The dredgeman’s ghost had helped her to pilot the boat all the way from Hermit Key to this island — Kiwi had no idea where they were in relation to their home, but Ossie said she’d been following his map toward the Calusa shell mounds. The ghost, she said, was retracing its route. They had been following the canal that the dredge crew had begun digging in 1935 and had failed to complete.
“And then, on our wedding day, Louis left me at the altar. I woke up here alone.” She wound what was left of her dress around her fist and shivered a little. “I woke up here so empty, Kiwi. I don’t know …”
“At the altar …,” Kiwi said slowly. He was looking past his sister; his eyes had caught on a frizzled length of rope hanging from the lowest branch of a sweet bay tree. Kiwi watched the rope swaying, almost but not quite sweeping the ground. A fat knot was camouflaged against the trunk, black as a bump on the wood.
Is that how you marry a ghost?
It occurred to him that he was looking at a small noose.
“He was gone and I couldn’t finish it …”
Ossie stopped talking and gave an angry little shrug, as if refusing to apologize for something she felt terribly about. Waves of wind were moving along the tree line and the rope twisted into complicated shapes, spun out of them.
“Look, I hate to interrupt this … this. But you want to tell me exactly what’s going on here?”
Denny drew himself up to his full height of five four. He had waded in with a map and a grease-blotched towel that he’d found wedged under the pilot’s seat. Outside the cockpit he looked a little like an evicted mole, blinking in the glass glare off the water, and Kiwi wondered what the Philosophy of Denny said about this particular eventuality: a student pilot finding his younger sister in a wedding dress, in the middle of the swamp.
Dennis Pelkis, forty-two-year veteran of the skies around Loomis County, stared at the Bigtrees with a face that flickered between its natural good humor and an uneasiness that was almost fear. Kiwi wondered if it was possible for a man to look less comfortable with a situation. He was wearing his sunglasses, and the swamp grass waved whitely inside them. Sunburn was coloring the lobes of his huge ears.
“My sister was trying to elope with her boyfriend,” Kiwi said, staring hard at Denny. “Louis Thanksgiving,” he said, because the name seemed to legitimize the scene. Everybody understood a jilting — a soured romance. Everybody liked to hate a pusillanimous groom. “It didn’t work out. He’s gone now.”
“Oh … well. Sorry to hear that, young lady. Help is on the way,” he mumbled somewhat unconvincingly.
A silence reasserted itself then for a period of seconds, until the air became a still, deepening pool. The rope was twisting and untwisting and whispering something dreadful inside the leaves. Osceola kept staring through the teardrop hoop on the rope into the trees with a vacancy that Kiwi remembered well.
“It’s okay,” Kiwi said. He kept staring at the rope. He could hear Dennis Pelkis talking in a low voice on his radio. “I promise, Ossie, it’s going to be all right. We’ll all go home now.”
“Kiwi,” Ossie said, her voice suddenly tack-sharp. Clouds moved and light caught on a tiny fishhook in her wedding lace. “Have you talked to Ava? Is Ava with the Chief?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE. The End Begins
The alligator’s hole was eight feet across. It divided the saw grass prairie that had nearly killed me from the sweet dark shapes of the bay trees. The hole was round as an open manhole, a large brown eye of water. A gator had dredged this lake with her claws and was probably swimming invisibly inside it. Flowers like chopped onions covered the surface of the water, which was turbid with mud — a tell that a hole is gator-occupied. I heard a wet swishing in the saw grass behind me and jumped; some warm-blooded, snouty thing that might have been a bear cub or a wild hog was disappearing into the willow scrub. But I was happy, my heart was bursting with happiness at all the ordinary threats. Pigs and alligators seemed like heaven to me. Creatures of the same mud that we had grown up in, Ossie and Kiwi and I, like our snouty cousins. To my left, a ghostly logger’s road looped backward through the mud in the direction I had just come from, a road that I knew better than to walk.
And then I heard my name: “Ava!”
Through the palmetto screen I glimpsed his skin and his hands and his long nose, his shoulder blades, oh I recognized him, dragging our skiff overland. He was wearing the undershirt from the hammock, no coat, and his face looked whiskery and profoundly unmatched to me, indecently arranged, as if his features were floating in jelly. If he was wearing the whistle I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t get a fix on the gray lights of his eyes, he was still that far away. I ran to the edge of the alligator hole and stopped on my heels. The dark water rippled away from me; the Bird Man was approaching from the treeline, I could hear him; there were no other shadows for miles, nowhere else nearby for me to hide.
“Kid!” he said, and it seemed clear that he had seen me now because he was really moving. His long legs flew through the grasses. He was using his machete to hack through the mangle of palmetto scrub. He was — could this be true? — grinning at me. Without thinking I held my nose and jumped.
There have been only eighteen confirmed fatal alligator attacks in Florida since 1948. Nothing to worry about, the Chief tells our tourists. You stay out of a Seth’s domain and the Seth leaves you alone. I swam through a brown bloom of mud. I swam hard, my eyes shut against the thick silt, expecting at any moment to graze an alligator’s scales with my outstretched hands. I was expecting to hear a splash above me at any minute, the Bird Man diving into the alligator hole. I thought I could hear him calling in a shrunken, watery voice somewhere high above me. This was a true cave in the limestone, nothing that the gator had dug for itself. Now I was maybe six or seven feet below the light pinwheeling on the surface of the hole. I could see a dimmer squint of light at the cave’s far end and I swam for it; my reach ended in a wall of mud and decaying plant matter. Long brown grasses swayed in front of me. My hands expected to find the softening carcasses of birds and deer in that mess, or else a sheath of earth — but when I pushed into the decaying weeds, they yielded. Grass brushed everywhere against my skin. For a second I felt nothing but slimy green fingers, and then with an ease that shocked me I was clear of them. What I’d thought was a wall was a natural portal, a hole. An aperture in the limestone cave — these holes explain how the largemouth bass and the spade-sized black gambusia can sneak inside an alligator’s den. This one was large enough for a small Seth to squiggle into and out of. Weeds and soft rock crumbled around me.
Louis’s WPA coat was waterlogged and I couldn’t swim well with it on; I ducked my arms out of it, gathered it to my side. I had a new problem now: with the heavy jacket pinned beneath my right arm, I was flailing, kicking frenziedly into the underwater grasses, struggling to find my rhythm. The bundle was becoming so heavy, impossibly heavy, all the drenched clothes dragging at my side like a wing I couldn’t beat. And my lungs, my lungs were bursting.
The surface was only a few feet above my head, maddeningly close, but still I couldn’t reach it. The heavier the bundle got, the more tightly I held on to it, a wrestling instinct. I watched my sister’s ribbon flutter up my wrist. Let it drown me, I remember thinking. This cloth was it, I thought, this was the one thing I’d saved. But my arm felt like it was caught in a vise of water and being sucked inexorably down and down and down and then snapped painfully backward. I dove a little myself and tightened my grip on the bundled rags that belonged to my family, to Mom and to Ossie. I couldn’t have held on to their real bodies more forcefully. At no point do I remember wanting to let go. When I flipped onto my side, making a panicked grab for my mother’s yellow cloth and Louis’s sinking coat, I saw the alligator.