Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“I can’t wait,” Kiwi said sincerely. He was thinking about money. From Denny’s explanation of the pilot licensing requirements, it sounded like he and this cheerful and alarming man were going to spend forty hours together in the plane and twenty more in ground school — four months.

“Longer than a Vegas marriage,” he grinned, and Kiwi let out an accidental whimper. The kind of grief that shows up at a Halloween party with its costume in tatters, swears “I’m a chuckle!” What if Swamplandia! went into foreclosure before he got his license, his pay raise?

“Ha-ha! Four months does sound like a long time. And there’s no way to, ah, expedite the process?”

“Ex-speed-ite.” Denny frowned. “You sure that’s how it’s pronounced? We can’t speed anything, Bigtree. Same FAA rules apply for heroes.”

Kiwi frowned down at his fingernails. “Your hands are damn pretty,” Sawtooth used to say accusingly. Like most alligator wrestlers, Sawtooth Bigtree had lost substantial chunks of several fingers. Part of his thumb was somewhere in the Gator Pit, remaindered by one of the Seths. Even Ossie boasted scars from an accident that took place when she was four years old and a juvenile alligator had snapped at her hand while she was pulling up weeds along a riverbank. Kiwi was the only Bigtree with zero injuries — no stitches, no scars. He’d once cut his pointer finger opening a can of cherry soda after a wrestling match. He tried to imagine his ladylike hands throttling up inside a floatplane.

“Do you happen to know, sir, what my ranking is going to be? Second? Third?”

“Huh? That ain’t how the check ride gets scored.”

Kiwi nodded. “I recognize that I probably won’t rank as the First Pilot of the Apocalypse, given that I am an airplane greenhorn. But do I necessarily have to be the last one?”

Denny exhaled two cool gusts of smoke through his nostrils and stared at him.

“You’re a funny young man, Kiwi.”

On Thursday, Kiwi found himself ducking the crack in the break room door, where he got a brief glimpse of a bunch of flame-clad staffers watching TV, and then he was pinball-whizzing out of the World: upstairs, downstairs, through staff-only hallways. There was an empire of supplies down here: pyramids of toilet paper (single ply; this was Hell), boxes of BrimStones that spilled over the cardboard like collapsed speech bubbles, devil horn hatbands and devilish ribbons for the ladies. Finally he exploded through the same small service hole that spat out garbage. Yvans was standing right there by the Dumpster, waving at him.

“Where you going, Kiwi?”

So much for the secret mission.

“Nowhere,” he said, hurrying past Yvans. Really, he had no time today to listen to Yvans complain about the complaints of his wife. Kiwi’s secret destination was the gas station. You couldn’t really skulk there, you had to walk across the highway. Kiwi walked through four lanes of stalled traffic. A knotted sock of quarters bulged in his pocket. The pay phone was at the end of the candy aisle. It was the nearest semiprivate phone that Kiwi knew about. He hunched between the black- and yellow-jacketed candy bars and the gigantic freezer. For twenty minutes Kiwi kept plunking the same quarter in the phone and dialing Swamplandia!

“Answer,” he commanded the receiver. “Pick up.”

The phone was busy. Busy! Busy! Busy! Busy! it told his ear in black starbursts.

Weird , Kiwi thought, which became:

Bad .

Wrong .

Really fucking worrisome , as a mainland kid would say.

The busy signal whammed into his head in a series of right hooks. He rolled his quarter out, dialed again. “Ava. Ossie. Chief,” he said between teeth. After a while he switched the speed and order: “Chief-Ossie-Ava. Ossie-Ava-Chief. Pick. Up.”

The owner dropped his newspaper and stood. He was an older Afro-Cuban man with powdery hair and eyes like acetone. He didn’t like Kiwi — he’d sell Black and Mild cigarettes to Leo and Vijay but never to Kiwi. The cigarettes cost one dollar and came in two flavors: wine and apple. The last time Kiwi had tried to buy a pack with his fake Kiwi Beamtray ID, the owner had shouted at him to get out of the store. A curtain of pink and green lottery tickets hung level with his forehead, which gave him an exotic, Scheherazade look.

“Hey! In the back!” He unlatched the little gate to the register. “ ¿Qué haces? ”

“Hey, sir!” said Kiwi. “Good afternoon?” Maybe he thinks I’m making sex calls , Kiwi thought, his ear smashed and rubbery against the receiver. Masturbating into the CLOSET OF ICE!

He dropped another quarter into the slot, watched his fingers hopscotch across the dial pad onto his home numbers. Last try. Okay, no , this is the last try —he began threatening the receiver, trying to bluff the universe into giving him an answer.

“Hang up the phone, maricón !”

“I’m not doing anything wrong here. I’m a hero, sir. Hell’s Angel. Don’t you watch TV?”

Kiwi hung up the phone. He tried to mad-dog the owner and then gave up, felt his face tremble and collapse. On the way out he knocked over a display of gummies.

“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his cheeks with his fists, a teenage mantis. “God, sir, I’m really sorry.”

The owner held the door for him. He patted Kiwi’s left shoulder.

All that day and into the next his head felt clouded. Where was everybody? Were they visiting Grandpa or something? Had the Chief instructed the girls not to answer the telephone — were they avoiding the creditors? Probably he was overreacting? Kiwi pictured all ninety-eight Seths in the pit lifting their great warblers’ chins at the sun while just inside the screen door the telephone rang and rang and rang.

Kiwi Bigtree, Hell’s Angel, got a leather jacket from the World of Darkness management with his new epithet emblazoned on it. He got a free Friday. He stood in his jacket and waved sightlessly into the lanes of traffic until a green Toyota that was batwinged with dents on its left side honked at him, screeched to a halt well before the intersection.

“Hello again, Mr. Pelkis.”

“Oh My Christ Son the Light Is Green Get in the Car!”

Kiwi was relieved when Dennis Pelkis told him that they were just going to eyeball the plane. He drove Kiwi to the papaya-colored seaplane hangar off Route 302 where the flight school conducted their lessons. He taught Kiwi how the water rudder and the floats worked and walked him through a preflight checklist. It took Kiwi two tries and a rump-assist from Denny to scrabble over the gap between the dock and the plane and get inside the cockpit.

Later Dennis drove Kiwi to his house in the Coconut Creek development, in a suburb of Loomis, so that Denny could have black coffee and a roast beef sandwich that was hemorrhaging horseradish, treat a corn on his big right toe, watch the ball game; and also so that Kiwi could take a test on the pitot-static instrument family. Kiwi felt sort of forgotten about. Kiwi pictured his existence in the mind of Dennis Pelkis: a tiny Kiwi politely letting Dennis’s other concerns cut in front of him in line at the register until he was the last priority, the afterthought.

The test was easy. Kiwi had retained most of the colorful facts from the textbook:

A white arc indicates the arc in which it is safe to use flaps.

The green arc is the normal operating range of the aircraft.

The yellow arc is the caution range for the airplane.

“More apple juice, Kee-wee?” asked Denny’s dotty wife, whose hostessing strategy was to remove each item from her refrigerator — a carton of juice, a pie slice with lime green filling, a single egg — and offer it to Kiwi. She did this with the serene efficiency of a crazy person; was this a custom of the suburbs?