Swamplandia! Read online

  Mom wasn’t the only Bigtree wrestler we were missing. Grandpa Sawtooth had vanished that year, too. He was still alive, but the Chief had exiled him to the mainland about a month before Mom died. The Chief had installed Grandpa Sawtooth in an assisted-living facility called the Out to Sea Retirement Community—a temporary thing, the Chief had assured us kids. Just until we “tied up some loose ends” on our island. We missed Grandpa but he didn’t miss us. During his last days on the island he had more than once gotten lost inside our house. He still knew our names, sometimes, but he could not match them to our faces; his memory winked on and off with the weird, erratic energy of a lightbulb in a torment. We had seen Grandpa Sawtooth exactly once since his move: a few weeks after he got “settled in,” we spent twenty-two minutes in his cabin at the Out to Sea facility. Through Grandpa’s porthole you could see the abridged ocean, lassoed in glass, and a low stone seawall. Inside the retirement boat, no music played, no living lizards curled tails along the walls, and the lights were halogen. The Chief kept promising us another trip to Loomis to visit him: “As soon as I muck out the Gator Pit, kids …” “As soon as I get a cage and rigging done on that airboat …” By December, we’d stopped asking.

  I remember clearly the first time I saw the face of our enemy—it was on a Thursday in January, ten months and two weeks after Mom’s death. A huge thunderstorm had rolled over the islands that afternoon, and the living room was unusually dark. I had been lulled into a half-awake state by an I Love Lucy marathon on channel 6. Grandpa’s rabbit-eared TV was crackling like water, and I kept dozing off on the couch and getting my senses all tangled, dreaming that the storm had moved inside. Then the TV screen went entirely black, and a baritone voice intoned: “The World of Darkness comes to Loomis!” I was glued to the set: plaid-vested schoolchildren lined up to enter the gaping doors of what appeared to be a giant amusement park. The camera followed them down a narrow walkway—the “Tongue of the Leviathan!” an announcer called it. The Tongue appeared to be a sort of thirty-foot electric-traction escalating slide, covered in sponge and pink mesh, visibly slick; it gulped whole grades of kids into the park. The camera zoomed forward to give a teaser glimpse of the interior of the Leviathan: a scale model of a whale’s belly, lit up by a series of green lights on a timer, so that it looked to my untrained eye like some kind of alien cafeteria. Then the TV flashed to a keyhole peek of riders disappearing down the Tongue. For a few seconds the screen went black again and the TV speakers burbled with “cetaceous noises of digestion.” Then schoolkids screaming “We love the World!” on somebody’s cue disappeared down a neon tube.

  “Christ Jesus,” said the Chief, “how much do you think this piece-of-shit commercial cost?” Swamplandia! had never done a TV spot.

  The World of Darkness was located in southwest Loomis County, just off the highway ramp. The camera pulled back to reveal imbricating parking lots, a whole spooling solar system of parking lots. On its western edge, the Leviathan touched a green checkerboard of suburban lawns. A moat of lava lapped at the carports, the houses at the World’s perimeter looking small and vexed. The World of Darkness offered things that Swamplandia! could not: escalator tours of the rings of Hell, bloodred swimming pools, boiling colas. Easy access to the mainland roads.

  “Can the World of Darkness really do that, Chief?” I asked my dad. “Move right into the middle of a city?”

  The Chief had stopped watching. He was draining a Gulch brandy and cola in the deep crease of our couch. “Don’t let me catch you falling for that bullcrap, Ava. Who is going to pay a day’s wage to slide down a damn tongue? That’s about the stupidest thing I ever heard of. You go touch your Seth’s belly scales and remind yourself who’s got the real leviathans …”

  One Tuesday in late January, just a week or two after the World of Darkness’s grand opening, the morning ferry failed to show. On an ordinary weekday, the double-decker ferry departed from the Loomis County Ferry Port at 9:05 and arrived at our park’s landing a few minutes after ten o’clock. This orange boat linked Swamplandia! to the mainland; we had no bridge system and no road access. So the ferry was our lifeline, the only way for tourists to get to our park. The twenty-six-mile trip took forty minutes in good weather, and could take as much as an hour and a half in rough water. The service was a vestige from the frontier days, when it connected a handful of drifters and homesteaders scattered throughout the Ten Thousand Islands to the mainland. The majority of the Ten Thousand Islands were still uninhabited, and there were just four stops on the original thirty-five-mile loop: Swamplandia!, Gallinule Key, Carpenter Key, and the Red Eagle Key Fishing Camp. Our nearest neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Gianetti, had an avocado farm on Gallinule Key, a fifteen-minute airboat ride to the south.

