Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

The rain stopped as suddenly as it began. After five minutes we were totally clear of it. In the clarifying light that spilled between the live oaks I looked for proof that we had arrived in the underworld.

“I keep telling you, kid, this is the shallow end.” The Bird Man rubbed at the creases on his forehead. Why did adults always do that? I wondered. What if a face really worked like that, like rumpled trousers, and you could smooth out your bad thoughts from the outside in? I had thought he might share my happiness — we had made it through, and now we could find Ossie! Wasn’t that right? I crumpled a little; we’d arrived but there was no celebration or encouragement in his pale eyes.

“I got cut really bad,” I said, to say something. “On my hands.” Wordlessly he tipped a few drops from his bottle of green medicine onto our deepest cuts and we watched the white bubbles open like a million tiny mouths. This time I did not say one word about love.

“The freak show happens inside the circus tent, kid; we’re just at the entrance to the fairgrounds. No ghosts, not yet. Does that hurt you?”

I shook my head. He petted my hair and I smiled back at him helplessly, Ossie momentarily forgotten. With a twinge of shame I mussed up my hair again, hoping he’d lean in once more and smooth it. But the Bird Man did not touch or look at me again; he stretched the knit of his fingers and returned to his poling platform. I placed the red Seth on my lap and let her sun, soothed by her small weight there. Her sides collapsed dramatically with each exhalation and her belly felt cool and dry.

Already I had seen a few gars in the water, and tiny green herons. They had all looked conventionally alive to me, although who knew what the rules of this underworld were? I’d expected the weather to be icy, or at least a few degrees colder. I touched my hand to the rocky beach where we were resting and let a golden bug crawl onto my thumb. Dozens of legs combed up my bare arm, and for a second I felt almost joyful.

“Ossie!” I called. “Ossie?”

You be alive, too , I told her. I looked down until my vision blurred and watched the beetle crawling onto my shoulder.

“Do you think we’ll run into the rest of the dredge crew out here?” I asked. I had just seen something squatting on all fours behind the cabbage palms. A crocodile, I thought. You can tell from the teeth.

The Bird Man pulled his hat down. “It’s possible, kid. Stranger things have happened.”

“Do you think we might run into my mother?”

I picked up a clot of moss with my paddle, dunked it. I hated how little my voice sounded when I asked the question.

The Bird Man gave me a look I couldn’t read and then nodded once, quickly. “I told you, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. Right now we’re only in the shallows of the underworld, the threshold …”

After that we didn’t speak again for a long time. The underworld was unbelievably fecund. I saw snail kites, which I hadn’t seen in such numbers since I was nine or ten, and a virgin stand of mahogany. Wood storks’ heads appeared like ancient doorknobs along the branches. We are in the underworld now , I thought, kneeing forward in the skiff and looking around. We have crossed over; we could at any moment find my sister! But the pink sun was so hot here, and this landscape was not the landscape promised in the book. This landscape looked like our backyard. I saw lonely pine keys, cormorants, broken rock.

We stopped in a brush-filled cove, drank from the canteens. A Seth blinked incuriously at us, curled on the dark sand amid the palmetto fronds.

You could become a fossil in your lifetime, I’d discovered. I’d seen the eerie correspondence between the living Seths in our Pit and their taxidermied brothers in our museum. The Chief could achieve an ossified quality, too, with his headdress skeletally flattened against the sofa back, drunk and asleep.

“Is that one alive or dead, Bird Man?”

He was busy with the baling bucket and he didn’t hear me, or maybe chose to ignore me. I threaded all my fingers through the wooden holes in the crate carrier; the red Seth regarded me from a triangle of shadow. The wedge of our bow pushed into a dark spot on the water, where rain came shaking off the trees. I’d tied Osceola’s purple ribbon around my wrist — so tightly, the Bird Man grumbled, that it looked like a tourniquet. I waited for him to ask where the ribbon had come from but he seemed to think it was one of mine, original to our journey.

Somewhere, possibly just a few hundred yards to the east or the west of us on one of these tree islands, Ossie’s hair was blowing in this same wind that rippled the water at our bow. The Land of the Dead was windier than I had expected and as flat as a cracker and I had so many bug bites on my shins that the bumps overlapped. Mosquitoes were just as vicious here. I’d have to remember to tell that to my brother, I thought dizzily … I stared at the black mush on my ruby bruise where I’d slapped one and felt myself beginning to be sick. Kiwi would be taking assiduous Field Notes on the shallows of the underworld. He’d be skimming specimens off the water, or sketching the wings of undead mosquitoes. But why were the mosquitoes in the Land of the Dead so thirsty and noisy? Why did the fish jump just as high here as they did anywhere?

“Everything is alive here, Bird Man,” I whispered, not wanting to offend anyone — it seemed a funny thing to mention if there were ghosts around.

“So far. Watch out that we don’t get hung up on that—” The Bird Man pushed his pole against a submerged rock. “You’ll find a mix of the living and the dead in the shallows.”

“Oh. Right. That makes sense.”

There are estuaries near Swamplandia! where salt water and freshwater mingle, and it’s a crazy party down there: manatees and ten-foot saltwater crocodiles and freshwater alligators, bottlenose dolphins and bluegill, soft-shell turtles.

“Hey, do you want to play twenty questions or something?” I called over my shoulder. At this point we were twenty minutes beyond the Eye. “Do you want to, uh, to talk?”

The Bird Man shook his head and held the thick finger of his falconer’s glove to his lips. He seemed jumpy to me. Once I turned to look at him: we were paddling in a deep lake into fierce open sun, and sweat slid down the closed window of his face.

I am almost there, Osceola , I thought, as the little waves imploded. Keep breathing .

Five o’clock and we were still on the river. Now the Caloosahatchee had become the Styx. The water here was clear as a blue lozenge. Large, brilliantly winged moths trailed our oar handles for a mile. We moved through a labyrinth of canals that felt identical to the route we’d taken yesterday, just as shallow and confusing, just as chokingly hot. Occasionally you would see something new: on one tree island, for example, hundreds of cabbage palms felled by a storm covered the ground. Ferns had swallowed the stumps: resurrection ferns and saw palmettos, hundreds upon hundreds of waxy blooms with a brilliant red center. I told the Bird Man they looked like dwarfs in tuxedos and he smiled. Then I thought I saw a shape moving behind a screen of vines — it was two-legged, short but humanoid — and I hollered at the Bird Man to stop our boat.

“No,” he said, poling us evenly forward.

“What do you mean, no?” The island was curving away from us.

“I mean no. We’re not stopping. Not there.”

“But I saw somebody back there. What if it’s my sister?”

“It’s not her. Pick up your paddle, Ava.”

I caught my muscles making sly preparations to jump out and swim up current.