The Drowned Life (6 page)

Lonette had worked the cash register at the grocery. I remembered her passing by our front porch on the way to work the evening shift, and how one afternoon I overheard her telling my
mother that she and Pete had decided to try to start a family. I'm sure I wasn't supposed to be privy to this conversation, but whenever she passed by our house, I tried to make it a point of being near a window. I heard every word through the screen. The very next week, though, I learned that she had some kind of disease. That was three years ago. Over time she slowly grew more haggard. Pete tried to take care of her on his own, but I don't think it had gone all too well. At her funeral, Henry had had to hold him back from climbing into the grave after her.

“Is this murder?” I asked Witzer after he'd turned onto the dirt path and headed out toward the woods.

He looked over at me and said nothing for a second. “I don't know, Ernest,” he said. “Can you murder someone who's already dead? Can you murder a dream? What would you have us do?” He didn't ask the last question angrily but as if he were really looking for a plan other than Jolle's.

I shook my head.

“I'll never see things the same again,” he said. “I keep thinking I'm gonna wake up any minute now.”

We drove on for another half mile and then he pulled the truck off the path and under a cluster of oaks. As we got out of the cab, the sheriff pulled up next to us. Henry, the doctor, and Jolle got out of the cruiser, and all five of us gathered at the back of the pickup. It fell to Witzer and me to get her out of the truck and lay her on the ground some feet away. “Careful,” whispered the old man, as he leaned over the wall of the bed and slipped his arms under her. I took the legs, and when I touched her skin a shiver went through me. Her body was heavier than I expected, and her sex was staring me right in the face, covered with short hair thick as twine. She was breathing lightly, obviously sleeping, and her eyes moved rapidly beneath her closed lids like she was dreaming. She had a powerful aroma, of flowers and candy, sweet to the point of sickening.

We got her on the ground without waking her, and the instant I let go of her legs, I stepped outside the circle of men. “Stand back,” said Jolle. The others moved away. He pulled his gun out of its holster with his left hand and made the sign of the cross with his right. Leaning down, he put the gun near her left temple, and then cocked the hammer back. The hammer clicked into place with the sound of a breaking twig and right then her eyes shot open. Four grown men jumped backward in unison. “Good lord,” said Witzer. “Do it,” said Kvench. I looked to Jolle and he was staring down at her as if in a trance. Her eyes had no color. They were wide and shifting back and forth. She started taking deep raspy breaths and then sat straight up. A low mewing noise came from her chest, the sound of a cat or a scared child. Then she started talking backward talk, some foreign language never heard on earth before, babbling frantically and drooling.

Jolle fired. The bullet caught her in the side of the head and threw her onto her right shoulder. The left side of her face, including her ear, blew off, and this black stuff, not blood, splattered all over, flecks of it staining Jolle's pants and shirt and face. The side of her head was smoking. She lay there writhing in what looked like a pool of oil, and he shot her again and again, emptying the gun into her. The sight of it brought me to my knees, and I puked. When I looked up, she'd stopped moving. Tears were streaming down Witzer's face. Kvench was shaking. Henry looked as if he'd been turned to stone. Jolle's finger kept pulling the trigger, but there were no rounds left.

After Henry tamped down the last shovelful of dirt on her grave, Jolle made us swear never to say a word to anyone about what had happened. I pledged that oath as did the others. Witzer took me straight home, no doubt having silently decided I shouldn't be there when they woke Pete. When I got to the house, I went straight to bed and slept for an entire day, only getting up in
time to get to the gas station for work the next morning. The only dream I had was an infuriating and frustrating one of Lester II, eating hard-boiled eggs and explaining it all to me but in backward talk and gibberish so I couldn't make out any of it. Carrying the memory of that Drunk Harvest miracle around with me was like constantly having a big black bubble of night afloat in the middle of my waking thoughts.

