The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss, but lately he preferred to think of himself as a profession. For the past six months, he’d spent each day and half the night pushing farther into the alien interior of the Florida swamp, elbow to elbow with twelve other crewmen, the “muck rat” employees of the Model Land Company. They were the human engine of a floating dredge, a forty-foot barge accompanied by four auxiliary boats—the wood barge, the water barge, the cookshack, and, for sleeping, the houseboat. The dredge had a giant crane riveted to its deck and a dipper bucket that looked like the tiny cranium of a serpent, poised high above the palm trees and the mangroves. The Model Land Company was digging a canal through the central mangle of the swamp, and the dredge clanged toward the Gulf amid blasts of smoke and whining cables, tearing up roots and rock and excavating hundreds of thousands of gallons of bubbling soil. In sunlight and in moonlight, everybody on the barge had to work under veils of mosquito netting—and the weave of that finely stitched protection was what the word “dredgeman” felt like to Louis. Like soft armor, a flexible screen. As a dredgeman, Louis was no different from anyone on deck. And on the dredge, in this strange and humid swamp, every yellow morning was like a new skin that he could slip into.
At seventeen, Louis was the youngest member of the crew. It was the height of the Depression, and sometimes the men turned to the past for distraction—talking about the girlfriends they’d left mooning after them in red diner booths in Decatur, their high-school teachers, somebody’s family store in Rascal Mountain, Georgia, their Army stints, the dogs and the children still on terra firma, the debts they’d gleefully abandoned. Inside the suck of the other guys’ nostalgia, Louis became almost unbearably nervous.
“What about you, Lou?” somebody eventually asked. “How did you get washed down here?”
“Oh, not much to tell . . . ” he mumbled. Very little of his childhood felt real anymore. In fact, the vast and empty floodplain that spread for miles in every direction around the dredge’s gunwales seemed to mock the notion that his childhood had ever happened. Two skies floated past them—one above and one below, on the water, whole clouds perfectly preserved. “One thing about me, though,” Louis said, coughing, trying like the other guys to turn his past into good theatre. “One sort of interesting thing, I guess, is that I was born dead.”
“Well, goddammit, Louis, you don’t need to brag about it,” Gideon Thomas, the engine man, said. He laughed. “Born dead—shit, son, everybody is!”
Of all the men on the dredge, Gid was probably Louis’s best friend, although it wasn’t exactly a symmetrical relationship, since Gid teased Louis without mercy and “borrowed” things from the kid that he really couldn’t return, like food.
“I’m not bragging,” Louis muttered, and he wasn’t bullshitting, either. He was just repeating what he’d heard from his adoptive father—“born dead” was an epithet that he had used to needle Louis whenever he moved too quickly for the old man’s fists. And although the old man had boiled his birth story down to two cruel words, they both happened to be true—Louis Thanksgiving had very nearly been a nobody.
At birth, his skull had looked like a little violin, cinched and silent. The doctor who had uncorked the baby from his dead mother in the chilly belly of the New York Foundling Hospital had begun shaking him to a despondent meter, thinking, Ah, what a truly rude awakening! Because this tiny baby—holding his breath, refusing to wiggle—was failing at the planet’s etiquette. He did not blink. He was resolute and blue in the doc’s blood-soaked arms.
“A stillborn,” the doc told a nurse. “And the woman’s dead, uterine rupture, terrible. . . .” So this kid had missed it totally, then, his windy little interval between birth and death. His life. And the unwed mother, lying naked on a table in the Foundling Hospital, was now no one’s mother or daughter.
The doctor lit a Turkish cigarette and let out a little cry, a sadness that registered in decibels somewhere between a gambler’s sigh and the poor woman’s grief-mad wailing at the end of her labor—and then another cry joined the doctor’s. The stillborn’s blue face opened like a flower and he cried even harder, unequivocally alive now, unabashedly breathing, making good progress toward becoming Louis. The baby’s face was reddening by the second, and the doctor plucked the cigarette from his lips like a tar carnation. He would have liked to keep on smoking, and drinking, too, but babies—you couldn’t just stand there and toast their voyage back to nothingness! Although. If the room had been emptied of witnesses—no nurses, no mother, just this baby’s squalling eyes, and your own—could you maybe then . . . ? No, the better doctor inside the doctor insisted. We can’t do that. So the doc put on his green eyeglasses and massaged air into the baby’s chest with the flats of his hands; and when blood and air started to work in tandem and the midnight pigments in Louis’s bunched-sock face had brightened to a yellowish pink he stared down at the baby and said, “Well, pal, I think you made the right choice.” The mother’s cracked heels were by this time cooling to putty on the table.
