Swamplandia

Although Kiwi intends to return to the casino to talk to his father, he decides against it. He instead goes to visit his grandfather, Sawtooth. The man has declined sharply since his last visit, and his response when Kiwi tells him about all of the family’s troubles is to spit in his face and then begin choking him. Kiwi does not initially fight back, but soon realizes that his grandfather might actually kill him and manages to get his own hands around Sawtooth’s neck. Sawtooth lets go and goes back to watching television. Paramedics are called, but they blame Kiwi for the altercation. Disgusted, he returns to the World of Darkness.

Disoriented and sick from drinking the swamp’s brackish water, Ava tries to make her way home. She has her sister’s ribbon tied around her wrist. She comes upon a cabin that at first seems abandoned, but next to which she finds a set of clotheslines strung with clothes. She thinks of Mama Weeds, a legendary swamp woman who’d moved deep into the heart of the swamp and worked as a laundress and seamstress. She had been murdered in cold blood by a group of men who objected to her presence in the swamp (and to how easily she took to a life that they had all assured her would be too hard for a woman). After her death, her ghost was said to haunt the area where she had lived. Although Ava had always found the legend silly, she wonders now about its veracity. Ava recognizes some of her sister's clothing on the lines and is even more confused. Suddenly, a woman appears. Ava, by this point delusional from hunger and thirst, begins screaming at the woman. She accuses her of having stolen Osceola. Understanding that something is not quite right about this girl and wondering why she is on her own and so deep into the swamp, she tries to help. Ava, raving, runs away. She hallucinates, thinks about Louis and her sister, and keeps walking.

Kiwi is eating breakfast at Burger Burger with Vijay. Outside, he sees an unhoused woman and thinks about the legend of Mama Weeds. It is the day of his flying exam and he is nervous. Once he is in the air though, his nerves subside and he is struck by the beauty of the landscape below. He thinks he sees a woman jumping up and down on a remote part of the coastline, and something about her is familiar, but he keeps going. He cuts the power and lands the plane near what looks like an abandoned boat, and is surprised to find his sister Osceola there. She looks terrible and tells Kiwi and his instructor that she is thirsty. She explains that Louis the ghost had helped her steer the boat to this location and then left her at the altar on the morning they were supposed to get married. Dennis, Kiwi’s instructor, finds all of this terribly strange, and Kiwi tries to cover for his sister by explaining that she’d been jilted by her fiancé, leaving out the part about that fiancé having been a ghost.

Ava is still in the swamp. She hears someone calling her name and looks up to see the Bird Man. She dives into a gator hole and swims away from him. As she approaches a gator den, its occupant grabs her, and she tries to remember everything that her mother had taught her about swimming with (and escaping from) alligators. Although the creature bites her and she is wounded, she escapes. Not long after she frees herself from the gator, Ava spies the brown uniform of a park ranger. The two men she’d thought she’d seen with knives were not, as the Bird Man claimed, denizens of the underworld, but real (living!) gator skinners. They’d reported her presence to the park ranger, who had gone looking for her. The ranger tells her that they had just picked up her sister Osceola, and questions what the sisters had been doing on their own in the swamp.

She is reunited with Osceola and Kiwi, and Kiwi’s flight instructor drives them to the hotel where their father is staying. He is surprised to see them all, and Kiwi rents an additional room for the girls next to their father. Although the Chief still wants to save Swamplandia!, they instead move to the mainland where the girls attend a real high school and Ossie sees a therapist. They are a family once more.