  The Chief was on all fours when I found him. He was in the empty stadium, making some adjustment to the Pit pump. He was wearing a mainland T-shirt that said ALABAMA CARDINALS—this was from his “civilian” wardrobe. Without his radiant ropes and beads and feathers, you could see his pale scalp through a scrim of scant black hair. Color had ripened in twin spots on his stubbled cheeks, which made him look a little like a haggard Shirley Temple.

  The Chief had to drain and clean the Pit every ten days because the Seths were undainty eaters; we fed them a commercial diet, which we ordered from Louisiana breeders, mostly chicken and fish but occasionally more whimsical proteins: frozen nutria, muskrat, beaver, horse. The Seths regurgitated bones and feathers. Once, after a hurricane, we pulled the bars of a tiny rib cage out of the leafy deep end—they were a crumbly, dark-honey color. Forensic arguments erupted over green peas and meat loaf at our own table:

  “A Key deer, Sammy!” shouted Grandpa.

  “Na-uh, Pops,” the Chief disagreed. “My guess, those bones belong to a dog. Some poor mutt went for a swim … pass the gravy, honey?”

  On Live Chicken Thursdays, a very popular and macabre attraction, the Seths jumped five feet out of the Pit to snatch the cloud-white hens suspended above them, tied by their talons to a clothesline. The Seths drowned and ate these chickens in an underwater cyclone called the Death Roll while tourists snapped photographs. Live Chicken Thursday was a Bigtree tradition dating back to 1942. The ritual was Grandpa Sawtooth’s brainchild. I think my family traumatized generations of children and old women. And we girls must have inherited our forebears’ immunity to gore, because Ossie and I could eat PB&J sandwiches during a Death Roll, no problemo.

  “There now.” The Chief gave a satisfied grunt as clear bubbles shot forth again, some clicky mechanism having reset itself. He knelt over the edge of the Pit. A few Seths swam calmly around the underwater platform that the Chief just had been standing on; his tool belt was still jerked up beneath his soaked armpits.

  “Chief!” I said, bounding over. “Dad, the ferry never showed …”

  He looked up with a blind, irritated glare—the sun was behind me but I was too short to block it. His arms were gloved in filth up to the elbows.

  “Ava, you can’t see I’m busy? Gus Waddell called from the docks. The ferry isn’t coming today because Gus Waddell didn’t have any passengers.”

  “Do you want me to go check the TV, to see if something bad happened on the mainland?”

  “Ava Bigtree,” he said. “You are making me truly crazy. You can watch TV if you want.”

  After cleaning the pit, the Chief disappeared into the Isolation Tank to do some work with a recalcitrant bull gator, a one-eyed, indiscriminately nasty fellow that kept biting not only the other alligators but also any driftwood or pond lily that floated up against his blind spot, attacks which were scary but somehow also very embarrassing to watch. I hung around inside the empty stadium. It was a hot day, and the Seths slid through periphyton, a brownish-orange algae that reproduced explosively in the Florida heat and could draw its pumpkin lace across the entire Pit overnight. Everything else was pretty still.

  “The gators are not your pets, Ava,” the Chief was always reminding me. “That creat
ure is pure appetite in a leather case. A Seth can’t love you back.”

  But I loved them, the dark tapering mass of them; I feared them, too, their alien eyes and sudden bursts of speed. Chief Bigtree hung wooden memos bragging on them all over our park, many of them accurate:

  ALLIGATORS CAN RUN FASTER THAN ARABIAN HORSES ON LAND!

  THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!

  A SETH IS A 180 MILLION YEAR VETERAN OF OUR PLANET!

  “There’s no show today, you dummies,” I told the alligators over the railing. I rained out a bag of marbles and watched the planetary spin of them off the Seths’ black shoulders. The Chief said I could do this because the Seths used these marbles as gastroliths—they used them to grind up prey in their gizzards the way chickens use grit. And gastroliths allow crocodilians to float better—to settle their weight in the water. Our gators were born knowing exactly how much weight to swallow to find and keep their balance.

