Swamplandia! (32 page)

“Emily, babe, don’t move? We want that hair to stay put.”

Emily kept tugging one black strap and wiggling closer to Kiwi, until he could feel the dampness of her black swimsuit pressed against his side—she, too, was still wet from the rescue.

“Thank you for saving me,” she told him breathily. “For saving my
life.
”

“Sure. I mean, no problemo.” Kiwi felt a little sick.

“Emily, babe, when you stare at him? Can you look a little more,
you
know—” The photographer made a noise like a popped balloon and Emily shuffled her hair back, nodded like she understood this directive perfectly. “Like:
wow
. I am so happy to be alive. Like, give this man a medallion.”

Kiwi straightened at the word “man.” Instinctively, he clenched his pectorals.

I didn’t save her
, Kiwi was going to answer honestly if the question came up. They were cheek to cheek, and he could feel all the smiling muscles tensing in her face.

“Bag-tree,” a female reporter asked him, “how do you spell that?”

“It’s Bigtree. As in Hilola Jane Bigtree,” he said. And it felt wonderful to say it, like swinging an ax into the glass case of his Loomis identity. “I belong to the Bigtree tribe of Swamplandia!”

“I’m sorry?”

“B-I-G-T-R-E-E. We do an alligator-wrestling show? Have you seen that billboard on I-95? Big guy in a headdress?”

Her smile went vast and glassy.

“Channel seven came out a few years back to film a segment about
us? We advertised in all the local papers. We call the alligators Seths,” he added, as if this fact might spin some tumblers for her.

The pen hovered an inch above her pad.

“Okay, give me that, I’ll write it for you,” Kiwi said. “Can you at least put her name in there? It’s H-I-L-O-L-A.”

Kiwi started talking faster. He heard his voice taking on the Chief’s ringleader intonations.
This is how I can help them
. If he could pull it off. He pictured an article that would drive the mainlanders seaward like lemmings, pushing them deep into the swamp, toward his father and his sisters and the patient Seths, toward Hilola Bigtree’s glass tomb in the museum, a hundred new tourists clutching dollars, a hundred new mourners come to pay his mother the tribute that counted.

“… and that’s why I’m working this job at the World of Darkness in the first place …” Kiwi heard himself urgently quoting his father. “… we’re just sizing up the competition, building capital for our Carnival Darwinism expansion. I’ll level with you, ma’am, Swamplandia! is the superior park. Best value, biggest thrills. Catch the late show, Saturdays. Alligators! Starry nights! It’s like Van Gogh meets Rambo. We’re got ninety-eight true-life
monsters.
”

Kiwi frowned—had he just seen the nib of her pen trace a little star in the pad’s margin? “Did you catch all that? Could you perhaps list our showtimes in there?”

To his left, Emily was sipping a bottle of orange soda inside a crescent moon of reporters. She wasn’t so much giving an interview as she was performing respiration for them. “I saw a tunnel,” she was saying—“of light!” she added, to clarify that she wasn’t talking causeways. The TV crew formed a little carousel of approval around her, nodding and
ahh
ing. She sucked air as if air were a milk shake, demonstrating the joy of life.

“One last question, Mr. Bigtree: is this the first life you’ve saved?” The reporter’s glasses made her eyes look far away, like tiny moons.

“Yes? I mean, I guess so.”

She smiled with creamy indulgence. “That’s quite a milestone.”

Kiwi felt himself redden. The photographers were zipping their cameras into silver bags when he stopped them.

“Wait, ma’am? My quote was not entirely accurate. I just wanted to add, apropos of your last question …”

The reported looked over with a white, harried face. “You just said—did I get this right?—‘a porpoise of your last question’? Is that supposed to be a Leviathan joke? Afraid I missed that.”

“
Apropos,
” Kiwi repeated, touching a finger to his new mustache. “Would you like me to spell that for you?” In fact, Kiwi had once again mistakenly said “a porpoise.” He had been bungling his SAT buildingblock words for months now—he pronounced “fatuous” so that it fit the meter of “SpaghettiOs.” He’d been using the word “meningitis” in compliments.

“Well, I’m a wrestler, ma’am.” Kiwi kept his eyes on his big hands but his voice grew in conviction. “I used to tape up alligators …”

Several people had turned to stare at him now. Kiwi corkscrewed his fists into Bigtree Wrestling Grip 7 for the Circumnavigator trick. Was that it? All his fingers looked smashed and broken on the tiles.

“So, ah, viz-a-viz your, your inquiry?” he coughed. Behind him the Lake of Fire gurgled benignly, a cleaning solvent fizzing on its surface. “Can you change my answer? I guess I’ve saved my own life before.”

