Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

Mom, please help me to find Ossie. Please help me to make the net .

The next thing I knew light was pouring through all the holes in Stiltsville: dawn light screaming through the doorways that hung on their hinges, the broken windows that birds could fly through, the plank lace, the cheesed metals. Red sunbeams burned through the tin panels above my head. Where am I? I sat up. In the daylight I saw that parts of the room were sprouting a fuzz the spring green of scallions. An empty bedroll on the floor was halfway into its stuff sack. Ossie? — and her name was like a trapdoor latch that brought the whole predicament tumbling down on me.

Across the room, the Bird Man’s antique boots were coming toward me, the toes addressing the air like sniffing noses, and slowly I gathered up the long length of him: trousered legs, brace of feathers, face, hat. Today the Bird Man wore a strange expression. He crouched inches from my bedroll, staring right into my face — he reminded me of a tourist touching his nose to the ferry porthole, his eyes coming slightly unglued and his breath on me. It gave me a little chill. Something about his gray eyes seemed urgent and vacant at once. We had known each other for hours and miles now, but I thought that he looked even stranger, even more like a stranger, as if the currents that governed such things were blowing him backward. Stubble peppered his cheeks and I missed my father.

“I just talked to a fisherman out of Chokoloskee. Says that yesterday he saw a strange ship at dusk. About two miles west of us.” His voice was as excited as I’d ever heard it. “Sunrise at six a.m., kid. We’re going now. We’ve got fifteen-knot winds against the tide.”

Kiwi Bigtree was in an excellent mood. He had just dropped a fat check in the mail, made out to Samuel Bigtree in the amount of one hundred and forty-seven dollars and twelve cents, a check he’d sealed in an envelope addressed to Swamplandia! c/o Chief Bigtree.

YOU ARE WELCOME, DAD, he’d written on the flap.

His essay about the Glenfinnan Viaduct for Voila Arenas’s class had received a purple check-plus mark, not just a check for credit. To research the paper, he’d taken the bus to the Loomis Public Library — the two-story brick building near the courthouse downtown, with large, placid librarians moving through the stacks like human galleons and glass-green plants in pots. This place was nothing like the Library Boat, with its smashed hull and its stink of hydrogen sulfide. He’d spent four hours in the Non-Circulating Room next to a homeless man in a bloodstained Christmas sweater who had introduced himself as Rudolph. Rudolph kept screaming “Wheel … of … Fortune!” and dissolving into a guttural laugh while Kiwi frowned and traced mechanical diagrams of each of the Glenfinnan Viaduct’s twenty-one arches. Rudolph spit his gum on one. The title of Kiwi Bigtree’s paper was “That Scottish Wonder.” His report had a glossary. He’d made two appendices. Rudolph had admired them.

“This assignment was one page,” Voila had written lightly under her check-plus.

Victory 2: Kiwi passed his CPR exam. Monday was his first day of work as an indoor lifeguard. Which meant he had only to survive a last weekend as the Leviathan’s janitor. One Friday, one Saturday, one Sunday — more or less what the original Jonah of biblical fame had done.

Weekends, inside a whale: Kiwi worked the nine-hour Friday shift inside the Leviathan and for that period he forgot all about Swamplandia! He dragged his wheelie bucket through the Flukes and he forgot his mother, his sisters, the Chief’s impossibly stupid Carnival Darwinism, his anger, his mission, his genius burning inside him all day like a grounded rocket. After a few hours of cleaning the tunnels and slippery chutes in the Leviathan, Kiwi found he couldn’t worry about his family anymore — it was as if his mind itself got soapy-fingered. His mind lost its grip on the future.

By five o’clock, Kiwi’s thoughts had been sucked into the vacuum’s hum.

By nine o’clock, it was all he could do to manage a “Good night, Mr. Jenks” before punching out. There was a sort of grimly lit, fluorescent party happening in the break room. The party was catered by the girls who worked in the Dorsal Flukes, who had stolen a bunch of pizzas and soggy boluses of garlic loaf after their shift ended. About fifty kids were crammed around the sofa, shedding their uniforms. It was a frenzied scene, their weekend-night molting — Kiwi caught sight of several belly buttons and boxer waistbands and the wide hot pink strap of one girl’s sports bra as everybody peeled down to their regular clothes. Kiwi shoved four breadsticks into his pants and grabbed a two-liter bottle of diet cherry soda and fled. At 9:17, he shuffled off the elevator deck to his dormitory cot and fell open like a palm.

Monday finally came, and Kiwi celebrated by washing his face. The Lake of Fire was in a concrete grotto dug out of the same limestone shelf that ran beneath the entire city of Loomis; this shelf itself was artificial bedrock, dynamited out of the blue bay by dredge crews in the early century. The Lake of Fire had a separate admission fee for visitors. Kiwi had to use a swipe card and a special elevator bank to get there.

“Going down ?” the recorded voice inside the elevator car kept asking on a demonic loop. “Going down ?”

At the Lake of Fire, Dale Bonilla was waiting to orient him.

Little kiddies in their swimming trunks and their rental goggles engaged in gleeful masochism around him, shrieking, pounding one another’s sopping backs and buttocks, and giving indiscriminate wedgies. The mothers were all bone-dry; they slumped against one wall. The mothers’ faces were so slack with exhaustion that they looked almost rapturous — Kiwi thought so, anyhow, watching waves of electric light ripple over them. The Lost Souls’ expressions mirrored his own weekend stupefaction inside the Leviathan.

Dale Bonilla walked Kiwi down the left side of the Lake of Fire, his hands clasped behind his back and resting in the little coulee just above his swimming trunks.

“This is a cake job, Margaret, you’re going to love it. Look, here’s your Rescue Stick. Push the button here and give it a shake, see, like an umbrella, and it springs into a net.”

Kiwi sprang back as what appeared to be a commercial fishing net burst open from the Rescue Net. How many people was this thing designed to save, a wedding party?

“That’s for when you got to fish a kid out of the Lake.”

The Lake was a hundred-foot-long pool, twelve feet deep at its far end. Dye turned the water the color of dead rose petals, which Kiwi found beautiful in its own disturbing way. But this tenebrous dye made it next to impossible to see the swimmers’ bodies.

“I can’t see anything, Dale.”

“Right? Visibility blows . Here, though, I got the manual for you—”

Dale gave Kiwi what appeared to be an enormous cardboard coaster. It folded out into a kind of daisy-chain checklist of the forces working counter to a lifeguard.

THE DROWNING CHAIN

Lack of Education

Lack of Protection

Lack of Safety Advice

Lack of Supervision

Inability to Cope

Kiwi opened and closed the coaster-thing like an accordionist. Excellent , he thought, surveying the list. Check, check, check. It would appear that I am drowning right now, Dale .

“Allow me to demonstrate,” said Dale, pointing at a pair of feet kicking up spume the color of melted bricks. “See the feet? Watch the feet. The feet are, like, the flags of the body.”

Really, it didn’t seem possible that Dale was using this Rescue Net correctly. He dragged the kid’s kicking body toward the shallow end, and the kid, a skinny white boy with a crew cut and froggy eyelids, began to scream: “Let me go! Idiot! I was just diving!”