  I checked my watch: on an ordinary day, we would be five minutes into our show by now. My dad would have waded into the Pit water, carrying a gator harness that he made out of old airplane cables. He would have selected a sparring partner, “a big respectable sucker,” and slid the rusty harness over the Seth’s snout. The Seth, dripping and black, would fight like a fish inside that harness while the other gators continued switching through the sludgy Pit, slow and pitiless inside their Seth-oblivion.

  Once the Chief hauled his Seth onto the stage, the real fight began. The Seth would immediately lurch forward, yanking the Chief back into the water. The Chief would pull him out again, and this tug-of-war would continue for a foamy length of time while the crowd whooped and wahooed, cheering for our species. To officially win an alligator wresling match, you have to close both your hands around the gator’s jaws. That was the hard part, getting your Seth’s mouth to shut. Mom said that we girls were at a natural disadvantage because our hands were small—they could barely span a piano octave.

  But one curious fact about Seth physiognomy is this: while a Seth can close its jaws with 2,125 pounds per square inch of cubic force, the force of a guillotine, the musculature that opens those same jaws is extremely weak. This is the secret a wrestler exploits to beat her adversaries—if you can get your Seth’s jaws shut up in your fist, it is next to impossible for the creature to open them again. A girl’s Goody ribbon can tie off the jaws of a four-hundred-pound bull gator.

  But we didn’t just tape up the Seth’s jaws and declare ourselves the victors—our Bigtree show was special because we did tricks, too, and practiced some of the more dangerous holds. Before she died, Mom was in the middle of teaching me her advanced moves. The Chin Thrust, for example, a Bigtree standard. To do the Chin Thrust, you make a latch out of your chin against the purselike U of a Seth’s jaws, tucking its broad snout against your throat like a botched kiss. Another good one was the Silent Night, where you covered the alligator’s eyes with your hands, fastened its snout with the tape, and then enlisted the help of Mom or the Chief or Grandpa to flip it onto its back. This was a sorcery that “put the alligator to sleep.” Years later, I would learn that we were disrupting the alligators’ otoliths, tiny sacs that connect the inner ear with the brain. We blacked them out.

  If you are an animal lover, I can tell you what the Chief told us: that it was never a fair fight; that even taped and flipped, even “sleeping,” its legs churning toward an ultimate befuddlement and stillness, the alligator had all the real advantages; that an alligator can hoard its violence for millions and millions of years. A Seth could trick you into thinking it had died with a days-long freeze, a mortuary pose on a rock, and then do a lickety-split lunge and snatch an unwary turtle or a tiny ibis. The Seths had a ferocity that no wrestler could snuff for very long. The first and last time I’d tried to do a Silent Night, the alligator managed to right itself and bruised my entire right side with its thrashing tail, and Mom told the Chief that I was still too young to perform the trick. I felt older now, though. Looking out at all the vacant stands, I felt like I had better become ready.

  What the tourists paid to watch, the Chief always said, was an unequal fight. A little seesaw action: death/life. The Chief had long ago taught me a Bigtree strategy called “peacocking weakness.” All the best Seminole wrestlers used this strategy, too. The true champions handicapped themselves, the Chief said, blindfolding their eyes or binding their dominant hand. Weakness was the feather with which you tickled your tourists; it was your weakness that pinned the tourists to their seats. They saw the puny size of you versus your alligator. They saw that you could lose. If you exploited this fact, you could float the outcome of your battle into the air over the stadium, like a balloon. During the really scary family shows, the electric, something-goes-awry times, I would picture it up there just like the Chief had said, our fate, a translucent black balloon wombling between the palm trees.

  “You got to remind the mainlanders that your alligator is a no-shit dinosaur, Ava,” the Chief used to lecture me. “Those bored, dead drylanders. They act like they think they’re watching robots up here!” He’d shake his head. “Prove to them that you can lose, so you can surprise people, honey, and win.”

