Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Have you ever heard of Bianca Defiore and Michael Taylor?” the Bird Man asked quietly.

I shook my head.

“They went on their first date on Michael’s airboat, launched from Viper Bight at sunset for a little scenic tour. And then Mikey got lost.”

“Out here?”

“In a similar nowhere. He hit a tree that cut their gas line. He stranded them on the saw-grass prairie with food and water for one night. Bianca had a diabetic attack while they were waiting for Search and Rescue and she died, Ava. With all of their technology it was fourteen days before they found Mr. Michael Taylor, half-looney with his dead acquaintance in his arms.”

I shivered. “So, they goofed up one time. The swamp’s a big place …”

I got an image of Whip Jeters putzing around on his boat with his anemic flashlight.

“And don’t forget, these are people who have gotten into bad scrapes, yes, but they are here . They are in our world. They can be found by Search and Rescue,” he said slowly, checking my eyes for understanding.

“Right … I know.” I took the Bird Man’s hand. I was close enough to see the red canoes above his eyelids, the hazel lines that shot through his gray irises. You could stand this close to a Bird Man, or any man, I thought with wonderment, and still not guess what was in his mind.

While we were talking I let my fingers slide through his fingers, not really thinking about what I was doing, and he relaxed his own long fingers, squeezed down. The knit of our hands on his lap looked so distant from either of us, like a sculpture we’d made. My small fingers pushed inside the pallid roses of his knuckles. One knuckle had a raised scar on it, nasty as a tattoo; I saw older scars, too, from beaks or maybe talons. I figured this for evidence that the Bird Man was a powerful fighter, like my father and my mother and my grandmother and my grandfather, and hopefully, one day, myself.

“You’ve got a wrestler’s grip there, kid,” he said, smiling down at our fist. “Look, Ava—”

He jabbed a thumb up, and I started at the chaotic movement of our map. Three buzzards were crashing around on the wind a little ways behind us.

“You think Search and Rescue can find the back entrance of the underworld? You think Mr. Jeters can read a map like that? You’re on the edge of the universe, kid, and you don’t even know it.”

We rounded a bend and I groaned inwardly. The wind tilled the saw grass for miles and miles in every useless direction. We were going to have to carry the skiff for another long, mucky stretch. “The edge of the universe,” I repeated, and picked up the dripping handle of my oars.

Another portage of a quarter mile, and hard rain when we got back on the water. We both had pulled our slickers on — it was strange to see the Bird Man’s feathers pasted below the yellow plastic. He kept scratching his head, and he seemed more genuinely agitated now than I’d seen him at any point on this trip. It was a little frightening. He’d scratched his thin hair into a pompadour — it looked as though every wire were coming disconnected in his brain. I thought about making a joke about it (we used to tease Kiwi when he woke up with Amadeus Mozart hair, for example), but the Bird Man’s eyes warned me away from doing so. They mirrored the storm.

And then my breath caught, because we had arrived. Two great humps rose in the rain before us. I could see the gigantic swells of them not fifty yards away.

“We made it? That’s the Eye?”

The Eye had been described to me as a kind of Calusa Scylla and Charybdis, and I’d seen Grandpa’s grainy photograph, but I hadn’t been prepared for the overwhelming strangeness of seeing the mounds’ weird, pyramidal shapes up close. They rose out of the river like twin volcano peaks. They were perfectly denuded of trees or any green growth, fogged over by the rainstorm and made of what looked like lunar cement, whelk, and conch. The two middens that formed the Eye were a kissing cousins’ distance from each other. A tall man could have easily jumped from one mound to its neighbor. Water cut between them in a perfectly straight gray line; the channel couldn’t have been much more than four feet at its widest point. It was going to be a squeeze for us; no way could an entire dredge barge pass through the Eye; if Ossie and Louis had come this way, they would have had to abandon the barge somewhere and use the dredge scow, a tiny red canoe hung over the barge’s stern like a wooden eyebrow. The scow didn’t have a motor; she and Louis would have had to paddle hard . Which was exactly what the Bird Man wanted me to do now, apparently — to push our skiff into the portal.

“Come on, kid, put some real muscle into it.”

The Bird Man’s hair was hanging in his eyes and I didn’t understand the expression on his face. Maybe he’s scared, or angry? Because he’s been this way before , I thought, because he knows … but I couldn’t begin to imagine what he might know. We paddled hard against the wind and current and yet we weren’t making any progress; it felt as if our skiff were pinned beneath the wind’s great thumb.

“You think we can get through that?” I shouted. “Shouldn’t we find a place to wait this out?”

We paddled into the chop with spray flying at our faces. An easterly knocked us sideways and we aimed our bow for a blue breath between the rocks that I did not think we could make.

“This is our window, kid.”

The humps of broken shells rose around us. We had to pull ourselves through the passage with our hands — if the bow had twisted a few inches to the right or left we would have gotten hung up. The Bird Man put on his helmet and switched on the headlamp, it had gotten that dark. Shells glittered on either side of us like defunct treasure, washed a pearly rose and dish blue that glowed against the sky. The water was as narrow as a hallway, lapping the tall white walls of shells, and the green column of air on the other side of the tunnel stood open like a door. The underworld is coming next, I thought, and the muscles in my stomach tensed the way they did before a show. “Where is my SISTER?” I moaned through my teeth, too tired now for real hysteria but more determined than I’d ever been to find her.

Probably if I had waited even a few seconds longer to glance at the sky, I wouldn’t have seen her ribbon: a flag of purple snagged amid the toothy piles of whelk. “Ossie!” I shouted out loud, but the Bird Man didn’t hear me over the wind. I imagined the ribbon catching there as she tried to squeeze through, her hair flying out in a white fan around her face. I stood up, keeping my arms on the shell mound so that I didn’t overturn the skiff, and I reached onto my toes to grab it; in the process I nearly fell out of the shallow hull, and the Bird Man had to grab my waist and jerk me down again.

“Have you gone crazy? Sit down, sit down!”

I gaped up at him.

“I said sit, ” he screamed over the wind. “This is nowhere to capsize!”

“I just wanted a souvenir,” I called, and showed him the opal fragments of shell that I’d dislodged into my palm when I went for the ribbon. The ribbon itself I stuffed quickly into my pocket and didn’t explain. I still don’t know why I did this; somehow it seemed a smart secret to keep for the moment. I thought this ribbon must be a message from Ossie and I wanted time to puzzle it out on my own — it could be an arrow pointing me toward her, I thought. Or a new kind of map. It didn’t occur to me then that there might be a darker explanation for my discovery.

“Ava! Ship your paddle, kid, use your hands …”

He seemed angry with me but there was no time for a lecture: we were midway through the Eye. There was no space to row anymore so we were pushing our way forward with our palms on the brittle sides of the middens. Behind me I could hear the Bird Man’s pole striking shell. The air gushing into my throat felt hot as exhaust, and it was all I could do to keep my hands moving along the walls.