Swamplandia! (7 page)

Some team! The Chief was doing so many jobs alone. I’d fix on the Chief’s raw, rope-burned palms or all the gray hairs collected in his sink, and I’d suffer this terrible side pain that Kiwi said was probably an ulcer and Ossie diagnosed as lovesickness. Or rather a nausea produced by the “black fruit” of love—a terror that sprouted out of your love for someone like rotting oranges on a tree branch. Osceola knew all about this black fruit, she said, because she’d grown it for our mother, our father, Grandpa Sawtooth, even me and Kiwi. Loving a ghost was different, she explained—that kind of love was a bare branch. I pictured this branch curving inside my sister: something leafless and complete, elephantine, like a white tusk. No rot, she was saying, no fruit. You couldn’t lose a ghost to death.

She showed me a diagram in
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
, part of a chapter entitled “The Corporeal Orchard.” I’ve never forgotten it. It had a punctilious, surgical level of detail, like one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches—only in this drawing the aortas and ventricles of a human heart burst into flowering trees.

“Gross, Os. You think there’s a rotten fruit stuck inside me?” I touched a rib, horrified but also filling with a sort of dark self-regard.

“Not exactly. You’re scared. See? You’re angry because you think the Chief is going to die, too.”

“Huh? No I don’t!”

“You’re angry at him but it’s too early, Ava.”

“Never mind.” I frowned. Ossie thought she was so smart now that she’d read one book. Black fruit, how stupid can you get! “You know what, I think Kiwi is right.” I lifted the dirty stripes of my Swamplandia! T-shirt and scowled at my belly. “It feels more like an ulcer.”

But I couldn’t shake the image, crates and crates of sunken black oranges. My heart gone wormy and rotten with fear. I thought of the corporeal orchard whenever I saw the Chief’s face.

It was around this time that I developed a weird fascination with the tiny cockroaches that had overtaken our café. I’d see them marching around the perimeter and I’d feel a little twinge; I imagined a weird kinship between us. Their skeletons were flipped outward into hard mirrors, but inside, all jelly. They tapped and tapped at each other’s backs. I’d get unaccountably sad some nights, just watching this little blind ballet go tickling up the walls. Kiwi noticed my creepy new interest and tried to encourage it with a book he’d found on the Library Boat called
Why Insects Amaze Us
.

On Saturdays the Chief continued to hold rehearsals for the two of us. This was a gift from my father to me, probably one of the most magnificent I will ever receive in this lifetime, although when I was thirteen I just thought of it as “a morning.” Very extraordinarily ordinary.

“Wake up, Ava,” he’d say into my dim room, beautiful words.

Ossie, meanwhile, continued to break curfew with impunity, to date the dead, to wear very unflattering homemade turbans. If the Chief couldn’t fix Ossie, he still tried to stay active. He banished not ghost men but material things: six-pack plastics, empty tubs of Delacroix gator chow, paper plates, rotten eggs, dock flotsam—whatever trash we could produce in a day. Each night he burned our garbage in a ditch behind the coop. This was one of the last Bigtree routines to go. Columns of thick smoke rose behind the red wall at dusk, and frantic clucks rose from the chicken coop like rainfall reversing itself, spraying up into the cumulus puffs in the night sky. From the kitchen window, I would watch the Chief build his midweek pyre: leftovers and little bones and milk cartons, eggshells and newspapers, a grab bag of detritus. Whatever we couldn’t use or sell before nightfall, our chieftain struck a match against and sent to the stars.

O
ne Monday in early May I sailed into the kitchen and snatched an envelope out of the Chief’s blunt fingers—he held on to it for an extra beat out of a wrestler’s instinct, his square nails raking scum across the envelope. He chewed his breakfast cigarette and regarded me with deadened amusement.

“Somebody has a pen pal?”

The Chief had put on his humongous bifocals to go through our mailbag, specs which made him look a little like Elvis Presley or an erudite bear. They were tinted dark yellow on the bottom. He hated to wear these glasses in front of us and he never wore them in front of our tourists. They were part of his accounting costume—glasses and red pens for sorting our bills.

“No, Chief. It’s not a pen pal I’m writing to.”

“No?”

