The Drowned Life

by Jeffrey Ford

  The second reason the meeting was canceled was that Grandmother Young passed away on the Tuesday before the meeting, and although she had grown very frail of recent years, the entire town was surprised and saddened by her passing. She was Lipara’s oldest citizen, 125 years old, and we all loved her. True to her no-nonsense approach to life, her last words spoken to my wife, who was among a group of neighbors who were taking shifts watching over her in her final hours, were “Death has got to be less dull than Lipara these days.” Her funeral was as grand as we could muster in our downtrodden condition, and the mayor allocated funds so that a special monument to her memory could be erected in the town square. As her coffin was lowered into the ground, Colonel Pudding, sitting on a perch we’d positioned near the grave, shed baby-doll tears and uttered his one-word eulogy: “Mama.” Then he spread his wings, took off into the sky, and flew out of sight.

  The days passed into summer and we dreamed our dreams of eating peas and clipping our toenails. It seemed nothing would break the spell that had settled upon the town. We sleepwalked through the hours and greeted one another with half-nods and feeble grins. Not even the big fleecy clouds that passed overhead took on the shapes of dragons or pirate ships as they had once upon a time. Just when the stasis became almost intolerable, something happened. It wasn’t much, but we clung to it like ants on a twig being swept downriver.

  Mildred Johnson was sitting up late one night reading a new book concerning the egg-laying habits of yellow hens. Her husband had already gone to bed, as had her daughter, Jessica. The reading wasn’t the most exciting, and she’d dozed off in her chair. Some time later, she woke very suddenly to the sound of low murmuring coming from her daughter’s room. She got up and went to the half-open door of the bedroom to check on the girl, but when she peeked in she saw, in a shaft of moonlight, something moving on the bed next to Jessica’s pillow. Her first thought was that it was a rat and she screamed. The thing looked up, startled, and in that moment, before it flew out the window, she saw the smooth, fixed, baby-doll expression of Colonel Pudding.

  The parrot’s return and the unusual particulars of the sighting could not exactly be classified as bizarre, but there was enough of an oddness to it to engender a mild titillation of the populace. Where had the bird been hiding since the funeral? What was its midnight message? Was it simply lost and had wandered in the open window or was there some deeper purpose to its actions? These were some of the questions that set off a spark or two in the otherwise dimmed minds of Lipara. As speculation grew, there were more reports of Colonel Pudding visiting the rooms of the town’s sleeping children. It was advised by the pastor at Sunday service that all windows of youngsters’ bedrooms be kept closed at night, and the congregation nodded, but just the opposite was practiced, as parents and children alike all secretly wanted to be involved in the mystery.

  Beyond his nighttime visits, the parrot began to be spotted also in broad daylight, flitting here and there just above the rooftops of the town. One afternoon during the first week of summer vacation, he was seen perched on Mavis Toth’s left shoulder, yammering into her ear as she walked to the bank. Something was going on, we were sure of it, but what it was, no one had the slightest idea. Or I should say, none of us adults had a clue. The children of Lipara, on the other hand, took to whispering, gathering in groups and talking excitedly until a grown-up drew near. Even usual truants of the school year, like the master of spitballs, Alfred Lessert, began spending vacation days at the schoolhouse under the pretense of doing math problems for fun. It was the belief of some that a conspiracy was afoot. Parents slyly tried to coax their children into divulging a morsel of information, but their sons and daughters only stared quizzically, either pretending not to know what their folks were getting at or really not knowing. Miss Toth came under scrutiny as well, and instead of really answering questions, she nodded a great deal, played with the chain that held her reading glasses, and forced a laugh when nothing else would do.

  The intrigue surrounding the schoolhouse and the town’s children remained of mild interest to the adults throughout the summer, but as always, the important tasks of business and household chores took precedence and finally overwhelmed their attention, so that they did not mark the vanishing of old newspapers and cups of flour. As the first anniversary of the wind’s failure to appear drew closer we tried to pull tight the reins of our speculation as to what would happen this year. In our private minds we all wondered whether the present state of limbo would be split by the gale again howling through town, or if the time would again pass without incident and give further proof that the dreaming weirdness had run its course for good, never to return.

  One Friday morning in late August, I went to the mailbox and found a piece of folded paper, colored green, and cut into the shape of a parrot feather. I opened it and read: COLONEL PUDDING INVITES YOU TO THE FESTIVAL OF THE DREAMING WIND. The date was the very next day, the time, sundown, and the location, the town square. It went on to proclaim: BRING ONLY YOUR DREAMS. I smiled for the first time since the end of the previous summer, and I was so out of practice that the muscles of my face ached slightly. As old and slow as I was, I ran up the path, calling to Lyda. When she saw the invitation, she actually laughed and clapped her hands.

  Late the next afternoon, just before twilight, we left the house and walked to the town square. It was a beautiful evening—pink, orange, and purple in the west where the sun had already sunk half below the horizon. The sky above was dark blue and a few stars were beginning to show themselves. A slight breeze blew, enough to keep the gnats and mosquitoes at home. We held hands and walked in silence, joined along the way by other townspeople heading in the direction of the festival.

  The town square had been transformed. Streamers of gold paper were draped upon the picket fences and snaked around the light posts. In the southern corner, rows of folding chairs had been set up facing a slightly raised, makeshift stage that had been formed from wooden pallets. Two tall poles on either side supported a patchwork curtain comprised of a number of old comforters safety-pinned together. Six lit torches had been set up around the performance area, casting a soft glow that became increasingly magical as the sky darkened. Constable Garrett, big cigar in the corner of his mouth, dressed in a colorful muumuu and wearing a bow in his hair, acted the usher, making us form a line a short distance from the seating. We complimented him on his outfit, telling him how lovely he looked, and he nodded wearily as usual and answered, “What did you expect?”

