Swamplandia! (14 page)

“The mainland. You’re asking me if I’m a Kiwi? If I want to leave home for Loomis County?”

“Yeah. I don’t want to go there. You neither, right? I mean, I bet Kiwi likes it. I think it could be okay to go visit him. Remember when we stayed on the mainland during the hurricane? At the Bowl-a-Bed hotel? That wasn’t so bad.”

Pins clattering in the lobby even after the storm began—that’s what I remembered—gutter balls and the occasional strike still audible over the rising wind. Cold sodas and nuclear-orange crackers you could get for a quarter from a vending machine. We’d all piled into a single room. The Chief and Grandpa Sawtooth had climbed onto the balcony during the eye of the storm to smoke half a pack of cigarettes, and eleven-year-old Kiwi had followed to inform them about lung disease. At eight o’clock the power went out. Mom had read the
TV Guide
to us by candlelight.

“Yeah, that time was okay,” said Ossie. “I liked the shower cap, remember that?”

“The shower cap! Mom said we looked like actresses in it!”

(To be clear, we were talking about plastic hats. Disposable bath hats,
used
, with black curls of stranger hair in them. My sister and I dug into those jeweled soaps and shrink-wrapped bath hats as if we’d found a sultan’s treasures next to the minty hotel crapper.)

“That
was
fun. And all the mainlanders got so grumpy when they didn’t have hot water, and the Chief said that a Bigtree could shower in a Seth’s spit, remember? How hard he made Mom laugh?”

“But it would be different if we lived there. That time was like a vacation.”

We both grinned—the idea of the Bigtrees on a vacation, of the Chief as some dummy tourist! A Loomis
dad
.

Ossie’s smile flickered. “I don’t think we’d do very well there, Ava. I don’t see how we could really ever catch up. What grade would they even put us in, at a Loomis school? I mean, are they going to offer a class for Spiritists? Gym class for you? Gym credits for alligator wrestlers?” She flopped onto the bed and pushed two stained pillows at our ceiling like pom-poms: “Ava—I know! We can try out for the cheerleading squad!”

I laughed, startled—Ossie sounded as bitter as any adult. And Ossie was
never
the wise guy in our family. The jags of intelligence inside my
sister shocked everybody, tourists and Bigtrees alike—she’d say something smart out of nowhere and prove to us that she wasn’t only a dreamer. Every time Ossie was funny or mean it surprised me; it was like your skiff hitting an intricate reef, all those delicate white fans that wouldn’t yield, or like your foot scraping a rock in the middle of a deep empty lake. Even her fantasies had such rocks in them.

“I’ll be the prom queen.” She grinned a terrible grin at me. “You can be the class president. We’ll make
posters.
”

“Okay, I get it. Good. I think it’s a dumb idea, too. I was just wondering.”

Hours had passed since we’d returned from the Last Ditch, and already the dredge had taken on a pleasant, hallucinatory quality in my memory. Ossie did a studious belly flop onto her mattress, frowning down at the Model Land Company map through her white bangs. The map was four feet by three feet and thin as a butterfly wing; its blank half made the Floridian peninsula look like an amputated arm. It covered the whole floor between our beds, and the “L.T.” kept catching the light. A tiny lizard scurried over the Gulf of Mexico and disappeared behind the chest of drawers.

On Tuesday night I heard the bed groan at one a.m., the thud of Ossie’s shoes as she snuck out. Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long. It was five in the morning when I heard the door hinge squeak.

“Ava?” she whispered. Outside gray light was tenting the pines. “You’re not awake, are you?”

What a dumb question. I cracked an eye at her. My sister looked beautiful, I noted with a grudging pride. She’d copied a style from a magazine. Soft hair floated onto her cheeks.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

Her smile faltered. “It was wonderful. But he had to leave me; I think it was my fault? I couldn’t hold him. I started thinking my own thoughts again.” She looked at me with a face I didn’t understand, and I hated her new ghost, whoever he was. Was this guy just going to live inside her forever? Could she possibly want that?

“Good! I’m glad that guy is gone. Do you feel better now? Is it like climbing out of the Gator Pit? It sounds like waking up.”

But she shook her head sharply and I felt pained now, too, like I was
the one hurting her. Ossie’s hurt was an airborne virus, it could travel at you fast as a sneeze.

“I’m sorry, Ossie. Don’t be like that.”

“You don’t understand, Ava.” She pushed at her hair. “That’s okay. Maybe in a few years you will. It’s not like waking up. I was awake before. We were together, and now he’s gone.”

