Swamplandia! (46 page)

“It’s okay,” Kiwi said. He kept staring at the rope. He could hear Dennis Pelkis talking in a low voice on his radio. “I promise, Ossie, it’s going to be all right. We’ll all go home now.”

“Kiwi,” Ossie said, her voice suddenly tack-sharp. Clouds moved and light caught on a tiny fishhook in her wedding lace. “Have you talked to Ava? Is Ava with the Chief?”

T
he alligator’s hole was eight feet across. It divided the saw grass prairie that had nearly killed me from the sweet dark shapes of the bay trees. The hole was round as an open manhole, a large brown eye of water. A gator had dredged this lake with her claws and was probably swimming invisibly inside it. Flowers like chopped onions covered the surface of the water, which was turbid with mud—a tell that a hole is gator-occupied. I heard a wet swishing in the saw grass behind me and jumped; some warm-blooded, snouty thing that might have been a bear cub or a wild hog was disappearing into the willow scrub. But I was happy, my heart was bursting with happiness at all the ordinary threats. Pigs and alligators seemed like heaven to me. Creatures of the same mud that we had grown up in, Ossie and Kiwi and I, like our snouty cousins. To my left, a ghostly logger’s road looped backward through the mud in the direction I had just come from, a road that I knew better than to walk.

And then I heard my name: “Ava!”

Through the palmetto screen I glimpsed his skin and his hands and his long nose, his shoulder blades, oh I recognized him, dragging our skiff overland. He was wearing the undershirt from the hammock, no coat, and his face looked whiskery and profoundly unmatched to me, indecently arranged, as if his features were floating in jelly. If he was wearing the whistle I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t get a fix on the gray
lights of his eyes, he was still that far away. I ran to the edge of the alligator hole and stopped on my heels. The dark water rippled away from me; the Bird Man was approaching from the treeline, I could hear him; there were no other shadows for miles, nowhere else nearby for me to hide.

“Kid!” he said, and it seemed clear that he had seen me now because he was really
moving
. His long legs flew through the grasses. He was using his machete to hack through the mangle of palmetto scrub. He was—could this be true?—grinning at me. Without thinking I held my nose and jumped.

There have been only eighteen confirmed fatal alligator attacks in Florida since 1948. Nothing to worry about, the Chief tells our tourists. You stay out of a Seth’s domain and the Seth leaves you alone. I swam through a brown bloom of mud. I swam hard, my eyes shut against the thick silt, expecting at any moment to graze an alligator’s scales with my outstretched hands. I was expecting to hear a splash above me at any minute, the Bird Man diving into the alligator hole. I thought I could hear him calling in a shrunken, watery voice somewhere high above me. This was a true cave in the limestone, nothing that the gator had dug for itself. Now I was maybe six or seven feet below the light pinwheeling on the surface of the hole. I could see a dimmer squint of light at the cave’s far end and I swam for it; my reach ended in a wall of mud and decaying plant matter. Long brown grasses swayed in front of me. My hands expected to find the softening carcasses of birds and deer in that mess, or else a sheath of earth—but when I pushed into the decaying weeds, they
yielded
. Grass brushed everywhere against my skin. For a second I felt nothing but slimy green fingers, and then with an ease that shocked me I was clear of them. What I’d thought was a wall was a natural portal, a hole. An aperture in the limestone cave—these holes explain how the largemouth bass and the spade-sized black gambusia can sneak inside an alligator’s den. This one was large enough for a small Seth to squiggle into and out of. Weeds and soft rock crumbled around me.

Louis’s WPA coat was waterlogged and I couldn’t swim well with it on; I ducked my arms out of it, gathered it to my side. I had a new problem now: with the heavy jacket pinned beneath my right arm, I was flailing, kicking frenziedly into the underwater grasses, struggling to find my rhythm. The bundle was becoming so heavy, impossibly
heavy, all the drenched clothes dragging at my side like a wing I couldn’t beat. And my lungs, my lungs were
bursting
.

