Swamplandia! (38 page)

“See that?” said Vijay. “You’re on a roll this week, bro.”

Two slots over, Kiwi watched a man in a wheelchair win ten dollars in nickels.

“You jealous?” His eyes looked as gold-bitten as old Midas’s. “Take a picture, it’ll last you longer.”

“Quit staring at people, bro,” Vijay said irritably. “You’re always
staring
at everybody.” He frogged out his eyes and pulled his hair up in an imitation of Kiwi.

“Is that what I look like?” Kiwi was heartbroken. “Electrocuted?”

Both his friends nodded. “Yup,” Leo said drolly. “You do. Maybe your brain is full of electricity. Maybe that’s why you talk so crazy sometimes.”

He and Vijay exchanged an almost parental look, arch and dark, like this was a theory they had previously discussed.

“There is a documented correlation between unconventional speech and genius,” he said, patting at his hair. But nobody was listening to Kiwi anymore. They went upstairs to the dining room. For $5.99 you could get a surf and turf buffet.

ALL*U*CAN*EAT*STEAK*AND*LOSTER
.

“What’s a loster?” Kiwi asked, feeling weirdly implicated by the name on the chalkboard, a combination of “lost” and “loser.”

“Lobster, bro.”

The single lobster left in there looked like some kind of mystic, trailing long curls of whitish seaweed back and forth around the tank.

“That guy looks like the last unicorn or something,” said Leo. “Where’s the beef?”

Leo helped himself to two steak tenderloins that were globed with fat and several paper cones of ketchup. Vijay got a ladle or cut of pretty much everything but the baked scrod. Kiwi couldn’t figure out how to work the crank ice cream dispenser and returned to their table with a bowl of maraschino cherries.

Vijay jabbed a spoon handle at Kiwi’s cherries and made some jokes about virginity.

Leo handled the requisite surf and turd jokes.

Ha-ha-ha-ha, was Kiwi.

You couldn’t take jokes about your own asshole personally on the mainland, Kiwi had learned. Other dudes would rattle off “your asshole” jokes with blank faces, like cops reading you your Miranda rights—as though reciting from a script, as if legally this simply had to be done. After a minute Kiwi said, “This looks like Leo’s dick,” and held up a shriveled walnut to approving laughter. Vijay ate a baked potato. They headed back downstairs.

Kiwi froze on the second-to-last step. “Oh wait. You dudes go ahead. I forgot something.”

Adrenaline ate its way through Kiwi Bigtree’s body. He wanted to run but he couldn’t move. On the opposite side of the room, in a sandbar of light, a tall, bald white man wearing a bolo tie got down on his knees. He was getting a show ready; twelve LIVE GIRLS were standing in the wings. The girls looked a little less lively than advertised. They smoked cigarettes and kept listlessly touching each other’s hair. For many of them, Kiwi observed, girlhood had ended decades ago. The
casino stage was shaped like a banjo, the long runway strung with rows of white and violet lights.

The man was on his knees, hooking a microphone into an old-fashioned set of speakers. A black cord was looped around his left shoe. He stood and then the cord was underneath the sole;
oh no!
thought Kiwi. It was the sort of prelude to an accident that makes bystanders feel like psychics—and when the man tripped he fell
hard
. He had to push off on one knee before he could stand again. When he got to his feet the first thing he did was examine his own big hands. He frowned at his palms as if he were reading a newspaper, then shined his knuckles on his navy trouser knees. Even these odd gestures were familiar to Kiwi, because the man in question was his father. Chief Bigtree, disguised as an employee of the casino.

The Chief sat down at a small table. His wrestler’s fists joined into one tremendous, pale stone under the microphone; he stared sightlessly out at the crowd of slot machines. The first thing Kiwi noticed was the complex graininess of the Chief’s skin. (Was his dad really sick or something? What on earth was he doing here?) The second thing was that the Chief was wearing his glasses.

Oh
no
. Kiwi stepped backward on the stairwell, wondering if the Chief had already seen him. These glasses were a bad sign. On Swamplandia! the Chief had been contemptuous of various drugstore aids: bifocals, Ace bandages, hemorrhoid creams, luminous jellies for poison oak and bee stings; he was even a little unsettled by flavored toothpaste. Crutches were bad for business, the Chief liked to say. “Why announce your infirmities to the tourists, kids?”

