Swamplandia! (3 page)

“The gators are not your pets, Ava,” the Chief was always reminding me. “That creature is pure appetite in a leather case. A Seth can’t love you back.”

But I loved
them
, the dark tapering mass of them; I feared them, too, their alien eyes and sudden bursts of speed. Chief Bigtree hung wooden memos bragging on them all over our park, many of them accurate:

ALLIGATORS CAN RUN FASTER THAN ARABIAN HORSES ON LAND!

THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!

A SETH IS A 180 MILLION YEAR VETERAN OF OUR PLANET!

“There’s no show today, you dummies,” I told the alligators over the railing. I rained out a bag of marbles and watched the planetary spin of them off the Seths’ black shoulders. The Chief said I could do this because the Seths used these marbles as
gastroliths
—they used them to grind up prey in their gizzards the way chickens use grit. And gastroliths allow crocodilians to float better—to settle their weight in the water. Our gators were born knowing exactly how much weight to swallow to find and keep their balance.

I checked my watch: on an ordinary day, we would be five minutes
into our show by now. My dad would have waded into the Pit water, carrying a gator harness that he made out of old airplane cables. He would have selected a sparring partner, “a big respectable sucker,” and slid the rusty harness over the Seth’s snout. The Seth, dripping and black, would fight like a fish inside that harness while the other gators continued switching through the sludgy Pit, slow and pitiless inside their Seth-oblivion.

Once the Chief hauled his Seth onto the stage, the real fight began. The Seth would immediately lurch forward, yanking the Chief back into the water. The Chief would pull him out again, and this tug-of-war would continue for a foamy length of time while the crowd whooped and wahooed, cheering for our species. To officially win an alligator wresling match, you have to close both your hands around the gator’s jaws. That was the hard part, getting your Seth’s mouth to shut. Mom said that we girls were at a natural disadvantage because our hands were small—they could barely span a piano octave.

But one curious fact about Seth physiognomy is this: while a Seth can
close
its jaws with 2,125 pounds per square inch of cubic force, the force of a guillotine, the musculature that opens those same jaws is extremely weak. This is the secret a wrestler exploits to beat her adversaries—if you can get your Seth’s jaws shut up in your fist, it is next to impossible for the creature to open them again. A girl’s Goody ribbon can tie off the jaws of a four-hundred-pound bull gator.

But we didn’t just tape up the Seth’s jaws and declare ourselves the victors—our Bigtree show was special because we did tricks, too, and practiced some of the more dangerous holds. Before she died, Mom was in the middle of teaching me her advanced moves. The Chin Thrust, for example, a Bigtree standard. To do the Chin Thrust, you make a latch out of your chin against the purselike U of a Seth’s jaws, tucking its broad snout against your throat like a botched kiss. Another good one was the Silent Night, where you covered the alligator’s eyes with your hands, fastened its snout with the tape, and then enlisted the help of Mom or the Chief or Grandpa to flip it onto its back. This was a sorcery that “put the alligator to sleep.” Years later, I would learn that we were disrupting the alligators’ otoliths, tiny sacs that connect the inner ear with the brain. We blacked them out.

If you are an animal lover, I can tell you what the Chief told us: that
it was never a fair fight; that even taped and flipped, even “sleeping,” its legs churning toward an ultimate befuddlement and stillness, the alligator had all the real advantages; that an alligator can hoard its violence for millions and millions of years. A Seth could trick you into thinking it had died with a days-long freeze, a mortuary pose on a rock, and then do a lickety-split lunge and snatch an unwary turtle or a tiny ibis. The Seths had a ferocity that no wrestler could snuff for very long. The first and last time I’d tried to do a Silent Night, the alligator managed to right itself and bruised my entire right side with its thrashing tail, and Mom told the Chief that I was still too young to perform the trick. I felt older now, though. Looking out at all the vacant stands, I felt like I had better become ready.

What the tourists paid to watch, the Chief always said, was an unequal fight. A little seesaw action: death/life. The Chief had long ago taught me a Bigtree strategy called “peacocking weakness.” All the best Seminole wrestlers used this strategy, too. The true champions handicapped themselves, the Chief said, blindfolding their eyes or binding their dominant hand.
Weakness
was the feather with which you tickled your tourists; it was your
weakness
that pinned the tourists to their seats. They saw the puny size of you versus your alligator. They saw that you could
lose
. If you exploited this fact, you could float the outcome of your battle into the air over the stadium, like a balloon. During the really
scary
family shows, the electric, something-goes-awry times, I would picture it up there just like the Chief had said, our fate, a translucent black balloon wombling between the palm trees.