Exhausted, the doctor left the birth certificate blank. L-O-U-I-S read the alphabeads that two nuns strung on a little black bracelet for the baby, because the doctor remembered, or imagined he remembered, that the dead mother had at one point whispered this perfectly ordinary name to him. Louis’s mother was an immigrant from a country that he could not have pronounced or found on a map—and if Louis ever did hear its name when he was growing up, well, it might as well have been Oz or the moon to him, an imaginary place.
One of the Children’s Aid nuns came in to retrieve the newborn orphan, and Louis lost his true past in a few squeaks of her nun shoes on the linoleum. Carrying him away, leaving that widening blank of a woman behind him, this wimpled stranger wound the clock of Louis’s life. The nun (who sometimes dreamed she was a man in advertising, writing copy for Hollywood movies) tucked a paper with a short description of his delivery into his blanket, thinking that this might help him to be adopted by a Christian family: MISLABELLED STILLBORN MIRACLE BABY ALIVE PRAISE GOD FOR LOUIS, THANKSGIVING!
Somewhere down the line, the nun’s purple comma got smudged and then Louis had a surname.
When he was three days old, Louis Thanksgiving was added to a group of eleven orphans, accompanied by one nun, one priest, and one mustached Western agent who really did not care for children at all. He became one of those unfortunates who grew up in the Midwest, part of the human sediment deposited by the orphan train that ran from New York through Clarinda, Iowa. While plenty of boys and girls on the train found their way to loving adoptive families, such was not the case for Louis. The New York Foundling Hospital had placed a melodramatic advertisement in the newspapers of each of the towns along the railroad route, and dozens of farm families had gathered under a striped awning at the Clarinda station to size up the scabby knees from New York City. Louis was picked up by Mr. Frederick K. Auschenbliss, a German dairy farmer who treated him worse than he did his livestock. At least the cows got to stand still and swat flies; by the time he was ten, Louis was up to milk the cows at 2:30 A.M. and was spreading manure on the flat fields by sunrise. Mr. Auschenbliss was not an affectionate father. Picture instead a slave driver who grew into the hard hiss of his name—a hog-necked man with a high Sunday collar, his eyes a colorless sizzle, like grease in a pan, half his face erased by the shadow of the dark barn. Louis was zero when he arrived at the Auschenbliss farm, sixteen when he escaped it, and not even the nosiest guys on the dredge crew could get him to say one word about that time.
Louis, now grown into a bruised and illiterate young man, brother to no one in that house of twelve, escaped the farm and his adoptive parents and brothers as soon as flight seemed possible. He rode the rails southward on a voyage that had the fitful logic of interrupted sleep: suns set and suns rose. Forests dispersed into beaches and regrouped again in mountain passes. Lightning sent down its white spider legs outside the boxcar doors and crawled up the pine trunks, trailing fires. He hopped trains that crisscrossed the Midwest, touching golden millet fields and the black corners of the Atlantic, before finally pushing south, beyond the Florida Panhandle.
Florida, in those days, was a very odd place: a peninsula where the sky itself rode overland like a blue locomotive, clouds chuffing across marshes; where orange trees and orderly rows of vegetables gave way to deep woods and then, farther south, broke into an endless acreage of ten-foot grass. This, finally, was the vision that reached Louis through the boxcar door: a prairie that looked as vast as the African savanna. A strange weed or wild corn shifted restlessly in the afternoon wind—saw grass, a fellow-passenger said beneath the slouch of his hat. That was the name for the long stalks that swallowed men whole. Teams of government surveyors were working up and down the train routes, an eerie counterpoint to the dozens of herons and deer that Louis saw standing in the marshes. Then he noticed the dizzying height of the trees in the pinewoods, the thin millions of them extending as far as the eye could see. They were called slash pines, for the cat-face scars left by the gum tappers—already thousands of acres had been tapped for turpentine. The drained and solemn pines reminded Louis of a daguerreotype of Lee’s emaciated Confederate forces that he had once seen as a child.