  All around the festival area, Lipara’s children moved busily, with purpose, and in the middle of this bustle of activity stood Miss Toth, her skin blue, her hair a wig of rubber snakes, whispering directions and leaning down to put her ear closer to the ideas and questions of her students. Suddenly all was quiet and still but for the flickering of the torch flames. “Please have your tickets ready,” said Garrett, and he held his hand up and waved us on. Before taking our seats, we were directed to three long tables upon which lay painted papier-mâché masks of animal heads, household items, seashells. The masks could be affixed to one’s head by wire ear loops. Mixed in among the masks were newspaper hats, and at the end of each table was a stack of cardboard fans.

  I settled on a mask that made my head a can of beans, and Lyda adopted the visage of a barnyard chick. Mildred Johnson’s face became a bear paw; her husband’s a bright yellow sun. Beck Harbuth chose a dog mask, and Mayor James Meersch turned away from the table a green monkey. Once everyone was something else, we put our newsprint caps on our heads, took our fans, and went to sit before the stage. The show started promptly. Miss Toth appeared from behind the curtain, carrying a hat rack, which she set down next to her. She welcomed us all and thanked us for coming, introduced Colonel Pudding—creator and founder of the Festival of the Dreaming Wind—and walked off the stage. A moment later, from over our heads, there came the sound of flapping wings, and Colonel Pudding landed on the top of the hat rack. He screeched three times, lifted his
wings, bobbed his head twice, and said, “Mama, The Tale of the Dreaming Wind. Once upon a time…” before flying away. Jessica Johnson ran out from behind the curtain, whisked the perch off the stage, and the play began.

  The play was about a great wizard who lived, with his wife and daughter, in a castle way up in the mountains. He was a good wizard, practicing only white magic, and for anyone who made the arduous journey to see him, he would grant a wish as long as it benefited someone else. The only two wishes he would not grant were those for riches or power. A chorus of younger children sang songs that filled us in on the details of life upon the mountain. White confetti blew across the stage, becoming snow, to mark the passage of time.

  Then the wizard’s wife, whom he loved very much, caught a chill that progressed into pneumonia. It soon became clear that she was dying, and no matter what spells of enchantment he tried to work, nothing could cure her. When she finally died, he was deeply saddened, as was his daughter. He began to realize that there were things in the world his magic couldn’t control, and he became very protective of his daughter, fearing she would succumb to the same fate as her mother. He had promised his wife that he would always love the girl and keep her safe. This responsibility grew in his mind to overshadow everything, and the least little cut to her finger or scrape on her knee caused him great anguish.

  Time passed and the girl grew older and developed a mind of her own. She wanted to go down the mountain and meet other people. The wizard knew that there were all manner of dangers waiting for her out in the world. Before she got to the age where he knew he could no longer stop her from leaving, he cast a spell on her that put her into a profound sleep. To protect her, he encased her in a large seed pod with a window so that he could see her face when he needed to. There she slept, her age unchanging, and he finally felt some relief.

  He noticed at the end of the first year of her protective sleep that she must be dreaming, because he could see through the window the figures and forms of her dreams swirling around her. It became clear to him that if he didn’t find some way to siphon out the dreams, they would eventually fill the seed pod to bursting, so, using his magic, he cast a spell that added a spigot to the top of the structure. Once a year, as summer turned to fall, he’d climb a stepladder, turn the spigot, and release her pent-up dreams. They sprayed forth from within like a geyser, gathering themselves up into a kind of cloud that, when fully formed, rushed out the castle window. The mountain winds caught the girl’s dreams and drove them south, where their vitality affected everything they touched.

  As the story unfolded on the stage before me, I was amazed at the quality of the production and how ingenious the props were. The seed pod that contained the wizard’s daughter was a large luggage bag covered with glitter, with a window cut to reveal the girl’s face. Her dreams swirling within were colored paper cutouts of small figures—different animals and people and objects—attached to thin sticks that the daughter, played wonderfully by the beautiful Peggy Frushe, controlled with her hands, hidden from sight, and made sail gracefully before her closed eyes. When the dreams were released by the turning of the spigot, they took the form of younger children in colorful costumes, who whirled madly around the stage and then gathered together before blowing south. And what was even more amazing was that the errant Alfred Lessert, with his freckles and shock of red hair, played the troubled wizard with a pathos that transcended drama and stepped neatly into reality.

  While I sat there, noting the remainder of the play, wherein a youth comes to the far north to beg for a wish to be granted, discovers the girl and frees her, does battle with her father, who just before killing the lad with a deadly spell, succumbs to his daughter’s pleas and spares him, letting the young couple flee down the mountain toward freedom, I was preoccupied, seeing my own years in Lipara unfold on a wooden-pallet stage in my mind. Before I knew it the action transpiring in front of me had rushed on, and the wizard was delivering his final soliloquy, a blessing for the couple, amid a blizzard of falling snow. “Out there in the world, my dear,” he said, calling after his daughter, and scanning the crowd to look at each of us, “the wind will blow both beautiful and bitter, and there’s no telling which it will be whenever the boughs bend and the leaves rustle. There is no certainty but that there is no certainty. Hold tight to each other and don’t be afraid, for sometimes, in the darkest night, that wind may even bring you dreams.”

  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.

  THE GOLDEN DRAGON

  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 doorw
ay, 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.