The Drowned Life (25 page)

At the end of the production, the players bowed to thundering applause. We were then instructed to hold high our fans and to wave them as hard as we could. Everyone in the audience and onstage paddled the air with all they had, creating two hundred small gusts of wind that joined together to form a great gale that gave comfort and left no one unchanged. Afterward, some danced the Combarue to the sound of Constable Garrett's harmonica while the children played hide-and-seek in the dark. We all drank punch and talked and laughed late into the night until the torches burned out.

On our walk home by the light of the stars, Lyda turned to me and divulged how, when she and some of the other neighbors were clearing out Grandmother Young's house, she'd discovered, beneath the bed, a set of loose papers that held the plans for the festival and the outline of the play. “By then the Colonel was putting the scheme she'd taught him into action, and so I kept it a secret from everyone so as not to ruin the surprise,” she said. I told her I
was glad she had, just as we passed the bench in the shadow of the strange old oak that gave birth to blue bats, and we caught sight of Alfred Lessert and Peggy Frushe sharing a kiss. “Some things never change,” I whispered.

Wearily, we crawled into bed that night, and I lay for a long time with my eyes closed, listening to Lyda's steady breathing and the sound of a breeze sifting through the screen of our open window. My thoughts, at first, were filled with the sights and sounds of the festival—the glow of the torches, the masks, the laughter—but these eventually gave way to the sole image of that old wizard, alone on his mountain in the far north. Through the falling snow, I noticed his beard and recognized his wrinkled face. Murmuring some incantation, he lifted his wand. Then he nodded once, granting me my wish, and I realized I must be dreaming.

It was a few months after Lynn and baby Jack and I moved into the left half of a ninety-year-old duplex on Harris Avenue that I met Gil. He came to the front door one night—a medium-built, dark-haired guy with a face that had definitely been punched more than once. Pointing over my shoulder, he told me his house was the one behind mine. “I'm your neighbor,” he said, and I shook his hand. He laughed and asked if I wouldn't mind giving him a ride down into Camden. “I don't have a car,” he said. I hesitated a minute, because Camden wasn't the safest place at night. “I just have to pick something up at a friend's place,” he said. “Five minutes, no longer.” His smile seemed genuine, so I agreed, wanting to act the good neighbor. I told Lynn I'd be back in a few minutes. On the way to the car, I noticed he limped.

Driving down Harris, Gil told me about how he'd gotten his house with the money that came to him from a job-injury claim. “My back,” he said, smiling. I nodded while out the windshield I could see the neighborhood getting shittier. “I worked sanitation
for the state,” he said. Eventually, he had me turn off Harris and onto a backstreet. A few seconds later, by his instruction, I pulled up in front of a big dilapidated place. All the lights were out inside and the front porch sagged. “One minute,” said Gil before he left the car. The instant he was gone, I knew the trip was a bad idea. A lot of the other houses on the street were boarded up and falling apart. There were no working streetlights. More than ten minutes passed, and I started to get nervous. Eventually I saw him through the passenger window, hobbling toward the car. “Let's get out of here,” he said as he got in.

“Did you just score weed?” I asked as I pulled away.

Gil laughed and nodded.

Before I went home, I stopped over at his house. As we passed through the doorway, I noticed that there were two live parrots on perches on the porch of the other half of his duplex. They whistled in unison. “I hate those two fucks,” said Gil. “When the big, crazy kid from down the block gets them going, they don't shut up for hours.”

There was a guy sitting on the couch in his living room, staring at the television, which wasn't on. “This is the guy I share the house with,” said Gil, and he introduced us. Ellis seemed shy and had kind of pointy ears, and looked like he'd just finished weeping. I thought he might be brain-damaged. Then we all smoked, and just as I caught the first inkling of a buzz, Gil said, pointing at his friend, “This guy knows everything about vitamins.”

“Yeah,” said Ellis as he took a hit and nodded. As he passed me the joint, Gil said to him, “Go get your supply and show him.”

“Okay,” said Ellis, and he went into the back of the house somewhere.

Gil finished off the weed and while he stubbed the roach in the ashtray he laughed. “He's got a case of vitamins in there,” he said. “He spends a fortune on the shit. Takes them three times a day, a dozen at a clip.”

“Is he sick or something?” I asked.

“He tells me it's going to increase his mental capacity.”

We couldn't laugh because Ellis was back, carrying a red suitcase. He laid it on the coffee table and unzipped it. As he lifted the flap, a few brown bottles rolled out onto the floor. It was a king's ransom in vitamins. He picked up one of the escaped bottles and read the label. “Essential Oil of Sea Arrow,” he said. Looking at me with his droopy eyes, he added, “It activates the pineal gland.” We heard the parrots whistle and Gil and I laughed. Ellis gathered his bottles and zipped up his case.

