Swamplandia! (33 page)

Behind Emily’s head, Kiwi could see the tall buildings of downtown Loomis. Large ficus trees became a blotter for electric light. He gulped a moan and shoved her hand beneath the roomy waistband of Cubby’s jeans.
Don’t ruin this, brain, please
. He hoped this amazing thing that her hands and her warm mouth had committed them to could proceed without another word.

Forty minutes later Kiwi got dropped at the World of Darkness, no longer a virgin. His predominant emotion: confusion. A headache swaddled his thoughts like cloth.
Don’t come back, brain, ever again
. The few dreams he had were bad and broth-thin: Ava turned up in some of them, and Osceola. The Seths were an undersea quilt of lantern eyes and teeth. He woke up half a dozen times to a feeling of pins and needles—as if the entire length of his skinny body were a numb foot tingling awake, resigning itself to the pain of sensation.

By 4:30 a.m. Kiwi wasn’t drunk anymore, or a hero—that whiskey shimmer had been reabsorbed by his skin.
I hate you
, he thought, and this thought floated serenely outside of him, because who could it attach to? He couldn’t even pretend to hate the Chief at this hour. He missed his family too badly.
I hate who?
Carl Jenks? What about Dr. Gautman? Emily Barton? Every tourist? The Chief’s loan officer? Failure! He couldn’t hate any of them, he couldn’t find one person to use as a tether; the rage was like a balloon that drifted heavenward and broke free of its string. Kiwi, who considered himself a grammarian of human emotion, knew that anger required a direct object. (I am angry at ______. I hate ______.) “To hate” was a transitive verb. Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of ______.) Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space.

Kiwi shivered in his sheets. These, too, were rentals. “Prison linens,” Leo called them, although Kiwi sort of liked their stripes, which were wood-duck gray and a mustardy gold and indisputably ugly and which made Kiwi feel strangely at home. They looked like something his mom might have thoughtlessly plucked from the Goodwill bin. His mom in the Goodwill was like a girl in a field of dismal flowers.

I hate you, Dad
, he tried again—but that old trick wasn’t working. Lately his dad had started to shrink in his mind, too thin to blame the big crimes on (loss of home, loss of life).

Kiwi Bigtree contracted into his smallest self. He smothered his face with the pillow. At one point he opened his closet door and stared at the green poster of his mother, closed it. Minutes dripped red light down one edge of the bedside clock. He stared at the closet door and he called this state “sleep.”

When Kiwi woke up at 7:09, he was a hero again. Everybody pounced in the break room. Barb from ticketing joked that she wanted Kiwi’s autograph. Half a dozen employees who had seen his article blocked his path to the time clock. Yvans shook the front page of the
Loomis Register
at him.
KIWI BIGTREE, “HELL’S ANGEL”
the headline read, and below this,
WORLD OF DARKNESS HERO
.

One line four up from the bottom read: “And Kiwi Bigtree is no stranger to the water—he grew up on an ‘alligator farm’ in the swamp!”

A farm?

Two-thirds of the article was about Emily’s “tunnel of light.” Specialists were quoted next to their boxy photographs: a famous surgeon who claimed this tunnel was the happy fiction of a body deprived of oxygen, and a priest who called the light God.

Their debate on the cosmos was allotted one paragraph. Kiwi skipped it irritably, wondering:
But where is my
family
?

Kiwi’s real name appeared in every paragraph, but with each successive mention the words “Kiwi Bigtree” seemed to grow more remote from his own understanding of himself until the newsprint looked like runes, glyphs, an obsolete equation for sound. Kiwi read the letters K-I-W-I B-I-G-T-R-E-E as if he were staring at two squads of ants.

The final line was a quote from a World of Darkness director, Mr. Frank Saleti, whom he’d never met before: “We couldn’t be prouder of his performance. Kiwi Bigtree is one of our finest employees.”

“And that girl you saved was on
television
, Kiwi, did you see it?” Yvans spun him toward the mounted television set as if Kiwi might appear there again this moment like a face in a mirror. “Channel five, how you call that show with the crazy lady? The large-butted one with hair like a squirrel’s tail? She seems like she is bipolar or something? Very hyper-acting?”

Kiwi knew the program. “Emily Barton was on
Jenny Just Spills It
?” This show was Loomis prime time and very popular with a certain histrionic-lady demographic. The eponymous host Jenny drank pots of coffee on air and often wept with her guests. Rescues were a regular feature. Kiwi had once watched Jenny interview a fire-truck dalmatian.