The woods were deep, but they were neither peaceful nor quiet—they were full of men. Axes swung and fell, a blue glinting at the edge of the woods, and Louis followed the axe handles to the stout arms and the square, heat-flattened faces of the Civilian Conservation Corps lumbermen. Nearly thirteen million job seekers were massing like locust clouds in the cities, but few of these money hunters had made it to the deep glade. From his train, Louis saw just a smattering of humans. When the train had a mechanical problem outside the Crooked Lake National Forest, the engine cut out and the metal moaned to a full stop in the middle of a wrinkled wood. Out here, Louis could hear the beginning of the wind, the hiss of the air plants and the crimson bromeliads. Oak toads chorused incessantly. If he could hear his own death in all that lively hubbub, he ignored it. Home, home, home, the rails sang, and the train lurched back to life.
Louis disembarked in Titusville, and signed a six-month contract with the C.C.C. He wrote his name down as LOUIS THANKSGIVING, dropping the Auschenbliss, then looked up and down the dusty street as if he’d just got away with a crime. Why did anybody fool with guns, he wondered, when he had just dispatched Mr. Auschenbliss with one bloodless swipe?
“There’s Indians, but they got their own camp,” the recruiter told him in a patient voice, as if this were a concern he frequently allayed. “There’s Coloreds here, though—we haven’t segregated your camp yet.” He glanced up from Louis’s paperwork to see if this would be a problem. Louis stared incredulously back at him. He wanted to tell the man that he had spent the past sixteen years living with animals and a pack of brothers whose great entertainment on weekends was to devise “practical jokes” with bulls and farm machinery, one of which had nearly decapitated Louis. Louis had no problems with any man alive—black, white, or Indian—so long as his surname was not Auschenbliss.
On his first stint, he was deployed on a C.C.C. dredge barge with fifteen other men, who were introduced to him by their professions (“This here is the cook, the cap, the engineer, the fireman . . .”). He was now part of a government team surveying the woods around Ocala. Thirty dollars a month, and, try as you might, you couldn’t spend more than five dollars of that unless you were a serious and self-hating gambler—what could you buy in the swamp besides cigarettes, penny stamps, and camp equipment? Louis bought a mess kit for fifteen cents.
Some of the veteran dredgemen grumbled that their outfit lacked a houseboat, which would have allowed the crew to sleep in dry bunks on the river; instead, they had to debark from the barge and make camp each night, after scouting for unflooded islands. Louis slept in a tent with five other men, the odor of sweat and cigarettes percolating inside the tent’s bubble. Outside, rising from the ground like the earth’s own exhalation, came the odor of peat, a great seawall of it, nothing so subtle or evanescent as a fragrance—no, this was stuff with a true stink. In open sunlight, the peat gave off an olfactory roar that recalled to Louis Thanksgiving the feculence that hung over Clarinda. Cow patties, Louis thought, wrinkling his nose; farm perfume. But out here the air was salted, the smell quadrupled. He complained about it affably, happy to have something to say to the other men at night. Our legs are tangled, he realized that first night, saying nothing and moving not one inch once he found his bedroll, the tent humid with the other men’s careful closeness. Every man had to maintain a fixed position; you had to train your body so that even in sleep it remained a tethered boat that wouldn’t rock. Louis had heard that a surveyor for the train company had been beaten to death south of Tallahassee after climbing into another man’s bedroll stark naked—a fairy, a funny one, the men hissed.
Nights came and the moon was so bright that it penetrated the tent cloth. Louis was often awake until the filmy predawn, listening to the hum of the mosquitoes as if even this were something holy. He was in love with everybody, and also with the heat and the stink and the foul teakettle dredge that had cut a channel so far from his childhood. He was in love with the crushed oyster beds and the uprooted trees. He was smart enough, too, to keep these feelings to himself. Louis liked to hoard a kiwi all day and then wait until the other men were snoring to open it. He’d push a thumb through the furry skin and release the kiwi’s perfume through the tent. The first time he did this, he’d watched as the men smiled in their sleep; after that he did it nightly, smiling himself as he imagined pleasant dreams wafting over them. His good mood spilled over into the mornings, and a few of the more taciturn crewmen grumbled that this farm kid must have a screw loose. Who woke up whistling in hundred-and-two-degree heat? What sort of special asshole kept right on beaming at you when his cheeks were flecked with dead mosquitoes and his own pink blood?