The surface was only a few feet above my head, maddeningly close, but still I couldn’t reach it. The heavier the bundle got, the more tightly I held on to it, a wrestling instinct. I watched my sister’s ribbon flutter up my wrist. Let it drown me, I remember thinking. This cloth was it, I thought, this was the one thing I’d saved. But my arm felt like it was caught in a vise of water and being sucked inexorably down and down and down and then snapped painfully backward. I dove a little myself and tightened my grip on the bundled rags that belonged to my family, to Mom and to Ossie. I couldn’t have held on to their real bodies more forcefully. At no point do I remember wanting to let go. When I flipped onto my side, making a panicked grab for my mother’s yellow cloth and Louis’s sinking coat, I saw the alligator.

The den was rising in front of me again; the thing had gotten ahold of my calf. Dark orange pigment rose everywhere and soon it was too cloudy to see, although I tried—my eyes stung inside a fog that I realized must be plumes of my own blood. Grasses seemed to burst from the rocks, growing feet longer in one blink as I descended. Waving away from me. The alligator was trying to roll me, pulling me backward toward the entrance of the gator hole. I kicked but my calf was still caught—skin tore but I couldn’t get loose. Any wrestler knows that once an alligator closes its jaws it’s almost impossible to get them open again. Something entered me then and began to swell. My mother, before she died, really was training me to be her understudy, and every Sunday we’d practice the beginning of the Swimming with the Seths act. So I tried to remember what we’d rehearsed in our own Pit, the smooth strokes that carry you to the surface. There is a way to still your body and then slingshot forward in a surprise frog-legged stroke, a Bigtree escape maneuver. Blindly I did this, played possum underwater and then flew forward with a strength that felt far beyond the limits of my small body. I kicked and I was allowed to kick, the pressure vanished, and when I looked the alligator’s tail was disappearing into the cave. My calf was freed. Petals of red pain shot through me until my ribs ached, the agonizing pressure expanding in my chest, as round as a sky, and I began to rise like one bubble in a chain.
My skin
, I thought,
is coming apart …

Somehow my body’s stitching held. I broke the skin of the water and
started breathing again. The deep bright air of our world, I gulped, the scouring air, I kept on gasping. I had never tasted the scattered light in the air before, or pulled it into my mouth with my entire body, even my cycling feet. It felt like the sky had descended to my eye level. Air floated toward me, ghostly and wet, and turned to fire the instant it hit my raw lungs. For a long time the whole world was just oxygen—the lowered heaven of this sky and the explosions of my breath. Then the buoyant and obliterating force inside me began to wane, and my own thoughts crept back in around its edges. I saw that I was bobbing in a gray lake I didn’t recognize. Ferns dripped onto its surface. At a certain point I realized that my two hands must be empty, because I was swimming.

The Bird Man, if he’d seen me, didn’t follow me through the underwater tunnel. For close to an hour I hid on a mangrove island, hunched next to ibis and anhingas, waiting to see if he’d swim up. After that, I crawled forward on the branches until I found land that would hold my weight.

I checked myself for damage: I had a shallow bite on my calf, that was all. I’d gotten hurt far worse during our staged fights in the Pit. (In fact, the wound looked so relatively puny to me that I didn’t treat it; it’s a wonder I escaped infection.) It bled a lot at first, but I elevated it on a rock, rested. Adrenaline cured the sting of it. I wasn’t scared now; my insides still held the space of the shape my mom had filled. I’d lost everything, all the clothes, even the ribbon on my wrist.

I’d been following a gator haul because I couldn’t find any other road out of the slough and the matted brush gave me the easiest passage. Everywhere I felt sore and cruddy, my crotch was burning, the skin on my face came off in white peels when I rubbed at it. When I exited the slough and stood in the grasses I began shivering everywhere, as if my skin were doing its own jolly imitation of the wind-bucked water. Getting my shoes to move on land felt like lifting buckets. Yellowish gray clouds of palmetto scrub wasped away to sticks beneath me. The gator haul petered into water and then I
heard
them, I heard snatches of a human conversation. Someone real on a walkie-talkie. Two wood storks watched incuriously from a high branch as I crashed through a pitch
pond of water lilies and hurtled toward what I hoped were real voices. Through the leaves I could see the distinctive dun and olive braid of a ranger’s uniform.

Frogs pushed their buffoon throats at me from various heights in the trees in their primordial vaudeville, and I remembered to call back to the voices: “Here! I’m over here!”

