Read Online Swamplandia! by Karen Russell - Free Book Online Page A

this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult’s breath turned the big world as small and dark as a boat hold. Our mother took each of us by thehand and we shuffled awkwardly forward. Then she did a strange thing. She led us to the exhibit my father had made of their wedding day. Her dress, a long, simple gown in a mollusk shade of old lace, was behind glass. Her orchid headpiece, too, a ring of tiny, silvery blooms that looked like a halo with all the light crushed out of it. She made my sister and me put our palms on the glass, and then she made us each promise to wait until we were thirty years old to marry,
if
we married … We had both nodded very somberly. Mom was twenty-nine that year. In seven years she would be dead. We were six and nine at the time. I used to think the promise would make more sense when I got older, but I was thirteen now and that night in the museum seemed even more mysterious to me with each passing year, a memory too baffling to even broach with my sister. If we ever did succeed at locating Mom on the Ouija board, I thought, I had a list of important questions for her.
    Where was the contest held? How did you enter? I didn’t know. When I asked Grandpa Sawtooth about it, he’d raised an eyebrow at my father and squinted down at me for a long minute; then he snorted and told me that the contest was held in a top-secret location, where the judges threw you into seven feet of water, and you had thirty seconds to pull your alligator ashore and tape her jaws up. Bleeding too much disqualified you. Plenty of contestants died every year. A pipsqueak like me shouldn’t enter, he said; I’d be gone in two bites.
    I researched the Kentucky Derby on the Library Boat—the purse was one million dollars! And those leprechauns were only riding horses. Obviously my mother had not been a millionaire. My heroic logic was as follows: if I was the champion, like her, our fame would be a perennial draw.
    You had to be eighteen to compete—that’s what my mother told me at nine when I begged to be a contender. So in a typewritten letter that took me three drafts to compose, I asked the commission to make an exception and allow me to wrestle at age thirteen. I explained about my mother’s cancer and Swamplandia!’s many troubles. My own feats with the Seths I tried to describe modestly but candidly. I didn’t brag exactly, but I made sure the commissioners understood that I was the real deal; I wasn’t some unserious church girl from Nebraska who had only ever handled pet-store geckos, or some inlander, “Rebecca” or“Mary,” a pigtailed zoo volunteer. The kind of girl who liked to do those drugstore paint-by-number watercolors of horses. Shetland ponies.
Palominos
. I bet the Marys were really excellent at that.
    “I am a Bigtree wrestler” was the first line of my letter, and as insurance I’d enclosed a famous key-chain picture of my mother. It sold for $4.99 in the gift shop, and you could also get it on a cozy or a magnet. My mother looks a little older than Osceola, maybe eighteen or nineteen, her hair is shining like mahogany; she’s sort of studious-looking in thick eyeglasses (contact lenses and chaste emerald bathing suits came later, as a concession to our modern tourists); she’s got an eight-foot alligator’s jaws in her bare hands. HILOLA BIGTREE AND HER SETH I wrote carefully on the bottom, and added in parentheses ( MY MOTHER ).
    My best guess was that these individuals were based in America’s capital, Washington, D.C., but I hadn’t yet been able to locate an exact street address. Gus Waddell claimed never to have heard of them. Well, Gus was really more of a nautical man, a very nice man but not exactly what you’d call educated when it came to herpetological sports.
    I wasn’t going to risk a no by involving the Chief and Kiwi prematurely. I wasn’t going to tell my sister, either—Ossie was like an aquarium when it came to other people’s