SLOUGH

Christopher Lee Chilton

It was an old Crown Vic that stopped for me, the kind they used to make into police cars. I thought it might be an undercover cop car at first, and the three men inside — large men with sack-like jowls — might be cops. They turned out to be insurance adjusters on their way to a conference in Daytona Beach.

I was going to the Everglades to band birds. They didn’t understand why anyone would want to ban birds from the Everglades. No, I said, I’m going to band them. To track their migrations. They didn’t understand why anyone would want to do that, either.

They offered me sunflower seeds. They were spitting the shells into a murky bottle formerly filled with Old Crow, and when I saw it, I realized they were all ripping drunk. The drunkest of all might have been the driver, who had one hand on the bag of seeds and another on the bottle, and who was trying to steady the wheel with pleated knees.

We were going very fast, and I became afraid. I must have been pressed against the seat in fear, because the man next to me — sour of breath, greasy of face — turned to me and asked me how old I was.

I said: I’m twenty-two, sir.

He shook his head and called me son. Son, he said. You ain’t gonna die at twenty-two.

But he was wrong. I did die. We made it to Daytona and I hitched the rest of the way to Hialeah safe and sound. Later that spring, in my canoe with all my banding equipment, looking for wood storks, I came upon an alligator poacher in an airboat. He was just some cracker kid, no older than sixteen. He must have been afraid of being caught more than anything. He got me right in the stomach with his .22. He didn’t ask me my age, so the rhyming of it — the stupid little limerick God loves to write — was lost on him.

I sank to the bottom of the slough. The water there moves slowly but steadily, and it began to tear away bits of skin from my body. Beautiful tropical fish gathered around to feast on these floating pieces of myself, and when these were gone, they ate out my eyes.

In Baltimore they had me declared dead. It must have been a slow and painful process for my mother and sister. It doesn’t seem right to have a funeral, my sister said to my mother. He’s not even here.

But I was there. Or, at least, a part of me was there. I was looking at a pair of birds in the hall of the funeral home. They were Gouldian finches, an Australian species with striking rainbow-colored markings: a red mask lined in teal, and a violet bib over a golden belly. Gouldian finches are popular in the exotic bird trade, and a popular species among poachers. This was the kind of thing it had been my job to know. I spent much of my own funeral wondering where the funeral home had gotten them.

These two finches — the striking male and plainer female — were kept in a glass case that seemed entirely sealed. There must have been cleverly disguised air vents somewhere. The finches hopped restlessly around on a three-fingered branch.

The curved top of the case made it resemble a gravestone, which struck me in bad taste. In my distracted and half-present state — at this moment, an eel was oilily sliding between my ribcage and lungs — I was seized by the idea that these finches were to be buried in my place, a representation of my absent spirit. This isn’t right! I wanted to scream at the funeral director, potting around the carpeted floor in his velvet slippers. Free these finches, sir! I knew then why ghosts in old books are always described as rattling their chains. If I’d had chains, I’d have rattled them.

My sister stood up in the chapel to speak, but I couldn’t really hear her. I was having trouble focusing on any one place or thing. I was being carried away to diverse corners. Carried away by the little fish and the big ones, by the oblique scuttling of crabs, inside the gullets of pelicans, cruising in swift straight lines over the water like Crown Vics. I felt bad for my sister, who was trying to reduce my life to a few meaningful sentences. She couldn’t have known that just the opposite was happening. I was expanding; I was being spread out.

I lost sound and vision. I had to make do with my deepest dreams. I became obsessed with the idea of becoming fossil fuel. I saw myself powering a great industrial machine with thrusting pistons. I relished the sexual power of the industrial machine, and knowing that, without me, a gallon of petroleum, the machine was impotent.

I was embarrassed by this fantasy, and by how much it pleased me. In life I had been something of a Luddite. I took conscious measures to reduce my carbon footprint. Perhaps the fantasy was evidence of how much I was changing, how much I had already changed. Or maybe it was something that had always been within me and only now being revealed.

Sometimes I imagined myself as a cupful of gasoline inside a Crown Victoria, being driven by three dipsomaniacal insurance adjusters, picking up a young hitchhiker. I was combusting at their feet, like a rare red orchid. At other times I thought of myself as a skin of oil on tarmac, inside which all possible colors lived.

In my more lucid moments, I knew the process of becoming petroleum took many millions of years. By that time there would be no Crown Victorias, no Gouldian finches. There wouldn’t even be a Florida. Everything would be something else. I thought about that. I went on thinking about it for a long time.