Saturday night in the World of Darkness! Kiwi Bigtree had been alone for his whole small life and he was ready to
party
. He had mainland friends and a reason to drink with them. A hero’s welcome awaited him at Lotsa Shots, on the Paradise Level of the Sunrise mall next to the Have a Shakee Shack and Gamenesia. Kiwi borrowed one of Leo’s polo shirts and his El León cologne. When he and Leo stood next to each other now, they smelled like a fire hazard. Their polo shirts might as well have been rags soaked in kerosene.

“You sure you’re okay to drive, Vijay?”

“What, do
you
want to drive, asshole? No? You want to walk? All right then.”

The skunk lines of the road whipsawed in front of the windshield. Everybody had piled into the shitbox Volvo, two of the girls from the Dorsal Flukes and Leo in the backseat and Kiwi representing for Team Safety and Legality by wearing his seat belt in the front. Had there been a crash-test helmet, he would have worn it. Someone thunked a flask against Kiwi’s head.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“Make a note of this, Bigtree,” Leo giggled. “We earth people call it a
flask
. It’s for transporting awesome feelings. Getting-laid juice.”

“Fuck you,” Kiwi said, but he was exhausted. “I know what a flask is for.”

Red orb after red orb floated dreamily over their car roof. Vijay’s huge sneaker stayed flat on the accelerator. Stoplights swayed yellow and green over the Loomis intersections, like air plants, the mainlanders’ epiphytes. I-95 extended from Florida to
Maine
, and that faraway syllable made Kiwi fantasize about college, snowfall … Kiwi found his reflection in the side mirror: his eyes squeezed black and small above the ruddy poles of his sideburns. This face appearing in tomorrow’s newspapers, everybody!

“Running
lights!
” Vijay crowed, a yellow globe pinging to red in the side mirror. “You know why, ’cause we can’t crash, bro, we got the fucking hero with us!
Kiwi Bigtree!
”

Everyone in the World of Darkness was calling him Kiwi Bigtree now. How had this happened? It was anthill intelligence. Even Nina Suárez and her moussed coterie of World girls were kissing his cheek in greeting; they tiptoed up and called him “Kee-wee” at close range, like they were talking into a phone. Margaret Mead, RIP. Kiwi seemed unable to collect and absorb it, this happiness he knew he should now possess.

KIWI BIGTREE: SON OF THE SWAMP
. He hoped the newspaper printed the name of their park. It would be a Trojan attack inside an article about the World of Darkness.

The bouncer at Lotsa Shots was a white man with ratty wheat-colored hair, his arms a lewd sleeve of nude blue fairies.

“You boys having a good time tonight?”

“So far, bro,” Vijay said, just as Kiwi slurred, “Heretofore.”

“How old are you boys?”

Vijay nudged Kiwi forward. “My friend saved a girl’s life today.”

My
friend
, Kiwi grinned. He was trying to remember his phony birthday—according to this card he was twenty-seven. These IDs were the handiwork of Vijay’s cousin’s boyfriend, a dimply Cuban-American kid who had introduced himself to Kiwi as Street Magic.

“It’s true, you don’t believe me? He did CPR on her! Check it out, that bitch is right over there. She could be
dead
if it wasn’t for him.”

Oh no!
Kiwi thought, because Emily Barton
was
here, at the bar. She was sitting on a stool, talking to the bartender, rowing her arms like a hockey player. She looked a little goofy. At the same time she was oppressively beautiful, with waist-length ebony hair.

“Congratulations, hero,” the bouncer said sourly, flipping their IDs. He waved them through a frail parasol of cigarette smoke. “I hope she blows you.”

“Asshole!”

“Not worth it, bro,” Kiwi said gravely, thinking it came out sounding pretty good. Being Vijay’s friend felt a little like being his personal accountant—girls, aggressors, who should Vijay invest his time in?

Everybody wanted to buy the heroic lifeguard a drink. A menu board listed 301 different kinds of shots—
NO REPEATS!!
someone had boasted in marker on the wall. For the first hour of his party, Kiwi, afflicted with a booze-specific lexical insecurity, kept asking everybody in his loudest voice, “Hey, am I really drunk? Like, drunk-drunk?”

Leo clapped Kiwi’s back and cheerfully offered a diagnosis: Kiwi was
wasted
.

