Authors: Jeffrey Ford
The Drowned Life
Jeffrey Ford
FOR JACK GALLAGHER
,
who, over martinis late one night on his screened-in porch,
the surf sounding just beyond the dunes,
told me, among other things,
about a guy who dragged a wheelbarrow
full of bricks with his eyelids
It came trickling in over the transom at first, but Hatch's bailing technique had grown rusty. The skies were dark with daily news of a pointless war and genocide in Africa, poverty, AIDS, desperate millions in migration. The hot air of the commander in chief met the stone-cold bullshit of Congress and spawned water spouts, towering gyres of deadly ineptitude. A steady rain of increasing gas prices, grocery prices, medical costs, drove down hard like a fall of needles. At times the mist was so thick it baffled the mind. Somewhere in a back room, Liberty, Goddess of the Sea, was tied up and blindfoldedâwires snaking out from under her toga and hooked to a car battery. You could smell her burning, an acid stink that rode the fierce winds, turning the surface of the water brown.
Closer by, three sharks circled in the swells, their fins visible above chocolate waves. Each one of those slippery machines of Eden stood for a catastrophe in the secret symbolic nature of this story. One was
Financial Ruin,
I can tell you thatâa stainless-steel beauty whose sharp maw made Hatch's knees literally tremble like
in a cartoon. In between the bouts of bailing, he walked a tight-rope. At one end of his balancing pole was the weight of financial ruin: a mortgage like a Hydra, whose head grew back each month, for a house too tall and too shallow; taxes out the ass; failing appliances; car payments. At the other end was his job at an HMO, denying payment to people with legitimate claims. Each conversation with each claimant was harrowing for him, but he was in no position to quit. What else would he do? Each poor sap denied howled with indignation and unalloyed pain at the injustice of it all. Hatch's practiced facade, his dry “Sorry,” hid indigestion, headaches, sweats, and his constant, subconscious reiteration of Darwin's law of survival as if it were some golden rule.
Beyond that, the dog had a chronic ear infection, his younger son, Ned, had recently been picked up by the police for smoking pot and the older one, Will, who had a severe case of athlete's foot, rear-ended a car on Route 70. “Just a tap. Not a scratch,” he'd claimed, and then the woman called with her dizzying estimate. Hatch's wife, Rose, who worked twelve hours a day, treating the people at a hospital whose claims he would eventually turn down, demanded a vacation with tears in her eyes. “Just a week, somewhere warm,” she said. He shook his head and laughed as if she were kidding. It was rough seas between his ears and rougher still in his heart. Each time he laughed, it was in lieu of puking.
“Storm warning” was a phrase that made surprise visits to his consciousness while he sat in front of a blank computer screen at work, or hid in the garage at home late at night, smoking one of the Captain Blacks he'd supposedly quit, or stared listlessly at
Celebrity Fit Club
on the television. It became increasingly difficult for him to remember births, first steps, intimate hours with Rose, family jokes, vacations in packed cars, holidays with extended family. One day Hatch did less bailing. “Fuck that bailing,” he thought. The next day he did even less.
As if he'd just awakened to it, he was suddenly standing in water up to his shins and the rain was beating down on a strong southwester. The boat was bobbing like the bottom lip of a crone on Thorazine as he struggled to keep his footing. In his hands was a small plastic garbage can, the same one he'd used to bail his clam boat when at eighteen he had worked the Great South Bay. The problem was Hatch wasn't eighteen anymore, and though now he was spurred to bail again with everything he had, he didn't have much. His heart hadn't worked so hard since his twenty-fifth anniversary, when Rose made him climb a mountain in Montana. Even though the view at the top was gorgeousâa basin lake and a breeze out of heavenâhis T-shirt jumped with each beat. The boat was going down. He chucked the garbage can out into the sea and
Financial Ruin
and its partners tore into it. Reaching for his shirt pocket, he took out his smokes and lit one.
The cold brown water was just creeping up around Hatch's balls as he took his first puff. He noticed the dark silhouette of Captree Bridge in the distance. “Back on the bay,” he said, amazed to be sinking into the waters of his youth, and then, like a struck wooden match, the entire story of his life flared and died behind his eyes.