I got up on my elbows in the bed.

“Kiwi says your boyfriend’s not real. Or he’s real, but he’s some Loomis kid you’re meeting up with in the woods.”

We stared at each other across the channel between our two beds.

“I won’t tell anybody, I swear. Is he older than you, this guy?” I paused, running down the list of boys with heartbeats who we knew. “Is it Gus Waddell? It’s not Cubby, is it?”

“Oh, well
shoot
, Ava!” she laughed, flopping back on her mattress. “Yes, he’s much older than me. He’s not some Loomis kid, either. Cubby Wallach,
oof.
” She scrunched her face in a way to further underscore: Not. Cubby. “Cubby’s just some kid. My boyfriend is a dredgeman from Clarinda, Iowa.”

Her fist contracted into an abacus. She counted knuckles for a while.

“I guess if he’d lived he’d be Grandpa’s age. But he still looks like he did the day he died.”

“Oh.” I frowned up at her. “That’s lucky, I guess.”

She leaned in and patted my head. “Good night, Ava,” she whispered.

“Good
morning
, you mean.” This was the fat cherry on the whole crappy sundae because it was obviously morning—the skies were pinking up behind the kapok.

“Not for me. I’m exhausted, Ava.
The Spiritist Telegraph
says some Spiritists sleep for a week after a possession, but I’m going to set the alarm for lunchtime.”

“Mmnh.” I mummied myself in the bedspread. Osceola could sleep forever, for all I cared. Fine by me. I would save the park by myself. I had important training to do with my red Seth.

“Okay. Getting into bed now.” But she sat on the edge of my bed instead. “Listen, I’m sorry I left without telling you. There’s a secret I have to keep for someone. Don’t worry, okay?”

I did my best to inhale like a sleeping person.

“Hey, chickee, I do wish I could tell you,” she mumbled sadly somewhere above my head, the mattress sagging with her weight, “what’s happening to me …”

Two thirty a.m., about ten days after the Chief’s depature: I walked downstairs to investigate an animal rumbling in the kitchen and found my sister gorging on a lump of cauliflower—there was nothing left to eat, she said, and she was
ravenous
. Swamp rats could not have cleaned out our pantry more thoroughly. I saw an apple core, broken spaghetti, six cola cans. Her lipstick had left a glossy print on the plastic we kept our bread in. She’d sucked the stick of butter into a little fang. “What the heck are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing, Ava?” She shook a box at me. “I’m
starving
.”

“But why are you dressed like that? Did you run out of clean clothes to wear?”

“This is my boyfriend’s shirt. He asked me to wear it.”

I recognized the canary checks, the stains on the collar that had probably set in the spring of 1936. She’d pushed the green cuffs up above her elbows and left the long shirttails flowing over her knees, which looked small and white as clams beneath this big guy’s shirt. My eyes settled on the mole just above her wristbone. Ossie had complained about this dumb mole her whole life and it was a relief to rest my eyes on it; I had the disorienting suspicion that this black mole must be where my real sister was hiding. My real sister had gotten sucked inward and in her place was this weird stranger.

“You’re probably going to get smallpox from that shirt,” I frowned. “Malaria. You’ll probably die now, too.”

Ossie rolled her eyes. A weak film of light rinsed the stairwell and I could see our shadows bending upward on the far wall like candle flames. At a certain point the tall women of our shadows intersected, became the blank upstairs.

When we were younger, two or three years earlier, we used to play a stupid game called Mountaineering on this stairwell, Osceola on the bottom step and me belaying her with the bedsheets on top. We crumpled Kiwi’s looseleaf to make the avalanche; if as a super bonus a pissed-off
Kiwi emerged from his study cave, he got cast as our Yeti. It was very life-or-death.

“Remember Mountaineering?”

“Oh,
Ava.
”

“That was a fun game.”

Ossie looked stricken.

“Remember End of the World, how mad Mom got when we ruined her towels? Remember that time we got Mom to play, too?” I paused. “The Chief says you’re lovesick. He says it’s just a phase.”

“What? It’s nothing like that. This isn’t some dumb crush. It isn’t … I really can’t …”

Ossie was anguished, or just insulted, I couldn’t tell. I was watching her hands move up and down, as if they might be reaching for something the words could not touch.

“And afterward, when I’m coming out of it? When he leaves me …?” she tried to explain.

“Uh-huh.” I pictured this withdrawal as something invisible, painful, autonomic, a reflexive ejection, like a Seth disgorging feathers.

