When I woke up from a dissolving dream of great happiness, Osceola was not in her bed. Light filtered through our window and when I read the clock I felt a little sick. I pulled on yesterday’s socks, my muck boots, and tied my grimy shoelaces. I tromped past the wax-fruit shine of the smaller reptiles’ plastic cage lids, still waking up. Searching for her from the crow’s nest of the kapok tree house, I felt chilled and annoyed. This time she wasn’t in the Gator Pit. I followed our old footsteps from yesterday’s trip to the ditch, which now felt like it had been a thousand years ago. Then our footsteps ran out, and fear unspooled through me as slowly as a yawn. The ditch that I returned to was empty. I remember it as being calm and wet, and very peaceful, flat as a pasture in the blue light.
As I approached the live oak in the center of the Last Ditch my heart began to pound — a glowing square was taped to peeling bark: a blank sheet of paper. No, I saw, hurrying forward, not blank, just white. There was a beautiful handwriting on it that I recognized:
Dear Ava,
I am eloping with Louis. That means we are going to the underworld to get married. Do not stay here by yourself. Get Gus to take you to the Chief. Ava I love you very much. Tell the Chief I love him too, and Grandpa and Kiwi. I will see you maybe.
— Ossie
All I could think was: Her spelling is perfect. I pictured Ossie in Kiwi’s empty room, looking up each word in his dictionary. Slowly I got up and walked to the bank of the canal, which that morning was swollen with rainwater and stained from the cypress roots. We’d checked our rivers against Louis Thanksgiving’s map, and it seemed possible that this canal in our backyard could be the very same artery that the Model Land Company dredge had dug out during the Great Depression. I peered around the river bend, saw only thin trees and moths.
Oh-no. Please-no. Mom …
Moths flapped in mute hysterics all along the canal. I counted hundreds, flying downriver like a second water.
The ditch is empty, I realized.
The dredge is gone.
CHAPTER TEN. Kiwi Climbs the Ladder
From the roof of the World, the pigeons looked like falling stars. It was a shame you couldn’t relax and enjoy the Olympic splendor of this, Kiwi thought, on account of how the pigeons kept shitting on everything. Their timing was uncanny, malevolent — the pigeons had gotten him twice this week, down his open work-shirt collar and splat across the back, and the King Suds Laundromat off I-95 was yet another mainland luxury that Kiwi couldn’t afford. Kiwi didn’t even have the bus fare to get to the King Suds Laundromat. He did not have sufficient quarters to pay tribute to King Suds, the mustachioed monarch who ran it. Instead, he took his uniform shirts and his losery boxer shorts into the dormitory showers and washed them with Leo’s dark green dandruff shampoo, which burned like acid on your skin. Somehow it had gotten onto his balls and into the webbing between his fingers and the shit just hunkered there like cold fire. He had developed a rash or a pox, something purplish and specklesome on his bony thighs that he was determined to ignore until it went away, or killed him.
“Ahh, Leo,” Kiwi moaned into the mildewed nave of the showers, “why is this shampoo so thick?”
Was Leo trying to regrow hair or something? In the break room his colleagues plugged their noses and made a big show of asking, “What smells like formaldehyde, yo?”
During their break hour, Vijay sighed and tugged at Kiwi’s slimy shirt hem. “I told you, I will lend you quarters to do your fucking laundry, you retard.”
“Laundry is my last priority right now, V.”
“Shit, I’d rethink that! Have you smelled you? I will, like, sneak your laundry into my house, bro. My mom loves doing laundry, it’s like this Immigrant Mother disorder? She uses Lluvia de las Montañas detergent — it’s so badass. You’ll smell like Costa Rica!”
The last thing Kiwi wanted was some other kid’s mother doting on him. Just the word “mom” still made his stomach flip.
“Ha-ha. Yeah. I am none to be fucked with.”
“Vijay. I need another job.”
“Yeah, I hear you.” He sighed happily and rolled his pant legs up. “Who don’t?”
The boys were sitting on the sooty edge of the roof overlooking the eastern side of the main lot, watching someone in a BMW double-park. An awesomely jawed man in chinos got out of the car, took a furtive look around, then sprinted on his loafer toes for the park entrance. Banker/lawyer, Kiwi thought, ticking down his taxonomic chart. Silk tie, comb-over, tassels. Something about his gait made the double-parker seem almost jolly; it was like watching an elf leave a Christmas surprise.
“Sing it with me now, Margie: what a d-d-douche.” Vijay was smiling his breaktime smile. You could tell time by that smile—5:45 must be just around the corner.
“D-d-d …”
Far below them, the Loomis traffic roared. A pigeon waddled along a pipe, lifting its mauve wings like an acrobat. Kiwi felt a stab of the unpredictable homesickness.
“How much do they make over there?” he asked quietly. He was pointing at the row of businesses that abutted the Leviathan hangar, which looked small as a ring of petrified rocks. As if someone had planted them around the World of Darkness, Kiwi thought, thinking for some reason of The Spiritist Telegraph. Those diagrams in the appendix of sacerdotal magic.
“Where? What are you talking about? The gas station? Don’t you read like every newspaper that was ever invented? Don’t you know the facts? People who work at gas stations get shot. They get capped, Marge.”
“No, no. The restaurant.” Kiwi pointed through the scrim of pigeons to a neon B.
“The Burger Burger? I would not really call that place a restaurant, bro. You can buy a cheeseburger there for a fucking quarter. You think the Burger Burger is going to pay you big money? Leo calls it the E. coli factory!”
“Leo eats there all the time.”
“They pay a dollar less than here and you smell like dead cow forever and all the girls are skanks, which is fine with me, but I swear to God they all got herpes.”
“Oh. I see.”
Kiwi wasn’t 100 percent on what that meant. What was the use of talking about anything? He needed to make a thousand dollars this month and he didn’t see how that was possible.
“Check their lips, bro.”
“Okay. I will. Poor girls.” Kiwi was sure he’d read about this ailment somewhere but he couldn’t quite recall the etiology — he would have to do some research later. Regardless of my findings, I am going to wolf like twelve of those burgers. Kiwi stared at the neon B and felt his mouth flood. Hellspawn Hoagies were eight dollars and he had thirty-two cents on his employee card.
Vijay was looking at him strangely.
“You cannot work there. Not to sound arrogant, bro? But without me around, they will destroy you.”
“What are you talking about?” Who could he mean, “they”? The skanks?
Vijay blew hair out of his left eye and looked at Kiwi darkly. “Everybody. The people who hear you talk.”
“Oh.”
Kiwi pushed greasy hair out of his own eyes — he couldn’t afford a haircut at the moment, either. On Swamplandia! Ossie had taken this duty over from his mother, surprising the other Bigtrees with the steadiness of her hands. Their compliments had irritated her—“Well, I’m not a chimpanzee, you guys. I can use scissors. I can cut in a straight line.” Now Kiwi had hanks of red hair that crimped in the heat like sea serpents.