As it turned out, I’d been right about one thing: the men I’d seen on the tree island were very much alive. When I’d screamed two days ago on the slough, before the Bird Man got my jaws shut, these men had heard me. The ranger who found me brought me to meet them at the station, my heroes, so that I could thank them: two peckerwood guys sitting on the hard chairs, their cheeks flushed and stubbled. One of them had a haircut like a mushroom cap and nervous snowpea eyes and a cleft chin that made him look a little like Superman, or Superman’s sort of squirrelly twin. His friend was about a decade older and balding, with a kind, turkey-wattled face, a shirt so thin and gray it looked like dried sweat to me—not that I was in a position to judge anybody’s fashion or hygiene.

“Here she is, boys!” said the ranger (whose name I can’t remember now—he was a new recruit, decades younger than Whip). The way he said it, I felt a little like a trophy alligator he had just trussed and dropped onto the blond wood of his desk for these hunters’ perusal, a creature routed from its hole. I must have looked like one, too, with my soaked and torn clothing and the reddish mud that had rinsed even my teeth and gums.

The men nodded; the younger one shifted on his tailbone, and the larger, older hunter kept frowning slightly and repeatedly wetting his lips. I crossed my blood- and filth-encrusted arms over my chest and stared back at them. The ranger had offered me a shower on the boat ride over and I’d said no without thinking. He’d seemed surprised, so I’d explained myself—showers were hated chores for me at home, I said, where I had been a kid.

“Who are you?” I said, although I’d meant to say “thank you.”

“Trumbull,” said the older one.

“Harry,” said the younger one.

“Ava,” I said, pointing at myself, and the herky rhythms of this exchange felt a little like a show I’d seen on Grandpa’s TV about apes who’d learned to fingerpaint the alphabet.

When they weren’t hunting Harry and Trumbull worked the graveyard shift in a prosthetics plant in Ocala. They’d dabbled in greyhound racing, hibiscus farming, migrant strawberry picking, the military, fairground “barbering.” Gator hunting was something they’d done together since they were runts. Trumbull was the engine for their twosome, the talker, and his talk kept picking up speed, as if his big voice were on a downhill slope. Harry, who kept glancing at him, seemed to be the brakes.

They had a camp they returned to every July over on the rock glades about a mile before the Calusa shell mounds, and they wouldn’t have been out nearly so far if they hadn’t found their usual campsite’s water pump bent like a hairpin and decided to press on. Not once had they seen another person out that way, not ever in their fifteen years of rambling. We kept exchanging this fact between us until it gleamed gold and I was almost blinded in that tiny room, I felt so lucky.

“It was just the
purest
coincidence …,” Harry, the younger one, kept saying. “When Trumbull tells me he thought he seen a little
girl
out there, well …!”

Trumbull and Harry started shaking their heads in alternating rhythms. I felt my head beginning to join in, stopped it. I was still shocked by the cool and even feel of tile under my bare feet; the ranger had taken my ruined shoes from me, and was making some quiet arrangement on the telephone in the next room.

“You guys surprised me, too. I thought you guys were ghosts,” I offered. I stood on the fault line of the men’s laughter and everybody seemed surprised when I started laughing along with them. For a second I had a flutter of the old after-show feeling and I thought,
Oh my God, what if it’s really over?

At that juncture, I wasn’t talking about the Bird Man. The ranger didn’t ask me any questions about how I’d wound up on the drift slough, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to volunteer.

“When you go back to your camp,” I asked them, “will you keep an eye out for a red alligator? She’s a Seth from my family’s alligator-wrestling park. She has this, ah, this special condition, I don’t think it’s a mutation, exactly, my brother will know …”

Harry made a little noise in his throat and looked around the room, like he wished the ranger would come back.

“Now you are not going to believe this …” The ranger returned from his desk with two more water bottles for me and a funny expression, a grimace that kept itching up toward a grin and collapsing. It made me think of a bent fishing rod, as if his mood were some monster fish that he couldn’t reel in.

“You said your name is Ava Bigtree? Do you by any chance have a relative named Oh-see-oh-la? Because
she
got picked up not five miles from where we found you, kid. They got her just this morning …”

He slid a paper toward me:
NOTICE JULY 29 SEARCH AND RESCUE UPDATE, BIGTREE, OSCEOLA RECOVERED BY SEAPLANE PILOT
 …