“You don’t see her, right?” I kept asking. “You don’t see anything yet?”
Eventually I stopped asking when we were going to get there. I stopped studying the buzzards, or worrying about whatever future was snaking upstream to meet us. At first it alarmed me to watch the buzzards drop into the thick palms; our map to the underworld kept rewriting itself, and how could anybody read a map like that? Half the black atlas would vanish into a hardwood hammock.
“Bird Man?” I asked at one point. “There goes our map again …”
But the Bird Man snapped in a tired voice that I should leave the navigation up to him. (The buzzards are our stars …) I took his advice; I didn’t let my mind wander anymore. Too dangerous. Instead I sent my thoughts flying backward. Certain memories I could reenter like safe rooms, and I had this one in particular I liked to turn the knob on: once when my sister was fourteen she had led the afternoon tour of the Bigtree Family Museum. The Chief was away on a business trip, and Mom was taking some Lithuanian schoolkids with weird haircuts backstage to see the alligators’ incubators. I was in a mood. I told Ossie that I was sick, and convinced her to do the tour. You used to be able to get Ossie to do anything for you — Ossie was the kindest member of our tribe. Privately I thought my big sister was weak and pitied her a little, for her softness and her status as a nonwrestler. She used to be so very quiet, back before her possessions started up. During these tours she read from a script that the Chief typed up for her. She stuttered t’s and said her s’s adenoidally. Her hands would shake. I still made her cover for me. I was passing by the museum window, eating a lemon ice and feeling like an expert deceiver, when I heard her voice float out:
“Ava Bigtree is only eleven years old. But she is already one of the best-t-t alligator wrestlers in the history of Swamplandia! She is Hilola Bigtree’s daughter and my sister. Remember her name, because one day she will be the best alligator wrestler in the world.”
Maybe Ossie was already home? I pictured Ossie sitting Indian style on the burgundy sofa in her polka-dotted pajamas. Watching TV, the mainland stations. News programs. Cartoons. Ossie eating popcorn while Tom and Jerry beaned each other with mallets. And then the TV went black, and the house was empty again. My giggle turned into something raw and terrible — accidentally, I’d just met this part of myself that no longer believed my sister was alive. Your sister, an old voice told me, as frank as noonlight, is lost forever. You’re too late. There’s not a shadow left for you to chase. You’ll go home and you won’t have a sister.
“Stay put, Osceola!” I’d put in the note pinned to our refrigerator. “If you beat me back home, sit tight. Don’t come looking for me now …”
“Look out, kid—”
I watched a water moccasin wrinkle slowly across the river. We passed her; we were gaining speed. Gray and rustling branchways arced above the skiff like dried-out rainbows. The magnolia leaves turned green or black with the always-changing light.
“Al-most,” the Bird Man whistled. He sank his pole into the water near an enormous frizz of roots. A hundred-year cypress lay on its side in the middle of the water. Roots shot outward from the hollow at the base like desiccated sun rays. Bright leaves like butterflies impaled there. Closer and closer, I thought, we are getting closer and closer to the land of the dead. The Bird Man pointed at the buzzards, then turned our bow until our boat was nearly facing upstream. We poled hard against the grain of the river.
The current grew stronger. It wove our skiff in an S-shaped path. In certain places now, the river was so narrow that trees on opposite banks could touch.
* * *
Some hours later I realized that we hadn’t seen a melaleuca in miles. No more threat of “monoculture,” as the scientists called it. The trees out here were a dark variety.
“You sure this is the river to hell? This place would be heaven to my father, all the hammocks out here.” I pointed at a stand of bearded trees whose flowers gave off a syrupy perfume as we paddled beneath them. “I don’t even know the names of some of these twisty ones …”
“Hey, kid, look where we’re going …”
We had to go onto our backs, flat as water moccasins, to pull our skiff through the next tunnel. My head was on the Bird Man’s lean stomach as we entered a net of branches. I could feel him breathing in a careful way under my damp scalp; each exhalation sank me a little. A black maze of branches moved over the sun. Leaves, round as pucks, waggled their tongues at us.
“What happened here?” The Bird Man touched the flaky spot on my knee where I’d scraped hard against the chickee ladder. “Poor kid. You okay?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. I don’t even remember how I got that one.”
He kneed forward in the skiff with his black feathers moving in wavelets, slid something from an interior pocket. The next thing I knew the Bird Man was uncapping a jar of green fluid. He drizzled a cool ointment over me and crisscrossed a bandage on my cut.
“There. Home remedy. ‘Home’ being a fluid terminology, in my special case.” He smiled. “There you go. Nomad medicine. Works better than anything in a first-aid kit, that’s for sure.”
Love.
“I love you,” I blurted out. The Bird Man laughed; for once I had succeeded in startling him.
“Are you feeling okay, kid? Do you need some water?”
I shook my head. “Sorry …” My eyes were burning. “I, uh, I thought …”
We ducked the subject of love by swapping water from the canteen. But now I had an embarrassed feeling and I wanted to explain myself to him; I didn’t want him thinking I was some idiot kid. So between sips of water I started telling him about my mother’s show. That show was my model for love, the onstage and the backstage parts. In this goony kid way, I think I must have been hoping that my story might get the Bird Man to love me the way my mother was loved by the Chief.
“You know, my father trained himself to be my mother’s sun, electrically speaking.”
That was exactly how my dad described the job of love. The Chief rigged the lights for Mom’s act years and years ago, on their fourth date — he dreamed up the lights and the choreography for her show before she’d ever so much as touched an alligator. This was a popular story on our island (Bigtree Museum, Exhibit 12). After she became a wrestler and started doing evening performances, he operated the follow spot. I’d always try to find a way to be backstage for this part. Love, as practiced on our island, was tough work: the blind eye of the follow spot took all your strength to direct and turn. Every night the Chief ratcheted its yellow-white iris around my mother’s muscular back on the diving board. The follow spot we used was decades old, heavy, with poor maneuverability, and the Chief struggled to hold the beam steady. I remember his hands better than his face (I was a short kid): the square nails discolored against the metal, his big knuckles popping from the pressure of his grip like ten white valentines.
My mother did her breaststroke inside the spot’s golden circle of light, growing smaller and smaller as she headed for the deep end. “Now watch this,” my father would say, smiling at me as he changed the color filter and adjusted the iris diaphragm. By the end of her performance his shirt was soaked with sweat.