“Nobody can get to hell without assistance, kid.”
When I burst into the kitchen I saw the Bird Man grinding coffee beans with Mom’s little tin mill, an artifact I had forgotten about.
“Found this in your museum,” he said without turning. “Haven’t seen one of these in ages. Your tribe has some really interesting stuff out there. Hope you don’t mind that I borrowed it—”
Ossie’s note was crushed against my chest and I couldn’t get my voice to work. What I remember feeling was a kind of stage fright, as if the curtains were about to lift onto a new and never-rehearsed show.
“Well, I guess I sure made myself at home,” he said, a red smile in his voice. “I’m making us eggs—” He turned to face me, shaking grease angrily from the spatula grill. “Jesus, kid. What happened?”
My sister never came home.
A ghost has kidnapped my sister.
“Read this, please,” I managed.
The Bird Man scowled down at the wedding notice like the Chief reviewing a bill.
“Is this somebody you know, kid?”
“Osceola, she’s my sister. She’s missing?” I moaned the information into a question. “She wants to marry this guy, Louis … but he’s not, ah …” I pushed a fist into one eye, tried to slow my breathing.
“Your sister is getting married? Today?”
“She ran away with her boyfriend. What should I do? Who do I call now?”
I glanced at the clock: twenty-two minutes had passed since I’d found Osceola’s note.
“Deep breaths, kid. Sit down. Nobody’s dying here. Now, let me just get my head around this …”
The Bird Man had opened all the windows in our kitchen. Rose curlicues shivered on Mom’s brown curtains, a fabric garden, and suddenly I missed my mom again with a pain that was ferocious. She was everywhere and nowhere in the kitchen. Pale brown eggshells rocked like little cradles on her cutting board. Salt, pepper, a jar of ancient Tabasco lined her countertop — the Bird Man had even found her real china, mainland stuff from her Loomis mother, these plates that were the hard white of malt balls. It was strange to see her cup and saucer in this stranger’s hand. The Bird Man had disappeared into his odd clothes again, the long coat in the death heat of summer, his ankle-laced boots. The coat had a layered ruff of black feathers and tumbled all the way down to his boot laces, like a trench coat. The feathers put a furlike gleam on his shoulders, which hunched together each time he sipped from my mom’s cup. That coat must be so heavy! I thought. How can he stand it? But he moved through our kitchen as if he weren’t wearing anything at all, as nimbly as any animal.
The Bird Man brought the coffee over; he motioned for me to sit, like we were going to have breakfast together. Black feathers sprayed around the orange handle of Mom’s mug. The kitchen was already hot and I could smell that coat today, the oily feathers trapping an unplaceable aroma. He poured us both cups of coffee and milk and his voice was very calm, as if we were discussing a misplaced key.
“You say the whole machine is gone?”
“The dredge barge.”
“And somebody is with her? Her, ah, her fiancé?”
I stared at him for a moment. “I don’t think anybody is with her right now, actually. I mean … I think she’s the only body on board. She makes stuff up. We don’t think she really has a boyfriend.”
“Okay. And does your sister know anything about engineering? Would she know how to pilot a dredge like that by herself?”
“I told you, I don’t know.” My face felt hot and huge. “I don’t think so. But the dredge must be running again, right?”
“How do you figure? Your sister—”
“Because it’s gone, Bird Man.”
“I see. Your sister. How old is she?”
“Sixteen. She’s not an alligator wrestler like the rest of us, though — she’s not real strong or anything. Could she have gotten the dredge down the canal on her own, is that possible?”
The Bird Man frowned, which turned his long nose into a blade. “It’s possible. The dredge was in the water already, correct? So if she carried an old outboard to the ditch, got a rope around it, and hooked it onto the back …” He shrugged. “It’s possible. But would she know to do that, do you think?”
I felt my teeth part around a “no,” then paused. We underestimated Osceola. Just when you thought she was a lost cause she’d surprise you with a funny proficiency. And we girls were always underfoot when the Chief did repair work on motorboats, airboats, the Pit plumbing …
“She might know how,” I amended. “She’s been carting all kinds of stuff out there.”
You track the buzzards. Do you know, I almost asked him, have you heard and do you believe in a story called the Dredgeman’s Revelation?
I’d assumed the bags Ossie had toted out to the ditch were full of flowers and candles, her séance stuff. But the Chief kept all kinds of old equipment in the museum. We had electrical relics piled up to the roof: spark plugs and the gouged eyes of Chevy headlights; a box of gold grommets that the Chief and Mom used to collect like metal seashells after hurricanes. Glass chutes, fire wheels, daisy-shaped gears. Antique tubing. Red and orange wires kelped in boxes. All these parts might mean something to a ghost mechanic like Louis.
“Plus she had help.”
“Help?”
“The ghost is helping her. Her boyfriend. His name is Louis Thanksgiving”—I felt my cheeks heat up, hearing how this sounded—“and he used to operate that dredge. He’s seventeen, or at least he was on the day that he died.”
“He’s a dead kid. Your sister’s helper.”
“My sister can talk to them.”
“To ghosts …”
I stared down at my coffee. “My dad says that she’s going through something. A phase …”
“Okay. And you don’t think she had someone real to help her, kid? Someone besides this … Louis?”
“No,” I said, startled by the force of my voice. “No, it’s Louis who’s behind all this.”
Somehow it was easier for me to imagine a secret wind unbending the pins of an engine than any tanned and red-blooded helper, some local boy or fisherman fixing up the dredge and piloting her away. Who besides us had even set foot in the dredge? Who alive would know how to run it?
So I did believe, finally, in the ghost of Louis Thanksgiving. I believed, in a waterfall rush, in the world of the ghosts. An underworld — I pictured blue mist, rocks so huge the dredge barge rolled between them like a marble.
“I know where the ghost is taking her, too!” I blurted out. “The Calusa shell mounds. The Eye of the Needle. That’s how she says you can get to the underworld — you go between those shell islands.”
The Bird Man got a funny smile on his face. “Right. The underworld.”
“Stop that,” I said angrily, surprising myself again. “What I’m telling you is real.”
But the Bird Man didn’t say — as I’d expected him to—“That’s ridiculous. Your sister is lying to you, or else she’s crazy.” He didn’t tell me what I’d been secretly hoping to hear: “I believe in ghosts.” Instead he ground a pale fleck of butter into a piece of burned toast and smiled sadly at me. Belief didn’t even come up.
“Oh, I know it is, Ava. I know it’s real. It’s just that your sister is pretty young to make that trip.”
Then the Bird Man sipped cold coffee and told me that there was a real underworld.
“This whole swamp is haunted, kid.”