Swamplandia! Read Free

We missed Grandpa but he didn’t miss us. During his last days on the island he had more than once gotten lost inside our house. He still knew our names, sometimes, but he could not match them to our faces; his memory winked on and off with the weird, erratic energy of a lightbulb in a torment. We had seen Grandpa Sawtooth exactly once since his move: a few weeks after he got “settled in,” we spent twenty-two minutes in his cabin at the Out to Sea facility. Through Grandpa’s porthole you could see the abridged ocean, lassoed in glass, and a low stone seawall. Inside the retirement boat, no music played, no living lizards curled tails along the walls, and the lights were halogen. The Chief kept promising us another trip to Loomis to visit him: “As soon as I muck out the Gator Pit, kids …” “As soon as I get a cage and rigging done on that airboat …” By December, we’d stopped asking.
    I remember clearly the first time I saw the face of our enemy—it was on a Thursday in January, ten months and two weeks after Mom’s death. A huge thunderstorm had rolled over the islands that afternoon, and the living room was unusually dark. I had been lulled into a half-awake state by an
I Love Lucy
marathon on channel 6. Grandpa’s rabbit-eared TV was crackling like water, and I kept dozing off on the couch and getting my senses all tangled, dreaming that the storm had moved inside. Then the TV screen went entirely black, and a baritone voice intoned: “The World of Darkness comes to Loomis!” I was glued to the set: plaid-vested schoolchildren lined up to enter the gaping doors of what appeared to be a giant amusement park. The camera followed them down a narrow walkway—the “Tongue of the Leviathan!” an announcer called it. The Tongue appeared to be a sort of thirty-foot electric-traction escalating slide, covered in sponge and pink mesh, visibly slick; it gulped whole grades of kids into the park. The camera zoomed forward to give a teaser glimpse of the interior of the Leviathan: a scale model of a whale’s belly, lit up by a series of green lights on a timer, so that it looked to my untrained eye like some kind of alien cafeteria. Then the TV flashed to a keyhole peek of riders disappearing down the Tongue. For a few seconds the screen went black again and the TV speakers burbled with “cetaceous noises of digestion.”Then schoolkids screaming “We love the World!” on somebody’s cue disappeared down a neon tube.
    “Christ Jesus,” said the Chief, “how much do you think this piece-of-shit commercial cost?” Swamplandia! had never done a TV spot.
    The World of Darkness was located in southwest Loomis County, just off the highway ramp. The camera pulled back to reveal imbricating parking lots, a whole spooling solar system of parking lots. On its western edge, the Leviathan touched a green checkerboard of suburban lawns. A moat of lava lapped at the carports, the houses at the World’s perimeter looking small and vexed. The World of Darkness offered things that Swamplandia! could not: escalator tours of the rings of Hell, bloodred swimming pools, boiling colas. Easy access to the mainland roads.
    “Can the World of Darkness really do that, Chief?” I asked my dad. “Move right into the middle of a city?”
    The Chief had stopped watching. He was draining a Gulch brandy and cola in the deep crease of our couch. “Don’t let me catch you falling for that bullcrap, Ava. Who is going to pay a day’s wage to slide down a damn
tongue
? That’s about the stupidest thing I ever heard of. You go touch your Seth’s belly scales and remind yourself who’s got the
real
leviathans …”
    One Tuesday in late January, just a week or two after the World of Darkness’s grand opening, the morning ferry failed to show. On an ordinary weekday, the double-decker ferry departed from the Loomis County Ferry Port at 9:05 and arrived at our park’s landing a few minutes after ten o’clock. This orange boat