“Mom’s dead. Our park is bankrupt. Your son works in a casino now. Ossie went batshit this summer, and I’m pretty sure she thinks she’s having sex with ghosts. Ava is alone with her on the island. Do you like that?”
With a look of infantile craftiness, Grandpa Sawtooth reared back and spit in his face.
Sawtooth swung first. Kiwi was still wiping the foamy spittle from his face with his shirt hem when his head snapped back, the old man punching his left cheek. Later, Kiwi would tell Robina and the Loomis EMT that he had provoked his grandfather — which might have even been true. Maybe the pitch of Kiwi’s voice tripped an old wire of antagonism in Grandpa Sawtooth’s brain, his outburst a limbic accident. Whatever the case, both men threw themselves into the fight. The deck chairs clattered as they fell away from them. Kiwi’s eyes widened: He’s choking me. The moment arrived when he would have killed his grandfather if he could have. He couldn’t break the hold, though, and his grandfather tightened his grip around Kiwi’s windpipe. With an obscene clarity of mind Kiwi recognized what Sawtooth was doing: this was a Bigtree maneuver, a way to get a Seth to open its jaws.
“You damn fool,” he muttered. Kiwi had no air to respond.
They crashed against the railing on the starboard side of the boat; Kiwi’s head got swung into the porthole; someone’s wrinkled face floated into view there, disappeared. A carousel of faces passed by, deathpale and unfamiliar faces. It was just the other residents. Seniors with no clue what was going on outside the cabin. An anhinga that had been drying its wings on a mile marker shot into the sky. Kiwi was trying to steer his grandfather toward a coil of heavy rope that he hoped the old man might trip on.
“Jaw up,” Grandpa Sawtooth used to shout at Kiwi on the Pit stage when he was five, eight, eleven. “Step up. Man up.”
Kiwi shut his eyes then. Felt his grandfather’s thick hands around his throat. He saw colors and they were slow and round as bubbles: black as bad purpose. Red as purpose (his fists were flailing now, falling down on Sawtooth, he could hear the old man cry out in pain). Blood trickled into his mouth from a cut on his upper lip. Kiwi opened his eyes and he didn’t know what he was doing, the whole stereoscopic world having flattened into brilliance. All he knew for certain was that he was fighting back. He could breathe again. He could scream again. He swiped at the old man’s wet shirt and closed on a handle of skin. His left hand squeezed down, and Sawtooth screamed with pain. Kiwi banged into a deck chair, howling, and he grabbed at whatever he could and he twisted. Both men looked down at Kiwi’s hands around the base of Sawtooth’s neck, as if equally surprised to find them there.
“Huh!” gargled his grandfather.
Kiwi could feel the man’s birdy veins. His fingers were long enough to stitch a mitt around his grandfather’s throat. His grandfather was hissing now, a coarse, inhuman sound. So this was the only answer the old man could give him, the only explanation — a nonsense hiss. The Seths know more about our family than you do, Kiwi thought furiously. He squeezed. Instinct drove him forward like a nail and he kept squeezing.
You are squeezing too hard, a small, milk-neutral voice inside Kiwi noted. You might actually kill him. The voice didn’t have the shrillness of a conscience; it was bored and old, content to let Death happen.
Kiwi let go.
Robina tried to get him to go to the emergency room but he refused; he watched with fascination as welts rose in archipelagos on his skin. Kiwi touched one gingerly and winced, blinked tears back into his eyes. Robina was asking him in a worried hiss if he was going to press charges; she didn’t specify who these charges would be pressed against, Sawtooth Bigtree or Out to Sea or her personally, and for a disorienting moment Kiwi thought she was asking him to turn himself in to the police.
“What? Criminal charges? No, I don’t think that’s necessary, okay? I just want to go. I’m really sorry …”
He’d left Grandpa Sawtooth watching Cheers reruns with Harold, both men sipping at Vital Light shakes that looked like peed-on snow. The “Heeeere’s … Cliffy!” episode was on. Grandpa Sawtooth had just two bruises that Kiwi could see — the dark blue-red stain of hemoglobin into bilirubin on his shrunken biceps, and a purpling of ruptured vessels on his cheek. The EMT had given him a clean bill of health.
“You got off extremely lucky,” the EMT had told him with relish. “He’s an old man”—the EMT kept repeating this to Kiwi, as if it were a controversial diagnosis. “An old, old man. You could have suffocated him. How would you like that, huh? How would you like to do jail time for killing your own grandfather?”
Kiwi shook his head, to indicate that he would probably not like that.
“You got off lucky this time, but I wouldn’t bet on it again.”
Now Kiwi nodded. He was afraid to talk. Two violet thumbprints were darkening at the front of his neck, a tier of ghostly fingerprints at the nape.
When Kiwi returned to the World dormitories, the elevator doors opened on faint sniggering, the TV screen drumming softly with pale light — the lounge was empty, but somebody was inside his dorm room. The Chief! Kiwi thought for a crazy moment. Then he heard the phlegmy rocket of Leo’s guffaw.
Leo and Vijay were standing in the middle of his room, wearing big shit-eating grins from ear to ear. They both had frozen, red-handed postures.
“What are you dudes doing in here?” Kiwi hated the pitch of his voice.
“Vijay says you’re broke, Bigtree,” Leo said. “So we decided to get you a little something. Think of it as an early birthday present, like …”
He swung the closet door open and Kiwi’s heart stopped.
The boys had put up a poster: a shiny centerfold from a porn magazine. Her face was an absolute blank but Kiwi returned the gaze of her enormous brown nipples, which seemed somehow sorrowful and frank, alert to a great sadness behind the pornographer’s camera, while the boys smirked.
“Look, he loves it!”
“Ha-ha,” Kiwi heard himself say. “Thanks, guys.”
Next followed innuendo of the conventionally scatalogical variety and Saturday insults, “cocksuckers” and “pussylickers” raining down on him like blows, and each time Kiwi spoke a word it felt like raising an arm to cover his face: “Fuck you, fuck you, shut up.”
Kiwi elbowed past them and tried to shut the closet door with a growl of laughter. Then he saw what they had done to the poster of his mother.
“Oh, sorry, bro.” Leo let out a buzzy laugh but then changed tone when he saw Kiwi’s face, pinching at his earlobe. The mood in the room became cinder-flecked. “That was like an accident? We were trying to get that ugly one off the wall, that’s some seventies shit right there …”
They had split her down her middle. SWA and MP CENTAUR read two halves of it. Half her face regarded him with its dusk intelligence, and he pushed the scraps of her into his fists. Kiwi wanted to scream at everyone to get out of his room, to die slow and go right to hell; out loud he could hear his dull, persistent chuckle.
What he could hear as clearly as if it were still happening was the blare of the Chief’s banter through the Pit’s loudspeakers:
“Hilola Bigtree has more talent in her pinkie finger than any other wrestler on the planet!
“Hilola Bigtree can tape up a twelve-foot gator in the time it takes you mainlanders to haul your lard asses up to the fridge!”
All day long the Chief’s good publicity funneled into the blue sky inside Kiwi, scattering birds.