“Look who’s grinning like an imbecile in the dead heat of noon,” the lieutenant said, shaking his head. “You are the most good-natured boy I have ever met, Louis—honestly, it’s a little worrisome. You better not snap and kill us in our sleep! I could tell you stories. Strange things happen to personalities this far out, you know.”
Every so often, the captain passed around a flask of purple apple moonshine, joking that he hoped it wouldn’t blind the men. Louis thought the captain’s hooch tasted like a mixture of Christian cider and gasoline—it didn’t make his personality any stranger, but his smile shrank, and often he had to excuse himself politely to run and puke over the stern. Louis still had a kid’s broad face, a farm face, but with a nascent sharp handsomeness lurking around his cheekbones—he had what people described as a “lantern jawline,” with a Presidential thrust, a hint of bedroom avarice. It would have been irresistible to a woman, had there been any such creature in the general environs. The last one Louis had seen was the cook’s wife, who had a tall and mannish figure, with a dishlike face, mean little eyes, and a dirty cloud of yellow hair. That must be the cook’s older brother, Louis had thought as he watched them embrace at Fort Watson. Why is the cook’s older brother wearing a dress?
“She’s stately, you bastards,” the cook had said.
The dredge barge clanked downstream with its dipper handle swinging. For the first time in his short life, Louis had real friends, all sorts travelling alongside him into the glade—calm men, family men, bachelors, ex-preachers, hellions, white men, black men, the children of Indians and freed slaves. There was Adams, who had kicked a coral snake away from Louis’s naked big toe and thus saved his life with a casual grunt; ex-Army boys who followed the white-tailed deer into the briary midday darkness of the hardwood hammocks; drunks who took potshots at the queer golden cats that stalked the perimeter of their camp; gamblers who took all of Louis’s money with a pair of jacks and then gave (some of) it back at day’s end. Every man was Louis’s friend. When there was light in the sky, they waded forward. They surveyed the old section lines of the National Forest during the workweek, and on weekends they “rambled,” as LaVerl, the buck sergeant, said: shooting, fishing, sometimes even gator hunting along the nests that filled the unused railway bed. The cook told Louis to collect two dozen leathery eggs from these alligator nests, and made the whole crew a dinner of fishy-tasting omelettes.
When the light expired, they slept. White-tailed deer sprinted like loosed hallucinations among the tree islands. Sometimes Louis fell asleep watching them from the deck, and it worried him that he couldn’t pinpoint when his sleep began: deer rent the mist with their tiny hooves, a spotted contagion of dreams galloping inside Louis’s head. There were bad fires that blurred the world; in the summer months, you could see smoke rising almost daily, wherever lightning struck the peat beds.
Louis heard from the other surveyors that men all over the country were “hunting a week for one day’s work.” Sometimes when he thought about this he felt so lucky that he was almost sick to his stomach. Happiness could be felt as a pressure, too, Louis realized, more hard-edged and solid than longing, even. In Clarinda, he had yearned for better in a formless way, desire like a gray milk churn; in fact, he’d been so poor that he couldn’t settle on one concrete noun to wish for: A real father? A girl in town? A thousand acres? A single friend? In contrast, this new happiness had angles; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it. Well, Louis determined that he was not going to lose it, and that he was never going back. The Depression was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He had a crisp stack of dollars, a uniform with his name stitched in raspberry thread on the pocket, and pork and grits in his belly.
Elated, wanting never to leave, Louis Thanksgiving signed another contract, this time to dredge a canal clear across the swamp to the Gulf Coast, for the Model Land Company, a private firm that had bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of “virgin Florida farmland” that were still inconveniently covered in water. They were going to drain the swamp, and then develop and sell it, and they needed a team of skilled muck rats to do it.
But nobody had explained to Louis just how deep into the swamp he would have to go, or how quickly his bosses at the Model Land headquarters, in St. Augustine, Florida, would expect the crew to drain the floodplains with a single bucket arm—a herculean task for any machine, but especially for the ancient and fumy Model Land dredge, which made the government vessel look like some futuristic starship by comparison.
The dredge was there to spud down into the muck, and spud up with a bucket of oozing crust. And this in a swamp where you could sink a support platform through eighteen feet of peat before hitting stabilizing rock!
