Free The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford Page A

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.

A FEW THINGS ABOUT ANTS
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    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.
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    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.
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    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