Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

So that guy is my dad’s employer .

“Sammy!” It was an angry summons. The boss had a voice that carried crystalline across a room. The Chief listened with an odd smile. The Chief is going to destroy you, guy . Once, when Grandpa Sawtooth made some snide remark about his son, the Chief had bodily lifted the old man and chucked him into the slough. He waited for his father to throw the first punch. What the heck kind of wrestling move was this ? Kiwi wondered, watching the Chief’s palms lift and separate. Some kung fu trick?

With his huge palms held outward, the Chief shaped a prodigious apology on the air.

“You fucked it up, Sammy, you really fucked it this time …,” the shorter man kept screaming. “You want to see the records? You got petty cash amnesia again? Or do you remember what you did with my two hundred dollars?”

Kiwi didn’t hear what the Chief said after his boss exploded. Kiwi did not run, exactly. “Excuse me …,” he kept saying, pushing past low tables covered in empty pitchers.

If anyone follows me I’ll pretend to throw up , he thought. With any luck I won’t even have to fake it .

But no one was following him.

A craps table got him good just above his hip bone; it was going to bruise badly. Ecchymosis, his brain helpfully reported. “Owww!” screamed Kiwi, knocking into the disgusted dealer.

In the back lot a few motorcycles and one dust-red Chevrolet were parked beneath the lamps. The night was a bowl of heat. No moon, no stars.

Kiwi was surprised to see the Chief working here, but it was a dull and terrible surprise. With a grim, spiderlike lacemaking Kiwi’s brain knit his surprise into a dull and terrible knowledge.

This was not Kiwi’s first experience with the spider. That was Kiwi’s nickname for the complex neurophysics that processed your shock into horror. Spun love into fear. In January, for example, he’d seen his mother’s chart on Dr. Gautman’s wall. The spectacled doctor had entered and paused by the window. A pat of sun slid down the doctor’s biscuit-white face. He leaned by the tinted green window shades, watching Kiwi with his clipboard (“I imagine you’ll have some questions for me, Mr. Bigtree …”). But Kiwi Bigtree had turned his head quickly; nope, he didn’t have anything to say. All the questions that had gone hooking through his bloodstream abruptly straightened — aha! And: eureka! Now Kiwi understood perfectly what was happening. Okay , he blinked. Okay, sure. All right . His blood flow was red and serene. His mom was dying. In two months, if all went according to schedule, she would be dead. Like a genius he’d understood this, without any help from the doctors. A prodigy of the buzzing fluorescence. T3 c, A+!

He read the chart through twice. Afterward, all his uncertainty about his mother’s cancer — all that optimistic darkness — drained right out of him. He didn’t tell Ava and Ossie, and when they learned it for themselves from Dr. Gautman he’d felt an evil satisfaction. He’d watched his sisters’ calm faces fall away like scabs and become something else, something more terrible than he could have imagined. Ava’s and Ossie’s mouths were perfect Os. Meanwhile the doctor had tried to hedge the word “death” for them. He made it sound like the best thing for her; anyhow, there was “nothing left to do.”

“Imagine, children,” he’d said with a false, gentle grin, as if death itself were the miracle cure they’d all been waiting for. “At last your mother will be at total peace!”

You thought you couldn’t stand not to know a thing until you knew it, wasn’t that right? Who had said that, the Chief? Some poet from the Library Boat, maybe.

Knowledge at last , Kiwi’s mind recited dutifully. The fish’s living eye: glass .

Sometimes you would prefer a mystery to remain red-gilled and buried inside you, Kiwi decided, alive and alive inside you.

Kiwi gulped air and went back inside the casino. The scene was unchanged: stale cigarettes, the slots expulsing tokens, all these heads bent in a dying garden over the machines. The old women’s wigs looked to him like faded flowers, dull oranges and carmines and silvers. Horrifically, impossibly, the pageant had started up again. This was good news? His dad was still employed, at least. He spotted Leo and Vijay at the bar. His friends looked a little lost next to the tyrannosaurus drunks, old men whose tiny, atrophied arms curled whiskey sours against their Hawaiian shirts. The Chief’s voice swam everywhere in this nicotine aquarium:

“Let’s all welcome lovely Bella to the stage!”

For a second, Kiwi swore he locked eyes with the Chief. He lifted one hand in a stiff wave. The Chief, if he recognized him, didn’t wave back.

Kiwi stared over the wide expanse of rug and strangers and machines. Why couldn’t he cross a square of carpet to get to his father?

Kiwi counted out the money he’d brought — sixty-two bucks in pristine singles and fives. Kiwi would have ironed his salary if it were possible, he was that careful with it. He stuffed the bucks into one of the dealer’s envelopes.

“Miss?”

The woman who took the money from him was one of the Live Girls. Bouncing Bella. She stared down at the cone of twenties, and when she stared up at him her face had transformed.

“We have a place around the back where we can go, honey, it’s real nice …”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry …,” Kiwi yelped as if a great weight had just fallen on his toe. “Oh, my God, ma’am. You are misunderstanding me. We are having a misunderstanding.”

Well, his dick was stirring regardless. He noted this with dismay, his penis dumb as a beagle jumping for this woman’s gartered leg. Kiwi stared down at the red nails she’d hooked through his belt loop. Fantastic. Luckily yards and yards of Cubby’s heavy denim concealed his arousal from anybody. Somewhere in the suburbs of Loomis, Kiwi imagined Cubby Wallach making his seventh ham sandwich, grabbing a pie slice, adding to his empire of girth — that friendship seemed impossibly remote to Kiwi now, impossibly childish. Bella dropped her hand and frowned at him.

“This money isn’t for … that. I’m here to repay a loan. Miss, could you give this to that man over there?”

“Who? Bobby?”

“May-be …,” Kiwi said carefully. “Which one do you call Bobby?”

“Bobby’s our boss. The floor manager. You a friend of his?”

“No, no, the, ah … the other one. The older white man.”

“Sammy?” Bella’s eyes regarded him milkily. “Why don’t you give it to him? You should give it to him yourself, he’s having a rough night. I’ll take you over there. He’s a nice guy, isn’t he? We all love Sammy. He makes us feel beautiful.”

“He’s good at that,” Kiwi agreed. “Good with words.”

“Say!” Bella said, peering in at him. “Do I know you from someplace? Are you that kid who was on TV a few weeks back, the angel?”

“No, ma’am. I’m no angel, ha-ha.” Kiwi held his hands up. “Falsely accused.”

Bella began to tug Kiwi across the floor.

“Can’t do it …” Kiwi left her holding the envelope, already pushing back into the crowd. “… really busy, so … thank you!”

No signature, no note — Kiwi didn’t see how he could write a letter to his father here , on the edge of a pool table. It was a communication so private even Kiwi wasn’t certain what he was trying to tell his father. With the money he was saying “thank you” and “keep this job.” So far as he knew. Maybe he was saying something else entirely and they’d both have to wait to find out what. Kiwi was starting to think that certain gifts were like hieroglyphs that could take years to decipher.