Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

Okay, new version: the Chief doesn’t say anything, but he takes Kiwi upstairs and they eat everything that isn’t nailed down in the All U Can Eat Buffet. They shovel it in. At the end of the meal, they plunge their Bigtree fists into the tank and tear apart and eat that final lobster. It would be a moment of savage forgiveness. No words required. It would be barbaric and a little gross, eating that lobster, but it would have the transformative effect of a new ritual on them. After the meal, they would be reconciled. They would make plans to return to Ava and Ossie and Swamplandia! They would bring Grandpa Sawtooth home, possibly they would go downstairs and gamble together, and win.

Kiwi didn’t go back to the casino. He didn’t look up any bus routes. He didn’t call the listed number for Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming and ask for Sam. He didn’t ask Vijay for a ride to Pa-Hay-Okee, or thumb up the number in the Loomis Yellow Pages. Kiwi’s best conjecture was that the Chief had rented a room at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, as he always did on his Loomis trips. (THE BOWL-A-BED! WEEKLY RATES. MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED, YOUR PRIVACY=RESPECTED!!)

But he didn’t call there.

Instead, he used the bag of change to dial the house at Swamplandia! on his breaks. The phone buzzed and buzzed, a noise that was starting to really frighten him. Were the girls in Loomis County, too?

I have to go back there today , Kiwi thought. I have to talk to the Chief . When he picked up the telephone, he fully intended to ask Vijay to drive him back to the casino. On the second ring, the third ring, this remained his intention.

Vijay wanted to know why he was dropping Kiwi off at a fucking marina . On Hangover Sunday, no less. Why he was awake at all before dusk — Kiwi had once overheard Vijay having a screaming argument with his mother in which he claimed that getting up before noon made him feel dizzy. Vijay was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses and eating Advil in Halloween fistfuls.

“I’ll put the mace into your face , bitch!” he sang along with the radio.

They pulled into a space between two whiskery palms, both boys shading their eyes from the sun’s rays off the white quartzite. Dirty water lapped at a honeycomb of rock; beyond this, the listing masts of all the junker ships at anchor here made the ocean look like a blue pincushion.

“What is this place? Is it a junkyard for boats?”

“And people. Hey, thanks for the ride. I can get the bus back.”

“For real? You sure you want to dip into your savings account for that? I think the fare is, like, a whole dollar.”

“Shut up.”

Vijay’s voice brightened theatrically: “Or maybe you want to have your rich girlfriend come get you? You can, like, save her from the ocean this time?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend, V. Emily Barton is not my girlfriend.”

“Is that you telling me in your moon language that you’re, like, still a virgin?”

“Fuck you.”

“Nice, son. You’re getting so much quicker at the trigger! Smoother, too,” he added generously.

Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he’d called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak. Now he could tell any man in the World to go fuck himself with a baseball bat. Progress was being made, he guessed.

“Thanks. I try.”

Kiwi had arrived at the Out to Sea Retirement Community eleven minutes early. Through the Out to Sea portholes, Kiwi could hear TV laughter and silence.

At four, Kiwi walked the gangplank to his grandfather’s boat. A translucent glass-blue crab went skittering behind one of the bolts. Possibly-Robina was sitting there in her civilian clothes — a striped T-shirt with a cartoon cat in a top hat on it, shiny purple leggings. She was watching a soap opera on the boat’s biggest television. All around her the elderly residents were involved in their own dramas: smaller televisions glowed and crackled along the rows of portholes.

“Howdy, ma’am … okay to visit with Sawtooth Bigtree?”

“Mmh.” Robina’s chin was sunk behind her big fists. Kiwi bent and scribbled his name on the blank clipboard.

“Good show, huh?”

Possibly-Robina sucked a diet soda through a straw.

Kiwi had to flip back two weeks to find the name he was looking for: Samuel Bigtree. The Chief had last been here two weeks ago. Was the Chief planning to visit today? Kiwi wondered. He thought about erasing his signature from the sheet, then decided to leave it there.

Everyone besides Robina was asleep, or tortoised deeply into their own world; one Russian man with burning cerulean eyes was leaning in to watch an infomercial, his great knuckles bunched like red grape skins on his slacks. On the TV screen, a woman smeared pink jelly on her crow’s-feet and became young. “Miracle formula: Mariana diatoms. $69.99 in three payments!” a voiceover announced.

“What she saying?” the Russian man kept repeating. “What she doing? Wheel me closer!”

Soledad, a ninety-something Cuban woman with moist eyes, started screaming at Kiwi in Spanish. She had been Grandpa Sawtooth’s friend on the last visit, but maybe Grandpa had bitten her since then.

“Your grandfather is never going to be the prom king of Out to Sea, okay?” Robina had informed them when they’d first moved Sawtooth in. “You guys better give up that dream. He is not a people person.”

“Hiya, Soledad. How’s my grandpa? What’s news?”

Possibly this was an insensitive question. “News” for these retirees no longer meant “events” but instead seemed to describe the lisping voices of the tides. From every corner of the schooner patients blinked down at him, quietly magnetized to the boat’s surfaces. Like the swamp’s red-toed lizards, they seemed stuck to their bed rails and their chairs’ handlebars by the pads of their fingers.

Kiwi walked into the galley. “Hi, Harold.”

Harold no longer remembered him. He was sitting on one of a dozen plastic stools, eating a banana very, very slowly in a pair of new pajamas. White ducklings marched up the pant legs on an alarming voyage toward Harold’s crotch. A patch was affixed to his chest and he kept scratching at it.

“Do you have a cigarette?” he asked Kiwi. “I could really use a cigarette.” When Kiwi did not answer he returned to his contemplation of the banana.

“Harold, have you seen my grandfather?”

“I’m right here, you damn fool!” came a familiar croak from the deck outside the central cabin. Kiwi moved through a blinding square of sun and found his grandfather out on the starboard deck, barefoot in a puddle of the filtered seawater. His feet were bloated and shiny as custard, with curled, wintry toenails.

“Hi, Grandpa.”

His face was stubbornly set in its Bigtree crags.

“Grandpa Sawtooth, it’s me, Kiwi.”

Not a flicker.

“Like a fruit.” Grandpa Sawtooth smiled evilly. “That’s a damn fool name.”

Kiwi moved into the shade of the cabin’s roof and took a breath. Behind his grandfather’s head, he could see to where the seawall curved and enclosed the entire marina. He didn’t know how the residents of Out to Sea could bear to look at it — the future closing its circle on them and the sun dribbling down into the sea behind it.

“So. I saw Dad two days ago.”

Kiwi sat down in one of the blue deck chairs and his grandfather followed.

“Grandpa!” Kiwi looked to see if anyone was listening; there were a few dark clouds and one enormous gull leisurely devouring sea bugs on the boom. “Grandpa, the Chief is working at a casino. The one they call the Jesus in the Temple Casino, over by the new penitentiary. Did you know that? I bet you knew that, huh?”