The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford Read Free Book Online

drunk’s head slamming the side of the pickup bed. I’d wake and sit up straight, shivering. Each time this happened, I tried to remember to see who it was in my dream, because it always seemed to be the same person. Two nights before the celebration, I saw a tattoo of a coiled cobra on the fellow’s bicep as he fell and knew it was Henry Grass. I thought of telling Witzer, but I didn’t want him to think I was just a scared kid.
    The last Saturday in September finally came and after sundown my mother and father and I left the house and strolled down the street to the Blind Ghost. People were already starting to arrive and from inside I could hear the band tuning up fiddles and banjos. Samantha Bocean had decorated the place for the event—black crepe paper draped here and there and wrapped around the support beams. Hanging from the ceiling on various lengths of fishing line were the skulls of all manner of local animals: coyote, deer, beaver, squirrel, and a giant black bear skull suspended over the center table where the lottery winners were to sit and partake of their drink. I was standing on the threshold, taking all this in, feeling the same kind of enchantment as when I was a kid and Mrs. Musfin would hang lights and tinsel in the three classrooms of the schoolhouse for Christmas, when my father leaned over to me and whispered, “You’re on your own tonight, Ernest. You want to drink, drink. You want to dance, dance.” I looked at him and he smiled, nodded, and winked. I then looked at my mother and she merely shrugged, as if to say, “That’s the nature of the beast.”
    Old man Witzer was sitting there at the bar, and he called me over and handed me a cold beer. Two other of the town’s oldest men were with him, his chess-playing buddies, and he put his arm around my shoulders and introduced them to me. “This is a good boy,” he said, patting my back. “He’ll do Bo Elliott proud out thereunder the trees.” His two friends nodded and smiled at me, the most notice I’d gotten from either of them my entire life. And then the band launched into a reel, and everyone turned to watch them play. Two choruses went by and I saw my mother and father and some of the other couples move out onto the small dance floor. I had another beer and looked around.
    A few songs later, Sheriff Jolle appeared in the doorway to the bar and the music stopped mid-tune.
    â€œOkay,” he said, hitching his pants up over his gut and removing his black, wide-brimmed hat, “time to get the lottery started.” He moved to the center of the bar, where the Night Whiskey drinker’s table was set up, and took a seat. “Everybody drop your lottery tickets into the hat and make it snappy.” I guessed that this year it was Samantha Bocean who was going to drink her own concoction since Reed stayed behind the bar and she moved over and took a seat across from Jolle. After the last of the tickets had been deposited into the hat, the sheriff pushed it away from him into the middle of the table. He called for a whiskey neat, and Reed was there with it in a flash. In one swift gulp, the sheriff drained the glass, banged it onto the tabletop, and said, “I’m ready.” My girlfriend Darlene’s stepmom came up from behind him with a black scarf and tied it around his eyes. Reaching into the hat, he ran his fingers through the lottery tickets, mixing them around, and then started drawing them out one by one and stacking them in a neat pile in front of him on the table. When he had all seven, he stopped and pulled off the blindfold. He then read the names in a loud voice and everyone kept quiet till he was finished—Becca Staney, Stan Joss, Pete Hesiant, Berta Hull, Moses T. Remarque, Ronald White, and Henry Grass. The room exploded with applause and screams. The winners smiled, dazed by having won, as their friends and family gathered round them and