As autumn came on and passed and then winter bore down on Gatchfield, the insidious strength of it never diminished. It made me quiet and moody, and my relationship with Darlene suffered. I kept my distance from the other four conspirators. It went so far as we tried not to even recognize one another's presence when we passed on the street. Only Witzer still waved at me from his pickup when he'd drive by, and if I was the attendant when he came into the station for gas, he'd say, “How are you, boy?” I'd nod and that would be it. Around Christmastime I'd heard from my father that Pete Hesiant had lost his mind and was unable to work; he would break down crying at a moment's notice, couldn't sleep, and was being treated by Kvench with all manner of pills.

Things didn't get any better come spring. Pete shot the side of his head off with a pistol. Mrs. Marfish, who'd gone to bring him a pie she'd baked to cheer him up, discovered him lying dead in a pool of blood on the back porch of the little yellow house. Then Sheriff Jolle took ill and was so bad off with whatever he had, he couldn't get out of bed. He deputized Reed Bocean, the barkeep and the most sensible man in town, to look after Gatchfield in his absence. Reed did a good job as sheriff and Samantha double-timed it at the Blind Ghost—both solid citizens.

In the early days of May, I burned my hand badly at work on a hot car engine and my boss drove me over to Kvench's office to get it looked after. While I was in his treatment room, and he was wrapping my hand in gauze, the doctor leaned close to me and
whispered, “I think I know what happened.” I didn't even make a face, but stared ahead at the eye chart on the wall, not really wanting to hear anything about the incident. “Gatchfield's so isolated that change couldn't get in from the outside, so Nature sent it from within,” he said. “Mutation. From the dream.” I looked at him. He was nodding, but I saw that his goatee had gone squirrelly, there was this overeager gleam in his eyes, and his breath smelled like medicine. I knew right then he'd been more than sampling his own pills. I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

June came, and it was a week away from the day that Witzer and I were to begin practicing for the Drunk Harvest again. I dreaded the thought of it to the point where I was having a hard time eating or sleeping. After work one evening, as I was walking home, the old man pulled up next to me in his pickup truck. He stopped and opened the window. I was going to keep walking, but he called, “Boy, get in. Take a ride with me.” I made the mistake of looking over at him. “It's important,” he said. I got in the cab and we drove off slowly down the street.

I blurted out that I didn't think I'd be able to manage the Harvest and how screwed up the thought of it was making me, but he held his hand up and said, “Shh, shh, I know.” I quieted down and waited for him to talk. A few seconds passed and then he said, “I've been to see Jolle. You haven't seen him have you?”

I shook my head.

“He's a goner for sure. He's got some kind of belly rot, and, I swear to you he's got a deathberry bush growing out of his insides…while he's still alive, no less. Doc Kvench just keeps feeding him pills, but he'd be better off taking a hedge clipper to him.”

“Are you serious?” I said.

“Boy, I'm dead serious.” Before I could respond, he said, “Now look, when the time for the celebration comes around, we're all going to have to participate in it as if nothing had happened. We
made our oath to the sheriff. That's bad enough, but what happens when somebody's dead relative tells them in a Night Whiskey dream what we did, what happened with Lonette?”

I was trembling and couldn't bring myself to speak.

“Tomorrow night—are you listening to me?—tomorrow night I'm leaving my truck unlocked with the keys in the ignition. You come to my place and take it and get the fuck out of Gatchfield.”

I hadn't noticed but we were now parked in front of my house. He leaned across me and opened my door. “Get as far away as you can, boy,” he said.

The next day, I called in sick to work, withdrew all my savings from the bank, and talked to Darlene. That night, good to his word, the keys were in the old pickup. I noticed there was another truck parked next to the old one on his lot to cover for the one we took. I left my parents a letter about how Darlene and I had decided to elope, and that they weren't to worry. I'd call them.

