Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Would you calm the fuck down?” Vijay asked. “You’re breathing like a drunk. You’re breathing like a sumo when the elevator’s out.” Vijay grinned at the rearview mirror, pleased with this last one.

“You’re breathing like me , bro!” fat Leo wheezed from the backseat.

Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming was the southernmost Seminole casino. Sawtooth and the Chief had come out here once or twice, but Kiwi had been too young and too haughty to join them — too afraid of losing, really, in front of the tough public of his dad and his grandfather. His mom had come here as a kid, she’d told them. When she lived on the mainland as Hilola Owens. No photographs existed from that period in the Bigtree Family Musuem. (It was all BS, the Chief joked — Before Swamplandia!) His mom said that Loomis teens used to haunt Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming before the Sunrise mall and multiplex opened in the seventies. Hilola and her girlfriends would walk around the perimeter of the casino like it was the deck of a luxury ship. They’d get the bouncer to bring them champagne flutes and narrow cans of Hula-Hula pineapple juice from inside.

“Are you sure we can get in?” A part of him wanted to travel the weeds outside, to do a little pilgrimage. He pictured his mom as a skinny girl his age drinking her Hula-Hula juice with no idea of the havoc that her death was going to cause, the violent way her death would rip through space. What a weird future awaited her in the past! (Or: what a weird future had survived her?) Alligators, his sisters, his father. Ninety pounds of her was going to sink an island.

“They’ll serve us beer in there, no problem,” Vijay was saying. “You brought your fake, Kiwi Beamtray?”

The Volvo was one of two dozen cars in the casino lot. A busy night.

Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming supplied the only legal gambling available in Loomis County. A few wiseacres called it the Jesus in the Temple Casino, because the main building used to be a Catholic Church. In 1947, the Seminole tribe had bought the ruins of the church, which had been blown to large bits by Hurricane King. Thirty years later the Seminole transformed the former rubble into a gambling hall.

Once inside, Kiwi pulled a lever arm on one of the slots and won three dollars in quarters.

“See that?” said Vijay. “You’re on a roll this week, bro.”

Two slots over, Kiwi watched a man in a wheelchair win ten dollars in nickels.

“You jealous?” His eyes looked as gold-bitten as old Midas’s. “Take a picture, it’ll last you longer.”

“Quit staring at people, bro,” Vijay said irritably. “You’re always staring at everybody.” He frogged out his eyes and pulled his hair up in an imitation of Kiwi.

“Is that what I look like?” Kiwi was heartbroken. “Electrocuted?”

Both his friends nodded. “Yup,” Leo said drolly. “You do. Maybe your brain is full of electricity. Maybe that’s why you talk so crazy sometimes.”

He and Vijay exchanged an almost parental look, arch and dark, like this was a theory they had previously discussed.

“There is a documented correlation between unconventional speech and genius,” he said, patting at his hair. But nobody was listening to Kiwi anymore. They went upstairs to the dining room. For $5.99 you could get a surf and turf buffet.

ALL*U*CAN*EAT*STEAK*AND*LOSTER.

“What’s a loster?” Kiwi asked, feeling weirdly implicated by the name on the chalkboard, a combination of “lost” and “loser.”

“Lobster, bro.”

The single lobster left in there looked like some kind of mystic, trailing long curls of whitish seaweed back and forth around the tank.

“That guy looks like the last unicorn or something,” said Leo. “Where’s the beef?”

Leo helped himself to two steak tenderloins that were globed with fat and several paper cones of ketchup. Vijay got a ladle or cut of pretty much everything but the baked scrod. Kiwi couldn’t figure out how to work the crank ice cream dispenser and returned to their table with a bowl of maraschino cherries.

Vijay jabbed a spoon handle at Kiwi’s cherries and made some jokes about virginity.

Leo handled the requisite surf and turd jokes.

Ha-ha-ha-ha, was Kiwi.

You couldn’t take jokes about your own asshole personally on the mainland, Kiwi had learned. Other dudes would rattle off “your asshole” jokes with blank faces, like cops reading you your Miranda rights — as though reciting from a script, as if legally this simply had to be done. After a minute Kiwi said, “This looks like Leo’s dick,” and held up a shriveled walnut to approving laughter. Vijay ate a baked potato. They headed back downstairs.

Kiwi froze on the second-to-last step. “Oh wait. You dudes go ahead. I forgot something.”

Adrenaline ate its way through Kiwi Bigtree’s body. He wanted to run but he couldn’t move. On the opposite side of the room, in a sandbar of light, a tall, bald white man wearing a bolo tie got down on his knees. He was getting a show ready; twelve LIVE GIRLS were standing in the wings. The girls looked a little less lively than advertised. They smoked cigarettes and kept listlessly touching each other’s hair. For many of them, Kiwi observed, girlhood had ended decades ago. The casino stage was shaped like a banjo, the long runway strung with rows of white and violet lights.

The man was on his knees, hooking a microphone into an old-fashioned set of speakers. A black cord was looped around his left shoe. He stood and then the cord was underneath the sole; oh no! thought Kiwi. It was the sort of prelude to an accident that makes bystanders feel like psychics — and when the man tripped he fell hard . He had to push off on one knee before he could stand again. When he got to his feet the first thing he did was examine his own big hands. He frowned at his palms as if he were reading a newspaper, then shined his knuckles on his navy trouser knees. Even these odd gestures were familiar to Kiwi, because the man in question was his father. Chief Bigtree, disguised as an employee of the casino.

The Chief sat down at a small table. His wrestler’s fists joined into one tremendous, pale stone under the microphone; he stared sightlessly out at the crowd of slot machines. The first thing Kiwi noticed was the complex graininess of the Chief’s skin. (Was his dad really sick or something? What on earth was he doing here?) The second thing was that the Chief was wearing his glasses.

Oh no . Kiwi stepped backward on the stairwell, wondering if the Chief had already seen him. These glasses were a bad sign. On Swamplandia! the Chief had been contemptuous of various drugstore aids: bifocals, Ace bandages, hemorrhoid creams, luminous jellies for poison oak and bee stings; he was even a little unsettled by flavored toothpaste. Crutches were bad for business, the Chief liked to say. “Why announce your infirmities to the tourists, kids?”

Can he see me? Do I want him to? Kiwi blinked out of the shadows, mere feet from the seething lights of the casino floor. The walls smelled of old seediness, throw-up, and wood pulp. Behind him he heard a wine-red laugh and the tinsely clatter of forks and knives falling off a buffet table.

“Pick a direction, fuckface.” Someone shoved past Kiwi on the stairs, a blur of pale skin and tattoos flickering on a bicep.

“Sorry, sir, excuse me …” He felt seasick from the billiard greens and neons shooting out at him from every angle of the room. The roulette wheel turned its tiny spikes. Kiwi’s back was drenched in sweat that turned freezing in the air-conditioning. The Chief had switched on the microphone:

“Get your ballots out, folks, because this is going to be one stiff competition, har har …”

The Chief’s laughter burst from the speakers like brown water from spigots. Apparently a “beauty pageant” was about to take place; men were using squabby pencils to fill out a voter’s card. How depressing! The Chief’s gaze crossed Kiwi’s square of carpet twice — three times! four times! — before settling on the stage again. Behind his large glasses, Chief Bigtree’s eyes were lost in the neon snow of the show.