We were a quarter mile from the house when the Bird Man asked to see my show. To see me, specifically, wrestle an alligator.
“Oh! Sure! You mean … now?”
With my ears buzzing, I led the Bird Man (a tourist!) toward the Gator Pit. When we reached the stadium, I showed the Bird Man to an orange seat in one of the middle rows. Out of habit I began to set up as usual but my heart was thumping. I didn’t know how to work the follow spot or start the music; I was too short to reach the rack of gator nooses. I turned the popcorn machine on. I pulled on a wrinkled brown bathing suit I found backstage, its leg holes very loose on me, the material shivery and dank, and then I climbed the ladder to the diving board. I did not tell the Bird Man that while I had watched Hilola Bigtree’s Swimming with the Seths act hundreds of times, and even practiced swimming in the Pit with her, tonight was going to be my first dive. I stared at my bare feet on the stenciled stars and took a jittery breath.
I peered down into the water — I couldn’t see any of the alligators. I’d figured out how to work the control panel for the auxiliary lamps that glowed along the edges of the Gator Pit and lit the stairs up the stadium rows, but backstage the follow spot sat lidded and dark.
I took a final breath and I was flying. Water flooded my nostrils. When I opened my eyes, I could see the Seths’ dim shapes from below, their great bellies that look like prehistoric pinecones and their dinosaur feet. I could see the glint of a Seth’s claws, curled motionless at the mountains of its sides — an alligator’s tail does all the work of swimming. Little starbursts of teeth, pebbles over lips. A three- or four-hundred-pound Seth sailed over my head, and I watched a thin jet of bubbles rising from my own nostrils. Far above me peach ovals opened on the water — a column of milky illumination from the stadium lamps. They seemed to gasp back their light as I swam for them, like good dreams on waking.
I swam as smoothly as I could for the edge of the Pit. My palms scooped through little nets of algae and something thicker. (Don’t look, don’t look, cautioned my mother’s voice inside me — often during shows I could hear her in my mind’s ear, directing me. She’d scream at you good if you goofed a move; she got protective at odd moments. Our mom was her most conventionally maternal when she was watching one of us fight the gators.) A Seth floated above me as serenely as a souring iceberg, its huge legs contracting. Bubbles fell like crystals of salt from its thrashing tail. I surfaced as far as I could get from the Seths and scrambled up the ladder rungs. “Ta-da!” I said lamely. Without the Chief to hit the switch, the end of the show was harder to pinpoint. I caught my breath, my hands on my knees; then I walked around the Gator Pit fence to find the Bird Man in the stadium. He was standing up in the middle row, giving me a kind ovation.
“Beautiful, kid.” The Bird Man clapped his gloves together as I shook the water from my hair and grinned.
I had a feeling like I was still moving, still flying up and up toward the next surface. The stars greeted me like a second challenge. After months of the bad feeling — months of the sensation that I was evaporating, of practicing for wrestling shows we were never going to perform again — I could taste the old Bigtree victory. Suddenly I remembered: I am an alligator wrestler. This Bird Man’s eyes were like new lamps for the old performance. He kept smiling and smiling at me, and when his gaze rolled over my skinny legs, the pins of my knees became twin suns.
The Bird Man waited for me to finish drying off with one of the grungy towels we kept slung over the pine railing.
“That was really something, kid. You say you learned that from your mother?”
“Yup.” I smiled happily and squeezed my toes against the pool ledge, feeling suddenly shy. I got dizzy looking into the pure whites of his eyes. The alligators slid through the murk beyond the railing: lamplight opened there in soft petals between the black water and the alligators’ sand mounds. I switched the lights off; I knelt and checked the temperature of the Pit water with one finger. Then I led my new friend to our house.
This Bird Man was not what I’d expected a Bird Man to be; for starters, he was very kind. He did not conform to any of the common stereotypes of his profession: redneck exterminators, mangrove gypsies, backwoods ornithologists, black magicians, feathered druids, scam artists. This Bird Man volunteered very little about himself, his age or where he came from, but he told me that he’d been working hard all spring on account of the unusual migration. I wanted to ask, but did not: You do kill them, right? Or is that a rumor? And if you don’t kill the buzzards, where do you take them?
“Want to see something else?” I asked him as we walked down the wood-chip trail and turned at the shed. “It’s a real miracle.”
My flashlight found her first, its beam falling through the crepe of the palmetto straw. At her new length of twelve inches, the red Seth was almost too big for the tank now. She twisted her head and let out a dry hiss in the light.
“Beautiful,” the Bird Man said. He said it exactly right, with the whistling wonder that I had dreamed the red Seth would elicit from a tourist. I thumbed her jaws open and flipped her over to display her checkering of belly scales, which tapered to the single row of scales down her tail (which was still fully half the length of her) as proud of her as if she were my own design.
“See? This is her palatal valve, the same fire-type color, pretty impressive, right? And these are her dorsal scutes …”
“Well,” he smiled, “I’ve never seen anything like her.”
He thanked me; he still hadn’t mentioned the money we Bigtrees owed to him for his avian removal services. This made me feel grateful and a little nervous. We couldn’t pay him, obviously. I was embarrassed, imagining handing him my dad’s voice on the phone. The Chief would offer him coupons instead of cash.
When we got to the house it was very quiet — Ossie hadn’t come home yet. I didn’t think she would tonight.
“I haven’t slept indoors in such a while,” the Bird Man told me absently from the bottom step. He touched our wall the way a child might touch the flesh of a strange animal, flattening his hand against the polished grain of the wood and frowning at it for a moment. The indoors was exotic to folks from the remote swamp, I guessed.
“Thanks again, kid.” He smiled at me. “Beds and linens. It’s like a little vacation.”
His coat made a shuffling sound against the wall of the stairwell.
“See you in the morning! The sixth step sags a little,” I called idiotically. “The towels are sort of dirty?”
I watched him disappear behind my brother’s bedroom door, trailing wispy blue-black feathers behind him. They floated on a slender flume of light from Kiwi’s bedroom, dreamy nicks suspended in the dimness, so small they seemed like molecules of night or visible scent. Should I offer him water, a toothbrush? Did he want a cookie or a sandwich before bed, like I did? For a swamp kid, a visit from a Bird Man was like a dark Christmas. I wished Mom or the Chief were there to help me work out the etiquette of the visit.
Within minutes I could hear our guest snoring behind the wall. I sank beneath a dirty cloud of sheets and lay open-eyed on the pillow. I tried to match my breaths with his snores. I had a feeling like I was dreaming although I was wide awake, staring at the beige cracks overhead and floating happily on my mattress. Maybe this was how a possession started? The Bird Man was no ghost, though, and I was grateful for his company. I had childish fantasies about this man: I wanted to hold his hand in the woods again. I wanted to put my ear on his chest, something I used to do with Mom. To listen to the thud-thud-thud of another heartbeat. For the first time in what felt like months, I slept all the way through a long furrow to dawn.