The Bird Man was watching us talk from the skiff, mining his grimace with a toothpick with his legs flat in front of him. At one point he raised an eyebrow in my direction and clicked his teeth against the tiny splinter of wood—He wants you to be quiet, I understood. The buzzards hung in such eerie patterns in the thermals that I felt as if they had paused, too, waiting to see what would happen next. I heard myself telling Whip about Carnival Darwinism and Grandpa Sawtooth’s new home and the Chief’s departure.
“Say,” said Whip. When he spoke his tone was very studiously nonchalant despite the fact that he’d just interrupted me midsentence. “Just curious, where do you and your cousin keep all your fishing poles and whatnot?”
“At our fishing camp,” the Bird Man snapped from the stern of our skiff. He had drifted maybe twenty feet from us. “Been in the family for years. You know Mammoth Key?”
“Sure.” Whip scratched dead skin from one wrinkled knuckle.
“Want some cortisone? Some aloe vera?” I heard myself offer in a stranger’s hospitality voice.
“Nah, honey, thank you. So your cousin here has got a camp over on Mammoth! I haven’t been out there in five years. Good bass fishing over there.”
We all watched as single droplets of rain hit the water. Duckweed dragged like a wedding train behind our transom. I had seen a small alligator following us earlier, I told Whip, just half a snout and the olive bumps of her eyes visible, but she had disappeared.
“They’re a lot more skittish out here than your folks’ gators, that’s for sure.” Whip coughed. The Bird Man was plucking white bits of down from his coat sleeves and flicking them onto the water—He was bullying Whip! I realized. He had picked up on his fear and now he was tailoring the show for him. “My cousin has been telling me stories about her mother. I never knew her, regrettably — wrong side of the family,” the Bird Man said.
Whip shot me a look. “Your mama was a great woman, honey. It’s a terrible, terrible shame what happened …”
What happened, Whip? Even the few facts I did have about her last weeks tended to float away from me like shining leaves on water the more I tried to get a picture together.
“We’re doing okay. We want to get the show up and running again next month, with that cannon. The Juggernaut. Did the Chief show you our cannon?”
“Not yet. Looking forward to seeing it.” Whip gave me what I guess you’d call a rueful smile, which I understood as a kid to be a smile without joy. A smile with a pretty bad joy: knowledge ratio.
The Bird Man was rustling behind me. His black coat went huge on a sudden gust of wind, and the feathered sleeves swelled big as balloons around his stringy, freckled arms in a way that might have seemed silly on anybody else, almost clownish. Whip’s face was very still.
“What in the hell is wrong with your cousin, honey?” Whip mumbled, almost to himself. “He thinks it’s Halloween or something? That’s some coat he’s got.” He munched another tiny cracker. I said nothing but crowded so closely to Whip’s elbow that the boat rocked. The Bird Man and I locked eyes across the channel. We both knew that it would take one sentence now to end our trip to the underworld. I felt suddenly powerful — I could say the Bird Man was my kidnapper, or worse, and I would be believed. Whip Jeters would take me home on his patrol boat. But none of that would help my sister.
“Hey, Whip?” I said, lowering my voice. “You haven’t seen anybody else out here, have you? Or a funny-looking boat?”
“Nope, I haven’t seen a soul. Funny how?”
“Just funny-looking. Almost like one of those old dredges from the 1930s …”
“A dredge! You’re more likely to see a Chinese junk in these flats than a dredge launch. Those old jalopies would have to be fifty, sixty years old now … Where’d you get it in your head you saw a thing like that out here?” Now he sounded worried. “Because a suspicious-looking vessel this far from Loomis don’t portend one good thing. It’s drugs or poachers would be my guess, human smugglers coming up from Cuba …”
“The Chief says I have a wild imagination, Mr. Jeters,” I babbled. “Poor eyesight. I wouldn’t worry, it was probably nothing.” I leaned in and touched his elbow. “But if you see a dredge scow, Mr. Jeters, will you stop it? Will you … will you grab whoever you find on it?”
“I will, I will do that. Believe me, if there’s a dredge out here that’s still seaworthy I will have some questions for its operators.” He made a noise in his throat, laughter or disbelief. “I’ll put out a call on our station. You have a good fishing trip with your cousin, Miss Bigtree,” he said with a wink. He winked again, like a friendly tic he couldn’t control. He didn’t look at the Bird Man again, and I got the sense that Whip didn’t want to see anything that would hinder his exit. He had decided to believe me, I guess, but I think it must have been the sort of believing that requires a special paradox, a vigilant blindness. Whip Jeters wouldn’t look at my face, and he quit sneaking glances at my “cousin” in the glade skiff. Behind him, the Bird Man lifted his chin at me. Now his eyes were shining in the familiar way but I don’t think Whip could see this.
The rain was coming on fast. Whip switched on the flashlight at his belt loop and flashed the beam of light rapidly, twice, onto the stern. He paused, and then lit it once more. The yellow circle of light covered my sneakers and shut again for good. I don’t know if this was just Whip fumbling with the flashlight or if he was trying to get a message to me. There was no time to ask him; the Bird Man had already rowed over to receive me.
(I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none. So who knows what sense Whip made of the pair of us? It’s just as likely that his blinking flashlight was a malfunction, an unlucky one, and not a signal I missed.)
Whip Jeters swung me back over to the Bird Man’s skiff, and my fingers sank into the oily feathers on his shoulders. The Bird Man got me settled in the bow seat with my paddle.
“Good-bye,” said Mr. Jeters, no longer disguising his desire to get away.
“Good-bye,” we sang out together, the Bird Man’s voice a gravelly accompaniment to my high whine. Rain had started blowing in from the east, and I wondered if we’d paddle through the afternoon showers or hunch in one of the little coves around the mangroves and wait them out.
I didn’t tell the Bird Man what Whip had said to me as we parted ways. Before he’d returned me to the Bird Man, Whip Jeters had done a curious thing. He’d leaned in and let his dry lips brush my cheek. It felt stiff and formal, less like a kiss than some strange benediction. He’d put a warm palm on my shoulder and gotten close enough to whisper:
“Be safe, Ava.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN. Kiwi Bigtree, World Hero
The reporters talked him into hair and makeup. Some TV crew assistant had deflated his water-logged trunks by pounding on Kiwi’s actual ass, cheerfully conversant as he did this — as if Kiwi were somehow not attached to it, the ass. Great tinfoil sheets and lunar caps of light went up around the lifeguard station. The World of Darkness had closed an hour before and without the crowds the Lake of Fire felt newly eerie, water jetting from its sides in bruise-colored clouds. Kiwi flinched; a short, ebullient male stylist from the Loomis Register was combing the snarls from his hair. His mother used to powder his cheeks by the Gator Pit, using some sort of drugstore magic to transform her acned son into a wrestler of Seths. This is fraudulent, Mom! This is a dubious project. He’d pumped up his anger with big language like a bicycle tire.