“Put your hat on, sonny,” he said, and grinned back at me so then I knew that he had been making a joke. “Put on your sun cream.”
I laughed, startled, because the Bird Man sounded so much like an anxious mainland dad. We were bringing actual sundries to this underworld: sun lotion and aloe, itching powder, blond jugs of mosquito repellent, iced-tea mix from the café, a Ziploc bag of bandages and unserious medicines to treat a traveler’s minor aches and pains. To this cache the Bird Man contributed a half-full brown jar of pink bismuth antacid tablets. If indigestion was one of the dangers that we were preparing for on this trip to hell, I thought, then I was going to do just fine.
“I didn’t plan to make this trip again, you know,” he said softly at one point, and not really to me.
“Thank you. We are going to pay you, I swear, Ossie and me …” I studied the sky, trying to see what he saw. So the map to the underworld was not a secret, static document like the paper map we’d recovered from the dredge but alive and legible above us, beating its wings. I leaned into my knees and tried to lift off my tailbone a little, get settled on the skinny bow seat. The Bird Man began to perform a strange call — it took a minute before I realized it was our own English language:
“And and and and …”
The Bird Man told me that he was singing a transition song. He dipped his pole into the shallows and parted clumps of golden periphyton.
“And and and …,” he called, poling steadily faster. Again I fought the desire to cover my ears. Please stop, I thought, but after a few more measures the droned melody snuck inside me, it was infectious, and I almost wanted to sing along. After a while the song wasn’t a language anymore but a note like a skipped stone — a melodic conjunction. The bull gators were sopranos compared to the Bird Man’s deep pitch. I knew then that this person had a real magic. My pet Seth’s crate wobbled between my sneakers, her eyes two pins between the slats. We made a keyhole turn around the coast. The Bird Man’s pole kept clanging over rocks, his song like a cog in his throat, and I watched my home pull away from us.
CHAPTER TWELVE. Kiwi Goes to Night School
Vijay was wearing his red bandanna and doing twenty over the speed limit, and for once Kiwi didn’t say a word. Kiwi made no mention of the study he’d read on vehicular manslaughter or the difficult medical ethics of life support; he didn’t comment on the alarming flap-flap-flaping of Vijay’s unbuckled seat belt against the door lock; he didn’t ask if Vijay was a registered organ donor, or call attention to the many drivers flipping his best friend the bird: no, tonight Kiwi Bigtree was ready to endorse reckless speeds. Kiwi’s name was second on a green-and-white computer printout from the LCPS: Álvarez, Ruben, and then Bigtree, Kiwi. It was 7:01, and he was late for his first night of school.
“Buckle up, bro,” he’d mumbled at a light, but Vijay had stared sightlessly forward. Kiwi sighed. Out of kindness — perhaps as part of some private philanthropic project — Vijay was now pretending not to hear the dorkiest things that Kiwi said.
They flew onto a bridge that spanned downtown Loomis. Huge, luminous pharmacies pushed at the darkness like giant cruise ships at anchor. Kiwi spotted a billboard that the Chief used to lease, SWAMPLANDIA! in green-and-sapphire circus letters above his mother’s beautiful face. Now it advertised the Bigfoot Podiatry Treatment Center of America. There was a grinning Bigfoot in a karate suit on it, kicking a hirsute monkey foot at traffic.
“Can you maybe crack a window, bro?” Kiwi asked in a small voice. “I feel sort of carsick?”
The neighborhoods went from bad-historic to bad-dilapidated, then recovered their lawns and flowering trees again in mere minutes of highway travel. The Loomis Children’s Hospital appeared on the other side of the bridge, a putty-colored complex ringed by the world’s saddest playgrounds, with medieval-looking bucket swings on rusted chains and the pastel skeletons of bouncy-horsies. Next door was a church. A group of stone angels gathered like hunchbacked hitchhikers in the garden. A boarded-up movie palace called Casa del Encanto had become a lion’s den of hundreds of stray cats — Kiwi could see dark and pale fur coursing around the ticket booth. The strip malls and the XXX … And More video stores gave way to stucco coffee-colored office buildings, drab apartment complexes, a few hallucinatory glimpses of the sea.
“So what’s the deal with this XXX … And More chain?” Kiwi muttered. “What’s their business angle? That you can rent pornography and Bambi there?”
“Bambi! Ha-ha. That’s about a baby deer. Shit. You’re sick, Marge. You got weird tastes.”
But Vijay was only half-listening. He kept craning over, checking out the two girls in the car next to them. Kiwi liked them instinctively. The larger girl had a face as round and white as a clock and she kept touching a spot near her heart and exploding into a laughter that shook her every frizzy curl. The driver had an acned face and musty-colored bangs and laughed without teeth. Kiwi wondered if they were sisters. Something about their ease with one another and all the happy, feckless ugliness in that car made him think of sisters. They were singing along to the radio, acting much younger than their ages. It was clear that these girls didn’t care who was watching them through the clear panes. Kiwi wondered if they would step out of the car and shrivel into individuals, grow self-conscious again.
What are Ava and Ossie doing today? An easy thought to erase. Sometimes Kiwi wondered if he was also a genius at Zen Buddhism, he had become such an expert at annulling certain attachments.
The rap song playing now was one that Vijay had been trying to teach Kiwi for weeks. It was called “Gas Hose” and the title seemed to be a metaphor for oral sex. One of the verses Kiwi simply refused to sing: it rhymed “big old tits” with “my catcher’s mitts,” and then, most bafflingly to Kiwi, “cricket bits”—Kiwi believed that was the lyric, he could be wrong, because behind it was a chorus of moans and what sounded like a thousand air horns. “Cricket bits” [n]: could this be yet another mainland synonym for female genitalia? The party slang of entymologists? Either way, the rhyme really unnerved him.
On Swamplandia! the crickets sang to announce the day’s transition to evening, the flash of pink to black time that meant: deep summer. Vernal currents, an air as lushly populated as seawater, deer flies and damselflies, a whole cosmos of mosquitoes: all this iridescent life rose out of the solution holes at dusk. Seths bellowing in gravelly eruptions, launching that strange sound at the sky until you braced yourself for an astral landslide. Crickets meant that the moon was up, that a tide was rising, that his mother or the Chief would soon be calling for them across the mudflats …
“Oh fuck,” Vijay muttered. “Traffic.”
The Volvo was trapped inside a tunnel, sedans and a crocus-blue delivery van and one snouty limousine beeping all around them. Kiwi felt his lungs fanning open and shut, the first white tinge of panic. He shut his eyes and pictured the ocean. Vijay was twisting the knob of the radio, and Kiwi heard the “cricket bits” song fly past on three different stations. He heard the jingle for the World of Darkness: “Jo-nah survived the Le-vi-a-than …” Finally the cars began to move. When he opened his eyes, Kiwi saw a slab of blue night up ahead — and then the stars began to fly. The Volvo jumped forward. A rain-soaked banner sagging from the roof of a two-story building read LOOMIS COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE.