Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

I nodded my chin into his hand. For an alligator wrestler this posture is very humiliating. It didn’t seem like I should move though, or really even could have.

“You’re going to get the both of us killed …,” he pretended to repeat, but I knew this was different from what he’d said the first time. The first time, I was alone in the sentence.

I sat in the boat, mouth shut now, and balanced the oar on my knees as he poled us toward a soft little piney key. The mud was a loamy red-violet color. Pines and magnolias waved their flags at an elevation of six or seven feet. We flipped and dragged the boat onto the deep beach, our feet sinking a few inches. I got out the taped-up alligator and I was holding her with her claws scrabbling on my shoulder, all twelve inches of her fighting toward the floor of the skiff. She flipped and clawed and twisted redly, almost slipping out of my grip as she dug heavily into my knees, but I nabbed her. As if my heart had sprouted claws and was trying to escape my body. I pocketed her. Right next to my heart, the poor Seth kept it company while it boomed.

The Bird Man squatted and asked if I was okay.

I was.

Was I going to scream like that again?

I was not.

He sighed heavily and told me to relax and get myself together, that he was going to take a piss. Re-lax, Ava , he said, watching me struggle with the writhing alligator. He hung his hat and his coat on a pronged branch — both of us were sweating hard. The whistle dropped from the branch’s spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around. I thought, Make my call again, be the Bird Man . If he repeated the call from our first meeting, I knew I could get back into the boat.

But if I observed my friend and ferryman from a different perch in my brain, I saw that the Bird Man could be an anybody. He could blend quite easily into the crowd of panhandlers and businessmen on the streets of Loomis: a tanned, middle-aged man with a few scars on his knuckles. Just a fleck of foam on that sea, as my dad would say. My dad would want me to get a good description of him. I sat on a rock and watched him remove his coat behind the saw palmetto. Okay: How would he look to a ranger, or a mainland person? Okay: he weighed a skinny number like my brother’s, whatever that might be. He had brown hair with gunmetal streaks in it. Scars on his palms and arms. A thin outdoorsman’s face. “Off the grid,” my dad might have added with his chieftain’s squint — because there was in fact something unwashed and wobbly about the Bird Man when you got up close.

“Ava,” the Bird Man barked — to let me know he could see me, I thought with a little shiver. “Keep an eye out. Stay with the skiff.”

The Bird Man was a bone-thin shape behind the willow head. His magic dulled and swirled beyond my ability to recall it, like an island that shrinks to a point behind your boat. All of a sudden the dimensions of my problems changed on me, like rocks coming out of the darkness: Now I was lost. Now I hoped that my sister would find me . Mentally I called out to her: Ossie? Louis? Help me .

Why, there isn’t any ghost of Louis , the frank adult voice informed me. This voice was very primitive. It was some amalgam of the Chief and my mom and a much, much older creature. A dry rasp like a fingernail, a scale. You are both alone out here, you and Osceola, if your sister is alive out here .

I stared down at the purple ribbon and felt a sour rise in my throat.

I could hear the Bird Man zipping up behind the leaves maybe fifty yards from where I was sitting. I walked over to the tree where the whistle was swinging. I caught it, held it to my own lips, winced in preparation for the shattering sound. I’m not sure what I was expecting to summon — a gale of birds, an army of birds. I could see one great blue heron watching me from the river with her slate feathers blown smooth. I inhaled hard, I emptied my lungs into the whistle. Not a sound came out of it.

Oh no , I thought in a tiny voice. Oh-oh .

When the man returned he stooped and peeled a tiny stray feather off my collarbone. He was smiling at me — his grin was very gentle, wide enough to frighten. His eyes reminded me of two sweating water glasses. I pictured a stalk of cold water running from the burgundy toes of his boots to his scalp. Then his gaze deadened on me — like he could still see me but he wasn’t really looking anymore, some plug knocked loose — and his new eyes went rummaging around the green corridor behind me, where saw palmettos squeaked along the water.

“Don’t sulk,” he said, and there was an elastic snap in his voice as his mood turned on me. “You’ve been a good sport this whole trip, why ruin it?”

His voice surprised me. Inside it I could hear a wounded note, like a dog’s keen, almost, but not only hurt. Something else in it, too. Our dog Yallo used to howl when it got its big paw caught in our doorjamb, and you could hear his feelings waffle: rage-pain-rage. But I didn’t understand what doorjamb the Bird Man could be caught in — we were safe now, weren’t we? Those men weren’t coming.

“Why would you do that to me?” he mumbled. “Aw, kid, you’re going to screw it all up. Do you know what I’m risking here? For you . Ava. Do you know what could happen to me, if they find me with you …?” His voice was half a growl now. “Do you have any idea ?”

I was thinking that those hunters had been real and that we might have missed our chance to save my sister. I was really quaking with anger now, gathering breath — and then I saw his eyes and immediately shut up my face. Something bad here, I thought. Something going awry. The air between us felt like dry powder.

“Come on, kid,” he said, and his voice had changed completely; it was charged with something that was almost kindness, that quivered like a finger of syrup. “I sure wish you had not done that. Do you want to find your sister or not? Come on. We’re wasting time.”

On this shoreline I couldn’t hear any voices but ours. No radio song. All the little umbilicals to the world collapsed.

“Let’s get you dried.”

I was crying now. I stared down at the purple ribbon on my wrist, all that I had to show for two days on the water.

The Bird Man’s hat hung from the branch above him, swinging slightly on the breeze; beneath it the coat opened its magnanimous arms. Feathers swirled out of its plumy mat. Black sleeves hung unwizardly almost a head above me, ballooning with wind. Birds moved above it by their own power. Nobody was controlling them.

This coat was just a rag, I realized. My heart froze. A crazy person’s disguise.

“You were lying to me,” I said dully. “There isn’t any such thing as the underworld, is there? This is just the ordinary swamp.”

“Aw, kid, don’t say that.” The man shocked me by pouting, his face bunching into a childish purse. When it smoothed I was scared worse than before. “Don’t be ungrateful. Didn’t I get you through the Eye? Aren’t we having a little adventure? We can even keep looking for your sister if you want, why not?”

He took a step toward me and I watched his hand swing through space and come to rest on my shoulder. He crouched low and his pale lips sprouted teeth and I couldn’t remember how to see this face as friendly.

Who are you?

Somebody was grinning at me. I could hear the wind fluttering his empty sleeves.

Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming was a forty-minute drive from downtown Loomis. The casino’s glowing sign marked the periphery between the city and the undeveloped swampland that stretched forty miles to Chokoloskee Bay. Gus Waddell’s ferry departed from a marina just a few minutes down the road, hidden from the two-lane highway by a large commercial strawberry and tomato farm. This was the closest Kiwi had been to his family’s island since his trip to the ferry docks. Proximity to the park made Kiwi feel like he was snorkeling, getting air from a winnowing tube. Night fell around the car like a lake. If only he could lift his head, he would see what he was so afraid of. Home, he thought, peering suspiciously through the windshield.