Authors: Karen Russell
My eyes flew down the column and came to rest on the little ledges of their names: “Bigtree, Osceola” and “Bigtree, Kiwi.”
“I would love to hear what you girls thought you were doing out there,” the pale ranger said, raising a scabby eyebrow at the gator hunters. Harry stared at Trumbull with a hangdog expression, as if to say that he’d been ready before they even got here to
go
, and Trumbull, who was eating a bag of white potato straws that he’d purchased from the vending machine near the latrine, didn’t have a lot to add. He read a few lines and shrugged.
“That’s a funny name,” said Trumbull, jawing on a potato straw. “Bigtree. What were you all doing way out here? Family vacay-shun, or something?”
Kiwi, Ossie, and an older white couple named Mr. and Mrs. Pelkis were waiting for me at the ferry dock. We talked over one another while the older couple watched from the dock’s edge, babbling about Seths and Louis Thanksgiving and the Chief in what must have sounded like a foreign language—behind us, Mrs. Pelkis started sobbing for some reason, her husband loudly shushing her. And I folded into my sister’s grief and heat. My brother’s wet face. I kept closing my fingers around the secret, enfleshed stones of their wrist bones and breathing in the strange smells of them—Ossie’s mangrove dank and Kiwi’s hotel scent of aftershave and shampoo—to verify that they were truly alive.
Nobody spoke on the car ride into Loomis. Kiwi had written out directions to the place where our dad was staying, the Bowl-a-Bed
hotel, on a card from Mrs. Pelkis’s purse. After that brief exchange with us, she’d slammed a cassette of classical music into the tape deck with the attitude of someone turning a door lock. The huband, Dennis Pelkis, was snapping blue gum like he was trying to generate electricity or something. I’d been testing him: every time I asked a question he put another stick of blue gum in his mouth, which meant he had four sticks in there right now. Which was fine by me—nobody seemed capable of speech just then. Ossie and Kiwi watched the rainfall through their respective windows, and because I was squeezed in the middle and I didn’t have a window I watched the changes on their faces.
The farms came first. The Seths’ country gave way to green and yellow tractors that looked like imperial carriages on their huge tires, and great gusty sprinklers throwing water everywhere. We passed the last gas station before the city began in earnest and Osceola started to cry a little. I leaned over her and pushed the lock down on the car door.
The whole time I was thinking about the buoyancy that saved me. I know that I am a pretty biased interpreter of the events that led to my escape, but I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water. Her courage. In the cave I think she must have lent me some of it, because the strength I felt then was as huge as the sun. The yellow inside you that makes you want to live. I believe that she was the pulse and bloom that forced me toward the surface. She was the water that eased the clothes from my fingers. She was the muscular current that rode me through the water away from the den, and she was the victory howl that at last opened my mouth and filled my lungs. I didn’t want to tell my sister anything about this in the Pelkises’ car—I didn’t see how I could manage it with words—but I wished I could at least give Ossie a picture of where I had been, what had been in me. I wished she could bob with me for one second in that air. Black bay trees had lined the sky behind the lake and I was furiously alive around the bubble of our mother.
Was that fullness what Ossie had meant when she talked about her possessions? If so then I had been very wrong, I decided. I was wrong to have laughed at her in our bedroom, in the beginning, back when we’d said that her ghosts weren’t real, or her love.
The road spun behind us like something the car was secreting, yards
and yards of black filament. I reached over and squeezed my sister’s hand.
“Hey,” I said. “I believe you.”
The bowling lanes at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel stay open until 2:00 a.m. From the lobby, you could hear the belly-growl of the balls hurtling down the lanes and the clatter of the pins. The Bowl-a-Bed’s bellhop and concierge was a ghoulish young man wearing orange-and-ruby bowling shoes on his size 13 feet. He was a kid, younger than Kiwi, with braces and thick black eyebrows, eyebrows so muscular and expressive they looked almost prehensile to me. They shot up when he saw us.
Ossie and I stood before him with mud-stiffened hair falling into our burned faces. I was shivering inside the ranger’s long T-shirt, and she had on one of Mrs. Pelkis’s kitten-printed nightgowns. Our faces in the lanes 1–9 scoreboard glass looked sewn onto our necks with scratches. Kiwi at least was wearing zippered pants.