“You got to remind the mainlanders that your alligator is a no-shit dinosaur, Ava,” the Chief used to lecture me. “Those bored, dead drylanders. They act like they think they’re watching robots up here!” He’d shake his head. “Prove to them that you can lose, so you can surprise people, honey, and
win
.”

Now I wondered: Would we ever do a show like that again? What if yesterday had been my last-ever chance to wrestle? To surprise the mainland people? I leaned over the railing to the Gator Pit. The little bag felt weightless and I realized that I was almost out of marbles.
Oh for heaven’s sake, Ava Bigtree, don’t be so melodramatic! Of course you will wrestle again. Today is a fluke; of course the tourists will be back!
I tried to give myself a lecture in my mother’s stern voice. Then I used her same
voice on the gators, who were blinking up at me so stupidly from the Pit:

“Eat up, you fools, because no one is coming,” I hissed. Blue and gray marbles caught in their scales like stubborn bubbles. The big yellow shooter rolled around one Seth’s scaly shoulders like a dollhouse sun. They all sank into the water and turned into gastroliths.

“Ava? What are you doing?” Ossie’s voice erupted through the speaker hooked up to the ticketing booth. “Ha-ha—did you lose your marbles?”

Two weeks passed. The Chief discovered that we couldn’t even sell out the once-a-day wrestling show. We started performing for whoever showed up, whenever they came (we were still getting a few confused Europeans, clutching these expired travel guides with hydrangea-pink spines and greeting my father with
¿Qué
? and
Quoi?
). The Chief and I cut twenty minutes from the show, but you could feel the tourists’ pity first and then their distraction, their attention wandering the skies of the open stadium like kites. Without Mom and Grandpa Sawtooth the whole show felt horribly incomplete to me. “The tourists can’t tell,” the Chief assured us, but it seemed like even the expressionless Seths had to know that something was missing. One Thursday when the Chief was in a black mood and caught a tourist yawning during his wrestling demonstration, he groaned loudly and released the Seth back into the water with a slap: “Ta-da,” he growled, standing up. “That’s all, folks.”

We were still calling this thing the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular.

I started to miss the same tourists I’d always claimed to despise: the translucent seniors from Michigan. The ice-blond foreign couples yoked into thick black camera straps like teams of oxen. The fathers, sweating everywhere, with their trembling dew mustaches. The young mothers humping up and down the elevated walkway to the Swamp Café, holding their babies aloft like blaring radios.

Where had all the families gone? The families were gone. All at once, it felt like. Families had been our keystone species of tourists on Swamplandia! and now they were rarer than panthers. Red-eyed men with no kids in tow started showing up at the Saturday shows. Solitaries. Sometimes they debarked the ferry with perfumed breath,
already drunk. Sometimes they motored over from the Flamingo Marina in Loomis County on their own junker boats, and always they seemed far more interested in the cheap beer and the woodsmoke black racks of the fried frog legs than our tramway tours or our alligator wrestling—somehow Swamplandia! seemed to have earned a truck-stop reputation as a good place to “get obliterated” on a weekend night. One guy I found urinating on the side of our gift shop—the actual wall, even though the public bathrooms with the vault toilets were just a five-minute walk down the trail! I hated them. When we had a crowd of these red-eyes, the Chief would not let me wrestle and performed the whole show himself. The Chief liked most every tourist with a wallet but he cooled on these guys. He blamed the World of Darkness for them, too.

“We’ll get the families back,” the Chief promised us one night after a particularly scary set of individuals had mobbed up to see our show. These guys drank so much beer that Gus and Kiwi had to help them back onto the ferry; I’d caught one of them throwing up into the bushes behind the musuem. Another one had cozied up to the ticket booth window and whispered strange jokes to my sister, leaning into his elbows like a grasshopper, so that from where I was standing it looked like he was trying to kiss her through the glass. The Chief had started screaming at these men on the ferry dock, but now that we were home he seemed angry with us: “What’s wrong with you girls? You need to calm down.” He patted Ossie stiffly. “Those clowns are gone. Those fools are just paying our rent until we get the
families
back. This is like bad weather, you understand? It’s gonna blow over.”