Going under was easy. No struggle, but a change in temperature. Just beneath the dark surface, the water got wonderfully clear. All the stale air came out of him at onceâa satisfying burp followed by a large translucent globe that stretched his jaw with its birth. He reached for its spinning brightness but sank too fast to grab it. His feet were still lightly touching the deck as the boat fell slowly beneath him. He looked up and saw the sharks still chewing plastic. “This is it,” thought Hatch, “not with a bang but a bubble.” He herded all of his regrets into the basement of his brain, an indoor oak forest with intermittent dim lightbulbs and dirt floor. The trees were columns that held the ceiling and amid and among
them skittered pale, disfigured doppelgängers of his friends and family. As he stood at the top of the steps and shut the door on them, he felt a subtle tearing in his solar plexus. The boat touched down on the sandy bottom and his sneakers came to rest on the deck. Without thinking, he gave a little jump and sailed in a lazy arc, landing ten feet away, with a puff of sand, next to a toppled marble column.
His every step was a graceful bound, and he floated. Once on the slow descent of his arc, he put his arms out at his sides and lifted his feet behind him so as to fly. Hatch found that if he flapped his arms, he could glide along a couple of feet above the bottom, and he did, passing over coral pipes and red seaweed rippling like human hair in a breeze. There were creatures scuttling over rocks and through the sandâlong antennae and armored plating, tiny eyes on sharp stalks and claws continuously practicing on nothing. As his shoes touched the sand again, a school of striped fish swept past his right shoulder, their blue glowing like neon, and he followed their flight.
He came upon the rest of the sunken temple, its columns pitted and cracked, broken like the tusks of dead elephants. Green sea vines netted the destructionâtwo wide marble steps there, here a piece of roof, a tilted mosaic floor depicting the Goddess of the Sea suffering a rash of missing tiles, a headless marble statue of a man holding his penis.
Hatch floated down the long empty avenues of Drowned Town, a shabby but quiet city in a lime green sea. Every so often, he'd
pass one of the citizens, bloated and blue, in various stages of decomposition, and say, “Hi.” Two gentlemen in suits swept by but didn't return his greeting. A drowned mother and child, bulging eyes dissolving in trails of tiny bubbles, dressed in little more than rags, didn't acknowledge him. One old woman stopped, though, and said, “Hello.”
“I'm new here,” he told her.
“The less you think about it the better,” she said and drifted on her way.
Hatch tried to remember where he was going. He was sure there was a reason that he was in town, but it eluded him. “I'll call Rose,” he thought. “She always knows what I'm supposed to be doing.” He started looking up and down the streets for a pay phone. After three blocks without luck, he saw a man heading toward him. The fellow wore a business suit and an overcoat torn to shreds, a black hat with a bullet hole in it, a closed umbrella hooked on a skeletal wrist. Hatch waited for the man to draw near, but as the fellow stepped into the street to cross to the next block, a swift gleaming vision flew from behind a building and with a sudden clang of steel teeth meeting took him in its jaws.
Financial Ruin
was hungry and loose in Drowned Town. Hatch cowered backward, breaststroking to a nearby Dumpster to hide, but the shark was already gone with its catch.
On the next block up, he found a bar that was open. He didn't see a name on it, but there were people inside, the door was ajar, and the muffled sound of music emanated from within. The place was cramped and got narrower the farther back you went, ending in a corner. Wood paneling, mirror behind the bottles, spinning seats, low lighting, and three deadbeatsâtwo on one side of the bar and another behind it.
“Got a pay phone?” asked Hatch.
All three men looked at him. The two customers smiled at each
other. The bartender, who sported a red bow tie, wiped his rotted nose on a handkerchief, and then slowly lifted a finger to point. “Go down to the grocery store. They got a pay phone at the deli counter.”
Hatch had missed it when the old lady spoke to him, but he realized now that he heard the bartender's voice in his head, not with his ears. The old man moved his mouth, but all that came out were vague farts of words flattened by water pressure. He sat down on one of the bar stools.
“Give me something dry,” he said to the bartender. He knew he had to compose himself, get his thoughts together.
The bartender shook his head, scratched a spot of coral growth on his scalp, and opened his mouth to release a minnow. “I could make you a Jenny Diverâ¦pink or blue?”
“No, Sal, make him one of those things with the dirt bomb in itâ¦they're the driest,” said the customer nearest Hatch. The short man turned his flat face and stretched a grin like a soggy old doll with swirling hair. Behind the clear lenses of his eyes, shadows moved, something swimming through his head.
