It had been so good for a little bit, to picture my mom out here. To think that I was on my way to meet her, in the blue mists of the underworld. Why had I ever believed the book? Quick as fire on peat, my mists were gone. Now instead of adventuring into an underworld I found myself in the most treacherous part of the swamp.
Seas of saw grass flooded into other, larger seas. No boats and no houses, no smoke rising on the mirror-flat horizon.
I said my little continual prayer that Ossie be alive and dry and far, far, far, far behind me. I tried not to think about the bad possibilities of just where she might be, or who was with her (such thoughts as: What if the Bird Man has found her?) and especially to never think about the ending of the Dredgeman’s Revelation.
Okay. Okay. I had to move now. There was an orange light thinking its way across the darkness over the swamp and that was the sun.
At the dome’s edge, two black branches spooned out of the same wide trunk. They looked like mirror images, these branches, thin and papery and perfectly cupped, blue sky shining behind them, and an egret sat on the scooped air like a pearl earring. I squeezed through the left opening and scraped sooty bark all over my arms. At one point, I went sloshing into an old hole up to my chest; lily pads and mosquito larvae swarmed in front of my eyes. Accidentally I choked more water down. The Chief would have been proud — at last I’d turned the color of a real Indian. My neck and arms and legs were dyed a black-maroon from the tannins and I itched everywhere, as if my whole body was developing a rash. I wrung out my Swamplandia! T-shirt and continued walking. You could barely read the letters on it now. After a while the forest started to change.
CHAPTER TWENTY. Out to Sea
Two days had passed since Kiwi had seen the Chief and he still hadn’t made a move to contact him. But he would! Today maybe. He’d mentally scripted the whole encounter — first he would reveal his many mainland accomplishments to his dad. He was a local Loomis hero, surely the Chief had heard something about that? He had saved a girl’s life inside the Leviathan, wasn’t that something? He’d earned one of four positions in the World of Darkness as an Apocalyptic Pilot; in September he would get his GED.
In Kiwi’s fantasy of this meeting, the Chief didn’t say much. Really, he didn’t say anything — maybe he would be overcome and just sort of paternally beam? Conveniently choked by pride, or joy? Or, failing those ambitious emotions, perhaps they could at least achieve a food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions? Kiwi prayed that was how it would go down, anyway, because when he tried to imagine having an actual conversation in the English language with his father in that casino: that was the end of the tape.
Okay, new version: the Chief doesn’t say anything, but he takes Kiwi upstairs and they eat everything that isn’t nailed down in the All U Can Eat Buffet. They shovel it in. At the end of the meal, they plunge their Bigtree fists into the tank and tear apart and eat that final lobster. It would be a moment of savage forgiveness. No words required. It would be barbaric and a little gross, eating that lobster, but it would have the transformative effect of a new ritual on them. After the meal, they would be reconciled. They would make plans to return to Ava and Ossie and Swamplandia! They would bring Grandpa Sawtooth home, possibly they would go downstairs and gamble together, and win.
Kiwi didn’t go back to the casino. He didn’t look up any bus routes. He didn’t call the listed number for Pa-Hay-Okee Gaming and ask for Sam. He didn’t ask Vijay for a ride to Pa-Hay-Okee, or thumb up the number in the Loomis Yellow Pages. Kiwi’s best conjecture was that the Chief had rented a room at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, as he always did on his Loomis trips. (THE BOWL-A-BED! WEEKLY RATES. MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED, YOUR PRIVACY=RESPECTED!!)
But he didn’t call there.
Instead, he used the bag of change to dial the house at Swamplandia! on his breaks. The phone buzzed and buzzed, a noise that was starting to really frighten him. Were the girls in Loomis County, too?
I have to go back there today, Kiwi thought. I have to talk to the Chief. When he picked up the telephone, he fully intended to ask Vijay to drive him back to the casino. On the second ring, the third ring, this remained his intention.
Vijay wanted to know why he was dropping Kiwi off at a fucking marina. On Hangover Sunday, no less. Why he was awake at all before dusk — Kiwi had once overheard Vijay having a screaming argument with his mother in which he claimed that getting up before noon made him feel dizzy. Vijay was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses and eating Advil in Halloween fistfuls.
“I’ll put the mace into your face, bitch!” he sang along with the radio.
They pulled into a space between two whiskery palms, both boys shading their eyes from the sun’s rays off the white quartzite. Dirty water lapped at a honeycomb of rock; beyond this, the listing masts of all the junker ships at anchor here made the ocean look like a blue pincushion.
“What is this place? Is it a junkyard for boats?”
“And people. Hey, thanks for the ride. I can get the bus back.”
“For real? You sure you want to dip into your savings account for that? I think the fare is, like, a whole dollar.”
“Shut up.”
Vijay’s voice brightened theatrically: “Or maybe you want to have your rich girlfriend come get you? You can, like, save her from the ocean this time?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend, V. Emily Barton is not my girlfriend.”
“Is that you telling me in your moon language that you’re, like, still a virgin?”
“Fuck you.”
“Nice, son. You’re getting so much quicker at the trigger! Smoother, too,” he added generously.
Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he’d called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult were a fork tenderly entering a steak. Now he could tell any man in the World to go fuck himself with a baseball bat. Progress was being made, he guessed.
“Thanks. I try.”
Kiwi had arrived at the Out to Sea Retirement Community eleven minutes early. Through the Out to Sea portholes, Kiwi could hear TV laughter and silence.
At four, Kiwi walked the gangplank to his grandfather’s boat. A translucent glass-blue crab went skittering behind one of the bolts. Possibly-Robina was sitting there in her civilian clothes — a striped T-shirt with a cartoon cat in a top hat on it, shiny purple leggings. She was watching a soap opera on the boat’s biggest television. All around her the elderly residents were involved in their own dramas: smaller televisions glowed and crackled along the rows of portholes.
“Howdy, ma’am … okay to visit with Sawtooth Bigtree?”
“Mmh.” Robina’s chin was sunk behind her big fists. Kiwi bent and scribbled his name on the blank clipboard.
“Good show, huh?”
Possibly-Robina sucked a diet soda through a straw.
Kiwi had to flip back two weeks to find the name he was looking for: Samuel Bigtree. The Chief had last been here two weeks ago. Was the Chief planning to visit today? Kiwi wondered. He thought about erasing his signature from the sheet, then decided to leave it there.