“Oh, it’s much worse than that stuff you hear on the radio. Your heart breaks, too, but that’s just kid’s stuff, Ava. Heartbreak is just for starters, for mortals …”

Ossie pushed the white apples of her fists into her stomach, as if she were trying to find a new way to feed herself. After a possession came a condition called Spellbreak (
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
, page 206). This was when your ghost left you, the end of your séance experience. Ossie said the loss of contact with her ghost was absolute.

“Every time I get afraid he won’t come back, Ava. He’s my same age, can you believe that? He’s a teenager. He’s like us.”

“Oh boy. I bet we have so much in common.” I knew what our brother would say:
Way to pick a winner, Osceola
.

Don’t come back, ghost
, I thought in a shout.
Leave her alone. Whoever you are, stay lost
.

Ossie thumped the cabinets for more dry food, and I thought of the Chief drumming up a Seth. A jar of gherkin pickles got passed down to me, followed by a brown tin of these prehistoric Little Cheddars, a discontinued brand of cracker. Ossie’s hands puffed huge and white behind the aqua light of the jar. I used my alligator-wrestling muscles to open it.

“He needs me to
live,
” she said mournfully, crunching into a pickle. “He needs me to hold on to his memories, and to move around the world … Death kidnapped him, Ava.” She stared at me with dry, serious eyes; for one second she looked exactly like Mom if you netted her offstage and unawares. “He was so young.”

I touched her arm through the soft cage of the dead boy’s plaids. I had just brushed my teeth but I ate these disgusting foods to keep her company. (That was my grand sacrifice—I ate miniature pickles with my sister. In retrospect, it seems that I might have done a little more for her.)

“Are we playing a game, Ossie?”

“It’s no game with him. He’s
sincere
. Serious about me. You know what I mean?”

“I know,” I said, sick with questions. “Were we playing a game before, though?”

Ossie ignored me. “We are a couple now. We live together here—” She touched her heart through the thin cotton. I noticed two initials embroidered on the shirt pocket in raspberry thread: L.T.

“You and the ghost.”

“Me and Louis.”

And then she gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shoot! I wasn’t supposed to tell you his real name.”

“Louis,” I said slowly. Got it. That was easy: the
L
of the L.T. I didn’t like this. Something was changing here, speeding up like a heartbeat.

“Okay. And when can I meet him?”

“My ghost is on the move, Ava,” she said—as if her ghost were some prowling scoundrel or a moon on the wane. She smiled at me, her eyes raw and wet. “I think I’d like for you to meet him.”

I loved my sister, so it was with some discomfort that I realized I didn’t want her to be happy. Not like this, anyways, because of some ghost.

She let slip that her new boyfriend Louis’s earthly title had been “the Dredgeman,” but she wouldn’t tell me any more about him. Who was this guy? When she dated the morgue-fresh dead of Loomis County, she taped their newspaper obituaries above her bed. These were recent tragedies: local sons our age like Camden Walsh, the handsome brunette
prom king from Jupiter High, who had drowned in a canal, or Julio Sáenz, a football star and galumphing freckle-spattered sophomore in Fort Pierce who got struck by lightning on the forty-yard line. But I couldn’t find Louis’s papers in our bedroom or folded inside
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
. He wasn’t in her binders or pinned up on her headboard. His name didn’t seem to exist anywhere outside of my sister.

At noon I did my sleuthing on the Library Boat. Again I couldn’t find any trace of him, his origins—no books, no pictures. Possibly she had found something hidden inside the dredge itself, an engineering manual or another Model Land contract? A diary? Old letters from the cook’s wife?

“The Dredgeman???” I wrote on a café napkin. Probably Sherlock Holmes carried a pad with him. Fans creaked and spun to life in the quiet café. The generators hummed. Moths were sparkling around our ceiling in patterns that seemed almost meaningful, stitching a violet-brown lace between the blades, and I mopped my face with the blank side of the napkin and waited for more clues to accumulate.

For a week the Model Land dredge barge didn’t budge an inch. It remained pinched between the clothespin trees along the canal’s eastern bank. It was a delicate and temporary-looking captivity, and I bet the next major storm would wash it further downriver. The boat was always covered in twenty-odd buzzards, and mysteriously denuded of the swamp birds you usually saw out here: anhingas and cormorants and a beautiful variety of heron. The buzzards continued to pour over Swamplandia! in clothy waves; on the radio, the university scientists speculated that the unusual migration had something to do with the late frosts in the Midwest. Disturbances in the raptors’ diurnal cues.