Everyone besides Robina was asleep, or tortoised deeply into their own world; one Russian man with burning cerulean eyes was leaning in to watch an infomercial, his great knuckles bunched like red grape skins on his slacks. On the TV screen, a woman smeared pink jelly on her crow’s-feet and became young. “Miracle formula: Mariana diatoms. $69.99 in three payments!” a voiceover announced.
“What she saying?” the Russian man kept repeating. “What she doing? Wheel me closer!”
Soledad, a ninety-something Cuban woman with moist eyes, started screaming at Kiwi in Spanish. She had been Grandpa Sawtooth’s friend on the last visit, but maybe Grandpa had bitten her since then.
“Your grandfather is never going to be the prom king of Out to Sea, okay?” Robina had informed them when they’d first moved Sawtooth in. “You guys better give up that dream. He is not a people person.”
“Hiya, Soledad. How’s my grandpa? What’s news?”
Possibly this was an insensitive question. “News” for these retirees no longer meant “events” but instead seemed to describe the lisping voices of the tides. From every corner of the schooner patients blinked down at him, quietly magnetized to the boat’s surfaces. Like the swamp’s red-toed lizards, they seemed stuck to their bed rails and their chairs’ handlebars by the pads of their fingers.
Kiwi walked into the galley. “Hi, Harold.”
Harold no longer remembered him. He was sitting on one of a dozen plastic stools, eating a banana very, very slowly in a pair of new pajamas. White ducklings marched up the pant legs on an alarming voyage toward Harold’s crotch. A patch was affixed to his chest and he kept scratching at it.
“Do you have a cigarette?” he asked Kiwi. “I could really use a cigarette.” When Kiwi did not answer he returned to his contemplation of the banana.
“Harold, have you seen my grandfather?”
“I’m right here, you damn fool!” came a familiar croak from the deck outside the central cabin. Kiwi moved through a blinding square of sun and found his grandfather out on the starboard deck, barefoot in a puddle of the filtered seawater. His feet were bloated and shiny as custard, with curled, wintry toenails.
“Hi, Grandpa.”
His face was stubbornly set in its Bigtree crags.
“Grandpa Sawtooth, it’s me, Kiwi.”
Not a flicker.
“Like a fruit.” Grandpa Sawtooth smiled evilly. “That’s a damn fool name.”
Kiwi moved into the shade of the cabin’s roof and took a breath. Behind his grandfather’s head, he could see to where the seawall curved and enclosed the entire marina. He didn’t know how the residents of Out to Sea could bear to look at it — the future closing its circle on them and the sun dribbling down into the sea behind it.
“So. I saw Dad two days ago.”
Kiwi sat down in one of the blue deck chairs and his grandfather followed.
“Grandpa!” Kiwi looked to see if anyone was listening; there were a few dark clouds and one enormous gull leisurely devouring sea bugs on the boom. “Grandpa, the Chief is working at a casino. The one they call the Jesus in the Temple Casino, over by the new penitentiary. Did you know that? I bet you knew that, huh?”
“Look at that big sucker.” His grunt sounded satisfied. He was pointing at the feasting gull on the ropes. “Hungry.”
“Grandpa, can you tell me, has the Chief been working at the casino for a long time? Has he had other jobs? Did you know about his other jobs?” He paused. “Did Mom know?”
Sawtooth was watching the ocean. Wave after wave covered the sandy bottom of the marina. Jade squiggles alternated with blue and black inky ones wherever the sun hit depth. Something about watching this made Kiwi feel for an instant that he was staring into his grandfather’s mind: memories like these bright schools of mullet, abandoning his grandfather in leaps.
“Why did you guys hide it from us, Grandpa? Is the Chief angry that he has to do it? Is it our fault — I mean, the money part?”
Sawtooth was still frowning into the ocean, as if something magnificent were about to occur there. All those small flickers dispersing, unschooling.
“Okay. Fine. Can I please tell you something?” Kiwi’s voice tapered to a point. “Can I tell you something? Your daughter-in-law, Hilola?”
At Out to Sea, Sawtooth’s lifelong tan had faded to the color of creamed corn. He regarded his grandson warily, as if he were about to lose a privilege. Kiwi imagined that typically if a stranger came to talk to you at Out to Sea, this could portend nothing good.
“I am so sorry to be the one …” Kiwi cleared his throat. In a quieter voice, he told Sawtooth what had happened to Hilola Bigtree.
“Dead,” Sawtooth croaked. “Hah.”
The word had a dull thwack to it, like a fat raindrop hitting tarp. The drop rolled away and vanished. Nothing at all registered on his grandfather’s face.
“Mom died a whole year ago, Grandpa. More, now.”
For some reason he told him the exact date in a whisper. He could hear Harold coughing up banana inside the cabin; another resident was cycling through her television channels.
“We didn’t tell you, I don’t know, we didn’t want to …”
Sawtooth smoothed a finger over his otterish whiskers. He met Kiwi’s gaze with bald, staring eyes, the same depth and shape as the Chief’s eyes, Kiwi’s own eyes. The family had heard from Robina that Sawtooth suffered crying spells, at night—“like a schoolchild!” This was impossible for Kiwi to imagine, his granddad weeping; on Swamplandia! Sawtooth would pry the Mesozoic splinters of an alligator’s teeth from his skin with black doll’s eyes, unblinking, glassy with pain.
Well, he sure wasn’t crying over Mom. His eyes were perfectly calm. Sea light pulsed in them.
“Dead,” he repeated. A whisper, conspiratorial. “Huh. Did you tell Robina? Dead is bad, boy. You could get in trouble.”
Behind Kiwi’s head, a TV audience broke into raucous laughter and applause. Kiwi leaned in until his long nose was almost touching Grandpa Sawtooth. He moved forward, scooting to the edge of the blue-and-white deck chair, until their foreheads were touching. He dunked his own dim form into Sawtooth’s pupils and waited for a “Hello, Kiwi.” Sawtooth held his gaze patiently. Sawtooth Bigtree’s hands looked big as lobster claws on his meager thighs; all of the man’s ligaments looked to be in some state of bad flux, bulging or withering on the vine. “Normal aging” the textbooks would say, but “normal” seemed an injustice when it described this. Sawtooth’s wrists were the width of a child’s again. Kiwi took a breath.
“After Mom died, we lost most of the tourists …”
Kiwi had a sudden urge to topple his grandfather, to dump the elder overboard — maybe that would shake something loose in there or reconnect a wire. What was the point of growing so aged and limp that your mind couldn’t make a fist around a name? He wanted Sawtooth Bigtree to hurt, to ache, to mourn, to howl, to push with the cooling poker of his mind into the old ash heap of what he had lost and scrape bottom. He wanted the old man to be depleted to that limit. Like the rest of us, Kiwi thought angrily. Like family.
“I’m a traitor, Grandpa. Think Benedict Arnold. I’m working at the World of Darkness. You know I’ve been away from home for months now, Grandpa,” he heard himself saying. “Not quite as long as you’ve been away, but a long time. So I don’t have any news to share about your GRANDDAUGHTERS, AVA or OSCEOLA.”
“What the Christ are you shouting for, son? People are trying to catch fish out here. You’re going to scare all the damn fish away.”
Grandpa’s jaw muscles sagged and twitched. His eyes were lively, but it was like the empty animation of a fireplace. “I’m hot. I don’t like your tone. I’m going inside.”