“Nope. It’s like a contest? For money? A lot of money, Chief.” Lying to the Chief like this felt like freezing a lake into ice and skating quickly over it. “I probably won’t win, but if I do I am going to donate it all to your Carnival Darwinism.”

“Well. That’s …” The Chief stared at me in a peculiar way, as if he were about to sneeze, and then the muscles in his face relaxed again. His voice sounded offstage, tired: “Just don’t send these guys any of your own money, Ava. Don’t get scammed.” He patted my back.
“You know the real contests happen in the Pit with your Seth, right, champ?”

I nodded. The fan was blowing at the Chief’s headdress, flattening every feather so that they waved in place, like a school of fishes needling into a strong current. Something lunged in me then, receded. A giggle or a sob. A noise. I thought:
You look very stupid, Dad
.

“You’d better not let me catch you writing to any grown assholes in jail, kid. Or dead guys.” The smile crumpled on his face. “Please.”

My still-secret plan was to enter and win the same national championship that Miss Hilola Bigtree swept before she was a mother or even a newlywed, when she was eighteen years old and had first started dating my father. I loved staring at the bend of my own shadowy features in Mom’s trophies, and this was the largest one:
NATIONAL CHAMPION, 1971. AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF ALLIGATOR WRESTLERS
. This trophy even looked a little like my mom to me: a busty golden lady with skinny arms and fists on hips.

“How come you never got to be the national champion again?” I asked my mother once when I was nine or ten. She’d won the other trophies here, on our island—the Chief had given them to her. This was still impressive to me. But I wondered: why didn’t she want to beat the Seminole wrestlers, to show the Miccosukee alligator handlers what we Bigtrees were made of? We were pinning up laundry on the clothesline near the dandelion wash, and she’d laughed at me from behind a wailing wall of bedsheets. Only a square of forehead and her dark eyes were visible:

“Because I am your mother now, Ava. Because I have important things to do right here, on our island. Honey, did I leave that box of clothespins over by you? This wind!”

That day a category 2 hurricane was coming; truly, it was a strange time to try to pin up laundry, with the swamp wind whipping our hair at each other across the clothesline like a weird game of tennis. We had the same kind of hair, a black coffee shade with ruddy glinting, thick and ursine like Judy the bear’s fur—a big point of pride for me.

Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden
plummets, and she’d have to “take a rest” in the house, but she’d always emerge from these spells with a smile for us. Until she got sick, I can’t remember our mother ever missing a show.

“Honestly, can you imagine me without your father!” She used to say this all the time. With a sort of vacant, sticky violence, she’d kiss the forehead of whichever of her children was nearest.

Even as a kid I understood that she was kissing us to answer some question that she was putting to herself. Was she happy? we wondered. Were we the right answer? My mother married the Chief and gave birth to Kiwi at age nineteen; she started her career as an alligator wrestler that same year.

“She married him too young,” Kiwi told me once in a sad, knowing voice. But when I told Mom what he’d said, she laughed herself dizzy. Then she repeated it to the Chief and they both roared.

“Listen: your brother is an unkissed thirteen, Ava,” she told me. “He is just a boy. His judgments are like green fruit. He doesn’t have any idea about that stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Well, love!” she said, exasperated but not with me, I didn’t think. “Your father and I were sweethearts, you tell me what’s too ‘too’ about that! Without Sam I’d still be on the mainland!”

But one night, the eve of their tenth wedding anniversary, she woke my sister and I and made us come out to the museum. It was very late at night—she’d been drinking rum and soda with the Chief and some of our neighbors. Nobody looked up from the porch as we crossed the lawn. Her palms were damp and she was a little wobbly on her feet, giggling like a girl herself as she let us guide her through the wet grass. We entered the main room of the museum holding hands. “Shh,” she said. “No lights. We don’t want your father coming out here, this is
just girls.
” I held the flashlight and let the light settle on one of her posters. In it, she wore her shrug of a smile and her dark hair in a bun. Half her body was submerged in the lake; behind her you could see the orange sun on the Seths’ back plates.

