People began screaming, babbling obscurely; someone went splashing overboard. Louis heard the wet, frantic beats of arms on water. The birds had completely swallowed the dredge now. They were perched all along the trusses and gunwales and the cabin roof so that the whole structure looked upholstered in black velvet; it didn’t seem possible to Louis that there could be so many birds in all the world. Louis saw a buzzard that looked as large as a man lift and stretch its wings; some part of Gid went winking from its beak and fell into the water. Finally Louis felt a scream tear loose from his throat.
“Oh, shut up. They’re just birds,” Theodore Glyde, the tall, sallow engineer, kept repeating crossly next to him, gesticulating at no one. “They’re just filthy buzzards, they shouldn’t hurt us at all, anyhow, men, we’re alive …” He went on and on like this as the buzzards grew in size and definition — how could more be coming? Louis wondered. Hundreds more were coming. He stood there and waited with a pale, uplifted face. He might have looked courageous from the outside. Theodore Glyde was still throwing his arms around as if he could argue his death back into the hole of the moon.
“Here they come, fellas,” Louis T. said quietly, and beside him Theodore snorted with disgust and crossed his long arms in their slate-blue sleeves as if he were impatient to prove a point.
Oh God, Louis thought. He didn’t feel any more horror — just pure sadness, because he was seventeen that summer and he didn’t want to go. His real life had begun less than a year ago. I’m next.
And, Osceola told me in a whisper, he was. We sat there for a full minute listening to a wild gator clawing through the brush that lined the boardwalk. Afterward, she swore me to secrecy.
“You cannot tell anybody, Ava Bigtree.”
“Gee, okay. I’ll try …”
I pointed backward at the dark windows of our house and for some reason we both broke up, laughing and laughing. I made binoculars with my hands and pretended to scan the boardwalk for tourists.
“Got that, everybody?” I said. “It’s a secret!”
But then I saw, through the open fists of my binoculars, that Ossie’s pale eyes above her laughing mouth were filling with tears. It was strange to watch a face having that kind of secret disagreement with itself. For some reason I flashed to a dry, sunny day last year outside the hospital, to the Chief’s deadcalm eyes over his screaming red mouth.
We walked up the steps to the Bigtree Swamp Café and ate two pistachio cones while a storm rolled in. The longer I thought about the Dredgeman’s story, the more convinced I became that Louis was or had been real. How else could Ossie know about his death in such detail? My sister could memorize obituaries but tonight’s performance had been different. She hadn’t stuttered at all, she’d used words I thought she couldn’t possibly know. And then there was her face as she told it — she had reacted to her own recitation of the Dredgeman’s Revelation like a first-time listener. My sister’s eyes had turned melty and black as the cook shack fire spread. We’d both gasped when Gid died, and when the white sky had swallowed him cold. When the dredge wrecked, we’d been truly afraid.
Now Ossie crunched into her cone. “You want more ice cream, Ava?”
A tumor-headed buzzard cocked its head and looked at us from behind the café glass, not quizzically like a sparrow or a gull, but with a buzzard’s bored wisdom, and I imagined then that this bird, too, must also know the story, and that all the quiet trees and clouds had always known the story. I ate the second stale cone my sister handed me, licked green drops from the back of my palm. We polished off a tub of sprinkles. They covered our hands like magnetic shavings, and we were still giggling about our “gloves” when the power went out.
“Ava? That’s you, right? Don’t move. It’s okay. I’ll get candles.”
“Why not ask your boyfriend to do it?” I whispered, waiting to see if the café light would flicker on again. Louis Thanksgiving could be just outside the café windows. He could be inside this room with us, I shivered, riding out the storm. Ossie, I almost screamed, until it occurred to me that the ghost could also be inside of her.
Later, back in our bedroom, my sister unscrolled another, smaller map. She said she’d found it in the cuddy cabin on one of her dates.
“Look, Ava,” she whispered. “Louis says this is where the door to the underworld opens …”
“Na-uh.” I squinted at the map. “That’s the Eye of the Needle.”
I recognized the coordinates she was pointing to — we labeled this place on our own souvenir Swamplandia! maps and place mats. The Eye of the Needle was an Indian landmark. Grandpa Sawtooth had been fishing out there. Good red snapper hole.
“Of course it’s a real place, silly. But it’s also one of the thruways to the underworld. A gateway to the world of the ghosts.”
“The underworld? You mean, like, hell?” Just the word made my mouth go dry; I didn’t even like living this close to Loomis County. “Does the Chief know?”
The Eye of the Needle was a full day’s journey by airboat from our island — at least that, given how difficult it was to navigate the narrow mangrove tunnels between Swamplandia! and the Gulf-side shell mounds. Tourists certainly couldn’t get there, and we kids had never been. Grandpa Sawtooth took a photograph of the Eye of the Needle passageway during his rambles in the forties: a gray channel cut between two twenty-acre islands made entirely of shells. These islands looked like twin boulders to me, or like one island that lived next to its echo. Two intricate skulls rising out of the river. They are hundreds or maybe even thousands of years old — the Calusa Indians contructed the mounds out of clay and every kind of local shelclass="underline" oysters and conchs and whelks. The Calusa Indians were well established in our swamp when Ponce de León arrived in 1513, and they probably hugged the shoreline of Florida for hundreds of years before the European contact; by the late 1700s their tribe had disappeared, undone by Spanish warfare and enslavement, and by microbes: smallpox and measles. The Calusa shell mounds, these seashell archipelagos, had outlasted their architects by at least five hundred years. You can find them scattered throughout the Ten Thousand Islands; visitors will drag their kayaks up a shell mound’s glittery shores and picnic there. On the Gulf side a 150-acre shell mound supports a modern township. But the Eye of the Needle was a special landmark, known only to locals, and very remote.
“The Chief doesn’t know a thing about this passage to the underworld,” said Ossie. “Nobody living does, except for me, and I only know because Louis told me on the Ouija board.”
“So how come Louis knows?”
“Uh, because he’s a ghost? It’s a doorway to the underworld, Ava. The whole dredge crew is there. It’s where Louis goes when he’s not with me — he crosses over.”
Ossie pronounced the word “underworld” with great authority, as if we were talking about Cincinnati or Peru.
I got excited then. “Have you been there, Os? To the, ah, the underworld?”