Swamplandia! by Russell Karen

Author:Russell, Karen [Russell, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2011-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kiwi Goes to Night School

Vijay was wearing his red bandanna and doing twenty over the speed limit, and for once Kiwi didn’t say a word. Kiwi made no mention of the study he’d read on vehicular manslaughter or the difficult medical ethics of life support; he didn’t comment on the alarming flap-flap-flaping of Vijay’s unbuckled seat belt against the door lock; he didn’t ask if Vijay was a registered organ donor, or call attention to the many drivers flipping his best friend the bird: no, tonight Kiwi Bigtree was ready to endorse reckless speeds. Kiwi’s name was second on a green-and-white computer printout from the LCPS: Álvarez, Ruben, and then Bigtree, Kiwi. It was 7:01, and he was late for his first night of school.

“Buckle up, bro,” he’d mumbled at a light, but Vijay had stared sightlessly forward. Kiwi sighed. Out of kindness—perhaps as part of some private philanthropic project—Vijay was now pretending not to hear the dorkiest things that Kiwi said.

They flew onto a bridge that spanned downtown Loomis. Huge, luminous pharmacies pushed at the darkness like giant cruise ships at anchor. Kiwi spotted a billboard that the Chief used to lease, SWAMPLANDIA! in green-and-sapphire circus letters above his mother’s beautiful face. Now it advertised the Bigfoot Podiatry Treatment Center of America. There was a grinning Bigfoot in a karate suit on it, kicking a hirsute monkey foot at traffic.

“Can you maybe crack a window, bro?” Kiwi asked in a small voice. “I feel sort of carsick?”

The neighborhoods went from bad-historic to bad-dilapidated, then recovered their lawns and flowering trees again in mere minutes of highway travel. The Loomis Children’s Hospital appeared on the other side of the bridge, a putty-colored complex ringed by the world’s saddest playgrounds, with medieval-looking bucket swings on rusted chains and the pastel skeletons of bouncy-horsies. Next door was a church. A group of stone angels gathered like hunchbacked hitchhikers in the garden. A boarded-up movie palace called Casa del Encanto had become a lion’s den of hundreds of stray cats—Kiwi could see dark and pale fur coursing around the ticket booth. The strip malls and the XXX … And More video stores gave way to stucco coffee-colored office buildings, drab apartment complexes, a few hallucinatory glimpses of the sea.

“So what’s the deal with this XXX … And More chain?” Kiwi muttered. “What’s their business angle? That you can rent pornography and Bambi there?”

“Bambi! Ha-ha. That’s about a baby deer. Shit. You’re sick, Marge. You got weird tastes.”

But Vijay was only half-listening. He kept craning over, checking out the two girls in the car next to them. Kiwi liked them instinctively. The larger girl had a face as round and white as a clock and she kept touching a spot near her heart and exploding into a laughter that shook her every frizzy curl. The driver had an acned face and musty-colored bangs and laughed without teeth. Kiwi wondered if they were sisters. Something about their ease with one another and all the happy, feckless ugliness in that car made him think of sisters.

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