“What did Emily tell her? Did she use my real name?”

“That she had like a kind of a vision underwater.” Yvans grinned with all his teeth. “She says she saw an angel.
You
, Kiwi.”

Kiwi’s shoulders flew up around his ears.

Deemer and Floricio, two of Ephraim Lippmann’s thuggish buddies who had shunned Margaret Mead for weeks, now knocked into Kiwi Bigtree—in the friendly way—or punched him, in the friendly way, in the halls. “Saw you on TV, motherfucker! You’re big-time!” Kiwi smiled warily back at them.

Nina Suárez stopped him in the Flukes to gush, “Did you watch the news? It’s like we’re
all
famous now!” She’d seen her bike in the parking lot when the news crew camera panned out.

“You must feel wonderful!” strangers kept insisting. “You must feel …”

But from eleven to two fifteen Kiwi felt like puking, and when that feeling at last subsided he felt nothing.

When Kiwi was three or four months old, the Chief had photographed him in a wicker laundry basket on a sandy kink of land in the Pit. Kiwi wasn’t sure what the inspiration for this shot was: baby Moses meets Robert Louis Stevenson? Inside the photograph Kiwi had company: rat snakes and scarlet kings, thin ropes of them, and hatchling Seths with their yellow eyes bugged and wild around his clothes-pinned diaper. “My son didn’t cry at all,” the Chief told strangers at every opportunity. Everybody agreed that this was an auspicious image for a Bigtree wrestler. Baby Kiwi was wrinkled up with laughter, his pudgy fists swinging for the lens.

His parents had turned this image into a ten-by-fourteen-inch poster and sold hundreds of them to the tourists over the years.

“See, son?” The Chief liked to say, tapping the baby Kiwi in the poster. “What happened? You were brave as spit
then.
”

Gus Waddell will have brought him the newspaper by now
. He pictured the Chief lowering his coffee. His son, a World of Darkness employee! But a “hero,” now. Did those two facts cancel one another out? Possibly the Chief would take the bus to the World of Darkness to look for him, he had to be prepared for that. Maybe the Chief was rolling toward him right now with a slow, inexorable rage, like a bowling ball …

Kiwi caught himself smiling at the thought. He smiled so hard that his eyes narrowed into crescents and began to water. And it was this grin that broke the news to the rest of him—Kiwi realized then that he would really love to see his father.

Attendance at the Leviathan spiked by 20 percent during the week following the “Hell’s Angel” story. People wanted to meet him, to pump his hands and thank him for some reason, as if he had saved them personally. They posed for snapshots in front of “the Lake where it happened.”

“Are
you
religious?” Lost Souls asked him. “Do
you
believe in angels?”

“No,” Kiwi replied seriously. It was his kid sisters who believed in ghosts, angels, life after death, conjuring spells. “I am not. I do not. Who knows what Emily Barton thinks she saw down there, but I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I am not a literal angel, no.”

He gave several dozen autographs as Kiwi Bigtree, Hell’s Angel. As he signed he’d feel the bones inside his back clench against these credulous people, unaccountably furious.

“Ticket sales are up twenty-two percent this week,” Mr. Jenks reported grudgingly on Friday, reading off an enormous legal pad that said
MEMOS
. Many of Mr. Jenks’s managerial accessories were labeled in a font sized for the legally blind.

“So enjoy your fifteen minutes, Bigtree …,” Carl grunted through the roll of tape in his mouth. Back home a roll of duct tape in your mouth meant you had an alligator’s jaws in your fists, but Carl Jenks was just taping up cardboard.

“Can I help you, Carl?”

“No. I know how I want my things.”

Carl was moving, or “being removed,” by his own boss, the Carl of Carls, to the other side of the World. Lamentably, he said, he would still be Kiwi’s supervisor. Orcs and pencils disappeared into the box.

“I hope you know how lucky you are,” Carl Jenks muttered. “The training alone is a huge company investment. They’ve hired a private CFI who brags that he taught his semideaf nine-year-old niece how to fly. Promises even you can pass the check ride. If you ask me you’re a bad investment—who is going to remember this Lake of Fire story a week from now?—but Tom Barrett saw your picture in the paper this morning and he’s just giddy about it. Thinks we’re going to get all this free publicity, and new clients from the ‘crystals-are-my-medicine’ crowd. New Agers.”

