Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

As soon as he cut the propeller, Kiwi jumped out the cockpit door and waded in front of the seaplane, splashing through water that soaked up to the thighs of his jeans. On the tree island in front of him he saw the wreck — this boat was an antique! It had gone crashing into the black mangroves with enough force to crack several trunks at the knees like scorpion legs; they stood on leafy tiptoe now on the marl. The twenty-foot crane was caught in the canopy, its yellow bucket peering cannily above the fronds. What was the woman screaming at him? It sounded like a foreign language: he heard “C-c-c,” and “eee—”

He froze in the water for a moment, trying to understand her. He was still fifty yards away from the shore. That’s my name , Kiwi realized. The woman was his sister. He went crashing through the mirror of the water toward her, each of them shouting out the other’s name like imperfect echoes.

“Terrific landing, son!” Denny was calling behind him. The skin around one eye was puffing tall as bread from where he’d hit the cockpit window while exiting the plane. “One of the best I’ve seen in my career! Just think of what the papers are going to call you now. ”

“So let me get this straight — this girl is a relation of yours?”

Osceola was sitting on Denny’s cooler lid. A dirty crepe dress frothed over her knees, beneath which long vertical scratches skidded from shin to ankle. She didn’t remember how she’d gotten them. She downed half a gallon of water and ate all the candy bars and fruit that Mrs. Pelkis had packed for Denny and she was still hungry, she said, still thirsty.

Kiwi kept hugging her and whispering that everything was okay, wondering if this was true — Ossie looked very sick to him. That thing she had on was their mother’s wedding dress, Kiwi noted with a wandering horror. His eyes kept fixing on disturbing new pieces of the picture she made: Ossie’s hair was a muddy yellow from the mangrove tannins and her eyes were hollows. Her voice, when it came, was barely a whisper, as if she were afraid the mere act of speech might cause the pilot and her brother to vanish.

“No more water?”

“No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Os. We’ll get you more on the mainland.”

“I’m going to drink from the faucet. Kiwi, I’m going to drink water for an hour.”

“Sure. Come on, get in the shade.”

They were on a strip of rocky beach surrounded on all sides by mangroves and thin palms. Dennis “Denny” Pelkis, who seemed somewhat dazed, had waded out to do some kind of make-work maintenance on the plane.

“He left me,” she said quietly.

“Who left you? The Chief? What are you doing out here?”

“Louis Thanksgiving. He took me out here and then he left me at the altar.”

What she described to Kiwi was the story of a jilted bride: the ghost had proposed to her with a lavish sincerity. He had entered her — forever, she’d thought. When you married a ghost, she explained, you didn’t say “till death do us part.” Who or what could part you? There was nothing left to part you. No body left to be parted from.

“I’m sorry that didn’t work,” Kiwi managed to choke out. “But also, I’m not really sorry, you know?”

Kiwi wondered if he could hug Ossie. He was very aware of Dennis Pelkis watching them from the shade of the patchy mangrove saplings, smoking his third or maybe fourth cigarette.

The ghost had taught her how to rig a 5.5-horsepower engine to the back of the dredge scow, how to open the tank vent and move the gearshift lever to neutral, how to set the choke between half and full, adjust the throttle, prime the fuel system by squeezing the flaccid gas-line bulb to firmness, how to tie a rope around the engine and pull. The ghost had used her hands to make sure that the dredge barge was firmly attached to the stern of the dredge scow. He had used Osceola’s hands to steer.

“You drove that thing by yourself?”

Ossie nodded. “But he was doing the driving through me”—as she spoke she flexed her fingers, her violet eyes squeezed into petals, unreadable—“he possessed my hands on the throttle. At first,” she added with the terrible new shyness. “We had an accident. The second day. I lost the bag that had our camp stuff, our food, Louis’s old machete, everything went overboard … I lost Louis’s shirt, the Model Land Company map. Everything, Kiwi. I had to put this dress on, I didn’t have anything else.”

The dredgeman’s ghost had helped her to pilot the boat all the way from Hermit Key to this island — Kiwi had no idea where they were in relation to their home, but Ossie said she’d been following his map toward the Calusa shell mounds. The ghost, she said, was retracing its route. They had been following the canal that the dredge crew had begun digging in 1935 and had failed to complete.

“And then, on our wedding day, Louis left me at the altar. I woke up here alone.” She wound what was left of her dress around her fist and shivered a little. “I woke up here so empty, Kiwi. I don’t know …”

“At the altar …,” Kiwi said slowly. He was looking past his sister; his eyes had caught on a frizzled length of rope hanging from the lowest branch of a sweet bay tree. Kiwi watched the rope swaying, almost but not quite sweeping the ground. A fat knot was camouflaged against the trunk, black as a bump on the wood.

Is that how you marry a ghost?

It occurred to him that he was looking at a small noose.

“He was gone and I couldn’t finish it …”

Ossie stopped talking and gave an angry little shrug, as if refusing to apologize for something she felt terribly about. Waves of wind were moving along the tree line and the rope twisted into complicated shapes, spun out of them.

“Look, I hate to interrupt this … this. But you want to tell me exactly what’s going on here?”

Denny drew himself up to his full height of five four. He had waded in with a map and a grease-blotched towel that he’d found wedged under the pilot’s seat. Outside the cockpit he looked a little like an evicted mole, blinking in the glass glare off the water, and Kiwi wondered what the Philosophy of Denny said about this particular eventuality: a student pilot finding his younger sister in a wedding dress, in the middle of the swamp.

Dennis Pelkis, forty-two-year veteran of the skies around Loomis County, stared at the Bigtrees with a face that flickered between its natural good humor and an uneasiness that was almost fear. Kiwi wondered if it was possible for a man to look less comfortable with a situation. He was wearing his sunglasses, and the swamp grass waved whitely inside them. Sunburn was coloring the lobes of his huge ears.

“My sister was trying to elope with her boyfriend,” Kiwi said, staring hard at Denny. “Louis Thanksgiving,” he said, because the name seemed to legitimize the scene. Everybody understood a jilting — a soured romance. Everybody liked to hate a pusillanimous groom. “It didn’t work out. He’s gone now.”

“Oh … well. Sorry to hear that, young lady. Help is on the way,” he mumbled somewhat unconvincingly.

A silence reasserted itself then for a period of seconds, until the air became a still, deepening pool. The rope was twisting and untwisting and whispering something dreadful inside the leaves. Osceola kept staring through the teardrop hoop on the rope into the trees with a vacancy that Kiwi remembered well.

“It’s okay,” Kiwi said. He kept staring at the rope. He could hear Dennis Pelkis talking in a low voice on his radio. “I promise, Ossie, it’s going to be all right. We’ll all go home now.”

“Kiwi,” Ossie said, her voice suddenly tack-sharp. Clouds moved and light caught on a tiny fishhook in her wedding lace. “Have you talked to Ava? Is Ava with the Chief?”