“Turn the light off please, Ava,” she whispered, and I remember her breath hot and rummy on our cheeks. To this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult’s breath turned the big world as small and dark as a boat hold. Our mother took each of us by the
hand and we shuffled awkwardly forward. Then she did a strange thing. She led us to the exhibit my father had made of their wedding day. Her dress, a long, simple gown in a mollusk shade of old lace, was behind glass. Her orchid headpiece, too, a ring of tiny, silvery blooms that looked like a halo with all the light crushed out of it. She made my sister and me put our palms on the glass, and then she made us each promise to wait until we were thirty years old to marry,
if
we married … We had both nodded very somberly. Mom was twenty-nine that year. In seven years she would be dead. We were six and nine at the time. I used to think the promise would make more sense when I got older, but I was thirteen now and that night in the museum seemed even more mysterious to me with each passing year, a memory too baffling to even broach with my sister. If we ever did succeed at locating Mom on the Ouija board, I thought, I had a list of important questions for her.

Where was the contest held? How did you enter? I didn’t know. When I asked Grandpa Sawtooth about it, he’d raised an eyebrow at my father and squinted down at me for a long minute; then he snorted and told me that the contest was held in a top-secret location, where the judges threw you into seven feet of water, and you had thirty seconds to pull your alligator ashore and tape her jaws up. Bleeding too much disqualified you. Plenty of contestants died every year. A pipsqueak like me shouldn’t enter, he said; I’d be gone in two bites.

I researched the Kentucky Derby on the Library Boat—the purse was one million dollars! And those leprechauns were only riding horses. Obviously my mother had not been a millionaire. My heroic logic was as follows: if I was the champion, like her, our fame would be a perennial draw.

You had to be eighteen to compete—that’s what my mother told me at nine when I begged to be a contender. So in a typewritten letter that took me three drafts to compose, I asked the commission to make an exception and allow me to wrestle at age thirteen. I explained about my mother’s cancer and Swamplandia!’s many troubles. My own feats with the Seths I tried to describe modestly but candidly. I didn’t brag exactly, but I made sure the commissioners understood that I was the real deal; I wasn’t some unserious church girl from Nebraska who had only ever handled pet-store geckos, or some inlander, “Rebecca” or
“Mary,” a pigtailed zoo volunteer. The kind of girl who liked to do those drugstore paint-by-number watercolors of horses. Shetland ponies.
Palominos
. I bet the Marys were really excellent at that.

“I am a Bigtree wrestler” was the first line of my letter, and as insurance I’d enclosed a famous key-chain picture of my mother. It sold for $4.99 in the gift shop, and you could also get it on a cozy or a magnet. My mother looks a little older than Osceola, maybe eighteen or nineteen, her hair is shining like mahogany; she’s sort of studious-looking in thick eyeglasses (contact lenses and chaste emerald bathing suits came later, as a concession to our modern tourists); she’s got an eight-foot alligator’s jaws in her bare hands.
HILOLA BIGTREE AND HER SETH
I wrote carefully on the bottom, and added in parentheses (
MY MOTHER
).

My best guess was that these individuals were based in America’s capital, Washington, D.C., but I hadn’t yet been able to locate an exact street address. Gus Waddell claimed never to have heard of them. Well, Gus was really more of a nautical man, a very nice man but not exactly what you’d call educated when it came to herpetological sports.

I wasn’t going to risk a no by involving the Chief and Kiwi prematurely. I wasn’t going to tell my sister, either—Ossie was like an aquarium when it came to other people’s secrets. I sent this letter to the Smithsonian, the state universities, the Florida Wildlife and Gaming Commission, along with a flap note: “Sir or madam, please do me the great favor of forwarding this letter to the correct bureau(s). Thank you!!!”

If they accepted me, I figured that I would be the youngest person, boy or girl, ever to compete at the national level. Five years younger than my mother, even.

That same month, a remarkable thing happened on our island: a miracle, a freak rainstorm of luck during a time of cash and tourist droughts. I got to watch this miracle unfold inside a glass case—not in our museum but in one of the reptile incubators. On Swamplandia! we hatched baby alligators under heat lamps, dozens a year, using incubators that the Chief got on the cheap from a bankrupt chicken-farming family in Ocala. We restocked the Pit with the largest and the hardiest of the alligators, and the rest we sold to St. Augustine reptile farms in
north Florida or released. Thermostats controlled the gender of the future alligators in their eggs, and the incubator I was polishing was set to 84 degrees Fahrenheit—a female brood. I breathed a tiny porthole onto the incubator glass and peered in.