The crew had changed, too—none of the C.C.C. boys had signed on with him. LaVerl was going back to his family’s horse farm in Savannah, and the lone Indian on the crew, Euphon Tigertail, who had survived subhuman conditions while working on the Panama Canal, decided that he couldn’t work in the swamp any longer. He’d been undone by microscopic foes—the chizzywinks and the deerflies. “You sure you want to be a dredgeman for this outfit, Lou?” Euphon had whispered, both of them staring at the hulk of the dredge. Its digger arm was as tall as a house and sunk deep into a quagmire. A pair of enormous cast-steel feet gave the contraption a drunken, donkey-legged appearance. The stack slumped toward the saw-grass prairie, which looked like a drowned and shimmering field of wheat. For a second, Louis thought of the distant Auschenbliss pastures and shuddered.
“You’d be better off gum-tapping in the turpentine woods. It’s all soup doodly in those prairies; it ain’t like the pine rocklands. There’s nothing piney about it. No elevation, Lou. No lakes or trees or breaks. It’s just saw grass till you want to scream. You won’t have a dry day again for months. You’ll go in there and never come out.”
How could you make a mistake when you had only one option? Louis felt that his hellish past exempted him from all regrets. But he was humbled by his friends’ defection—and a little shocked, hearing their complaints about the last months. Ultimately, Louis felt an almost romantic embarrassment, listening to the grizzled guys talk. It turned out that the same nights and routes that he recalled as heavenly had been, to the other C.C.C. men, “god-awful months, a nightmare” and “the valley of the shadow—only full of mosquitoes!” When the dredge anchor hit at Chokoloskee, their whole C.C.C. fraternity came loose like a knot, and Louis and Euphon and LaVerl parted at the dock like strangers.
Louis’s first job on the new dredge was described by the splinter-toothed captain as “involved”: he had to dive overboard with a knife clenched between his teeth and cut the slimy ropes of cattails away from the dredge’s wheel and shaft. “Removing detritus” was what the captain called this labor. Dee-tree-tus. A name from a book, Louis figured, as he removed the knife from his mouth and spat copper. He had split his lower lip; the water tasted like brine and sour blood. Five times his first day he had to jump overboard into that stinking gator marinade and hack at the weedy ropes.
“What do I do if there’s a gator?” Louis asked at supper the first night.
“You put that knife between the blamed scalyback’s eyes, he’ll lay offa you. Or get the base of his neck, sever his spinal cord,” Ferguson, one of the cranemen, said. He had gone gator hunting with some drunk white gladesmen near Flamingo Bay once, and now claimed to be a scalyback expert.
“Don’tcha go for the eyes themselves, though—the crocs can retract those.” He held up two gnarled fingers and jerked them back into his fist.
“Thanks for the advice,” Louis said. He imagined himself screaming underwater, and the tiny needles of salt against his gums and eyeballs. Curiously modest, he refused to strip before diving. He jumped in with his pants and cotton underwear on, and kicked beneath the dross of slimy marine plants. His legs floated like two planks behind him, every muscle tensed, ready to jerk away from an alligator’s teeth.
Louis wasn’t a particularly quick learner, but he was strong and docile, and within a month he was doing all sorts of jobs on the dredge: trimming greenish fat off the pork in the cookhouse, helping the sweating firemen to keep up steam. The men looked like beekeepers in their cotton gloves and mosquito veils, their lungs filling with black mangrove smoke from the smudge fires they burned constantly to keep the insects away.
“Line up, boys! Take your medicine,” the cap said, pressing indigo flecks of charcoal and sulfur into Louis’s cupped hands. Every time he asked what they were for he got a different answer: ear infections, hay fever, sties, skin lesions. Gideon Thomas said the pills were placebos, although Louis noticed that he still queued up to receive them, like a good Catholic boy in line for Communion.
“Ahhh,” Gideon said, extending his chaw-stained tongue.
“Stick out your palm, you jackass. I’m not your damn mother!” the cap howled. If the pills were making a difference, it was hard to imagine how bad you could get without them. Men held their orangey scabs up to the sun and catalogued them like entomologists.