“No bags?” the bellhop asked us with a practiced little smirk. His big shoes waggled on the desk.
“Fuck you, clown,” said my brother with astonishing ease. Ossie and I exchanged glances; he’d lost his accent. “Tell us where Samuel Bigtree is staying.”
The Chief was in room 11, just behind the last gutter-ball alley. This would have warranted a joke at some earlier Bigtree epoch but we were BE now, Beyond Exhaustion, and I just wanted to see my dad. The stunned bellhop had given Kiwi a little key, which he turned in the pale blue door to room 11 with a just-audible click.
“Stee-rike!” Kiwi whispered. Then he called out, “Dad. It’s us.”
On the car ride over, Kiwi had told me in a slow and urgent voice that he was sure the park would go into foreclosure. We would lose our home, the Seths. But it was going to be okay, he kept saying, it would really be okay, because he was almost a pilot and the Chief had a job and we would find an apartment on the mainland …
My father’s face filled the door frame and his shock was a wonderful thing to behold. The whole hotel was filled with bowlers’ thunder at that hour. Pins were falling everywhere around us and I watched my
dad’s eyes widen to take us in. When my father stepped forward it didn’t matter that we were nowhere near our island. All of us, the four of us—the five of us if you counted Mom inside us—we were home. We were a family again, a love that made the roomiest privacy that I have ever occupied.
“Good night, Ossie.”
“Good night, Ava.”
After a little while I could hear my sister breathing beside me. My father and my brother were snoring in a duel or a duet on the other side of the wall. There had been, as you might imagine, quite a scene between them. Kiwi told us that he’d been working at the World of Darkness for two months and this fact didn’t make a dent. The Chief, holding Osceola, had thanked and thanked my brother for finding her until Kiwi grew embarrassed. He pretended to hawk up a wad of phlegm so that he had an excuse to grab tissues for his eyes.
I’d told the Chief about a dream I’d had on Swamplandia!—a great tree had swallowed him, his knuckles sunk into the tree bark—and he listened with such a frightened, pained expression that I stopped talking. So I didn’t tell my dad about the Bird Man, or Louis Thanksgiving, or the red Seth, or Mama Weeds. What we did talk about was Mom: “I found her dress out there, Dad. I found it, but I lost it again. I think Mom was with me when I battled the Seth …”
The Chief gave me an anguished look. His hand gripped my forearm too tightly, as if he were afraid that any one of us might flash without warning from the room.
“That’s okay. That’s okay, Ava. They found you, your brother found your sister, that’s much better than an old dress, I’m sure.”
But that night the Chief wasn’t in a talking mood. He looked huge and sad on the horned edge of the hotel bed, which had that goofy look of all “fancy” motel furnishings, cheap wood with stupid designs. The wallpaper nudged its quiet spirals upward toward the ceiling fan. We all looked caged in that hotel room. We watched a sitcom on TV and whenever the canned laughter tumbled into the silence of the room, I wanted to roar.
Turn it off
, I thought, but we were all a little afraid to. We watched the TV family speak their lines to one another as if we
were trying to remember how to do it, talk. One on one we probably could have spoken, but the four of us together went mute.
“Did you want to go bowling, girls?” the Chief said at one point, his voice unnaturally loud and cheerful. “Ten free frames. There’s a coupon for a game on the desk, comes with the room …”
“No thanks,” we said in one voice. Ossie didn’t have a change of clothes, she said.
“Where’s your purple skirt?” I asked, gulping against an icy vision of the clothesline. “Where’s Louis’s jacket?”
“I don’t know.” She looked at me strangely. “Back in the swamp, I guess—I lost a bag overboard on the second day.” I started to tell her about Mama Weeds, stopped. Now that I was fed and watered and sitting on bedsheets, that whole part of my journey seemed filmy, impossible. Already I’d lost my pet alligator, Louis’s jacket, Ossie’s ribbon, Mom’s dress; I was afraid that if I shared this out loud I’d lose even the story.
