Tailwinds, minor turbulence. The plane sheared gently to the left and clouds veiled the sun; when they emerged the city had vanished. Now they were flying over the saw-grass prairie.
Kiwi was shocked to see how beautiful his home was. This beauty was a secret that the trees had been keeping — the islands looked so different from this altitude. Shining green, shining blue. The sun webbed the mangrove jungle in inky red. Where was Swamplandia!? Kiwi wondered. Distance turned all the tree islands into identical green teardrop shapes — at this altitude you could see how the current’s hand had shaped them. You could also see the melaleuca stands, which looked like mildew on bread, gray trees grouped so thickly there was not a breath between them.
They were flying very low — five hundred feet, “dragging the river,” Denny called it, to check for sunken logs or boats or other obstructions “that could cause us to swim on a landing, son.” Now Kiwi could see the network of Army Corps dams and dikes and levees, which cut up the natural flow of the floodplains from Lake Okeechobee. They looked like Tinkertoys, a small and ambitious child’s game — it amazed Kiwi to see the way the river scissored off course or dropped out of sight because of these dikes. He saw hunters’ cabins on the banks of remote islands. Kiwi couldn’t see any actual alligators, but he sighted dozens of their hairy nests along the bayheads. Now they sheared right and Kiwi saw two Calusa shell middens rising out of the river.
“Look at that.” Kiwi touched his forehead to the glass. “What is that thing?”
A woman was standing on the coastline, jumping up and down. Kiwi looked closer, startled: she was waving and waving at them, in some kind of real distress. All he could really make out was the frenzy of her beating arms. Later he’d wonder if something about her movements hadn’t seemed familiar to him, even then.
Privately, Kiwi always credited what he did next to Grandpa Sawtooth. If he hadn’t won his first fight just yesterday — if he hadn’t made a fist and connected with a throat — Kiwi didn’t think that the next action he took would ever have occurred to him. But today his body was full of new ideas. Without asking Denny, he began to cut the power.
It was a nerve-jangling ride down — the Cessna came within thirty feet of the treetops, S-turning all the way down to the lake’s surface. As the turbulence worsened Kiwi grew steadily calmer. The water he planned to land on was so glassy that he couldn’t gauge its depth, but he was going to use the woman as his LVP — the last visual point, the last thing he’d seen to judge his altitude before descending. Incredibly, it seemed like Dennis Pelkis was going to let him do this; Dennis Pelkis was talking him through it: “Seventy mph approach, fifteen hundred rpm — to idle — to LVP, slow to fifty mph, then power to sixteen hundred rpm until touchdown. Power way, way back now …” Pull up, pull up, something screamed in Kiwi, wanting to recover the view from the cockpit window — trees were spearing up outside the windows, becoming individual. Slashes of color became streaked and knobbed trunks. There were fish in the lake. Kiwi could see them, individual fish. He turned left just slightly and pulled his nose up when they went gliding onto the water’s surface. He straightened out and dropped the bottom rudders. Kiwi heard spray striking the floats, and then it was over: the plane drove hard across the slough, the sun kaleidoscoping through great wheels of water. Kiwi’s breathing stopped with the engine.
As soon as he cut the propeller, Kiwi jumped out the cockpit door and waded in front of the seaplane, splashing through water that soaked up to the thighs of his jeans. On the tree island in front of him he saw the wreck — this boat was an antique! It had gone crashing into the black mangroves with enough force to crack several trunks at the knees like scorpion legs; they stood on leafy tiptoe now on the marl. The twenty-foot crane was caught in the canopy, its yellow bucket peering cannily above the fronds. What was the woman screaming at him? It sounded like a foreign language: he heard “C-c-c,” and “eee—”
He froze in the water for a moment, trying to understand her. He was still fifty yards away from the shore. That’s my name, Kiwi realized. The woman was his sister. He went crashing through the mirror of the water toward her, each of them shouting out the other’s name like imperfect echoes.
“Terrific landing, son!” Denny was calling behind him. The skin around one eye was puffing tall as bread from where he’d hit the cockpit window while exiting the plane. “One of the best I’ve seen in my career! Just think of what the papers are going to call you now.”
“So let me get this straight — this girl is a relation of yours?”
Osceola was sitting on Denny’s cooler lid. A dirty crepe dress frothed over her knees, beneath which long vertical scratches skidded from shin to ankle. She didn’t remember how she’d gotten them. She downed half a gallon of water and ate all the candy bars and fruit that Mrs. Pelkis had packed for Denny and she was still hungry, she said, still thirsty.
Kiwi kept hugging her and whispering that everything was okay, wondering if this was true — Ossie looked very sick to him. That thing she had on was their mother’s wedding dress, Kiwi noted with a wandering horror. His eyes kept fixing on disturbing new pieces of the picture she made: Ossie’s hair was a muddy yellow from the mangrove tannins and her eyes were hollows. Her voice, when it came, was barely a whisper, as if she were afraid the mere act of speech might cause the pilot and her brother to vanish.
“No more water?”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Os. We’ll get you more on the mainland.”
“I’m going to drink from the faucet. Kiwi, I’m going to drink water for an hour.”
“Sure. Come on, get in the shade.”
They were on a strip of rocky beach surrounded on all sides by mangroves and thin palms. Dennis “Denny” Pelkis, who seemed somewhat dazed, had waded out to do some kind of make-work maintenance on the plane.
“He left me,” she said quietly.
“Who left you? The Chief? What are you doing out here?”
“Louis Thanksgiving. He took me out here and then he left me at the altar.”
What she described to Kiwi was the story of a jilted bride: the ghost had proposed to her with a lavish sincerity. He had entered her — forever, she’d thought. When you married a ghost, she explained, you didn’t say “till death do us part.” Who or what could part you? There was nothing left to part you. No body left to be parted from.
“I’m sorry that didn’t work,” Kiwi managed to choke out. “But also, I’m not really sorry, you know?”
Kiwi wondered if he could hug Ossie. He was very aware of Dennis Pelkis watching them from the shade of the patchy mangrove saplings, smoking his third or maybe fourth cigarette.
The ghost had taught her how to rig a 5.5-horsepower engine to the back of the dredge scow, how to open the tank vent and move the gearshift lever to neutral, how to set the choke between half and full, adjust the throttle, prime the fuel system by squeezing the flaccid gas-line bulb to firmness, how to tie a rope around the engine and pull. The ghost had used her hands to make sure that the dredge barge was firmly attached to the stern of the dredge scow. He had used Osceola’s hands to steer.
“You drove that thing by yourself?”
Ossie nodded. “But he was doing the driving through me”—as she spoke she flexed her fingers, her violet eyes squeezed into petals, unreadable—“he possessed my hands on the throttle. At first,” she added with the terrible new shyness. “We had an accident. The second day. I lost the bag that had our camp stuff, our food, Louis’s old machete, everything went overboard … I lost Louis’s shirt, the Model Land Company map. Everything, Kiwi. I had to put this dress on, I didn’t have anything else.”