The Drowned Life (15 page)

One Thursday night, instead of meeting in the stockroom of the store, the card players came to the house. My grandfather answered the door and greeted them. Leo came in first, took his cigar briefly out of his mouth, and shook hands with my mother and father and grandmother. Phil entered behind him, gave a wave to the grown-ups, and then pointed at my brother and me and said, “How's the ball choppers?” Dr. Geller arrived a few minutes later, looking like he hadn't slept in a week. My mother served deviled eggs and everyone drank whiskey and beer, cigar and cigarette smoke dimming the room. After some slow conversation, Leo said, “Let's do this before we get three sheets to the wind.” Everyone agreed and they moved into the dining room, my grandmother taking up her place at the table.

It had been decided that Leo would be the one to represent the group, so he sat closest to my grandmother and took from his pocket a silver dollar to lay in her outstretched palm. Although the old men were all gravely quiet, I could see my mother and father standing in the kitchen silently laughing. I sat on my grandfather's lap and watched closely as the blue curtain lifted and the cards hit the table. “To your self, to your heart, to your home, to what you least expect and what's sure to come.”

“Maisie,” said my grandfather, “remember, he just wants a lucky number.”

She stared hard at my grandfather for the interruption.

“Don't give me that crap,” he said.

“All right,” she said. “A lucky number,” and lifted the pile of cards that had fallen under “what's sure to come.”

Leo bit down hard on his cigar as she shuffled the cards out in
front of her. Phil watched the proceedings with his bad eye while at the same time staring down my brother, straight on, who was fidgeting in the chair across from him. The doctor leaned over to me and said, “And me, a man of science.” My grandfather overheard him and laughed low in his chest. Then my grandmother held out the facedown cards to Leo and said, “Pick one.” Leo reached in, grabbed the card at the exact center of the spread, and turned it over, placing it faceup on the table.

The ace of spades was always frightening to me back then, because any time it came up, my grandmother would slip it off the table and give a forced laugh.

“Doesn't that mean death?” Mrs. Crudyer asked her once at a luncheon.

“Well,” she answered, “it means a lot of things, but…here, I see a man with flowers for you. A dozen yellow roses.”

It was less than four months later that Marion Crudyer's liver gave out and she passed. That dark ace had come up in a reading my grandmother had done once for me, and afterward my brother told me to make out a will and leave everything I owned to him. I walked around for two weeks awaiting sudden death. My mother dissipated my fears by telling me it was “no more than a fart in a windstorm.”

I went to my grandmother and asked her how she had learned the cards. She told me that Mrs. Harris, one-time mistress of the tea leaves, who had lived in her apartment building in Jamaica, Queens, had taught her. On the night old Mrs. Harris died, my grandmother and her sister, Gertrude, saw a banshee floating outside the third-story landing window, combing its blue hair and moaning.

“Number one is the number,” she now told Leo. “I see one.”

“Fizzle,” said Dr. Geller, and the card players all smiled.

After the reading we moved back into the living room and my
grandfather brought out his mandolin. In between barrages of conversation, someone would say, “Mac, can you do, ‘Goodnight, Irene'?” and he would play it, double stringing and singing the words in his wolf voice. “September Song,” “Apple Blossom Time,” “Till the Real Thing Comes Along”—even my father sang, and my grandmother drank beer.

The doctor told about a child he had recently treated who was haunted by an evil spirit that broke dishes and furniture and left bite marks. The final diagnosis was too much television and sugar. Phil explained how he was considering using hydrochloric acid to eat away the gum wad at the store. Through snatches of stories and one-word comments, they compiled verbal obituaries for the town's recently dead. Then they talked nothing but horses as I slowly drifted off to sleep in the corner of the couch.

Saturday afternoon, my father, my grandfather, and I sat in the car in the parking lot behind the five-and-ten in Babylon. They were up front talking, and I was in the back, watching the rain make rivulets on the window.

“Listen, Jim,” my grandfather said to my father, “this morning Maisie got up and told me that she had a dream last night about an Indian and a shooting star. I forgot about it until I was having my coffee and looking over the
Telegraph
. In the eighth race, where we're putting all our money to win on number one, there's a horse at the five spot—Tecumseh.”

There was a rain-filled pause. “Well?” my father asked and waited.

“I don't know,” said my grandfather, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a huge roll of bills, and looked at it.

“I'll take a piece,” said my father and handed over some money.

My grandfather laughed and added it to the wager.