Week 1: They couldn’t sleep for the bug bites; scratching at them, and fending off new ones, was an eight-hour endeavor. The insects had been a chronic irritation on the C.C.C. barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they were pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men’s own thirst. Their crawling bodies put a fur on the steel hull of the Model Land dredge. Theodore Glyde, the dredge’s dour engineer, complained that he was working back-to-back shifts on the dredge, quitting the deck at sundown to work a second job as a bug killer.
Week 2: Everybody’s legs acquired the cracked sheen of cockroach wings. Louis, who had hosted much more colorful bruises back in Auschenbliss country, poured a little vial of alcohol over his shins and returned to work. On the C.C.C. barge, the crew had never been more than twelve miles from a port with a doctor, but this dredge had entered an unmapped part of the swamp where wounds had the opportunity to fester. Headaches blinded half the crew.
Week 3: Sores began to ooze. Men told stories from their Army days about amputations, gangrenous infections. Of all the dredgemen, only Louis was still indefatigably happy. He volunteered to haul water off-shift and shared his larded fried eggs with everyone.
“Louis, are you on a diet, or what?” Gideon grumbled. He was leaning against the starboard railing next to Louis, gobbling down a plate of Louis’s eggs with a guilt-racked expression. “You should eat, kid. It’s not good to share the way you do out here. What the heck are you always staring at?”
“The landscape.”
“The landscape!” Gid snorted. His broad nose wrinkled, as it often did when someone said something he didn’t like, as if he were trying to sniff out what was wrong with it. “There’s something . . . something womanly about watching that, Lou.”
Louis grinned over at Gideon and shrugged; even the other men’s ribbing made him happy. Daybreak, sunset: he liked to watch the red sun pour through the mesh veil of his mosquito screen until his blue eyes filled. Behind the screen, he had the face of a man in church.
“Hey, Gid?” he asked his friend later, when they were baling wastewater, the sun a pinhead of color behind the green trees. “Gid . . . are you anxious to get back?”
Warily, his friend turned to him. “Get back where?”
What Louis really meant was “anywhere.” Back to land. Back to themselves, back to their names without jobs, back to any motionless, dirty place—or to either of the twin poles that the swamp road they’d been digging was meant to connect. He had heard of hydrophobes, and he wondered if there was a word like that for him. Or for what he was becoming. Terraphobia? It was a fear of the rooted, urban world, of cars and towns and years on calendars. He wouldn’t be a dredgeman without the water churning under the machine, that was for sure. Sometimes, at night, Louis thought in a dreamy way about sabotaging the dredge—plucking parts like flowers from the engine room. It was only a thought, and a crazy one, but the closer they got to the Gulf the sicker he felt. His sweats grew worse when he pictured the dawn horizon solidifying—a sudden break in the mangroves that revealed the swallowing saltwater ocean, the big success for which the Model Land Company had hired the dredge and her crew.
“Jesus, Louis, you’re just like what’s his name? Greek guy. Narcissus! Making puppy eyes down at your face in that bucket.”
“Sorry. I was getting a little . . . homesick, I guess. So you’re excited for the end? For the Gulf side of things?”
“Fool, of course I am!” Gideon laughed, pouring the black water over the railing onto the head of a small and outraged alligator. “Am I excited for a paycheck and a woman and a bed? Am I excited to climb out of this soggy hell and get a pair of pants that’s not infested with forty kinds of insects, and a pair of shoes where I can’t count my toes? God damn, Lou, I’ll be singing Ave Marias! I’ll be diving for land!”
Louis spent the morning of May 12, 1934, beating himself at hand after hand of solitaire with Gideon’s faded deck. He was off duty, and free to ruminate. He did not have any headaches that day, or dark presentiments. At noon, he felt a little hungry, so he ate some ibis jerky and considered rowing over to the houseboat to bathe. He lit sticks of dynamite and lobbed them into the marl, then watched as the white-tailed deer shot off through the swamp. For every ten hours of work, the canal grew a hundred and forty feet longer; they were still a month away from the Gulf and the end of their contract.
Louis was sitting on the starboard side of the dredge with his bare feet swinging, his calves hot against the metal rail, watching a pair of otters mock-duelling in the cattails. When next they appeared they were lovers, their bodies turning in a silly ballet, black volutes beneath the lily pads and the purple swamp hens. He was twenty-five feet from the engine room when a roar like a tidal wave nearly knocked him loose from the deck. He turned and watched flames engulf the roof of the engine room in one spectacular spasm; within seconds, a thick smoke had swallowed the entire port side of the deck and shrouded acres of the sunlit sawgrass prairie to the southeast.