We fled to the biggest, brightest city we could find, and the rush and maddening business of the place, the distance from home, our combined struggle to survive at first, and then make our way, was a curative better than any pill Dr. Kvench could have prescribed. Every day there was change and progress and crazy news on the television, and these things served to shrink but never quite burst the black bubble in my thoughts. Still, to this day, though, so many years later, there's always an evening near the end of September when I sit down to a Night Whiskey, so to speak, and Gatchfield comes back to me in my dreams like some lost relative I'm both terrified to behold and want nothing more than to put my arms around and never let go.

Tonight, on the drive home from work, it was raining like mad. Torrential rain, so that the wipers were on high and everything in the dark world beyond the windshield was severely warped. I'd hit these giant puddles I couldn't see on the side of my lane. They'd throw a momentary curtain of water up in front of me and push the car toward the oncoming traffic. Along Route 537, passing through farm country, I drove blindly into a puddle so huge I almost stalled. At the last second, I saw that there were two cars abandoned in it, and I performed a snaky maneuver of the wheel around them I'd never have been able to do if I'd had time to think about it. Somehow my car kept running, and as I climbed the hill beyond that sump, Elvis came on the radio, singing, “Love Me Tender.” It was right at the top of that hill that I started thinking about ants. Why? I don't know. It started with a memory of the fat ants that climbed on the peach trees in the backyard of the house in which I grew up, and before I knew it there was an infestation of ants between my ears.

 

My grandparents lived in the garage, which had been renovated into an apartment. Out back, next to the shed, my grandfather had this huge green barrel that was for testing boat motors. We didn't have any outboard motors, so the thing just sat there year in and year out, collecting rain water. My brother, Jim, discovered one summer morning that the water in the barrel was filled with what he called “skeleton fish.” He showed me, and, yes, these tiny white creatures made all of white bones no thicker than thread with minuscule death's heads were swimming in the dark water of the barrel. “Watch this,” he said. He walked over to the nearest peach tree and soon returned. Into the barrel, on the calm water, he placed a peach tree leaf, and then on top of that he put a big black ant. The ant, upon landing on the leaf, started scrabbling frantically all around the sides of it. While we watched, Jim sang, “Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main.” Then the leaf started to take on water under the weight of the ant. A puddle formed in the middle of the shiny green boat and slowly grew. Eventually the leaf sank, and the ant was in the water, swimming like crazy with all its many legs, its antennae twitching this way and that. “Here they come,” said Jim. The skeleton fish rose from the depths. In seconds, the ant was surrounded by them. They swarmed thickly, and then slowly, with the speed of a fat flat snowflake falling, they dragged the ant down and down, out of sight, where the rotted leaves of last summer lay. “Davy Jones's Locker,” he said and was heading toward the tree for another when David Kelty came into the backyard and told us the bug spray guy was coming. We got on our bikes and followed the big yellow truck, traveling for blocks in the mysterious fog of its wake.

 

Once I read a book about ants written by an ant expert. It had great photos of ants doing just about anything you could imagine—ants of all colors and sizes and constructions. It said that there are ants that are like farmers, planting and growing crops of fungus in underground fields. It said there are ants that make slaves of other ants. One type of ant herds smaller insects like cattle and keeps them penned up and fattened for the kill. Ants make war. Ants represent some outlandish percentage of the earth's biomass. It said their burrows are “marvels of engineering.”

 

When my sons were younger, we used to take a walk to this place we called the Pit. It was a huge hole in the ground, in the woods, at the edge of town where the pine barrens started. How it got there, I don't know, but it looked like a meteor crater. It was the choice spot in the winter for sleigh riding—everybody launching off the sides and streaking down toward the center. There were plenty of collisions. Once I saw this woman from town, who eventually committed suicide, get struck by a kid on a speeding sleigh. Man, she flew up in the air just like in
The Little Rascals
episode where Spanky and Alfalfa and Darla and Buckwheat go sliding across a golf course on a door or something, hitting golfers. Before that I'd thought the way the golfers flew into the air was funny, overblown comedy, but when I saw it happen to this poor woman that old memory of humor returned mixed with nausea. Anyway, the Pit, yeah, it was remote. Lynn and I went for a walk there with the dog and we found a place where someone had built a fire, and in the charred remains were animal bones. I picked one up and Lynn looked at it and said it was probably the leg bone of a goat (she'd taken a lot of anatomy classes in school). “A fuckin' goat?” I said, all the time thinking, “Weird, suburban religious cult, practicing black magic.” Another time I found a stone arrowhead there.