“An arrangement made in hell,” said my father before lighting a cigarette.

My grandfather sat for a few moments in silence with his eyes closed, then he opened the door and got out of the car.

Through the rain-streaked windshield, we watched him walk across the parking lot and along the front row of cars to stop beneath a streetlamp beside a chain-link fence enmeshed in dead honeysuckle vines.

“Here he comes,” said my father as I climbed over into the front seat and kneeled next to him. When I looked again, I saw a thin man dressed in a black topcoat and hat, talking to my grandfather.

“Watch him pass the money with the handshake,” said my father.

I waited and the handshake came. It lasted only a second but I didn't see the money. The thin man looked up suddenly and then turned and ran, down through a row of cars and into the back entrance of the five-and-ten. When my father sat upright in his seat and threw his cigarette out the window, I knew something was wrong. The cop cars the bookie had seen entering the parking lot now came into view.

“It's a bust,” said my father.

My grandfather didn't move as the police jumped out of their cars and walked quickly toward him. As they approached him from the front, my grandfather had his hand behind his back and he was waving for us to take off. My father grabbed me and we ducked down beneath the dashboard. Seeing my worried look, he put his finger to his lips and smiled. We hid for ten minutes. When we finally looked again, the cop cars were gone and so was my grandfather.

Dr. Geller showed up at our door with his black bag, a stethoscope around his neck and blood on his shirt. My mother got up and let him sit in her rocker. We were gathered around the television, drinking whiskey sours my father had created in the blender with Four Roses, Mi-Lem, crushed ice, and cherries. My father gave my brother and me each a sour and we stole handfuls of cherries. There was onion dip and potato chips, sardines and pepperoni. We each bet a quarter on the seventh race, and the doctor won with a horse named Hi Side. He kept one of the quarters for himself and then split the rest of his winnings between my brother and me. My father filled the doctor in on what had happened with the bookie.

“Did Mac have time to get the bet in?” he asked.

“I think so,” said my father.

My grandmother shushed them, because the horses for the eighth race were on the track.

The number one horse, Rim Groper, pranced and skittered sideways past the camera as it was introduced. It was white and its mane was in curls. The announcer told us that its colors were magenta and black and that its grandfather had been the amazing Greenbacks.

“Looks like it's got some life in it,” said my mother.

“Seems crazy,” said the doctor and lit a cigar.

My grandmother watched the horses parading toward the starting gate and laughed. The two, the three, and the four horses went by, each looking much like the other—sleek and shiny, leg muscles bulging. Number five, Tecumseh, passed the camera, swaybacked and lethargic.

“There's a wooden Indian,” said my father, laughing at his own joke.

Before we knew it, they were in the starting gate and ready to go. The rain fell in black and white on a black-and-white track that was pure mud.

My grandmother had her fists clenched and her eyes closed. The doctor leaned forward in the rocker. My father put his drink to his mouth and kept drinking until the announcer yelled, “And they're off.” Coming out of the gate first, Rim Groper bucked, but Pedro Avarez held on and moved into a clear lead. The next horse, Cavalcade, was two lengths back, and the rest of the pack was a length behind him with Tecumseh bringing up the rear. My mother said, “Come on, come on,” through clenched teeth. My grandmother tightened her fists, and the thick blue veins of her wrists became visible. My father shoved a cracker with three sardines on it into his mouth.

On the back turn, Rim Groper bucked again, and this time Avarez flew off, hitting the mud with a splash. He was trampled by the pack, rolled and kicked like a log. The camera stayed on the horses as they rounded the turn and moved into the home stretch. Rim Groper, now free of his mount, flew ahead of the other horses. Tecumseh made a startling move on the outside and gained on Cavalcade. The jock on Cavalcade used the whip to force a burst of speed. Tecumseh kept closing. Rim Groper crossed the finish line four lengths in front of the competition. When the real leaders crossed the line, they were nose hair for nose hair and a photo finish was called.

While we waited for the results, the announcer told us that Pedro Avarez had broken his left leg but that he was conscious. “A true competitor,” said the announcer.

“A true bum,” said the doctor.

“The number one horse did finish first,” said my father.

My grandmother shook her head sadly. “I saw the one,” she said. My mother reached over and patted her knee.

“What a tangled web we weave,” said the doctor.

My father made another round of sours. Just after the doctor left, they announced that Tecumseh had edged out Cavalcade, paying thirty to one. Then it was time for my father and me to go pick up my grandfather at the police station.