What Louis saw next came filtered redly through one slit eye: a stencil of a man—Ira, Louis thought sleepily, or maybe Jackson—went flailing off the fantail. Louis heard him hit his head on the way down; another man jumped in after him. To save him, Louis thought, proud to have made the connection. Foggily, it occurred to him that he should perhaps do a thing, too. The fog seemed to have penetrated his brain from the outer world, because the whole deck of the dredge was lost in a roar of escaping steam. The boiler head has burst, Louis thought, and felt his pulse jump. He pushed himself up and started to make his way toward the smoking engine room, where the other men were already hauling water.
Louis held a hand to his face and found that it came away sticky. Blood was trickling out of one of his eyes, and the other didn’t like to open. He felt tired, a terribly heavy tiredness. I could fall asleep right here, he thought. His own square face surprised him in the water below the boat; he had at some point pitched forward onto the railing. His reflection blinked up at him, as if it were trying to remember how they knew each other. The otters, he noticed, had vanished.
“Gideon needs a hospital!” Hector, one of the cranemen, screamed. “He’s killed, he’s killed!”
Apparently, Hector had forgotten the usual chronology of death and medicine as it worked on the mainland, Louis thought grimly—if Gid was killed, then it was late now for the hospital.
It was almost impossible to push through the wall of steam, and, when he finally stumbled into the engine room, Louis found the scalded body of Gideon Thomas. He was lying on the floor with his right hand wrapped around his throat. Dead, Louis thought—the steam from the boiler must have seared his eyes and lungs. But then, as Louis watched, the hand began to move, massaging Gid’s black skin. His right eye opened like a blue crack of sky, and his other hand pushed flat against the metal wall—and then, impossibly, he was standing up, staring abstractedly at Louis, half his face a sputtering blank. His mouth was moving, but no words came. His jaw made convulsive chewing motions, and above this his right eye regarded the deck incuriously, with an ancient calm. The mariner, Louis thought—this line bubbled up to him from some long-forgotten event, a poetry recitation that the youngest Auschenbliss had given at a church assembly many winters before. The bright-eyed mariner.
Somehow Gid was now lurching toward him, trying to retch up smoke. This is a bad miracle, Louis thought as he watched Gid. Go to him, he thought, but he was frozen, staring. Gid took a step toward Louis and then said, with a grievous eloquence, “I believe my lungs are all burnt up, Louie. I do believe . . . ,” before crumpling.
“A hos-pi-tal! A—”
“God damn you, Heck, shut up,” Louis said with the first true viciousness of his life. “Hos-pee-tal” sounded like an imbecile’s taunt. What place could they take Gid to? There were no places here. That was the point of their continued presence, that’s what they’d been hired by the Model Land Company to accomplish: to turn this morass into a real place.
Something was happening down below. The whole deck had begun to vibrate. Elsewhere, cranemen were racing around, hauling water to put out the small fires that had now spread to the houseboat. Flames licked at the bleached planks of the cookshack, too. The smell of burning metal stung Louis’s lungs and throat. Lights rocketed up from the deep swamp like a July fireworks show, and then every bulb burned out at once—the governor belt on the steam engine must have broken, Louis thought. The cattails swayed inside the smoke, shushing one another and brushing close to the ship like alien observers.
Something or someone came crashing down onto the deck on the stern of the dredge and Louis didn’t turn to look. The blood on his hands had become the blood in his hair, he noticed, the blood on his neck, on his dungaree jacket. Hector came to tell him that below them in the hold the backing drum, a crucial part of the hoisting engine, was reeling in its cable. But his scream dropped into his shoes and now he stared past Louis with a goggle-eyed, just-awakened look. He pointed at the engine room, where two coal lumps—two feet, Louis realized, Gideon’s boots—were sticking out. The soles of his shoes flopped outward from the heel in a heart-shape. From the waist down he looked like a man relaxing on deck.
“Take his shoes off,” Louis said. “Please, goddammit, just somebody take them off!” But the other men responded by moving away from the flailing Louis, as if afraid to be contaminated by his raving. Several of the crew had gathered now. Nobody knew what had caused the accident—corrosion, the captain speculated. He’d seen a two-inch rent in the boiler head.