There was a spot at the rim of the Pit that jutted out over the downward slope. The kids and I would go there, and they would jump off the overhanging ledge of dirt and strike poses in the air before falling onto the slope, after which they'd roll down to the bottom. My job was to sit somewhere nearby, where I had a good view, and judge their jumps. It was nice work if you could get it, because when they were younger any chance to sit was a good thing. All I had to do was make sure that no matter what else happened, their scores added up to be exactly even at the end. The bonus was that all the running they did up to the top of the Pit for the next jump tired them out and they'd fall asleep pretty quickly on those evenings.

So one day, I was sitting there judging, and I looked down at the ground and saw a beautiful, completely clear stone, like a big round pebble made of water. I picked it up and inspected it. It was a perfect piece of quartz crystal—no apparent flaws. From then on, instead of going to the Pit to do the jumping game, we'd go treasure prospecting. In the following months, we found a lot of really nice specimens of clear quartz stones. I used to like to look at the sun through them. Then, on a hot summer afternoon, we were there, poking around in these mounds at the rim where the tree line started, and I noticed these really big ants crawling in and out of holes that had been burrowed in the hill. They were regular big black ants, but get this: on their back section, each had a patch of bright red—I mean like fire-truck red—hair. The color was striking, and when I got down right near them, I could make out the little individual strands of hair, and the patches looked like red crew cuts on their asses. I was amazed. I showed the kids. We went home and I tried to look it up on the Internet: “redihaired ants,” “hairy ants,” “hairy ass ants.” No luck. I looked through my ant book. Nothing. I asked a guy at work who was a biology professor about them. He'd never heard of them. After a while, I just gave up
and when I went back to the Pit I never saw them again. The Pit was filled in earlier this year. I really miss that hole in the ground.

 

For Christmas one year, when we were kids, my sister, Mary, got an ant farm. The box it came in had the coolest illustration on the cover, of ants in tunnels wearing miner's helmets and wielding pickaxes and shovels. One ant was in the foreground, winking out at you from the picture, and beneath him was a statement in red, block letters:
SEE ANTS LIVE AND WORK
. The ant farm was a clear plastic rectangle about three inches thick that sat on a stand and you had to fill it with dirt. Of course, it didn't come with ants. You had to send away to the company for them. So Mary set up the ant farm, filled it with dirt, and sent away for her ants. Well, a couple of months passed and the ants never showed up. The ant farm was relegated to the cellar, the place where all old, broken, and useless toys ended up—sort of a toy graveyard. We were playing down in the cellar one rainy day, and somehow the ant farm got smashed. Okay, nobody gave a damn. It was swept up and thrown out. About a year and a half went by when one day in the mail there came a little brown mailer envelope addressed to Mary, no return address. I was the only one home with her when it arrived. We were curious to see what was in it, because, back then, getting mail when you were a kid was exotic. Inside the envelope she found a plastic tube with a screw-off cap at one end. We had no idea what it was. She unscrewed the cap, tilted the tube, and out onto the marble-topped coffee table spilled about ninety-nine dead ants and one that was just barely alive. The living one turned in circles three times as if one of its back legs were nailed down and then it stopped moving. We sat there and just stared at the pile of dead ants. Then Mary said, with no emotion, “That present was worse than Sea-Monkeys.” We'd thought that ant farm box's main ant's conspira
torial wink had meant, “Kids, you're in for something really special here,” when all along, he was telling us, “Hey, you do know this ant farm thing's really just a stack of shit.”