Two days later, I was in the park, pushing baby Jack in his stroller, when I saw this guy running in the afternoon heat, shirtless but wearing jeans and work boots. As we headed across the sunburned lawn toward the pond, I saw him dashing beneath the trees all along the perimeter of the park. Otherwise, it was high noon and the place was deserted. I sat on my usual bench, Jack next to me in the stroller, beneath a giant oak that could catch a breeze even on the hottest days.

We sat there in silence for a long time and I told Jack to watch the sunbeams on the pond. I closed my eyes for a second, feeling as if I could just doze off, but then felt something move on the bench beside me. I opened my eyes and saw the runner. He was sitting there lighting a cigarette. He had curly hair and his muscled arms were loaded with tattoos. When he saw I was awake, he put his hand out toward me to shake. “You met my cousin the other day,” he said.

I shook his hand. “Who?” I asked.

“Gil,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “He lives right behind me.”

“He told me you took him down into Camden the other night.”

“I did.”

“Don't ever do that again,” he said. “I know where you went. On that street, you're lucky somebody didn't walk up behind you and put one in your skull.”

“It didn't look so great,” I said.

“Yeah, don't go back there. That house is a meth lab run by bikers.”

“Thanks,” I told him.

He crushed out his cigarette and stood up. “Back to work,” he said.

“It's a hot day to be running,” I said.

“I'm trying to get clean,” he said. “I need to sweat.” He took off, jogging at first, and eventually broke into a full run.

Thursday night, I went over to Gil's to play poker. When I arrived, Gil let me in and put a beer in my hand. His cousin Bobby was there and Ellis was sitting on the couch.

“I heard you met Bobby,” said Gil.

“Yeah,” I said, nodded, and waved to Ellis. Bobby came up beside me and pointed to an elderly Asian gentleman, sitting in the corner. “That's Ming the Merciless,” he said. The old man laughed and made his big cigar into a smoking middle finger. He wore suspenders and a rumpled white shirt.

We got down to playing cards at the dining room table. Gil dealt first. I was good at drinking beer but lousy at cards. Before the deck made the rounds twice, I was out a pocketful of nickels.

During a beer break, Gil had gone to the bathroom and Bobby was in the kitchen. Ellis sat on one side of me and the old man on the other. Ming asked me for a light, and I asked him what his name was. “It's not really Ming, is it?” He smiled and shook his head, but at the same time told me, “What difference does it make?”

I broke a dollar bill and lost it all, a nickel at a time. Ellis told everybody about a dream he'd had a lot recently.

“Every night almost, a winged creature,” he said.

“A winged creature?” said Bobby and laughed.

“I heard there's a vitamin you can take for that,” said Gil.

“Fuck you,” Ellis said.

Ming smiled and laid out a full house like he was opening a fan.

Bobby told Gil about an old friend of theirs, Pussy, who was in some motorcycle gang called the Grim Business. He'd recently been shot dead in a tattoo parlor in South Philly. Ming folded for the night, and as we played on, quietly told us a story about his restaurant, the Golden Dragon, which stood across the street from the house Lynn and I rented. He swore that Marilyn Monroe had stopped there one night for dinner.

“Ming, come on,” said Gil, smiling. “Wasn't she dead before you opened that place?”

“His bullshit is merciless,” said Bobby.

The old man smiled and continued describing Monroe's yellow dress with the plunging neckline and how her breasts had hypnotized him. “She ordered the moo goo gai pan,” he said. I pictured her on the wide sidewalk in front of the restaurant, oak roots rumpling the concrete and leaves shading the place. She smoked a cigarette, standing beneath that painting of a dog-headed dragon in gold leaf and fire-engine red.

The restaurant was boarded up now, but Ming said he and his wife still lived there. The fancy red lacquered architecture had rotted and every now and then a chunk of the facade would just fall off onto the sidewalk. Since the beginning of the warm weather, wasps had invaded the rotting beams, and I could hear them buzzing all the way across the street through the screen of my bedroom window.

I lost about eight bucks that first night of cards, drank too much, and smoked too much weed. After Bobby and Ming left and Ellis
went off to bed, I said to Gil, “You mean to tell me that guy Ming and his wife live over there in that fuckin' restaurant?”

Gil nodded. “He doesn't even have electricity. I'm not sure if they have water.”

“That's messed up,” I said. “He's no spring chicken. How do they get by?”