“Right. All that miraculous bullshit.” Kiwi felt the stab that accompanied all thoughts of Osceola. He could see her face smiling under the goofy puple turban.

“Barrett doesn’t get many ideas, so when he has one he likes he throws a lot of money behind it.”

“Yes. Got it. Ideas need money to become a reality.”

Kiwi rocked way back on his red-and-black sneakers ($22) with his
hands in his pockets, as if he were vying to become a Human Slingshot. He had no idea what Carl was talking about.

“What I’m telling you, Bigtree, is that HR is casting against type. The Loomis directors want you as one of the Four Pilots. They think it’ll be
cute—
” Carl’s smile went taut. “That girl Emily Barton is going on all the news outlets and calling you her ‘angel.’ So that’s how they want to bill you.”

The office was almost empty now, the walls bare except for glue and pegs. A World of Darkness calendar was the last thing left to pack, and Kiwi felt a rueful stab as he thought of the Bigtrees’ own calendar. Kiwi’s face was always the mascot for July, and for one month each year he grinned out at himself from the gift shop’s walls with a ferocious self-hatred, desperate for August to come.

“To be honest, I doubt they’ll let you fly in the end. What are you, twelve? I’m shocked it’s even legal for you to get a pilot’s license, frankly. Probably they’ll use you as a stewardess. Give you a little beverage tray and a catcher’s mitt to nab the Lost Souls’ vomit, you’ll excel at that. I’m just telling you for your own sake: Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t let your hopes get higher than your girlish hips.”

Kiwi reddened; it was true that he’d become a little pear-shaped. Burger Burger portions. All the pizza.

“Excuse me, Bigtree.”

Carl patted Kiwi’s wingless back and picked up a large box.

That afternoon, Kiwi conducted an intake interview with the Take to the Skies flight school on Carl Jenks’s new office phone, with Carl Jenks’s forehead visible behind the computer. Kiwi felt an incredible power over this man. To be envied was a new experience. Just the sound of Kiwi dialing made Carl’s forehead wrinkle and smooth. His boss’s skin was the pasty, poreless color of cake batter. Sad evidence, the Chief would have said, of a lifetime spent indoors.
And when the Chief sees me skyed inside a cockpit? What will he have to say about that?

“You’re that Hell’s Angel kid?” a voice was saying. “The one that saved Teddy Barton’s girl?”

“I’m Kiwi Bigtree.”

“Well, you sure screwed up these forms that you faxed us pretty good, Kiwi Bigtree. They’re just about illegible. You’re how old, son?”

“Eighteen. Almost.”

“Almost. So that would make you seventeen, correct?”

“Right.”

“Excellent. You can fly solo at fourteen, but older is better. How tall?”

“Six five,” Kiwi lied, shifting his weight onto his toes in Carl’s office.

“What on earth are you doing, prima ballerina?” Carl muttered from behind the computer.

“How’s your vision? You got your medical certificate yet?”

“No, sir.”

“You need to get that. High school diploma?”

“I’m attending the Rocklands High nontraditional student program, sir. Night school.”

“Degree expected?”

“Oh!” said Kiwi, misunderstanding the question. “Yes, definitely. I want to get several. The MA, and the PhD as well.”

“What
year
will you receive your high school degree?”

Kiwi was silent. Somehow he could more easily imagine his graduation from Harvard University in five years than any of the intervening steps. The prospect of actually passing Miss Arenas’s final exam next month and transferring his single credit to Rocklands High School was so overwhelming to him that it temporarily short-circuited his brain.

“It’s sunny out today, Mr. Bigtree, why not be optimistic? I’m going to put down ‘September.’ Okay, you’re all set in the computer. First class is Tuesday. Three thirty. You can do the lesson modules at the public library. I’ll put your Reach for the Skies! packet in the mail.”

Life was a phonograph in an empty room. The World was a silent record, turning.
Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing
. Such was Kiwi’s stoned thinking on a rainy Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., with five hours and fourteen minutes of his shift left to go. He was back to pushing the vacuum again, filling in for Leonard.

“Cover for me,” Leo had commanded Kiwi that morning. “My thumb feels wrong.”

“Your thumb?”

“Both of them,” Leonard said slyly. As a dedicated malingerer Leo set
a new standard; even his lies were lazy. “Both thumbs hurt now. I think I slept on them or something. You have to cover for me.”