On the way home, my grandfather told us that later on that afternoon the police had brought in the bookie and busted the whole operation.

“They said they'd let me off if I fingered the guy in the parking lot,” he said. “I saw him there in the lineup, but I'm not that stupid. They tried to sweat me, but eventually I told them they had nothing on me and they had to agree.”

“Did you make the bet?” my father asked.

“Nah,” he said. “I told the guy I couldn't make the wager and since I do so much business with him he accepted my apology this time.”

“I saw the handshake, though,” said my father.

“Just a handshake,” said my grandfather as he leaned over and reached for something beneath the seat of the car. “I had my own dream that the whole thing was bullshit.” He held the roll of cash up for us to see.

My father laughed so hard, he nearly drove off the road.

“I'm going to let them stew over it a little and then give back their cash on Thursday.”

“What was your dream?” asked my father.

“Some crazy twaddle,” he said. “Maisie was in it.”

As it turned out, my grandfather never got the chance to give the others their money back, because on the following Wednesday afternoon, Leo was in a head-on collision on Sunrise Highway and was launched, bald dome first, through the car windshield. My father told me that at the wake Phil put a box of Leo's special cigars in the coffin with him. The card players never met on Thursday nights again.

Following Leo's funeral, the store was closed for quite a few weeks, and when Phil returned, he seemed to have lost all of his frantic energy. The first thing he did was bolt a sign onto the soda fountain that announced that it was permanently closed. He no longer bothered with the black spot in the center aisle and it began to slowly grow. Finally the stress of the loss of his partner caused Phil's right eye to also turn outward. Thinking of what Mrs. Millman had said was the cause of his left eye going bad, I wondered what he was now watching for.

The day he had Tecumseh carted away, Phil stood with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the entrance to the store, unable to focus on us kids to call us by the names he had concocted. I heard from my mother that he moved to Florida to live with his son, whose wife despised him. The store was sold to a young couple, who cleaned it up so that it was shining white inside. They had no names for us, no
Playboy
s over the comics, no dust to make each purchase a discovery.

On Christmas Eve of that same year, the doctor was called out on an emergency. Mrs. Ryan wasn't well. When he arrived at her house sometime after midnight, he found her passed out on the floor next to her bed. More than likely, he determined she had had
a stroke, and then, attempting to lift her, he had one himself and keeled over. It was the news of this incident that infused the dark ace with all its old terror for me again. I went to his wake and funeral as did the rest of the town. When he was laid out in his coffin, I was glad to see that he no longer looked tired. I thought about one time when I was younger and he had come through a blizzard to treat a fever I had. When the fever broke, and I woke from a maddening dream of moonlight and banshees on the baseball diamond, he was sleeping in the rocking chair next to the couch where I lay, his pocket watch in his right hand.

Not too long after the doctor's death, my grandfather had a heart attack while cursing out Dick Van Dyke, whom he hated more than any man alive, and whose show my grandmother insisted on watching every week. The episode didn't kill him, but it paralyzed his left side and made him very weak. After a long stay in the hospital, they sent him home to live out the few weeks he had left.

One afternoon when I was given the task of watching him, he woke up after a long deathlike sleep and told to me to go and fetch my father. When my father got to his bedside, my grandfather used whispers and grunts to instruct him to open the top drawer of the dresser and reach in the back.

“There's a black silk sock back there with something in it,” he managed to get out through the corner of his mouth.

My father reached in, felt around, and pulled out the sock. He turned it over, gave it a shake by the toe, and out fell the wad of money, still rolled and held fast by a green rubber band.

“Play the six in the eighth this Saturday,” he told my father.

My grandfather slipped away three days later. The day of the wake, my father sat my brother and me down on the love seat in the living room and told us, “Mac lived a life….” He told us stories about the old days till he cried, and then he told us to go outside
and play. My mother stared horribly through the whole thing, and my grandmother moaned at night. On Saturday, the day of the funeral, after the guests had left the house, my father and I watched the eighth race. The number six horse, Tea Leaf, went off at twelve-to-one and finished second to last.

I was there on Sunday morning in my grandmother's room when my father gave her the money. She sat in the recliner, looking particularly frail and wrinkled and ancient.

“Mac told me to give this to you for the funeral,” said my father.

Closing her eyes, she took the money and held it above her heart. Then she turned to me and pointed, her hand shaking. “Never forget what you least expect,” she said.