“It’s a difficult journey. We’d have to take my skiff. No engines. You have to use the old Calusa waterways — way too narrow out there for an airboat. We’ll be extraordinarily lucky if we can pole it this time of year.”
“I’ll help out. A lot. You saw me last night—”
“Alligators aren’t the fauna we’ll be dealing with down there.” He shook his head. “No, look, you’re years too young for this. You’d be the youngest passenger I’ve ever taken …”
“I can wrestle the biggest Seth in the Pit. My grandfather says I can wrestle better than an adult man. I’m strong and I don’t get scared. We’ll pay you,” I added quickly. “How much do you want? I can pay you. When the Chief gets back …”
Taped beneath the telephone was our father’s mainland telephone number. The Chief always stayed in the same room at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel in east Loomis. (I can still hear the song of the numbers that we dialed for his hotel room, although it’s been years since I could recite the numerals themselves: __ __ __-__ __ __ __.) I held the earpiece against my damp face, and I listened to the tone for too long without dialing, until my heartbeat disappeared into the telephone’s terrible hum. Dial. Dial. I dropped it onto the hook. Why call him, why risk all that fear and disappointment, when this whole situation might be resolved before noon? Why should anybody ever have to know that Osceola ran away? If I made the right choice now. If I acted fast, with the reflexive courage of a Bigtree wrestling a Seth …
The Bird Man, meanwhile, had shifted verbs on me. He had detoured from the realm of theory and begun talking plans. “So we’re going to be discreet about this, we don’t need to attract any undue attention on the water. We’ll want to leave as soon as possible, before the tide goes out …”
I watched my hand scratch out a note to my father, in case he got home before we did. The note was very formal. “Sincerely, Ava,” I wrote, because the Bird Man was watching me and “I love you” or even just “Love” struck me as a childish sign-off.
Then I took the telephone off the hook. That way if the Chief called us before we got back he wouldn’t worry, he’d think we’d just been careless. So: we were going. The rose gardens on my mother’s curtains continued rippling. The lizards clung to the window screens, motionless. We left her china plates in a pretty stack.
We packed in a hurry: cans of pork and tuna, red beans, powdered coffee and milk, dry curls of macaroni, a skillet, the Chief’s fishing knife, a package of ground hamburger, envelopes of the powdered orange drink Ossie liked. I grabbed knives and old gallon jugs. But the Bird Man said we should bring more food, more water. Nonperishables. It seemed to me like we were overpacking; how long did a trip to the underworld take?
Two hours after I’d discovered Ossie’s note tacked to the tree, we started down the trail toward the island’s muddy shoreline.
“I never tie off at your dock — that’s a public spot, and you’ve got that fat ferryboat captain puttering around, minding other people’s business …”
“Gus.” I felt a little pang. “He’s nice.”
The Bird Man’s feathers heaved up and down — he was only shrugging again.
“I try to protect folks from their own curiosity about me. My profession. Not too many Bird Men working the islands these days. This way, kid. I’m over on the lee side.”
In addition to food and water I had decided to bring the red Seth in her wooden carrying crate. It wasn’t a practical or a kind decision, and I whispered a little apology through the breathing holes; if it was any consolation, I told her, by this time next year she would be too big and fangsome for me to carry. Her stint as my pet would be over. We would have to become rivals, I explained a little sadly, a world-famous duet of muscles and scales, we would pioneer new holds and we would invent our own championship if we had to …
The Bird Man glanced down at me. “Who are you talking to, kid?”
“Nobody. I’m, ah … I’m praying.”
“Just keep that thing taped up. If you’re dead set on bringing it, which is a pretty stupid move — but I noticed that you didn’t ask my opinion.”
My hand tightened on the carrier’s handle. We were deep into the underbrush now. He paused to make some grunting adjustment to the red cooler’s weight, sliding cans and jugs around, when a fish crow cried out, a long squawk. The Bird Man stood up.
“Hear that? That’s our augur. Hell’s doorbell. It’s time to go.”
“That’s it, really? That’s hell’s doorbell? A fish crow?”
This cawing was a sound I heard and ignored a dozen times each day. I would have expected something more impressive, like Phantom of the Opera music or the boom of a chasm opening. But this crow sounded like any old crow sounds, foreboding and hoarse, like a psychic who is indifferent to your fate. We entered a stand of madeira trees. As we walked beyond the strains of the crow’s last, dry cry, the Bird Man ticked off instructions on his thumb:
“One, keep your arms and legs inside the boat.
“Two, keep your questions to a minimum.
“Three: Some of the Ten Thousand Islands on the way to the underworld are inhabited.” The Bird Man’s voice seemed to issue from the pool of shadows beneath his hat. “The people who live along the Riptides of the Dead … these are not people you should trust, kid. A few of them aren’t even, to get real technical, people. Don’t get too loose and free with the details about your sister, either. Anybody asks, I’m your cousin. We’re on a fishing trip.”
“Okay. No problem, cousin.” I tried to grin. “Are you a Bigtree then, or am I a … you? One of your kind?” But the Bird Man didn’t like this game. I smelled salt and a skunkier odor, and knew that water must be hidden behind the yellow pines.
SWAMPLANDIA! AND BEYOND read a wooden sign at the edge of the grounds.
OVER 1,000,000 ACRES OF WILDERNESS!
“We can find her, I know we can,” I mumbled. “How far can she have gotten?”
The Bird Man didn’t respond. He lifted a low cocoplum branch for me: the glare of water dazzled in. Through the bushes I saw a treeless spit of sand.
“See that, kid? A hidden harbor.” I saw a horseshoe of earth around shallow broth. A glade skiff made a long snaky beak along the sand.
“You wait there.” He flipped the skiff and began wading out with it, the gravied water covering his boots. Grasses got crushed and sprang back around the hull. “You know how to paddle?”
“You bet.” I’d been kayaking through the Ten Thousand Islands before. I used to go rare-flower hunting in the spring with Mom and, on summer nights, gator hunting with carbide lanterns and.22 rifles with my grandfather. This would be a different kind of voyage, I thought, and felt a little yellow slurry of excitement. Sister hunting. Ghost seeking. Squeezing through the Eye of the Needle to another world.
The skiff was a fourteen-footer. I saw that he’d built it following the old Seminole blueprint, with penny nails and a cypress transom, a poling platform in the back; he waved me forward and offered me a glove. I hesitated — a second later his gloves hooked my armpits and swung me onto the bow seat. Up close, I noticed that the Bird Man had the finest purse of wrinkles around his mouth, so that he seemed older or younger depending on where the sun hit. His chin was pocked and small as a red potato.
“So you don’t think my sister is crazy?” I asked happily. Now that I could feel the current tugging at our boat a knot was loosening in my stomach.
“I don’t know your sister.”
“But you do think that ghosts are real? You think it could be true, that she’s been talking to them all this time?”