Carl Jenks had come out, too. He stood behind the pool table, next to the wooden cues like he was trying to blend in with them, and his face looked so swollen with distress that Kiwi wondered if Carl was holding his breath.
Why is he here?
Their boss’s face was like a stubborn sun that refused to set, burning uncomfortably late into the night. He took off his wire-rim glasses and glanced around blindly. Nobody was talking to Carl Jenks; Kiwi watched him nervously set one of his orc books, number 7,012 in that series, on the edge of the pool table. He was staring into a sunset-pink cocktail.

Kiwi stared at Carl Jenks. For a second he had the disorienting feeling that he was looking into a mirror—that somehow Carl Jenks’s miserable expression reflected something truer about Kiwi than the strip of glass behind the bar.
I should go talk to him …

But Kiwi couldn’t talk to Carl Jenks because he had a girl on his lap. Yes: Emily Barton, a beautiful girl, had volitionally climbed onto Kiwi’s lap and was now, with a dreamy casualness, as if she were reaching up to touch her own face, stroking Kiwi’s cheek. Just above his nouveau goatee-thing. Nothing like this had ever happened to Kiwi before.

Emily Barton was speaking very eloquently on the topic of herself. She was the only child of the only child of the CEO of the Carpathian Corporation, who had been visiting the Loomis World of Darkness chain on the day of her near-drowning. She was also, on her mother’s side, an heiress. She had a red-gold locket with her own childhood picture in it and her black hair smelled like peeled oranges.

Whenever one of Kiwi’s colleagues came over, she began talking in a singsong little-girl voice about her brush with “
l’morte.” Quit calling it that
. She kept touching Kiwi’s face with a small, repeated pressure, the kind of coy gesture that pretends to be void of intent; after a while Kiwi began to feel like a door that she was pushing at. Onto what? He had a feeling that whatever room he opened onto could only disappoint her.
You are a liar
, he thought, stroking her back.
We are lying together
. To date he hadn’t saved anybody—not this brunette mainlander, not his mother, not a single human or reptilian member of the Bigtree tribe.

“You
know
?” she’d ask after nearly every sentence. But Kiwi never did. He managed to touch her ponytail once, very lightly, with enough frail resolve to seem both timorous and creepy. The deep citrus smell of her hair was deranging him.

Emily was an only child but that had not made her
spoiled
. She skied with a famous Ukranian, Trainer Bart, in a mountain town in Colorado. Her father was a “cheese enthusiast.” He toured wineries and he collected big rocks of art with fabulous price tags for their “hideaway” in Putney, Vermont—her family was rich enough to have these alien hobbies.

Emily giggled at something bland and declarative he said, kissed the tip of his nose—sort of fell there, actually. Her head crashed into Kiwi’s shoulder. He could smell and taste that she was very drunk.

How strange, Kiwi thought, that you could want so badly to insert a part of your anatomy inside someone who you hated. Kiwi had never once seen a pornographic film. Henry Miller’s books had aroused but confused him. At some midnightish time he put a hand on Emily’s forehead—smack on it, like a TV athlete palming a basketball or a shaman attempting an exorcism—and tried to kiss her. Did he miss? His lips grazed a left eyebrow. The attempt was not repeated.

Much later Emily announced that she would give Kiwi a ride home.

“No, thanks, it’s way too far.” She was going the wrong way on the
highway. Then he remembered where he lived now. “Home” was one of those magnetic words, it would stick to wherever you slept. “Home, you know what’s so funny about it …,” Kiwi slurred. His epiphany about the origins of species dissolved into unnameable feeling (“You are drunk as a skunk, bro,” he heard Leo tell him). “Wasted” [adj]. The road in front of them billowed and fell like black parachute cloth.

Emily moved a hand from the wheel to her own thigh, and Kiwi watched this descent with a great disturbance that he did not yet know to call arousal. She tugged his hand down to join hers. Fortunately the hand, compared to the rest of Kiwi, seemed courageous and self-possessed. It caressed her knee, rucked the fabric of her tights. The hand slid up the length of her leg with the confidence of a psychic, as if it knew exactly what was coming next.
I surely hope one of us does
, Kiwi thought, watching the hand disappear. He touched the band of her underwear and then stopped; now the hand just sort of hung out there, under the skirt, not really doing anything. Like a bookmark. Apparently it was just going to hold his place until Kiwi developed a spontaneous literacy of the female body. Did Emily wish for the hand to be there? Was she just sort of tolerating it on her thigh for now, like a benign starfish that had become mysteriously attached to her? He ran a finger around the thin band. At the intersection on Segovia Road, Kiwi leaned over and with his free hand touched a barrette or possibly an earring? He had to duck a chandelier of jewelry to find her lips. Then they
were
kissing, a long, sloppy kiss, an incredulous kiss—Kiwi’s first.