Can he see me? Do I want him to?
Kiwi blinked out of the shadows, mere feet from the seething lights of the casino floor. The walls smelled of old seediness, throw-up, and wood pulp. Behind him he heard a wine-red laugh and the tinsely clatter of forks and knives falling off a buffet table.

“Pick a direction, fuckface.” Someone shoved past Kiwi on the stairs, a blur of pale skin and tattoos flickering on a bicep.

“Sorry, sir, excuse me …” He felt seasick from the billiard greens and neons shooting out at him from every angle of the room. The roulette wheel turned its tiny spikes. Kiwi’s back was drenched in sweat that turned freezing in the air-conditioning. The Chief had switched on the microphone:

“Get your ballots out, folks, because this is going to be one
stiff
competition, har har …”

The Chief’s laughter burst from the speakers like brown water from spigots. Apparently a “beauty pageant” was about to take place; men were using squabby pencils to fill out a voter’s card. How depressing! The Chief’s gaze crossed Kiwi’s square of carpet twice—three times! four times!—before settling on the stage again. Behind his large glasses, Chief Bigtree’s eyes were lost in the neon snow of the show.

“Well, don’t just stand there, folks,” the Chief growled. “Look alive! How are you going to judge a beauty pageant with your eyes shut?”

This
was how Dad was raising money for Carnival Darwinism?

The humans who answered his dad’s summons were sad quarry, Kiwi thought—pervy-looking old guys or catatonic gamblers, men with nothing else to lose tonight. The faces he saw under the lights were grim with an insuperable boredom, or in a kind of dreamy agony. One man with a tight, bloated face kept shuffling at his crotch in full sight of everyone.

Vijay and Leo did not join the huddle. They were busy chatting up two old women, two gargoyles in flowery pantsuits near the roulette wheel, hoping to find “female patrons” to support their gambling. They had a little routine, which they’d explained to Kiwi in the car. “The pitch.” It didn’t sound particularly sophisticated. The plan seemed to involve (1) talking to older ladies, (2) listening to older ladies, (3) asking older ladies for one hundred dollars. In denominations of twenty, if possible.

Vijay and Leo were working hard; Leo had a grin stuccoed to his face, and Vijay kept throwing his head back in a spectacularly phony laugh. Neither of them seemed to have noticed the white man behind the microphone. An aging Bigtree Indian with knotty hands and purple bags beneath his eyes whose face looked—if you really looked—exactly like the face of their friend Kiwi.

What were these women—strippers? dancers? Kiwi wasn’t sure what to call them but they seemed underwardrobed for air-conditioning. They were all lined up for the pageant. They scintillated in a sort of depressing, fish-market way. A brunette with a jowly, friendly face walked out first. Bouncing Bella. She guffawed for some reason when the Chief called her onto the stage, as if her name were a complicated joke that she had at last understood. A redhead in a padded bra that
looked like it was made from an extinct species of hot-pink Texan snake kept sneezing. The Chief held the microphone in his huge grip and ladled his compliments over each of them, as if he were trying to clothe them in words.

Easily it was the saddest pageant that Kiwi had ever seen.

“Okay!” The Chief cleared his throat. “Let’s get those ballots in, gentlemen …”

Does my dad do this every night?
Kiwi wondered. Only Tuesdays? The Chief was the proudest man who Kiwi had ever met. How had he survived a job, any Loomis job, for so long?

The Chief started using phrases Kiwi recognized from Hilola Bigtree’s show:

“Did you forget that they made women like this, folks …?”

“Now, believe me, this girl has got more talent in her
pinkie finger …
”

A few things were making sense now, in the scarlet hue of this event. It would appear—it would make sense, timewise—that Kiwi’s dad had been working two jobs for quite some time. Years, possibly. Which life did the Chief keep a secret from whom? Kiwi wondered. It seemed unlikely that these mainlanders knew his father as Chief Bigtree of Swamplandia! For a second, trying to assimilate this fact, Kiwi felt his whole childhood turn translucent.

So: the Chief’s “business trips” had been to this casino, or perhaps to equally shitty places of employ in Loomis County.

Kiwi’s mother used to describe the business trips to her children as “Sam’s ventures” in respectful, careful tones. Dark and sparkling tones—that was Hilola Bigtree, monologuing about her husband. Whenever one parent talked to him about the other one, Kiwi got the uneasy feeling that he didn’t know either person at all.

“Oh, your father is meeting with the investors, honey. ‘Investors’ are mainlanders who pay us more money than any one tourist. They are big fans of our show.”

