“We think this might run on the front page, love.”
The front page of a mainland newspaper! He hadn’t allowed himself to be photographed for the Swamplandia! brochures for years; in the most recent one he was fourteen, wearing his sister Osceola’s red ribbon around his forehead and furious about it, a feather sticking up behind his head like a middle finger.
The stylist licked his thumb and tamped down Kiwi’s owlish eyebrows. “Gawd! Stubborn! We don’t want you looking like a warlock in the photograph, do we?”
“Well, I guess you’re going to need more gel, then.” Kiwi rubbed at his forehead.
The newspaper photographer made him pose in his trunks, which hung flabbily down his chicken legs, still loaded with water. He stood shivering on the cement edge of the Lake of Fire. Emily Barton curled herself against Kiwi’s shoulder and arranged her hair so that it curled in a pretty raven lock around Kiwi’s right nipple. Kiwi didn’t want to touch it, the raven lock. It seemed to have its own important agenda down there. Kiwi badly wanted a T-shirt. The stylist, meanwhile, was circling Emily’s head with the hairspray like a maniacal bug exterminator.
“Emily, babe, don’t move? We want that hair to stay put.”
Emily kept tugging one black strap and wiggling closer to Kiwi, until he could feel the dampness of her black swimsuit pressed against his side — she, too, was still wet from the rescue.
“Thank you for saving me,” she told him breathily. “For saving my life.”
“Sure. I mean, no problemo.” Kiwi felt a little sick.
“Emily, babe, when you stare at him? Can you look a little more, you know—” The photographer made a noise like a popped balloon and Emily shuffled her hair back, nodded like she understood this directive perfectly. “Like: wow. I am so happy to be alive. Like, give this man a medallion.”
Kiwi straightened at the word “man.” Instinctively, he clenched his pectorals.
I didn’t save her, Kiwi was going to answer honestly if the question came up. They were cheek to cheek, and he could feel all the smiling muscles tensing in her face.
“Bag-tree,” a female reporter asked him, “how do you spell that?”
“It’s Bigtree. As in Hilola Jane Bigtree,” he said. And it felt wonderful to say it, like swinging an ax into the glass case of his Loomis identity. “I belong to the Bigtree tribe of Swamplandia!”
“I’m sorry?”
“B-I-G-T-R-E-E. We do an alligator-wrestling show? Have you seen that billboard on I-95? Big guy in a headdress?”
Her smile went vast and glassy.
“Channel seven came out a few years back to film a segment about us? We advertised in all the local papers. We call the alligators Seths,” he added, as if this fact might spin some tumblers for her.
The pen hovered an inch above her pad.
“Okay, give me that, I’ll write it for you,” Kiwi said. “Can you at least put her name in there? It’s H-I–L-O-L-A.”
Kiwi started talking faster. He heard his voice taking on the Chief’s ringleader intonations. This is how I can help them. If he could pull it off. He pictured an article that would drive the mainlanders seaward like lemmings, pushing them deep into the swamp, toward his father and his sisters and the patient Seths, toward Hilola Bigtree’s glass tomb in the museum, a hundred new tourists clutching dollars, a hundred new mourners come to pay his mother the tribute that counted.
“… and that’s why I’m working this job at the World of Darkness in the first place …” Kiwi heard himself urgently quoting his father. “… we’re just sizing up the competition, building capital for our Carnival Darwinism expansion. I’ll level with you, ma’am, Swamplandia! is the superior park. Best value, biggest thrills. Catch the late show, Saturdays. Alligators! Starry nights! It’s like Van Gogh meets Rambo. We’re got ninety-eight true-life monsters.”
Kiwi frowned — had he just seen the nib of her pen trace a little star in the pad’s margin? “Did you catch all that? Could you perhaps list our showtimes in there?”
To his left, Emily was sipping a bottle of orange soda inside a crescent moon of reporters. She wasn’t so much giving an interview as she was performing respiration for them. “I saw a tunnel,” she was saying—“of light!” she added, to clarify that she wasn’t talking causeways. The TV crew formed a little carousel of approval around her, nodding and ahhing. She sucked air as if air were a milk shake, demonstrating the joy of life.
“One last question, Mr. Bigtree: is this the first life you’ve saved?” The reporter’s glasses made her eyes look far away, like tiny moons.
“Yes? I mean, I guess so.”
She smiled with creamy indulgence. “That’s quite a milestone.”
Kiwi felt himself redden. The photographers were zipping their cameras into silver bags when he stopped them.
“Wait, ma’am? My quote was not entirely accurate. I just wanted to add, apropos of your last question …”
The reported looked over with a white, harried face. “You just said — did I get this right? — ‘a porpoise of your last question’? Is that supposed to be a Leviathan joke? Afraid I missed that.”
“Apropos,” Kiwi repeated, touching a finger to his new mustache. “Would you like me to spell that for you?” In fact, Kiwi had once again mistakenly said “a porpoise.” He had been bungling his SAT buildingblock words for months now — he pronounced “fatuous” so that it fit the meter of “SpaghettiOs.” He’d been using the word “meningitis” in compliments.
“Well, I’m a wrestler, ma’am.” Kiwi kept his eyes on his big hands but his voice grew in conviction. “I used to tape up alligators …”
Several people had turned to stare at him now. Kiwi corkscrewed his fists into Bigtree Wrestling Grip 7 for the Circumnavigator trick. Was that it? All his fingers looked smashed and broken on the tiles.
“So, ah, viz-a-viz your, your inquiry?” he coughed. Behind him the Lake of Fire gurgled benignly, a cleaning solvent fizzing on its surface. “Can you change my answer? I guess I’ve saved my own life before.”
Saturday night in the World of Darkness! Kiwi Bigtree had been alone for his whole small life and he was ready to party. He had mainland friends and a reason to drink with them. A hero’s welcome awaited him at Lotsa Shots, on the Paradise Level of the Sunrise mall next to the Have a Shakee Shack and Gamenesia. Kiwi borrowed one of Leo’s polo shirts and his El León cologne. When he and Leo stood next to each other now, they smelled like a fire hazard. Their polo shirts might as well have been rags soaked in kerosene.
“You sure you’re okay to drive, Vijay?”
“What, do you want to drive, asshole? No? You want to walk? All right then.”
The skunk lines of the road whipsawed in front of the windshield. Everybody had piled into the shitbox Volvo, two of the girls from the Dorsal Flukes and Leo in the backseat and Kiwi representing for Team Safety and Legality by wearing his seat belt in the front. Had there been a crash-test helmet, he would have worn it. Someone thunked a flask against Kiwi’s head.
“Ow! What was that for?”