The den was rising in front of me again; the thing had gotten ahold of my calf. Dark orange pigment rose everywhere and soon it was too cloudy to see, although I tried — my eyes stung inside a fog that I realized must be plumes of my own blood. Grasses seemed to burst from the rocks, growing feet longer in one blink as I descended. Waving away from me. The alligator was trying to roll me, pulling me backward toward the entrance of the gator hole. I kicked but my calf was still caught — skin tore but I couldn’t get loose. Any wrestler knows that once an alligator closes its jaws it’s almost impossible to get them open again. Something entered me then and began to swell. My mother, before she died, really was training me to be her understudy, and every Sunday we’d practice the beginning of the Swimming with the Seths act. So I tried to remember what we’d rehearsed in our own Pit, the smooth strokes that carry you to the surface. There is a way to still your body and then slingshot forward in a surprise frog-legged stroke, a Bigtree escape maneuver. Blindly I did this, played possum underwater and then flew forward with a strength that felt far beyond the limits of my small body. I kicked and I was allowed to kick, the pressure vanished, and when I looked the alligator’s tail was disappearing into the cave. My calf was freed. Petals of red pain shot through me until my ribs ached, the agonizing pressure expanding in my chest, as round as a sky, and I began to rise like one bubble in a chain. My skin, I thought, is coming apart …
Somehow my body’s stitching held. I broke the skin of the water and started breathing again. The deep bright air of our world, I gulped, the scouring air, I kept on gasping. I had never tasted the scattered light in the air before, or pulled it into my mouth with my entire body, even my cycling feet. It felt like the sky had descended to my eye level. Air floated toward me, ghostly and wet, and turned to fire the instant it hit my raw lungs. For a long time the whole world was just oxygen — the lowered heaven of this sky and the explosions of my breath. Then the buoyant and obliterating force inside me began to wane, and my own thoughts crept back in around its edges. I saw that I was bobbing in a gray lake I didn’t recognize. Ferns dripped onto its surface. At a certain point I realized that my two hands must be empty, because I was swimming.
The Bird Man, if he’d seen me, didn’t follow me through the underwater tunnel. For close to an hour I hid on a mangrove island, hunched next to ibis and anhingas, waiting to see if he’d swim up. After that, I crawled forward on the branches until I found land that would hold my weight.
I checked myself for damage: I had a shallow bite on my calf, that was all. I’d gotten hurt far worse during our staged fights in the Pit. (In fact, the wound looked so relatively puny to me that I didn’t treat it; it’s a wonder I escaped infection.) It bled a lot at first, but I elevated it on a rock, rested. Adrenaline cured the sting of it. I wasn’t scared now; my insides still held the space of the shape my mom had filled. I’d lost everything, all the clothes, even the ribbon on my wrist.
I’d been following a gator haul because I couldn’t find any other road out of the slough and the matted brush gave me the easiest passage. Everywhere I felt sore and cruddy, my crotch was burning, the skin on my face came off in white peels when I rubbed at it. When I exited the slough and stood in the grasses I began shivering everywhere, as if my skin were doing its own jolly imitation of the wind-bucked water. Getting my shoes to move on land felt like lifting buckets. Yellowish gray clouds of palmetto scrub wasped away to sticks beneath me. The gator haul petered into water and then I heard them, I heard snatches of a human conversation. Someone real on a walkie-talkie. Two wood storks watched incuriously from a high branch as I crashed through a pitch pond of water lilies and hurtled toward what I hoped were real voices. Through the leaves I could see the distinctive dun and olive braid of a ranger’s uniform.
Frogs pushed their buffoon throats at me from various heights in the trees in their primordial vaudeville, and I remembered to call back to the voices: “Here! I’m over here!”
As it turned out, I’d been right about one thing: the men I’d seen on the tree island were very much alive. When I’d screamed two days ago on the slough, before the Bird Man got my jaws shut, these men had heard me. The ranger who found me brought me to meet them at the station, my heroes, so that I could thank them: two peckerwood guys sitting on the hard chairs, their cheeks flushed and stubbled. One of them had a haircut like a mushroom cap and nervous snowpea eyes and a cleft chin that made him look a little like Superman, or Superman’s sort of squirrelly twin. His friend was about a decade older and balding, with a kind, turkey-wattled face, a shirt so thin and gray it looked like dried sweat to me — not that I was in a position to judge anybody’s fashion or hygiene.
“Here she is, boys!” said the ranger (whose name I can’t remember now — he was a new recruit, decades younger than Whip). The way he said it, I felt a little like a trophy alligator he had just trussed and dropped onto the blond wood of his desk for these hunters’ perusal, a creature routed from its hole. I must have looked like one, too, with my soaked and torn clothing and the reddish mud that had rinsed even my teeth and gums.
The men nodded; the younger one shifted on his tailbone, and the larger, older hunter kept frowning slightly and repeatedly wetting his lips. I crossed my blood- and filth-encrusted arms over my chest and stared back at them. The ranger had offered me a shower on the boat ride over and I’d said no without thinking. He’d seemed surprised, so I’d explained myself — showers were hated chores for me at home, I said, where I had been a kid.
“Who are you?” I said, although I’d meant to say “thank you.”
“Trumbull,” said the older one.
“Harry,” said the younger one.
“Ava,” I said, pointing at myself, and the herky rhythms of this exchange felt a little like a show I’d seen on Grandpa’s TV about apes who’d learned to fingerpaint the alphabet.
When they weren’t hunting Harry and Trumbull worked the graveyard shift in a prosthetics plant in Ocala. They’d dabbled in greyhound racing, hibiscus farming, migrant strawberry picking, the military, fairground “barbering.” Gator hunting was something they’d done together since they were runts. Trumbull was the engine for their twosome, the talker, and his talk kept picking up speed, as if his big voice were on a downhill slope. Harry, who kept glancing at him, seemed to be the brakes.
They had a camp they returned to every July over on the rock glades about a mile before the Calusa shell mounds, and they wouldn’t have been out nearly so far if they hadn’t found their usual campsite’s water pump bent like a hairpin and decided to press on. Not once had they seen another person out that way, not ever in their fifteen years of rambling. We kept exchanging this fact between us until it gleamed gold and I was almost blinded in that tiny room, I felt so lucky.
“It was just the purest coincidence …,” Harry, the younger one, kept saying. “When Trumbull tells me he thought he seen a little girl out there, well …!”