night school textbooks into his brain as easily as a pillow goes into its case. He clutched the exam to his chest.

“What are you holding there, bro?” Vijay asked. “You think somebody’s going to steal your paper ?”

“Test. It’s a test I took.”

“Well, son,” Vijay clucked, reaching across the gearshift with a goony smile, “what’s the verdict? Are we a genius ?”

“Fuck you.” Kiwi hopped out of the car and started loping away, hands deep in pockets; he was halfway to the World when he had to pivot and jog back and open the door again to snatch his folders and textbooks, his face the lopped red of a watermelon. The girls twittering behind him like birds.

Are we there yet, Bird Man?”

“Kid, you are making me crazy. New rule: you are not allowed to ask me that question.”

The Bird Man sank his pole into the river with a furious curl to his lips and I flinched, instinctively drumming my knuckles on the red Seth’s carrier. I’d been doing that all morning, a request for luck.

“Okay. Sorry. I was just trying to make a joke.” I tried grinning at him. “But what should I be looking for, Bird Man?”

“Hell’s a special place, kid. You’ll know it when you get there. Everybody does.”

We were poling through the glitter of high noon, and even the Bird Man’s voice sounded sweaty. Still he insisted on wearing his coat, on straddling the poling platform with his elbows bent, the black hood of his coat looming like a gloomy sun over the gunwales.

“I’m going to pay you when we get back, you know …,” I mumbled, to make myself feel better. I felt guilty imagining how tired my friend must be — the Bird Man had been standing ramrod straight on the poling platform for three hours now. He didn’t take breaks. I sat in the bow seat and paddled hard around the strainers. No sign of my sister on the river — no sign of any vessel, really, besides a bleached dinghy hung up in a swamp oak, a beard of vines and flowers tumbling out of it. But for some reason I wasn’t worrying anymore; in fact a small, indecipherable part of me hoped that we wouldn’t find Ossie right away. On Swamplandia! I wrestled alligators for hundreds and maybe thousands of tourists, men and women from fourteen countries and every U.S. state (except, weirdly, Oklahoma — the Okies had other vacation plans, I guess). But the Bird Man was the first adult besides Grandpa Sawtooth or Chief Bigtree or my mother who’d spent more than an hour with me.

At one o’clock, we poled into a place where the water level suddenly rose again, a channel glutted with rain, and the Bird Man had to climb down and sat behind me in the stern seat. We moved our gear forward to bring the bow down. The skiff was well built and didn’t tip. We both rowed for a while, passing islands of lightwood — the old pine stumps west of my house — and sundews. It was deep enough here to dip our oars through the golden brown algal mats without scraping bottom.

At three o’clock there was still no sign of Ossie.

At four o’clock we broke clear of the mangroves and now the horizons seemed to speed away from our boat, receding in both directions. A fuzzy black cloud line striped the bayheads. At five thirty the red Seth was agitating in her wooden crate, and I felt guilty for bringing her, and also glad she was there. As we poled deeper, I used my rain slicker to seine minnows and wiggly, translucent cricket frogs the size of my thumbnail for her.