But I couldn’t sleep—because what horizon did we think the sun was dropping into? If the World of Darkness stayed open and Mom stayed in her grave, how, exactly, were we supposed to get the families back? We ate our dinners beneath a reticent crescent moon. The Chief picked at his molars with a yellow toothpick, Kiwi read, Ossie kept her head down and ate off everybody’s plates. She ate with her fingers, peeling colorless grains of rice off Mom’s blue tablecloth. But I couldn’t stop imagining our fate up there, the black balloon. A thin globe of air clearly visible behind the toothy palms. I could see that balloon and the moon shining through it but I couldn’t begin to imagine what was going to happen to us.

I
ncredibly, Mom stayed dead but the sky changed. Rains fell. Alligators dug and tenanted new lakes. It became (how?) early April. We were doing four or five shows a week, at most, for pitiful numbers of people. Some audiences were in the single digits. I read my comics and memorized the speech bubbles of heroes. I dusted our Seth clock, a gruesome and fantastic timepiece the Chief had made: just an ordinary dishlike kitchen clock set inside a real alligator’s pale stomach. The clock hung from a hook next to the blackboard menu in our Swamp Café.
TIME TO EAT!
somebody—probably Grandpa—had scratched into the boards above it. Water overflowed the sloughs and combed the black mudflats. Mangroves hugged soil and vegetation into pond-lily islands; gales tore the infant matter apart along the Gulf. Our swamp got blown to green bits and reassembled, daily, hourly. The wet season was a series of land-versus-water skirmishes: marl turned to chowder and shunted the baby-green cocoplums into the sea; tides maniacally revised the coastlines. Whole islands caught fire from lightning strikes, and you could sometimes watch deer and marsh rabbits leaping into the sea of saw grass on gasps of smoke.

Some days Gus Waddell—our fat angel at the ferry’s helm—was our only visitor. Of course, we couldn’t tally Gus as a Swamplandia! tourist because he didn’t pay money to see us. Gus Waddell was the ferryboat captain, as per his monogrammed life vest and his little captain’s hat and his squishy-foam
I’M THE CAPTAIN
drink cozy. Uncle Gus brought
us mainland provisions: bagged butcher-shop meats and various zoo supplies and gallons of whole milk, big sandbags of rice. Several boxes of our favorite mainland cereal, Peanut Butter Boos. For the Chief, a rubber-banded roll of emerald Win This Lotto! tickets and the “Ziggurat”-size carton of Sir Puffsters cigarettes.

Back when Mom was healthy, we’d see the flash of orange paint behind the mangroves that meant the ferry had arrived and go scrambling for our staff positions, like mainland kids who hear a school bell. And then all day my siblings and I would barely see each other—we’d be too busy busing tables in the Swamp Café or selling tickets or giving a tram tour. Sometimes the first minute that we spent together didn’t come until 3:30 p.m., when we met onstage for the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular. But now Kiwi and Ossie and I were always lumping up in the Gator Pit, trying to figure out: what are we supposed to do? When Gus showed up with supplies and no people he gave us an uneasy gift: time. Free time. Many blank, untouristed hours of it. That’s how my sister’s metamorphosis started to happen, I think—inside that white cocoon.

We started spending the no-tourist days on the Library Boat—even Ossie, who had never been what you would call a bookworm. We boarded an airboat and motored over to the long bottleneck cove of a nameless pine island about a quarter mile west of Swamplandia! A coppery green twenty-foot schooner was at permanent anchor there, listing in the rocks. This was the Library Boat. Like Gus’s ferry, the Library Boat was another link to the mainland, although this boat never moved. It held a cargo of books. In the thirties and forties, Harrel M. Crow, a fisherman and bibliophile, had piloted the schooner around our part of the swamp delivering books to the scattered islanders. Then Harrel M. Crow died and I guess that was it for the door-to-door service. But his Library Boat, miraculously, had survived on the rocky island, unscavenged and undestroyed by hurricanes. It was an open secret, utilized by all our neighbors. You could row over to the site of the wreck, descend into H. M. Crow’s hold, return with an armload of semidamp reading material. People contributed newer books, too—the bottom shelves had filled with trashy romance novels, mysteries, somebody’s underlined Bible, a mostly filled-in book of jumble puzzles, the plays of Shakespeare. So the collection was always evolving.