“Get away from me!” I screamed. “You can’t have these! My sister is alive.” I used the Bigtree maneuvers to get away from her, dodging the hand that snaked out for me as quickly as I’d leap away from a Seth’s thrashing tail, lunging at a spot above her calf where the dress hung loose. I had to get my family away from her.
“What are you talking about, your sister? You need to calm down. My God, you look like some rabid animal! How old are you, girl? How did you get way out here?”
Her voice made me think of the Bird Man’s voice, bright with a false kindness. I held Osceola’s and Louis’s clothing and began to back away from her, a snarl clawing its way up my throat. I had rescued their clothes and a two-inch triangle of my mother’s dress.
“Hey, girl!” the monster shouted. “You need help! Girl, get back here!”
When I got to a small drift slough I drank more of the water. I ate saw-grass buds, peeled sticks between my teeth. No longer did I think that drinking the water was a bad idea — I didn’t have any ideas left in my head, I was all clouds. A burning thirst was unraveling my stitching from the inside. I held the clothing to my chest and tried in a fuzzy way to figure out what this jumble of fabrics meant — that my sister was alive out here? That my sister was dead? I clutched what I’d managed to salvage: a small ball. After my battle with Mama Weeds I was tired, tired. Thinking felt like lifting spadefuls of heavy dirt.
As I walked I kept seeing the monster’s face: the spheres of grass blown inward and split as easily as bubbles. Her eyes as pure holes. I felt I’d glimpsed then what would happen at the world’s end when the stars cracked open. It was not a picture of heaven this Mama Weeds fixed on me like a gaze but something much bigger: a breaking apart, a mindcrush, a red smear pulsing where two black tunnels met; I found I actually couldn’t think about it.
I hadn’t traveled very far at all when I saw signs of a human presence. Cracked sticks, an empty plastic bottle still dewed with juice. This made sense, I thought, remembering the woman and her nearby shack. But then I saw a black feather, and another. Tiny feathers clinging to a gray net of moss on a trunk.
It’s not him, I told myself. There are about a thousand species of birds in our swamp. I didn’t run now but pushed forward through the thickets very quickly. I was still hugging what I’d saved from the line. This little yellow triangle of flowers from Mom’s old dress. When I looked at it now I wasn’t so sure that it had belonged to her dress at all — anyhow, the scrap was so tiny that it just had half a flower on it, the pattern didn’t even get a chance to repeat itself. I slid it into one fist and held on to it, punched against the trunks.
In the east the sky throbbed with recurring heat lightning. It was some o’clock. I put on Louis Thanksgiving’s jacket, which reached below the crusts of my knees; I unscrolled the old veil that I found in his pocket and tied it around my face. I did this for pragmatic reasons: an afternoon thundershower was sweeping the prairie and the bugs were all over. I figured the veil would work just as well for me as it had for the early Florida dredgemen to keep the bugs out of my nose and mouth. Out here the mosquitoes were after me for red gallons — you could see clouds of them hanging above the grassland. I’m sure they are still out there hovering like that, like tiny particles of an old, dissolved appetite, something prehistoric and very scary that saturates the air of that swamp. A force that could drain you in sips without ever knowing what you had been, or seeing your face.
Ahead of me, through the tiny squares of the veil, I viewed saw grass for aeons, saw grass with no end in sight. These were the deadlands, the flatlands, I assumed now, the place that the Bird Man had been referring to all along. The plants grew razor-straight, and they were almost twice my height, nine feet tall and fingered with so many tiny knives. Ghost gray or yellowish gray or a dull waspy brown, the colors shifting subtly as clouds passed over them; there was no other variation in any direction on the monotone prairie. The stalks grew out of a calcareous marl, hidden under three feet of water, a soil that crumbles under your weight. My heart sank; my life wasn’t going to be long enough to reach the end of this place.
But I walked anyways. I tried not to know that I wasn’t going to make it, to undo that knowledge like a knot.
I buttoned Louis Thanksgiving’s shirt right up to the collar.
I tightened Ossie’s ribbon and I double-knotted the mosquito veil.
I squeezed my mom’s scraplet into my fist.
As I walked I told myself a story — I imagined myself as Louis Thanksgiving. I mean I actually pictured myself inside of him. Black hair and swinging elbows. When I closed my eyes I pretended I was Louis, being carried. I could see him rising like a limp balloon into the clouds beneath the birds’ beating wings. Through Louis’s eyes I saw the dark green tops of the trees, the Argus eyes of the secret lakes and sloughs opening for us as we drifted up. Then Louis Thanksgiving was carried so high that he couldn’t see anything besides his own sun-freckled hands. They swung beneath him in two pale green cones of space. The trees vanished. Ice lands whispered up in sulfur curls. The world below him had no rocks, no terrestrial scars, it was fathoms of air and evening blue. The last lakes looked small as stars. Two sets of iron-gray talons dug like prongs into the meat of his shoulders. And I could feel them, under the jacket, eight points of pressure against my sternum.
This wasn’t a real possession: I could also feel the mud squeeze into my sneakers, hear thunder. I could fold Louis’s thin collar under my fingers and inhale the chalky mosquito wire. I wasn’t Ossie, lost in my big trance — I was just myself telling myself a story. But I wouldn’t have made it very far without the Dredgeman’s Revelation, which distracted me from the pain of sunburn and thirst. If I looked up and saw the buzzards wheeling in the thermals like black motes in a blue eye, I forced myself to relocate my gaze to my sneakers and start again: The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving … My own thoughts were like bad food, so instead I told myself the story of Louis Thanksgiving fishing for bowfin on the deck of the dredge barge, and Louis Thanksgiving lost and happy in the Black Woods, Louis swimming under the wheel with the captain’s knife in his mouth, until I became Louis, walking.
Rain began and ended, I don’t know how many times. Light faded like water draining into a hole. Through the mosquito veil the endless prairie ordered itself into tiny squares and I kept moving through them. Who knows how long I spent wading through those serrated grasses? I must have recited the Dredgeman’s Revelation at least a hundred times forward and backward. I added a new ending: in my version, the dredgeman escaped, and lived. The little hand of a clock sprung back, and Louis Thanksgiving drew breath. The engine room gasped its flames into the wood, and the explosion never happened. Birds shrank away into a fatal yellow moon. Everybody, all the dredgemen, they survived.
At first I didn’t understand the scene in front of me: forty-odd yards from where I was standing the line of saw grass ended, and I could see beyond it to maple and bay trees and the brown water of an alligator hole. I was within sight of a sudden elevation — six or seven feet, a spectacular height in this part of the swamp — where the ten-foot-tall stalks sheared away quite suddenly and became dimpled rock. The eternity I’d seen ended as cleanly as if someone had run a scythe through it. I chanced a look at the sky: towering clouds were moving swiftly toward me, as big as white ships. The skies were beautiful here, and empty.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. Kiwi Takes to the Skies
Vijay and Kiwi were ripping Moo Cow creamers for their coffees at the Burger Burger. They kept tossing the crenellated pink containers onto the restaurant table until it looked like a Ken doll had gone on some unmanly daiquiri bender. They’d both ordered the A.M. Delicious! Dollar Breakfast Combo #2: cheddar, sausage, and egg sandwiches. You got what you paid for in this life, said Vijay through a nuclear yellow mouthful of fast-food cheese.