Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Ossie!” I yelled behind me. “Please, we have to at least check …”

The Bird Man’s hand flew out and retreated so nimbly that at first I didn’t know what had happened; I saw colors, felt my teeth snag on my lower lip; I touched my cheek, confused; He hit you , explained the smart voice that narrates pain to your animal parts; on the platform he resumed poling forward. The skiff turned away from the tree island. He hadn’t done it to hurt me, he said angrily. The last thing he wanted was to hurt me, but what the hell was he supposed to do if he couldn’t trust me to keep quiet?

“You better start paying attention, if you want to get out of this place alive. That wasn’t your sister, believe me. That’s not a good island to stop at. We have a very small window to find her and we can’t waste time chasing some shadow, kid.”

“It wasn’t a shadow. What I saw—”

“You can get stranded out here, kid. Did you know that? Did your sister’s book include a tide table for the underworld?”

The Bird Man turned my chin to face him.

“Look: have you ever heard of someone getting trapped on a sandbar?” I stared at him. My mouth stung. “Trust me on this one. Remember the rules? Remember what I said about the riptides?”

I nodded. The water was five feet deep here and clear to the bottom and my muscles twitched to jump. Believe him , I thought. He’s gotten you this far . But then who was that girl? As he poled forward I craned around to watch the island recede, wanting very badly to see her shadow — but this time there was nothing. Just a wall of leaves and a cradle of water, shining. The Bird Man was struggling mightily to keep the skiff straight — it had become so narrow in the mangrove tunnel that when we got turned even a few inches sideways we hung up on the brambles. At one point a felled mahogany blocked a channel, a huge tree with shaggy roots, thirty or forty feet tall, and he had to pole us out stern first.

“Ossie!” I screamed one last time at the bend in the river, and the Bird Man shot me a warning look. Two buzzards swung through the silk of the rain. It was six o’clock by my watch, the underworld becoming muggy and preternaturally dark.

Dusk again. The pig frogs were throating their joy in the cattails. Sometimes I forgot for whole minutes what we were doing out here, who we were looking for.

Through her cage slats the red Seth blinked up at my face with florid eyes.

We wove through a long ridge of pinnacle rock. The sun glittered behind what sounded like the roar of the surf, as if the twisted pines hid a long seabed, a tidal hum so convincing that you could almost make out the Gulf foaming behind the trees — mosquitoes, the ocean’s tiniest mimics. I swabbed their iridescent green-and-silver corpses out of my ears and crusted nose and continued to peer into the scrub, my heart pounding.

I was baling water in the bow seat, the Bird Man poling behind me, when I heard the crackle of a song I recognized and shot up.

“… bye, bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry …”

Somebody on the tree island was listening to a radio! There was no mistaking the moody AM crackle — it was a station I knew, WCAM, Glen Winter’s Golden Oldies show. Who had a radio out here? I saw tall shapes moving between the black mangroves: gator hunters. I guessed this from their canvas gear, the steaklike crimson of their faces beneath their hats. I knew a fair amount about that messy business, not from the Chief but from Grandpa Sawtooth, who used to hunt everything without discrimination before Park Services took over. I’d watched him cutting out the brain cap, salting it, stripping the skin before the scales slipped. “Hornbacking” meant taking everything, the whole hide. During the worst years of the Great Depression, hunters sold even the heads and claws to the seaside artisans who turned them into pocketbooks. “People were tacky in those days,” Grandpa Sawtooth grunted by way of explanation.

Through the holes in the trees, I saw something flashing. Long and scythe-bright: knives. Handles that connected to fists. Two men were cutting at something splayed on the ground that I couldn’t see, a radio bleating fuzzily behind them. I rotated by careful half degrees in the skiff. I didn’t want to upset our equilibrium — who knew the rules of this place? — but if there were other living people in this underworld I wanted to know if they’d seen Ossie. And these guys seemed like happy drunks, not ghosts.

“No,” the Bird Man said before I could ask. “Better keep your mouth shut. Those men are dead, kid.”

Dead? “Are you sure?” Already the river was hurrying us away from them. “They looked just like ordinary people. Like any hunters.” My voice broke into agitation like a rash. “They’ve got a radio … ,” I whined.

“Do they?” the Bird Man hissed. “Did you see if they had knives, also? Did you see, with your superior vision, what they were skinning behind the trees?”

“Alligators.” My voice sounded faint.

The Bird Man sped us downriver. But I could still hear the chorus of the radio song and the men’s cheerful voices shouting the lyrics above it, sloppy with drink:

“… and them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singin’, ‘This’ll be the day that I dieee, this’ll be the day …’ ”

“Sit tight. Don’t mess this up now, Ava. This is the dangerous stretch. We’ll tie off soon. We’ll get there before midnight.”

I swam my oar head through the river and watched a fist of brown moss dimple and sink. We were already in the underworld, right? So his promise didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Where would we be before midnight? But I saw the Bird Man’s face and knew better than to ask. For what felt like a long time I could hear the perfect radio version and also the drunk overlay of the hunters’ voices, and I could see it, the dry levee, and for some reason the picture made me very afraid for my sister. Those men are alive, Ava . I heard the stern, tiny rudder of her voice, my mother’s voice. You know they are .

“Help!” I hollered, scaring myself worse with my own screaming. “Help, can you hear me? If you’re real, come help me! We’re over here on the water …”

I was fumbling for the cooler and trying to get the red Seth inside my bib pocket; I wasn’t going to jump without her. Then the Bird Man was covering my mouth.

“Oh shut up, shut up,” he groaned. “Now why would you do that?” His glove tasted like sour fur.

He clamped hard against my mouth to smother my second scream and I thought dizzily that this was how our Seths felt. Like a Seth I was too weak to do anything, to bite down or force my jaws open. When it was clear that the men weren’t coming he loosened his grip. His eyes were full of a funny sadness, like a disgust — disappointment. I couldn’t slow my breaths enough to get air down. Air looped shallowly through my nostrils. My vision darkened. For just a second, black snow shook across the sun, and I thought with a misled excitement about the painting Winter on the River Styx .

“If I let go,” he said directly into my ear, “can I trust you to keep your mouth shut? Please, I am trying to help you here. Jesus H. You cannot go screaming around the underworld, kid.”

This felt like one of Kiwi’s English tests: was the Bird Man scared of me or for me?

If it was the first one I knew that I should probably bite down or scream again. If it was the second one I needed to stay quiet. Oh but Kiwi, I can’t guess the answer from his voice .

“Kid, pull another stunt like that one and you will get yourself killed.”