“You mean a Dry Reach. That's one dusty drink,” said the other customer, a very pale, skeletal old man in a brimmed hat and dark glasses. “Remember the day I got stupid on those? Your asshole'll make hell seem like a backyard barbecue if you drink too many of them, my friend.”
“I'll try one,” said Hatch.
“Your wish is my command,” said the bartender, but he moved none too swiftly. Still, Hatch was content to sit and think for a minute. He thought that maybe the drink would help him remember. For all of its smallness, the place had a nice relaxing current flowing through it. He folded his arms on the bar and lowered his head, resting for a moment. It finally came to him that the music he'd heard since entering was Frank Sinatra. “The Way You Look
Tonight,” he whispered, naming the current song. He pictured Rose, naked, in bed back in their first apartment, and with that realization, the music stopped.
Hatch looked up and saw that the bartender had turned on the television. The two customers, heads tilted back, stared into the glow. On the screen was a news show without sound but the caption announced “News from the War.” A small seahorse swam behind the glass of the screen but in front of the black-and-white imagery. The story was about a ward in a makeshift field hospital where army doctors treated wounded children. Cute little faces stared up from pillows, tiny arms with casts listlessly waved, but as the report obviously continued, the wounds got more serious. There were children with missing limbs, and then open wounds, great gashes in the head, the chest, and missing eyes, and then a gaping hole with intestines spilling out, the little legs trembling and the chest heaving wildly.
“There's only one term for this war,” said the old man with the sunglasses. “âClusterfuck.' Cluster as in âcluster' and fuck as in âfuck.' No more need be said.”
The short man turned to Hatch, and still grinning, said, “There was a woman in here yesterday, saying that we're all responsible.”
“We are,” said the bartender. “Drink up.” He set Hatch's drink on the bar. “One Dry Reach,” he said. It came in a big martini glassâclear liquid with a brown lump at the bottom.
Hatch reached for his wallet, but the bartender waved for him not to bother. “You must be new,” he said.
Hatch nodded.
“Nobody messes with money down here. This is Drowned Townâ¦. Think about it. Drink up, and I'll make you three more.”
“Could you put Sinatra back on?” Hatch asked sheepishly. “This news is bumming me out.”
“As you wish,” said the bartender. He pressed a red button on
the wall behind him. Instantly, the television went off, and the two men turned back to their drinks. Sinatra sang, “Let's take it nice and easy,” and Hatch thought, “Free booze.” He sipped his drink and could definitely distinguish its tang from the briny sea water. Whether he liked the taste or not, he'd decide later, but for now he drank it as quickly as he could.
The elderly customer stepped around his friend and approached. “You're in for a real treat, man,” he said. “You see that little island in the stream there?” He pointed at the brown lump in the glass.
Hatch nodded.
“A bit of terra firma, a little taste of the world you left behind upstairs. Remember throwing dirt bombs when you were a kid? Like the powdery lumps in homemade brownies? Well, you've got a dollop of high-grade dirt there. You bite into it, and you'll taste the life you left behindâbright sun and blue skies.”
“Calm down,” said the short man to his fellow customer. “Give him some room.”
Hatch finished the drink and let the lump roll out of the bottom of the glass into his mouth. He bit it with his molars but found it had nothing to do with dirt. It was mushy and tasted terrible, more like a sodden meatball of decay then a memory of the sun. He spit the mess out and it darkened the water in front of his face. He waved his hand to disperse the brown cloud. A violet fish with a lazy tail swam down from the ceiling to snatch what was left of the disintegrating nugget.
The two customers and the bartender laughed, and Hatch heard it like a party in his brain. “You got the Tootsie Roll,” said the short fellow and tried to slap the bar, but his arm moved too slowly through the water.
“Don't take it personally,” said the old man. “It's a Drowned Town tradition.” His right ear came off just then and floated away, his glasses slipping down on that side of his head.
Hatch felt a sudden burst of anger. He'd never liked playing the fool.
“Sorry, fella,” said the bartender, “but it's a ritual. On your first Dry Reach, you get the Tootsie Roll.”
“What's the Tootsie Roll?” asked Hatch, still trying to get the taste out of his mouth.
The man with the outlandish grin said, “Well, for starters, it ain't a Tootsie Roll.”