Thus ended Kiwi’s Life-Saving Orientation.
Every twelve minutes a high-speed fan blew pressurized air into the caissons, transforming the Lake of Fire into a turbulent wave pool. The water shivered up into red pyramids while the swimmers screamed with surprise. This happened twenty-eight times during Kiwi’s shift. When the waves receded, Kiwi watched the ruby dye congeal in the deep end. He thought about the wings of roseate spoonbills, their brilliant plumage. He thought about the July skies over the saw grass. In this way his mind emptied very naturally into thoughts about home, his sisters and his mom, Grandpa, his delusional father. Kiwi had to paddle a long ways back before he could focus on the Lake.
During his lunch break Kiwi wandered the tunnels until he found the payroll office. Nobody had cashed the checks he’d signed over to his father yet. Had they even gotten to the island? Was his asshole dad trying to make a point? From the pay phone, Kiwi spoke to “Holly,” a loan officer at the Sunshine Community Bank.
“I’m a relative. No, I’m not Hilola. I’m her son. I’d like to pay down Samuel Bigtree’s debt, ma’am. Can we maybe work out some kind of deal? I’m interested in buying my family some time.”
Kiwi meant this very literally. At his current wage of $6.50 an hour he probably couldn’t afford to purchase Swamplandia! a month or even a week, he explained to Holly. But to forestall their homelessness he was willing to negotiate the price of minutes, hours — how much would a minute cost?
The woman on the other end of the line laughed sadly.
“Honey, are you a signer on this account? No? Then you need to put your father on the phone.”
“Okay, Holly? That’s not possible. Could you just tell me the dollar amount that we owe you?”
But she couldn’t, not legally. She informed Kiwi Bigtree that he did not owe her employer anything.
“Are you guys going to foreclose on us?”
But she couldn’t tell him that, either. What she could do — she put the phone down to get her supervisor’s consent — what she would be very happy to do was apply any moneys Kiwi sent her toward Swamplandia!’s “substantial debt load.”
So after work, Kiwi mailed a money order directly to the bank. Fourteen dollars and twenty-two cents, the change in his stupid World trousers. What was left of his salary after food and rent. He watched his signature swirl over and under the mint line and licked the little stamp, feeling sick in his gut.
Lifeguarding was exhausting. Kiwi moved from his chair only to take bathroom breaks. Vijay returned to smoking on the roof without him. Kiwi spent most of each shift doing a mental good cop/bad cop narration in the Lake’s general direction: Please, children, I am begging you, nobody drown, followed by, You bitches better not drown. The Lake of Fire was adjacent to Beelzebub’s Snack Bar, where Lost Souls ate fourteen-dollar boxes of Dante’s Tamales “for the experience.” What experience? A Dante’s Tamale was a mutant breed of tamale from Cienfuegos, Mexico, that was, without exaggeration, the size of a wind sock. A grown man ate a Dante’s Tamale and wept into his wife’s hair. Toddlers ate the Dante’s Tamales and turned unhealthy shades of purple.
“Smile!” The itinerant photographer wandered through the Lake of Fire and snapped candid pictures of the Lost Souls — the itinerant photographer was a graduate of a prestigious art school in Rhode Island and everyone agreed that his shots were very creative. At the end of the day Lost Souls queued up to buy a $29.95 picture of themselves printed on a mug or a calendar, glossy assurance that they had suffered in Hell.
A new World of Darkness jingle, sung by a deeply ironic gospel choir, was being piped in through the World speaker system: “The Leviathan, the Leviathan, what a bargain! All that pain in a single afternoon!” The chorus was like a virus, playing in a self-replicating loop in everybody’s brains. Sometimes whole winding lines of Lost Souls would all at once burst into the song.
Swamplandia! had its own jingle, too, which nobody seemed to know. It wasn’t conventionally “catchy,” although it sometimes almost rhymed. Risa Bigtree had written the original lyrics, with old Sawtooth on the uke. His mother and the Chief had sung it for the radio ads — the Chief, whose voice rumbled like a washing machine full of shoes, and his mother, who happily admitted that she didn’t understand what pitch was. Fortunately, the Bigtree tribe never had the bucks to saturate the mainland airwaves with it. Kiwi and Ava and Ossie were on the recording, too. They shared a middle verse.
We Bigtree children wrestle gators
With the skill of our forefathers
With the steel of our foremothers
We Bigtree children tame our gators …
From the tall lifeguard chair, which rose nine feet above the Lake and overlooked the deep end beneath an ornamental black umbrella, Kiwi blew his whistle — a Korean kid had just beaned his twin sister in the head with a BrimStone, an enormous inflatable beach ball (rental units: $8.75; on the weekends hundreds of BrimStones blew in from the Vesuvius Blast Off, which meant an extra hour of cleanup for Kiwi). When the screaming began, he thought this roughhousing was the reason for it, even though the Korean boy’s mouth was a seam.
It was whole seconds before he saw the body.
A blot appeared and spread in the pool’s deep end. It stopped and shivered in place. Arms rose out of the blot, flailing and falling a little ways, rowing again. This T shape in the deepest part of the Lake was a girl or a woman, Kiwi realized, floating there with such gracefulness that at first Kiwi thought her posture must be deliberate, part of some show, her arms fluttering and black tendrils lifting and separating from her head. He guessed what must have happened: she’d gotten a foot or leg caught in an open drain. Kiwi rose onto the platform on trembling legs and began to blow into his whistle. The crowd in the Lake was screaming at him.
“Help her!” he shouted back to them. “She’s drowning!” It was the crowd’s howling, finally, that got Kiwi to leap, and not the girl at all — he wanted only to escape the sound of the strangers’ terror.
When Kiwi jumped from the lifeguard platform, he shut his eyes. Everybody was screaming but he could feel his own silence unfurl and flutter in streamers behind him, like two black ribbons tied to the soles of his feet. Then Kiwi hit. The Lake water rushed into his nose and unhinged his jaw, flooded into him, and this felt like swallowing a gallon of melted pennies, swallowing everything the wrong way, a mucoid sting. He made it over to the girl, found her wrist and closed onto it and held on, and he was worried that he was going to break all the small bones inside the girl’s fingers as he gripped a hand and then an arm and pulled at it, blanking on all his reading and certain now that he was injuring her, doing her some terrible and irreversible physical harm; but then as he tugged her toward the surface Kiwi could feel the wake of her legs kicking alongside him. For a hallucinatory second, just before surfacing, he came face-to-face with the girl under the lava globes in the water. She is staring at me! Their eyes met. Her hair was rising and twirling continuously into a slow fountain above her pale temples and her two eyes were open, black and alert. She’s conscious, Kiwi had time to think. Awake under the lake. Then they were both kicking for the surface together, their arms linked at the elbow like twins. When they broke the surface the girl immediately went limp again.
“Hey, come on,” Kiwi gasped, jerking at her arm, “what are you doing?” She wasn’t moving at all now. Her eyes (had he imagined them open?) were smoothly shut. He hooked an arm around her and dragged her in, and throughout the great cavern of the Lake of Fire he could hear the Lost Souls cheering.