As the men stood huddled on the starboard side of the barge, black shapes began to populate the sky: buzzards appeared and dotted the watery horizon in twos and threes, a half-dozen, dozens more behind them. They moved so swiftly that they looked like pure holes advancing through the air, a snowfall of inky holes. Talons began to hail down on Gid. The first batch dived and took Gid’s hat, and tore at the buttoned collar of his shirt. Hector produced a rifle and shot wildly at them; a bullet grazed the captain. “Put the gun away!” the cap screamed. “You’re liable to kill somebody.”
Everyone was watching the buzzards. They were nothing like the red-headed turkey vultures the crew had been seeing since Long Glade; these were huge birds, black and wattled, and with their wings folded they made Louis think of funeral umbrellas dripping rain along the stone walls of St. Agnes Church in Clarinda. Several birds had formed a heaving circle around Gid now; within moments one had flown off with his cigarettes and another had torn his shirt sleeve loose from the elbow. Two buzzards worked industriously to tug a black shoe off his foot. Louis couldn’t move or think; his mind was helium light. The taste of screws and pennies pumped into his mouth until he felt sick with it. Around him the cranemen were hollering “Fire!” at a pitch that became a single sheet of sound, draping like a canopy over the dredge.
What rolled through Louis’s mind were like the shells of thoughts, a series of “O”s, round and empty, like the discarded rinds of screams. A fine tooth of purplish glass marked the spot on the deck where Gid’s eyeglasses had been, and Louis got down on his knees to retrieve it; when he felt a prickling on his neck, he looked up.
In a scene that seemed as plausible and as horrifying as Louis’s worst dreams, the birds descended on Gideon and hooked the prongs of their talons into his skin; perhaps a dozen of them lifted him into the sky. Gid’s body shrank into the cloudless expanse. The sky that day was a bright sapphire, better weather than they’d had in weeks; for a long time, the men could see the shrinking pinpoint of Gid’s black head, lolling below his shoulders, as if he were trying to work out a bad crick in his neck.
A strangled quiet came over the men. It felt like hours before anybody moved.
“You boys ever seen birds do anything like that?” Hector asked, close to sunset. His voice was a child’s squeak, and it occurred to Louis that there was real bravery in the act of speech. Louis’s own throat was a desert and he couldn’t have got a word out for a million dollars. No, Louis thought, you saw a thing like that and you went deep inward; you didn’t want to make a single ripple in the air.
“Never,” the launchman said behind him. “Never seen a bird behave that way.” His tone was mild and genial, as though he were discussing unseasonably cold weather, or food with a peculiar taste. Hector, in his panic, didn’t seem to hear the answer. Some of the men were still staring at the spot in the sky where Gid had disappeared into a bone-white ridge of cloud. The moon was rising. The fires were nearly all snuffed. Louis, able at last to overcome his vast, black speechlessness, noticed something interesting that he pointed out to the other men: the buzzards were returning.
People began screaming, babbling obscurely; someone went splashing overboard. Louis heard the wet, frantic beat of arms on water. The birds had completely swallowed the dredge now. They were perched all along the trusses and gunwales and on the cabin roof, so that the whole structure looked as if it were upholstered in black velvet; it didn’t seem possible to Louis that there could be so many birds in all the world. He saw a buzzard that looked as large as a man lift and stretch its wings; some possession or some part of Gid went winking from its beak and fell into the water. Finally, Louis felt a scream tear loose from his throat.
“Oh, shut up. They’re just birds,” Theodore, the tall, sallow engineer, kept repeating crossly, gesticulating at no one. “They’re just filthy buzzards. They shouldn’t hurt us at all—anyhow, men, we’re alive. . . .” He went on and on like this as the buzzards grew in number. How could more be coming? Louis wondered. Hundreds more were coming. He stood there and waited with a pale, uplifted face. Theodore was still throwing his arms around, as if he could argue his death back into the hole of the moon.
“Here they come, fellas,” Louis Thanksgiving said quietly, and beside him Theodore snorted with disgust and folded his arms across his chest as if he were impatient to prove a point.
Oh God, Louis thought. He didn’t feel any more horror—just pure sadness, because he was seventeen that summer and he didn’t want to go. His real life had begun less than a year ago. I’m next. ♦