  Now I wondered: Would we ever do a show like that again? What if yesterday had been my last-ever chance to wrestle? To surprise the mainland people? I leaned over the railing to the Gator Pit. The little bag felt weightless and I realized that I was almost out of marbles. Oh for heaven’s sake, Ava Bigtree, don’t be so melodramatic! Of course you will wrestle again. Today is a fluke; of course the tourists will be back! I tried to give myself a lecture in my mother’s stern voice. Then I used her same voice on the gators, who were blinking up at me so stupidly from the Pit:

  “Eat up, you fools, because no one is coming,” I hissed. Blue and gray marbles caught in their scales like stubborn bubbles. The big yellow shooter rolled around one Seth’s scaly shoulders like a dollhouse sun. They all sank into the water and turned into gastroliths.

  “Ava? What are you doing?” Ossie’s voice erupted through the speaker hooked up to the ticketing booth. “Ha-ha—did you lose your marbles?”

  Two weeks passed. The Chief discovered that we couldn’t even sell out the once-a-day wrestling show. We started performing for whoever showed up, whenever they came (we were still getting a few confused Europeans, clutching these expired travel guides with hydrangea-pink spines and greeting my father with ¿Qué? and Quoi?). The Chief and I cut twenty minutes from the show, but you could feel the tourists’ pity first and then their distraction, their attention wandering the skies of the open stadium like kites. Without Mom and Grandpa Sawtooth the whole show felt horribly incomplete to me. “The tourists can’t tell,” the Chief assured us, but it seemed like even the expressionless Seths had to know that something was missing. One Thursday when the Chief was in a black mood and caught a tourist yawning during his wrestling demonstration, he groaned loudly and released the Seth back into the water with a slap: “Ta-da,” he growled, standing up. “That’s all, folks.”

  We were still calling this thing the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular.

  I started to miss the same tourists I’d always claimed to despise: the translucent seniors from Michigan. The ice-blond foreign couples yoked into thick black camera straps like teams of oxen. The fathers, sweating everywhere, with their trembling dew mustaches. The young mothers humping up and down the elevated walkway to the Swamp Café, holding their babies aloft like blaring radios.

  Where had all the families gone? The families were gone. All at once, it felt like. Families had been our keystone species of tourists on Swamplandia! and now they were rarer than panthers. Red-eyed men with no kids in tow started showing up at the Saturday shows. Solitaries. Sometimes they debarked the ferry with perfumed breath, already drunk. Sometimes they motored over from the Flamingo Marina in Loomis County on their own junker boats, and always they seemed far more interested in the cheap beer and the woodsmoke black racks of the fried frog legs
than our tramway tours or our alligator wrestling—somehow Swamplandia! seemed to have earned a truck-stop reputation as a good place to “get obliterated” on a weekend night. One guy I found urinating on the side of our gift shop—the actual wall, even though the public bathrooms with the vault toilets were just a five-minute walk down the trail! I hated them. When we had a crowd of these red-eyes, the Chief would not let me wrestle and performed the whole show himself. The Chief liked most every tourist with a wallet but he cooled on these guys. He blamed the World of Darkness for them, too.

  “We’ll get the families back,” the Chief promised us one night after a particularly scary set of individuals had mobbed up to see our show. These guys drank so much beer that Gus and Kiwi had to help them back onto the ferry; I’d caught one of them throwing up into the bushes behind the musuem. Another one had cozied up to the ticket booth window and whispered strange jokes to my sister, leaning into his elbows like a grasshopper, so that from where I was standing it looked like he was trying to kiss her through the glass. The Chief had started screaming at these men on the ferry dock, but now that we were home he seemed angry with us: “What’s wrong with you girls? You need to calm down.” He patted Ossie stiffly. “Those clowns are gone. Those fools are just paying our rent until we get the families back. This is like bad weather, you understand? It’s gonna blow over.”

  But I couldn’t sleep—because what horizon did we think the sun was dropping into? If the World of Darkness stayed open and Mom stayed in her grave, how, exactly, were we supposed to get the families back? We ate our dinners beneath a reticent crescent moon. The Chief picked at his molars with a yellow toothpick, Kiwi read, Ossie kept her head down and ate off everybody’s plates. She ate with her fingers, peeling colorless grains of rice off Mom’s blue tablecloth. But I couldn’t stop imagining our fate up there, the black balloon. A thin globe of air clearly visible behind the toothy palms. I could see that balloon and the moon shining through it but I couldn’t begin to imagine what was going to happen to us.