The Drowned Life

by Jeffrey Ford

  One Thursday night when my grandmother had taken sick after dinner and my father was not home from work yet with the car, my mother sent me to fetch my grandfather from the store. I wasn’t usually allowed out that late, but my grandmother needed the milk of magnesia and my grandfather had put it somewhere and never told her where it was. It was a week before Halloween and the night was cold and windy. The trip down the back road spooked me as barren branches clicked together and dead leaves scraped the pavement. When the Beware of Dog lunged out of the shadows, barking behind its chain-link fence, I jumped and ran the rest of the way, thinking about a boy who had lived on that block and had been hit by a car and killed over the summer.

  When I made it to the store, I opened the door and went inside. The lights were out and the place was still. I walked quietly up the aisle, noticing how all of the toys and books appeared different at night, as if when no one was looking they might come to life. A muffled voice drifted up from the back of the store, and I followed its trail behind the soda fountain to the door of the stock room. They all saw me standing there, but no one acknowledged my presence because the doctor was talking. I stood still and listened, trying not to seem too interested in the ladies on the walls.

  Dr. Geller was a short, heavyset man with wavy black hair and a face nearly as wide as the seat of a fountain stool. I never saw him that he wasn’t yawning or rubbing his eyes. When he’d come to the house on visits to tend to my brother and me, he would finish his examinations and then sit down in my mother’s rocker where he’d fall asleep, smoking a cigar. In his vest pocket he had a silver watch on a chain he would let us see if we did not flinch at the bite of the needle.

  His voice came out cracked and weary amid sighs of defeat as he told about how Joe, the barber, had a heart attack and was lying on the floor of his shop facedown among the curls of hair. “Five minutes after I checked his vital signs and pronounced him dead,” said Geller, “Joe stood up, took the little whisk broom from his back pocket, cleaned the chair he was closest to, and then spun it around for the next customer. His eyes were rolled back in his head and blood was leaking from his nose, but he spoke to me. ‘Trim and a shave?’ he asked. And I said, ‘Nothing today, Joe.’ After that he fell back onto the floor and died for good.” The doctor drew on his big cigar, and my grandfather called me over and put me on his lap.

  • TWO •

  My grandfather was a powerful man even in old age. He had been a boxer, a merchant marine, a deep-sea diver. There was a tattoo on his left bicep that when looked at straight on was a heart with an arrow through it, filigree work around the borders. Across the center of the heart, written in vein blue, was my grandmother’s name, Maisie. When you looked at the same design over his shoulder, as he had my brother and me do sometimes, standing on the dining room table, the image became a naked woman bending over, waving to you from between her legs.

  “Don’t tell your mother,” he’d say and laugh like a bronchial wolf.

  He was well respected among the card players, because he had an inside line at the track. He worked in the boiler room at Aqueduct Raceway—the Big A. Over the years he had struck up as many friendships as he could with the jockeys, the paddock boys, the ticket punchers. Whatever the word was on a given horse, he made it his business to know before it was led into the starting gate. In addition, he studied the Telegraph, which he called the horse paper, as if it were a sacred text, working the odds, comparing the results of stakes races, jotting down times and blood lines in the margins. He knew a lot about Thoroughbreds and won a considerable amount of the time, but, still, he was not the best handicapper in the house. A constant point of aggravation for him was not so much that when my grandmother bet she would invariably win but that her method lacked any logical cogitation.

  Her winners came from her dreams. “Last night, I saw yards and yards of burgundy silk,” she said at breakfast one morning, and later that day she put two dollars to win on a horse, Rip’s Burgundy, running in the eighth. My grandfather scowled and rolled his eyes. “Bullshit,” he said, but when the race was over, a horse he had considered a total pig had come out of nowhere on the back turn and scorched the field.

  Whenever she was about to go to the track she had these dreams. Sometimes she saw numbers, sometimes it was just a fleeting glimpse of something that had to do with a horse’s name she’d find in the morning line. No matter how sure she was of her bets, though, she would never play more than two dollars. Because of this, her winnings never seemed as spectacular as my grandfather’s.

  Her other talent was for reading futures from an ordinary deck of playing cards. About once every two months, she and my mother would have a little get-together of the neighborhood ladies. They’d drink sherry from teacups, eat thin sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and gossip. After everyone was a little tipsy, the women would beg my grandmother to take out the cards and read their fortunes. Everyone pretended it was just for fun, but even from the back room, where I’d be perusing the latest Green Lantern, I knew when it was happening because of the sudden silence. Then I’d drop my comic and hurry out to see.

  She’d be sitting at the dining room table across from Mrs. Sutton or Mrs. Kelty, her pupils obscured by the rims of her glasses, her lips pursed and moving, staring at the white tablecloth where she was about to place the cards. She would then say, “You must cross my palm with silver.” A quarter was the going rate. The blue curtains behind her were always filled with a breeze when 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.” She’d lay the cards faceup in groups of five. This was followed by a period of silence in which the ladies smiled at one another. Her first line was always, “You are about to meet a man,” and broken clues to this liaison would, thereafter, pepper the reading.

  The only vacations my grandparents ever took were to racetracks. The autumn following the summer of the death of Joe, the barber, they took a trip up to Rockingham Park in New Hampshire. The first night at the hotel, my grandmother ate oysters and had a dream about violet smoke. She told my grandfather at breakfast and he said, “Jeez, here we go,” and checked the morning line to see if there were any horses names that had anything to do with violet smoke. She made him slowly read off the names and finally decided on a horse in the fifth race called Quiet Pleas.

  “What’s that got to do with smoke?” asked my grandfather.

  “It’s kind of wifty like it,” she said.

  “You’re wifty,” he said and shook his head, but later, at the ticket window, he had a feeling and also put fifty dollars on Quiet Pleas to win. When the horse paid enough for them to ride home in a new car, he began to see the beauty of it.

  • THREE •

  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 grandfat
her, “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.

  • FOUR •

  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.