The Chief made many weary, angry phone calls about the day’s events to “straighten these mainlanders out.” News stations were desperate to talk to my brother, Dennis Pelkis said on the telephone—“Hell’s Angel strikes again!”—but Dennis reported proudly that he wasn’t giving them our number. Then the Chief had to set up a meeting with the ranger who found me and a social worker for Monday, at some foreboding address inside the cold stones of downtown Loomis.
No, it turned out the Chief wasn’t angry at me at all. Not for a second, he said, not even when I lowered my voice and explained to him that I had lost Ossie. When I asked him about Swamplandia! and foreclosure and the Seths and his mainland job, he didn’t exactly answer. He was very proud of us, was his reply, the tribe of us. “We are going to the island tomorrow,” he promised. “We’ll put everything in order.”
The Chief borrowed forty dollars from Kiwi and rented an adjacent room for me and Ossie, lucky 13, where we were supposed to shower and then sleep, impossibly, in beds. An hour after we turned out the lights, I woke myself up. I stared around the featureless space with my heartbeat stinging me and tried to figure out where I was. I watched a body stand and raise one curtain to half-mast, so that the dark rolled out of the room. The curtains turned the color of weak tea, one droning
hallway bulb behind them. My sister! I couldn’t quit rubbing at my eyes.
“You okay?” Ossie walked over to my bed. Like me, she was quilted with rashes and burn; she’d showered for close to an hour and her skin had a scoured look. She had lost weight in her arms and her cheeks, which gave her face a crop of new hollows.
“You were laughing in your sleep, Ava.”
I reached out and grabbed her warm wrist with Bigtree Wrestling Grip 7. Slowly I remembered that I wasn’t in the swamp anymore, that we had made it to the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, a place with color TVs and a confectionery of miniature, jewel-colored soaps and shampoo-plus-conditioners and comforters that smelled reassuringly of ordinary vices: old pepperoni pizza, draft beer, Vaseline, cigarettes.
“It’s okay now, Ava. I’m right here, all right?”
“Ossie?” For a second I didn’t believe it was really her. She touched my forehead. She touched me as if she were Mom, as if I were a child again back on the island and sick with fever, or even just pretending. Our mom, as stern and all-seeing as she could often seem, would do us this great favor of pretending to be credulous when we faked sick. Mom cooed sincerely over our theatrical moanings and coughs. She would push our hair back from our cool liar’s scalps and bring us noodles and icy mainland colas as if happy for an excuse to love us like this.
“Was the ghost real, Ossie?” I asked her sleepily.
“I thought so.”
“Okay. Is the ghost back, though?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she told me that night. But until we are old ladies—a cypress age, a Sawtooth age—I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.
I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, either. Not the kind from Ossie’s book. I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulable than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
. Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.
After my mom died, I used to have these dreams where I arrived to clean out the Pit and found a stadium filled with hissing, booing tourists. Nothing was right about this show: the Seths were gone and the Pit itself had mutated into an opaque, roiling pool. I realized that I
had scheduled Mom’s show and forgotten to cancel it. Now she was dead and the crowd was enraged. Some people threw bottles. With the irrefutable logic of dreams I knew that I would have to replace Mom on the board. As I climbed the ladder I had the worst case of stage fright because what was I supposed to do after diving? What would happen to me when I followed her down the pickled stars on the green board, and jumped? The next moment was unimaginable. The water bulged beneath me and even in dreams my mind failed to tell my mind what was inside it.
Sometimes I worry that what I did with the Bird Man happened because I really wanted it to. And what if it happens forever, Ossie, I’d ask my sister, the bad laughter of that summer? Like a faucet we left running, a sound we have forgotten we are making. Sometimes I hear the crying of strange birds outside the grates of my apartment window and I wonder. Even deep inland, I still worry that he might be one empty lot over. For our first six months in Loomis County I couldn’t sleep.
“It’s over,” the Chief kept saying when we found each other in the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, his showman’s voice partially whited out by the falling pins, “period, the end.”
And on a calendar that summer really is over, I guess. Full stop. Ossie and I attended a public school in the fall where they made us wear uniforms in the dull sepias and dark crimsons of fall leaves, these colors that were nothing like the fire of my alligator’s skin. But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me. Kiwi is sympathetic, but Ossie is the only one who I can really talk to about this particular descent.