Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

I’d been following a gator haul because I couldn’t find any other road out of the slough and the matted brush gave me the easiest passage. Everywhere I felt sore and cruddy, my crotch was burning, the skin on my face came off in white peels when I rubbed at it. When I exited the slough and stood in the grasses I began shivering everywhere, as if my skin were doing its own jolly imitation of the wind-bucked water. Getting my shoes to move on land felt like lifting buckets. Yellowish gray clouds of palmetto scrub wasped away to sticks beneath me. The gator haul petered into water and then I heard them, I heard snatches of a human conversation. Someone real on a walkie-talkie. Two wood storks watched incuriously from a high branch as I crashed through a pitch pond of water lilies and hurtled toward what I hoped were real voices. Through the leaves I could see the distinctive dun and olive braid of a ranger’s uniform.

Frogs pushed their buffoon throats at me from various heights in the trees in their primordial vaudeville, and I remembered to call back to the voices: “Here! I’m over here!”

As it turned out, I’d been right about one thing: the men I’d seen on the tree island were very much alive. When I’d screamed two days ago on the slough, before the Bird Man got my jaws shut, these men had heard me. The ranger who found me brought me to meet them at the station, my heroes, so that I could thank them: two peckerwood guys sitting on the hard chairs, their cheeks flushed and stubbled. One of them had a haircut like a mushroom cap and nervous snowpea eyes and a cleft chin that made him look a little like Superman, or Superman’s sort of squirrelly twin. His friend was about a decade older and balding, with a kind, turkey-wattled face, a shirt so thin and gray it looked like dried sweat to me — not that I was in a position to judge anybody’s fashion or hygiene.

“Here she is, boys!” said the ranger (whose name I can’t remember now — he was a new recruit, decades younger than Whip). The way he said it, I felt a little like a trophy alligator he had just trussed and dropped onto the blond wood of his desk for these hunters’ perusal, a creature routed from its hole. I must have looked like one, too, with my soaked and torn clothing and the reddish mud that had rinsed even my teeth and gums.

The men nodded; the younger one shifted on his tailbone, and the larger, older hunter kept frowning slightly and repeatedly wetting his lips. I crossed my blood- and filth-encrusted arms over my chest and stared back at them. The ranger had offered me a shower on the boat ride over and I’d said no without thinking. He’d seemed surprised, so I’d explained myself — showers were hated chores for me at home, I said, where I had been a kid.

“Who are you?” I said, although I’d meant to say “thank you.”

“Trumbull,” said the older one.

“Harry,” said the younger one.

“Ava,” I said, pointing at myself, and the herky rhythms of this exchange felt a little like a show I’d seen on Grandpa’s TV about apes who’d learned to fingerpaint the alphabet.

When they weren’t hunting Harry and Trumbull worked the graveyard shift in a prosthetics plant in Ocala. They’d dabbled in greyhound racing, hibiscus farming, migrant strawberry picking, the military, fairground “barbering.” Gator hunting was something they’d done together since they were runts. Trumbull was the engine for their twosome, the talker, and his talk kept picking up speed, as if his big voice were on a downhill slope. Harry, who kept glancing at him, seemed to be the brakes.

They had a camp they returned to every July over on the rock glades about a mile before the Calusa shell mounds, and they wouldn’t have been out nearly so far if they hadn’t found their usual campsite’s water pump bent like a hairpin and decided to press on. Not once had they seen another person out that way, not ever in their fifteen years of rambling. We kept exchanging this fact between us until it gleamed gold and I was almost blinded in that tiny room, I felt so lucky.

“It was just the purest coincidence …,” Harry, the younger one, kept saying. “When Trumbull tells me he thought he seen a little girl out there, well …!”

Trumbull and Harry started shaking their heads in alternating rhythms. I felt my head beginning to join in, stopped it. I was still shocked by the cool and even feel of tile under my bare feet; the ranger had taken my ruined shoes from me, and was making some quiet arrangement on the telephone in the next room.

“You guys surprised me, too. I thought you guys were ghosts,” I offered. I stood on the fault line of the men’s laughter and everybody seemed surprised when I started laughing along with them. For a second I had a flutter of the old after-show feeling and I thought, Oh my God, what if it’s really over?

At that juncture, I wasn’t talking about the Bird Man. The ranger didn’t ask me any questions about how I’d wound up on the drift slough, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to volunteer.

“When you go back to your camp,” I asked them, “will you keep an eye out for a red alligator? She’s a Seth from my family’s alligator-wrestling park. She has this, ah, this special condition, I don’t think it’s a mutation, exactly, my brother will know …”

Harry made a little noise in his throat and looked around the room, like he wished the ranger would come back.

“Now you are not going to believe this …” The ranger returned from his desk with two more water bottles for me and a funny expression, a grimace that kept itching up toward a grin and collapsing. It made me think of a bent fishing rod, as if his mood were some monster fish that he couldn’t reel in.

“You said your name is Ava Bigtree? Do you by any chance have a relative named Oh-see-oh-la? Because she got picked up not five miles from where we found you, kid. They got her just this morning …”

He slid a paper toward me: NOTICE JULY 29 SEARCH AND RESCUE UPDATE, BIGTREE, OSCEOLA RECOVERED BY SEAPLANE PILOT …

My eyes flew down the column and came to rest on the little ledges of their names: “Bigtree, Osceola” and “Bigtree, Kiwi.”

“I would love to hear what you girls thought you were doing out there,” the pale ranger said, raising a scabby eyebrow at the gator hunters. Harry stared at Trumbull with a hangdog expression, as if to say that he’d been ready before they even got here to go , and Trumbull, who was eating a bag of white potato straws that he’d purchased from the vending machine near the latrine, didn’t have a lot to add. He read a few lines and shrugged.

“That’s a funny name,” said Trumbull, jawing on a potato straw. “Bigtree. What were you all doing way out here? Family vacay-shun, or something?”

Kiwi, Ossie, and an older white couple named Mr. and Mrs. Pelkis were waiting for me at the ferry dock. We talked over one another while the older couple watched from the dock’s edge, babbling about Seths and Louis Thanksgiving and the Chief in what must have sounded like a foreign language — behind us, Mrs. Pelkis started sobbing for some reason, her husband loudly shushing her. And I folded into my sister’s grief and heat. My brother’s wet face. I kept closing my fingers around the secret, enfleshed stones of their wrist bones and breathing in the strange smells of them — Ossie’s mangrove dank and Kiwi’s hotel scent of aftershave and shampoo — to verify that they were truly alive.

Nobody spoke on the car ride into Loomis. Kiwi had written out directions to the place where our dad was staying, the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, on a card from Mrs. Pelkis’s purse. After that brief exchange with us, she’d slammed a cassette of classical music into the tape deck with the attitude of someone turning a door lock. The huband, Dennis Pelkis, was snapping blue gum like he was trying to generate electricity or something. I’d been testing him: every time I asked a question he put another stick of blue gum in his mouth, which meant he had four sticks in there right now. Which was fine by me — nobody seemed capable of speech just then. Ossie and Kiwi watched the rainfall through their respective windows, and because I was squeezed in the middle and I didn’t have a window I watched the changes on their faces.