Swamplandia! Read Online Free PDF

U, DOTER , she’d write, or U ARE PREITY, AVA. I MIS U .
    This is a true fact: my brother gave himself report cards. He modeled them after a Rocklands Middle School report card, which he had purchased from his obese mainland associate, Cubby Wallach. Cubby Wallach was complected like a bowl of oatmeal and yet carried himself as if he were wearing a top hat and spats. He had the bellicose dignity of a kid who refuses to excuse or even to acknowledge his own extreme ugliness. I admired this trait. It reminded me of the Seths, with their scarred, alien faces and their beautiful oblivion. Like a Seth, Cubby Wallach would let you stare at his face without apologizing for it. No red cheeks or downcast eyes, just a cool, invulnerable stare. In this way his ugliness got transmuted into a powerful hypnosis. Ossie used to have a bad crush on him, and I pretended to hate him. “What an asshole,” I’d say, but it came out as sort of a giggle.
    Whenever he came to Swamplandia!, Cubby Wallach brought a gigantic shopping bag filled with other kids’ colorful graded homework and purloined protractors and sold this haul to Kiwi at an incredible markup.
    Kiwi insisted that he was our homeschool’s valedictorian. I was the salutatorian. Ossie mostly read magazines. Years ago, Mom enrolled us in Teach Your Child … in the Wild!, a vestigial statewide initiative from the early days of white settlement—we got a whole “substitute curriculum” for free in the mail. Every month some functionary at the Loomis County Public Schools sent us stapled booklets with titles like
Your Federal Government Is a Tree with Three Branches
and
Mighty Fungi: The
Third
Kingdom
. Several times a year we mailed back a stack of tests and completed worksheets, I guess to prove that we were learning
something
.
    This stuff was too easy for my brother. He said that he was going to leapfrog over the LCPS high school requirements and go directly to college. He was studying for the Scholastic Aptitude Test—the SAT. If you put the fan on high in his bedroom these little powder blue cardswith funny words on them flew everywhere: FATIDIC [adj], OPPROBRIUM [n]. My brother always had a pack of study cards with him. He would rather conjugate Latin than do any of the chores the park required of him. He was in charge of concessions. When the park was open, Kiwi would sit next to the trapped snowfall inside the popcorn machine at the top of the stadium steps, waving mechanically, his face making a funny pucker beneath the paper cone of his hat. Cubby Wallach had sold him these dark-rinse jeans, and they fit him like a puddle.
    Now Kiwi was free to spend most of every day mossed inside the Library Boat, where the portholes gave his face a Frankenstein gleam. He got this aura of expectancy about him that confused me. It wasn’t dread, not exactly, but you could not call it hope.
    “What little test are you studying for?” I asked him once, and he looked up with clouds for eyes and said, “My future.”
    I think that Kiwi resented my sister’s new scholarly ways a little, because up until this point he had always been the bookworm, the captain of the Library Boat. But Ossie applied herself to
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
with the same diligence with which Kiwi studied science and philosophy—she wouldn’t meet our eyes anymore, she was lost in her book.
    On April 29, we threw Osceola a sweet sixteen party. Without Mom and Grandpa the party felt dazed and sad. The guest list was us. The Chief and I thawed out an ancient cake from the Swamp Café freezer (“Let’s hope this doesn’t kill us, Chief!” I said, the absolute wrong joke to make). Our presents for her that year, not to put too fine a point on it, really sucked. The Chief walked over to the Bigtree Family Museum and returned with a pair of tawny moccasins. I had to remind him that the moccasins didn’t fit Osceola anymore; that’s why we’d moved them to the museum in the first place.
    “Well, it’s