As Kiwi got older and angrier, his mother would reveal a little more: “Your father is doing hard work for us on the mainland. He gets lonely in that hotel room. He wishes he were here on the island, believe me. I know you miss him, Kiwi,” she’d add. “I know you love your father.”

By the end, she seemed to say “I know you …” out of a deep anxiety
for the future that she wouldn’t get to oversee, the same way she begged: “I know you’re wearing deodorant” or “I know you’re practicing with the Seths” or “I know you’ll take good care of your sisters, Kiwi.”

“Brush your teeth, son!” she’d screamed at him once from her hospital bed, nine days before her death. “You’re not brushing, are you …?” and the pleading and suspicion in her voice belied the stupidity of this accusation. She was all doped with morphine.

“Mom, I’m seventeen,” he’d said quietly. And then, when he saw what her face did, “Thank you for reminding me, Ma. I’ll keep brushing.”

All his mom’s requests had become huge and tragic at the end of her life, like magnificent tropical flowers at the suicidal peak of their blooming. Kiwi was studying them, the angiosperms of tropical systems, for a future test that Kiwi planned to give and take. Perhaps he would be a horticulturist. As a genius, your career options abounded, and with his background he was set: horticulture, herpetology, oncology, radiology, the mortuary arts, museum sciences, he pretty much had his pick.

After her cancer was diagnosed, all business trips had stopped.

Always Kiwi had viewed his parents as coconspirators, confabulators. But Kiwi had assumed the conspiracy part was Swamplandia!—all that bullshit about the island and the Seths and their “Bigtree tribe.” He hadn’t guessed that a bigger, sadder secret existed on the shore, a backstage to their family’s story way out here in Loomis County. Carnival Darwinism seemed more impossible than ever before, now that Kiwi understood how the Chief had planned to fund it.

Onstage, the Chief was handing the Queen of Beauty a metal crown and a fountain of white carnations. His bum leg stuttered on the carpet.

“Another winner!”

“Another winner!”

“Another winner!”

A golden-toned computerized voice announced this good tiding over and over while somewhere nearby metal rained into a pan.

“Hey, Bigtree!”

Kiwi started. Leo showed up swinging a bottle of beer in each hand.

“There you are, bro … Are you watching this? Fucking unbelievable, right?”

He rolled his eyes toward the stage. There was something puppyish about the conflict on Leo’s face. He was clearly torn between his first impulse toward wonderment, a panting and ignorant enjoyment, and his obedience to their pack of three. You weren’t supposed to enjoy a spectacle like this.

“What I mean is, it’s sort of gross. Pathetic. These bitches are
old
. The whole thing’s retarded. What if that was, like, your mom?”

Then Leo made a joke about Vijay’s mother, an analogy that compared her to the Lucky-U-Can’t-Lose Slot Machine. Leo’s mother’s vagina was alleged by Vijay to be wide as a bus. Punching commenced.

“You guys? You’re going to get us kicked out of here,” Kiwi mumbled. Across the room his dad had started to cough. The Chief had an instinct for professionalism: when his coughing fit began he switched off the microphone. From the shadows, Kiwi watched his father’s silent convulsions.

A thickset man in jeans and a knotted red bandanna was approaching his dad’s table; he leaned in and thumped the Chief between his shoulder bones—too hard, Kiwi thought. The man had a skinny ponytail that jumped against the small of his back with each step, as if this guy thought he was a mobile rodeo.
My dad’s boss
, Kiwi realized with something like horror. He watched his father’s head tilt forward a fraction of an inch, as if in prayer. This was a humility that Kiwi had become familiar with, via Carl.

So that guy is my dad’s employer
.

“Sammy!” It was an angry summons. The boss had a voice that carried crystalline across a room. The Chief listened with an odd smile.
The Chief is going to destroy you, guy
. Once, when Grandpa Sawtooth made some snide remark about his son, the Chief had bodily lifted the old man and chucked him into the slough. He waited for his father to throw the first punch. What the heck kind of wrestling move was
this
? Kiwi wondered, watching the Chief’s palms lift and separate. Some kung fu trick?

With his huge palms held outward, the Chief shaped a prodigious apology on the air.

“You fucked it up, Sammy, you really
fucked it
this time …,” the shorter man kept screaming. “You want to see the records? You got petty cash amnesia again? Or do you remember what you did with my two hundred dollars?”