 

On Saturday nights, my brother and I used to stay up late and watch science-fiction and horror movies on the black-and-white TV.
Attack of the Mushroom People, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Man with X-Ray Eyes
(Milland was the coolest),
The Giant Behemoth
. We'd eat cheap chocolate chip cookies, a quarter for a box, and drink store-brand root beer. It didn't get much better than that; we were farting in silk. One of our favorite movies was
Them,
a story about a giant ant with a bad attitude and an appetite for human flesh. It grew giant because it got too close to an atom bomb explosion. You could shoot this thing with a fucking bazooka and it didn't care. And back then, anything that could withstand the mighty blast of a bazooka was worthy of our admiration. The movie starred James Whitmore. You know who I mean? He's still around—the Miracle-Gro guy, whose eyebrows at some point got too close to an atom bomb explosion. You know the commercials I'm talking about, the ones where there's some goofy-looking woman standing in a garden and beneath her is the statement “World's Largest Tomato.” Shatner made a giant-ant movie years after
Them,
but even though it's hard to beat Shatner's 100 percent cornpone emoting,
Them
is still our favorite. Whitmore plays a highway cop and his portrayal almost rivals the acting job the ant turns in. But there's one spot in the movie where Whitmore's deputy says something to him, as the ant is approaching, along the lines of “Where did it come from?” and Whitmore's response is “I don't care if it's from Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.” Kind of a strange locale to refer to, no? Especially considering the film is set in the Southwest near where they'd test atom bombs in the fifties.

But more than a decade after those late nights watching
Them,
I would meet and marry a girl from Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. There are more things in heaven and earth…my friend.

 

At night, when he'd come in late from work, my father often brought me a carton, like the kind you get for Chinese takeout, filled with tapioca pudding. He told me it was frog eyes, and I was young enough to believe it. I'd sit with him at the dining room table while he ate his heated-up leftovers. We'd sit in the dark in the dining room, and he'd say nothing. I'd eat the pudding slowly because as soon as I was done I was supposed to go to bed. One night, after he finished eating, he pushed back his plate, lit a cigarette, and told me, “I heard a radio show on the way home from work about ants.” I nodded. He said, “It was about these scientists who were studying a special kind of ant down in the Amazon jungle. They were interested in finding a queen ant to study, so they'd dig down into the ant burrows and find the queen's nest. The queen is bigger than all the other ants, so she was easy to find. They then took the queen from this one nest and put it in their field box to take back to the lab they'd set up, which was a half mile away. But when they got back to the lab, they found the ant was not in the box. It had vanished. This happened to them three days in a row and they couldn't figure out how the ant was escaping, since it was a plastic container with a snap-on lid that was always snapped shut when they'd go to open it. When they would go back to the ant hive the next day, they always found a new queen ant in the nest. Then one of the scientists got this crazy idea into his head that the queen ant they found every day was the same exact ant. Nobody believed him, so, when they collected the next queen, he marked it with a dot of blue dye. On the walk back to the lab, they checked the specimen box a couple times and the ant was in
there, but when they reached the lab, they opened the box and it was gone. The next day, back at the nest, they found a queen ant and it was marked with the blue dye. The only explanation they could come up with was that it had somehow teleported itself out of the box, passing through the plastic and across space and time, and reappeared in the nest. Eventually the local natives corroborated the fact that the queen of this type of ant had the power to disappear and appear wherever and whenever it wanted to.” My father looked at me and I nodded.

“What do you think of that?” he asked.

“How?” I asked.

“Well, the guy on the show said he thought it had developed this ability through evolution over millions of years as a defense mechanism.”

“Oh,” I said. I finished my pudding and went to bed.

This is a very vivid recollection for me, and in later years I wondered what the hell this radio show was he'd been listening to. I remember that one other time when he came home and I waited up for him, he told me about a show he'd listened to where they spoke about the fact that Catholicism was actually based on a mushroom cult and that all the stuff in the Bible was a secret code for information and stories about sacred mushrooms.