Free Swamplandia! by Karen Russell Page B

on the oily water. I was prepared for a long wait, but then fifteen minutes later we watched the Chief burst out of Sawtooth’s cabin door. He waved us toward the bus stop, looking flushed and upset.
    I didn’t try to talk to him until an hour later, when we’d boarded the ferry.
    “Chief Bigtree?” I used Dad’s formal title, hoping to make up a little bit for the indignity of his having to carry the Seth of Seths in a Hefty bag. “Gross,” Ossie had whispered on the long city bus ride to the ferry dock. “Poor Dad.” It did not even look like Robina had given us a fresh bag.
    “Ava Bigtree?” The Chief stared down at me. It was a long time before he could smile.
    “What did you want to ask Grandpa for?”
    “For money, dummy,” snickered Kiwi. “Where’s the treasure buried, Dad?”
    “For advice,” the Chief snarled, in a nastier voice than he ever used on family.
    Kiwi was still laughing softly to himself, but with these big alarmedeyes, as if only the lower half of his face were getting the joke. Then the ferryboat hit a bumpy stretch of water that splashed everybody’s faces; on the starboard side, a few little kids swallowed up to the knees by their humongous orange life vests screamed in joyful terror; when Kiwi looked over at me his eyes were bulging, his cheeks wet. Over the groan of the ferry’s engine I could hear him laughing and laughing. The entire time he had not stopped laughing.
    “Dad,” he mimicked, “I need to buy these saltwater crocodiles, see, it’s for my quack business model called Carnival Darwinism …”
    The Chief leaned in and grabbed the scruff of Kiwi’s T-shirt, spoke low and close: “Don’t mouth off again, son. That’s my fatherly advice to you.” Kiwi’s mouth opened like a doll’s, exposing a white paste of chewed gum. Ossie crammed a fist into her own mouth and craned around to find me. The moment passed.
    The rest of our ferry ride home was a silent one. I remember it now as a turning point, one of our last “normal” days as a family together, and maybe
the
last time that we assembled as a tribe on Swamplandia!, although at the time I just wanted to get home to pee and watch TV. Ossie hid behind the trunk of children’s life vests and ate fistfuls of these golden dietetic candies that she’d stolen from the nurse’s bowl at Out to Sea. Kiwi and I played cards, Go Fish and Walla-Walla, and he let me win every game. The Chief held the black bag on his lap. As soon as we left the harbor, he lifted the Seth of Seths out of the Hefty bag, cradling the skull with an air of sorrowful apology. The Chief loved that Seth—it wasn’t part of any act.
    Two passengers from Loomis County kept staring over and whispering. The Chief was wearing his faded yellow “visiting” shirt, which was older than Kiwi, buttoned up to his collar (
Why
, Dad?); he had his big hands folded on the Seth of Seth’s squamosal bone. It sat on his lap like a briefcase. These Loomis men were wealthy, or wealthy to me: they wore belts with shiny buckles, and their khakied laps held fancy red double-decker tackle boxes. They were most likely on their way to play Injun for a weekend at the Red Eagle Key Fishing Camp; they didn’t know my father was a Bigtree, and you could see the sneer in their eyes.
    These mainland men debarked at Red Eagle. The Seth of Seths grinned over at us from our father’s lap. The Chief sat like that, starfish-lipped, until the sky paled—and then we were home.

CHAPTER FIVE
Prodigal Kiwi

    W hen we got back to the island, Ossie and the Chief headed toward the house to get some grub, but I padded alongside Kiwi and grabbed ahold of his elbow. His arms surprised me with their thinness. Nobody was really eating right, and Kiwi wasn’t wrestling. I would never have guessed that the cessation of our alligator wrestling would make the least difference to him, to his body. But it had
mattered
to Kiwi; the changes on our island had robbed my brother of actual