I loved my sister, so it was with some discomfort that I realized I didn’t want her to be happy. Not like this, anyways, because of some ghost.
She let slip that her new boyfriend Louis’s earthly title had been “the Dredgeman,” but she wouldn’t tell me any more about him. Who was this guy? When she dated the morgue-fresh dead of Loomis County, she taped their newspaper obituaries above her bed. These were recent tragedies: local sons our age like Camden Walsh, the handsome brunette prom king from Jupiter High, who had drowned in a canal, or Julio Sáenz, a football star and galumphing freckle-spattered sophomore in Fort Pierce who got struck by lightning on the forty-yard line. But I couldn’t find Louis’s papers in our bedroom or folded inside The Spiritist’s Telegraph. He wasn’t in her binders or pinned up on her headboard. His name didn’t seem to exist anywhere outside of my sister.
At noon I did my sleuthing on the Library Boat. Again I couldn’t find any trace of him, his origins — no books, no pictures. Possibly she had found something hidden inside the dredge itself, an engineering manual or another Model Land contract? A diary? Old letters from the cook’s wife?
“The Dredgeman???” I wrote on a café napkin. Probably Sherlock Holmes carried a pad with him. Fans creaked and spun to life in the quiet café. The generators hummed. Moths were sparkling around our ceiling in patterns that seemed almost meaningful, stitching a violet-brown lace between the blades, and I mopped my face with the blank side of the napkin and waited for more clues to accumulate.
For a week the Model Land dredge barge didn’t budge an inch. It remained pinched between the clothespin trees along the canal’s eastern bank. It was a delicate and temporary-looking captivity, and I bet the next major storm would wash it further downriver. The boat was always covered in twenty-odd buzzards, and mysteriously denuded of the swamp birds you usually saw out here: anhingas and cormorants and a beautiful variety of heron. The buzzards continued to pour over Swamplandia! in clothy waves; on the radio, the university scientists speculated that the unusual migration had something to do with the late frosts in the Midwest. Disturbances in the raptors’ diurnal cues.
That may have been the case, but once these birds got to Swamplandia! it was hard not to take their presence personally. Bundles of feathers quivered all along the Pit walls and the tramway railings, sprouting bright doll’s eyes and talons as you drew closer. The flock of them watched over our doings like disinterested angels; at that point the buzzards probably knew more than I did about my sister’s nighttime activities. They saw more of her than I did.
“We are in love, Ava,” she told me one night while we were brushing our teeth. “We’re practically married.” Her face in the mirror seemed so sad. “When he left me tonight, Ava? It was terrible. It hurts worse than when a Seth bites you! It’s like the opposite of that feeling — like an unlatching. You know what I mean?”
I shook my head. I did not know. Nods weren’t going to come cheap anymore. If she wanted a nod, she’d have to do better than her easy, lazy invocation of “love.”
“Is it like being hungry?”
“Not really … maybe a little. It’s hard to explain. You know how light-headed you get when you don’t eat?”
“Sure. You feel bad.” I licked a pea of toothpaste off my finger. “Starved. About ready to eat Spaghetti Surprise.” Spaghetti Surprise was a simple equation for indigestion, invented by Mom: noodles tossed like a blond wig over all your leftovers. Noodles as a culinary disguise for gross, inedible root vegetables: surprise! In a trash can this dish was raccoon kryptonite; even Grandpa couldn’t finish it.
“Hey, remember when Kiwi goes, ‘Forget the cheese, Mom, you should grate antacids over these noodles,’ how hard she laughed …?”
“I don’t want to talk about Mom tonight, Ava, okay?”
“Okay.”
“We were talking about my boyfriend.”
Ossie made her voice shiny, doing her best impression of the mainland girls’ gossip:
“… and people think a ghost is just air but Louis is heavy, Ava. There’s so much to carry — he gave me his whole life …
“… his death, too.” She touched his shirt pocket and shivered a little. She felt cold, she said. Her heart, her vocal cords, they’d gone cold.
“I won’t feel warm again until my boyfriend comes back.”
I stared at her with the toothbrush in my mouth. Was she crazy? She was crazy — I hardly needed to ask the question. It was 80 degrees in our room. I tugged at my hair with both hands and watched her performing hygiene in the mirror. My sister didn’t look possessed — we were both wearing the same ankle socks and the striped pajamas that we wore to bed every night. Ossie had a green freckle of toothpaste on her upper lip, her hair was pulled into a high ponytail for sleep purposes, her cheeks were sunburned, she looked pretty and dumb with her same big-eyed, ostrichy features, and all these outside things were so as-ever and ordinary that I wanted to scream at her: You are faking, you are lying! There is no such thing as your dredgeman.
“You know who I miss? I miss our brother. I miss Mom. I don’t miss some invisible boyfriend. That’s …” But the words I tried to stick to the knot I felt all drifted away.
I told myself that I didn’t believe in ghosts at all, or at least not with the ardor of my sister, but at night the huge, paperwhite moths flew up to hit or kiss their wings against our bedroom window screens and even the tiniest rasp made me want to cry out.
CHAPTER EIGHT. Kiwi’s Debt Increases
The employees of the World of Darkness got paid on a biweekly basis. On his third Friday in Loomis County, Kiwi queued up outside a small office catty-corner to the Jaws, waiting to ask a question about his paycheck. He whistled the new hit single “Haters Will Hemorrhage Blood!” (Incredibly, this turned out to be a love song. It had a violin in it. Very popular that year, Vijay informed him, at area proms.) Kiwi undid a triple knot on his shoelace that had been bugging him for weeks, which felt as satisfying as solving a crime. A bunch of kids were shrieking as they slid down the Tongue.
“We love the World!” an entire family screamed in unison — this was the catchphrase from the World of Darkness commercials. People liked to scream it down the slide from the top of the Tongue, as if to confirm via sonar that they were at the location they’d seen advertised on their TV screen. Kiwi craned around to watch their descent. The mom and tiny daughter were wearing matching skirted yellow bathing suits and foam Whalehead hats. Mere seconds after they vanished inside the Leviathan ride, another family appeared at the top of the slide, their wide buttocks pancaked and drawn upward by the cushioned ruby pads.
Watching people board the ride and get released down the chute was like watching an eerie factory assembly line. Real whales, Kiwi had to believe, were less orderly but more expedient about their consumption of plankton. There were no lines winding around outside their great teeth, no hand stamps and tickets; the real whales just opened wide and destroyed.
At the apex of the Tongue, the ride operators came running out like bandits to pluck the eyeglasses and rings and wristwatches from the startled riders; you couldn’t wear these things into the deep inner pools of the Leviathan. You couldn’t have heart arrhythmias, spinal injuries, psychoses. You couldn’t have a baby growing inside you, either — not if you wanted to plunge headlong into the Jacuzzi steams of the Leviathan! No pregnancies! No stowaway futures! A chubby new hire in a tight WORLD OF DARKNESS SECURITY shirt was escorting a pregnant woman in a pink-and-blue-striped bathing suit down a side stairway just now. “Twins” he mouthed to Kiwi when their eyes met across the long hallway, rolling his eyes, as if he had just caught a nervy shoplifter.