“I don't know,” said Gil. He took a drink of beer and then told me, “Things went in the toilet when Mrs. Ming got some weird virus. Ming doesn't know what to do. In the beginning when she wasn't completely out of it, she'd whisper orders and recipes from a cot in a back room. Me and Bobby'd go over there for dinner occasionally. After a while, though, she just shrieked in pain and that's when the workers split on him. The customers never came back.”

That night I awoke around three a.m. and went downstairs for a glass of water. When I returned to the bedroom, I looked out the window and saw a shadow across the street, pacing slowly back and forth in front of the boarded-up entrance to the Golden Dragon. Every now and then, the glowing cherry of a cigar ash flared.

I made the mistake of telling Lynn that Bobby and Gil used to be heroin addicts. She said she didn't want either of them around the house and wished I wouldn't go over there on Thursday nights. I told her both of them were clean and weren't using. She didn't look convinced. “You have responsibilities,” she said, referring to the fact that it had fallen to me to watch baby Jack because she had to go to work. “Hey, I'm on it,” I said. I spent my days pushing a stroller, doling out the oatmeal and mashed peas, and playing a game Jack and I made up called Paradise Garden. I'd shown Jack the sign above the restaurant on one of our walks, and we pretended that there was a golden dragon that owned the garden.

One night, after Lynn got home from work, put a chicken in for dinner, and was playing with Jack on the living room rug, a call came through from the hospital. There'd been a big accident on
Admiral Wilson Boulevard and they needed extra nurses. I told her I'd take her, worried about her driving through Camden alone in the dark. She had a glass of wine and then went to put her uniform back on. A half hour later, we got in the car, baby Jack in his car seat in the back. There was a traffic jam where Harris Avenue met Route 130, detour traffic from the big accident. We sat in that for a long time before things started moving.

Jack and I finally arrived back home after dropping Lynn off. As I opened the front door, I could see all the way into the kitchen through living room and dining room, where Bobby and Gil were sitting at the table. When they saw me, they waved. I walked back there, wondering how they'd gotten in with the doors locked. I was a little scared. On the way, I put Jack down near his toy box in the dining room. When I hit the kitchen, Bobby said, “Dinner time.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“There was a chicken in the oven,” said Gil and they both stood up.

I then noticed a faint smell of smoke and saw the open oven door and window.

“We were sitting over at Gil's and saw the smoke coming out from under the door,” said Bobby. “We ran over, but your door was locked. So we broke in through the window. Check it out,” he said, and waved over his shoulder for me to follow him out the back door. On the little metal table where Lynn kept her gardening tools sat a roasting pan with a perfectly blackened chicken in it.

Bobby stuck his finger into the bird and it shattered. “I think it's done,” he said.

After Lynn heard about the chicken incident, Thursday night poker was no longer an issue. It was a good respite for me from the parenting life, interacting with adults for a few hours each week. It didn't hurt anything. I usually won a little money, had a few beers, smoked a joint, and stumbled home before 1:30.
Gil came to the back fence one afternoon when Jack and I were outside, and asked me if I'd hold the extension ladder for him so he could pull some bird's nests down from the eaves of his house. The sound of their chirping was freaking Ellis out. I put the baby in his playpen near the garden, straddled the low picket fence, and grabbed the rungs of the ladder. He hobbled up thirty feet with his bum leg and started dislodging handfuls of hay and twigs, shredded cigarette filters, and bits of string. The detritus rained down, dreamlike. But right in the middle of the slow falling—
plop, plop, plop
—three sightless baby birds hit the ground like ripe fruit.

I took Jack inside, but watched from the open kitchen window as Gil dug a hole. I couldn't see because of the fence, but I knew when he scooted them, writhing and chirping, into their grave.

“This is really fucked,” I heard him say to himself. He shook his head, and then he put the dirt in. We heard them from underground for the rest of the afternoon and so did their mother, who landed in the lilac and frantically called. “I oughta kill her too,” he said to me later as we had a cup of coffee in my kitchen, “but then where would it end?”

The next night, the old man Ming came late to the poker game. He remained standing quietly by the door in his overcoat and hat. One by one, each of us at the table stopped talking and drinking and looked over at him. There was a long silence, and then he said, “Would one of you accompany me back to the Golden Dragon? I believe my wife has died.”

“Why don't you call the cops?” said Gil, pointing to the phone.

“I don't want the cops,” said Ming.

“I'll go,” said Bobby. “Let me just get the flashlight.”

“My wife's a nurse,” I said.

“Okay,” said Ming. “Meet us.”

Trying to explain the whole thing at once to Lynn wasn't easy,
but luckily baby Jack was asleep in his crib, and she didn't mind running across the street to check things out. She knew Ming from occasionally talking to him on the sidewalk, and he'd always been nice to her.