“The lifeguard got her, Mommy …!”
“The lifeguard saved her …!”
Shut up, he wanted to growl. The girl was growing in her sleep, becoming so heavy inside the crook of his arms. He kicked his right foot out until his toes curled around the ladder rung.
Kiwi dragged the girl up and out on her back. “Are you okay? Are you okay?” he shouted moronically into her ear before bending close to deliver two rescue breaths. Fernando, his World of Darkness CPR instructor, had told him that he was “too nicey-nicey.” He tapped harder. People were watching him; he could feel the familiar onstage lurch of his body beginning to panic.
Okay, genius, this is a human person, this is not some alligator that you have to wrestle. But Kiwi had muscular amnesia. What came next? His fingers clutched at his rib cage as if he were holding his own guts together. Her, he had to help her. This girl was pretty. She had coal-black curls in a crazy sprawl on the towel and a narrow squint of a face; she was his age or even a little younger. Kiwi fixed his lips over the girl’s lips. He pinched her nostrils shut, one hand floundered against the alien slickness of her black swimsuit — she was breathing, Kiwi realized, he’d forgotten to listen for breaths. A fraction of a second before Kiwi exhaled his air into her, the drowned girl’s eyes flew open.
Kiwi sat back on his heels. He stared stupidly at his own hand, which was still pasted to the thin black fabric on her stomach. Both of their eyes were running clear ruby tears, their fingernails brilliantly stained, their lashes clumped and dark.
“You’re okay? You feel okay, huh?”
She sniffled and nodded, rubbing at her eyes.
“You were okay, though,” he said suspiciously, but the girl didn’t hear him. Her lips opened in a joyful shout:
“You saved me …” Even as she spoke she was turning from Kiwi to the crowd, beaming at the two dozen or so swimmers gathered at the Lake’s edge. “This lifeguard saved me!”
“What?” Kiwi mumbled. “No, really, I didn’t do anything, you just needed to catch your own breath …”
“What’s your name, son?” someone called, and without thinking Kiwi answered truthfully:
“Kiwi Bigtree.”
“Thank you, thank you,” the girl kept whispering, her lips opening and closing so delicately against the cleft above his left shoulder that he could feel the buzz of her gratitude on his neck — but what did she think he had done for her? Why were these other people agreeing with her? Rumors began within earshot of him:
“See that young man, son? He was all action. Fell back on his training. He’s a hero.”
“Did you watch the kid move down there? He freed her hair from the pool drain, the whole production took him under a minute, she wasn’t even breathing …”
A woman in a yellow sarong at the far end of the Lake with five duckling children thronged around her started clapping: “Bravo, young man!” And then the whole crowd around the Lake of Fire broke into a standing ovation. Applause like he remembered from the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular echoed around the vaulted ceiling — directed, incredibly, at him.
(With his eyes shut, with his face turned toward the din, he could see his mother standing in sunlight so bright it looked like slick ice on the wooden stage, waving at all her tourists indiscriminately, a sea of red ball caps and cellophane visors. H-I–L-O-L-A B-I-G-T-R-E-E! He could see himself at thirteen, selling bags of popcorn to her great admirers. When he watched his mother wrestling Seths onstage he’d felt proud and ashamed of her in shifting ratios — his mother’s tourists he just hated. Hate like that was an easy, monochrome feeling. Look anywhere but at my mother, he’d think at thirteen, and also: Stand up for her ovation, you assholes.)
Someone was taking a photograph of him, and others followed suit. Someone patted a thick towel around Kiwi’s shoulders. Kiwi heard the ricochet of the word “Kiwi” throughout the grotto and he felt a smile spreading messily on his face. He stood, dragging the girl up with him. After so many days and nights of being anonymous, a Margaret, his real name had a narcotic effect. He put one hand around this girl, and his free hand lifted in a wave.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. Help Arrives, Then Departs
Stiltsville was miles behind us and there was as yet no sign of my sister. We were traveling southwest with the current, alligators sprawled on either bank. My oar head was white and scummy with grass. A skipjack landed in our bow and I cleaned it and fed it to the red Seth. Behind me, the Bird Man’s pole kept clanging against limestone bedrock. Was the Bird Man angry with me? His hood hid the clue of his face.
Touch me again, Bird Man, I thought urgently. Tell a joke, say anything—because I was having the convection feeling. As if my skin were rippling, dissolving. Kiwi describes this phenomenon, “convection” [n], in his Field Notes: the rapid cooling of a body in the absence of all tourists. Even Kiwi, King of Stage Fright, admitted to feeling it on Sunday nights. Convection caused your thoughts to develop an alarming blue tinge and required touch or speech with another human as its antidote (Seths didn’t work, not even my red Seth, I’d tried). Sweating could feel dangerous if you were alone in the swamp, as if droplet by droplet your body might get whisked into the sun.
When I baled water I leaned sideways and grazed the edges of the Bird Man’s black coat. My fingers came back wet, with tiny black feathers stuck to them, which reassured me that neither one of us was a figment. At noon the basking lizards slid into the water to cool off. The river began to pick up speed.
At twelve thirty we ate lunch inside a Park Services chickee hut to avoid the mosquitoes. When you rowed into a cloud of skeeters it was loud as a tractor but there was nothing there, just these tiny molecules of sound. Some ranger had borrowed the Seminole design and erected a modern chickee here to use as a campsite, since there was nowhere high enough on the surrounding tree islands to pitch a tent. The inside smelled clean and dry, like a hollowed-out stump. We weren’t the first people to use this shelter, either — overnighters’ trash filled the corners. Their beers and soda bottles looked shiny as treasure. On the back platform I found a dead anhinga furred in mosquitoes, and a single, mysterious crutch. The poor bird had a broken left wing. The crutch belonged to a human invalid, presumably. Someone on our same mission, maybe, limping toward a wife or daughter in the underworld.
“Uh-oh,” the Bird Man said, shaking the crutch at me. “A bad thing to forget, huh? Wonder what the story was there.”
“Can you talk to that one?” I asked the Bird Man, indicating the dead anhinga, and he looked at me with an adult’s generic formula of pity and irritation; I was disappointed in him. Given where we were headed, I thought my question was a good one. We made our tuna sandwiches and scooted under the palm window.
“There are lots of Seminole ghosts out here, did you know that, Bird Man? My sister told me.”
“Of course,” he nodded, as if I’d just told him there were lots of sheepshead minnows. “We might see them later.”
“My sister is named for a Seminole chieftain. The whites killed him with malaria. He died in Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. Do you think he’s in this part of the underworld?”
“Who knows, kid? Maybe we’ll meet him.”
After the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830, the Seminole people were hunted like animals. They built the palm-thatched chickees for use as temporary shelters, hiding places. President Jackson sent a letter to the Seminoles that we reproduced in our museum, the last line of which reads: