The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford

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 conspiratorial 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.”
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    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.
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    At night, when he’d come in late from work, my father often brought me a carton, like the