Novel

by George Singleton

  Maybe I heard such cussing in a previous life, too, but like I said before, I won’t go into that Avatar I-am-me business.

  “Here I am,” Maura-Lee said. “We’ve known each other—what?—four, five months?”

  I said, “I threw away my calendar when I moved to Gruel.”

  Maura-Lee seemed to have a bone to pick. She rolled her eyes and said, “That figures. Just like everybody else around here, everyone I’ve ever known forever here.”

  Notice how I didn’t say, “I thought you moved here from Raleigh,” and so on.

  Jeff the owner yelled out, “Hey! Y’all keep it wise over there,” and looked at us. “I got a special on champagne today. Hey, Novel,” he looked at his wristwatch, “you ain’t ordering no special Bloody Marys today? Y’all’ses happy hour commences in thirty minutes.”

  Maura-Lee slid off her barstool. She said, “Sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately. Let me come look at your people outside of what they wear for breakfast. I’ll help you.”

  She held up her chin in a way that she tried back when she weighed two hundred pounds. And she’d go back to that weight once she committed, again, to Jesus crust. But I didn’t care at that moment. There were secrets I needed to ferret out. “Come on,” I said, but in my mind I only wanted to see her hold my favorite rat snake.

  I unloaded two ex-pickle jars filled with tomato juice, vodka, the normal spices, and Jeff’s “special ingredient”—I saw him try to hide it behind the counter when he thought I looked away—which was only pulverized habanero. Maura-Lee rode back to the motel with me, and when I got to the office door with her I announced, “Y’all know Maura-Lee Snipes. She’s the woman who provides us with her fresh-baked goods every morning.” I carried the booze through and set it atop the photocopier wet bar. “Start handing me your glasses, please.”

  “Are you a writer, too?” Donna-Rose asked Maura-Lee.

  “Not a writer. I’m a baker, and that keeps me busy enough.”

  Maurice came shuffling up wearing an ascot. He’d spent his writing hours this Saturday drenching Grecian Formula into his hair, evidently. Or he’d polished his head with good old-fashioned Kiwi black. “You should write a novel about a baker-ess, and every chapter could be a different loaf. Pumpernickel. Rye. Sourdough.” Maurice had also found my stashed bourbon, I had a feeling. He looked Maura-Lee up and down and said, “I like your oven. I like your rack.”

  Maura-Lee smiled, but said nothing. But then this woman named Rowena—who planned on writing a sequel to the sequel to Gone with the Wind—said, “I don’t think it’s a great idea to have people from the community intermingle with us writers who pay good money to be around each other. As God is my witness I’ll demand a refund from you, Novel.”

  I said, “Now, now. Come on over here and get your sixteen ounces of near vitamins and essential herbs.”

  Rowena’d signed up for an entire month and—I’ll give her this—did try to escape the three-days-and-done pitfall. Her sequel to the sequel involved descendants of Rhett and Scarlett living in the year 2165 on another planet, and having a family reunion on the tricentennial of the Civil War’s end. Get this: She called it Gone with the Solar Wind, and incorporated a lot of scientific information she garnered from a NASA Web site.

  Maura-Lee said, “I’m just here to help. Novel wanted me to come over here and show some of you people the kind of character you’re supposed to care about.”

  That wasn’t true, but it sounded good. Five minutes later Jeff the owner walked in with one of his Louis L’Amour paperbacks—Last of the Breed—that he’d redesigned with colored markers so it read “by Jeff” and some last name I couldn’t make out. The title, too, became Last of the Bread. “I’m a local author,” he said to everyone. “I heard about this place and thought I’d come over and help out any way I could.” Jeff wore a cowboy hat and fringed vest. He said, “Howdy, ma’am,” and so on. He held up his book. “I brought along my last novel, a kind of historical piece I wrote about our own Maura-Lee Snipes over there.”

  Maurice Gall yelled out, “It should be List of the Bread! Like my idea!”

  I looked over at sad Maura-Lee, who backed her way out the door and returned to my van. The expression on her face advertised nothing but years of taunting, from elementary school days on up to what customers may have said too loudly in the presence of an obese baker. I tried to get out there to see her, but someone started tossing drinks at someone else.

  Then everything blurred. I asked Maurice Gall to go out to the shed for more booze, hoping that the snakes would only scare him. That much remains clear. And I kind of recall Rowena accusing someone of poisoning her croissant. The next day she got a ride out to Graywood Regional Memorial, where she evidently disappeared. At least she never came back to the writers retreat to pick up the manuscript for Gone with the Solar Wind.

  I read through some of it, later on. The maid was some kind of cyborg named Butterfly McC-3PO. She couldn’t deliver a baby, either.

  11

  WHEN I WAS in the sixth grade I won first place in our tiny school’s science fair, then went on to the state finals and would’ve won that had not some freakish kid from Durham built a rocket. The only reason I placed so high was because some of the judges were health food nuts, and another worked for Pepsi. My lame demonstration involved that age-old experiment of dropping things into a glass of Coca-Cola in order to watch their inevitable demise. I lined up baby teeth, unshelled hard-boiled eggs, chicken bones, oyster shells I collected on shrimp expeditions with my father, roadkill skulls, pennies, eating utensils, and so on. Coca-Cola—or any soft drink, including Pepsi—will eat through, erode, and decay any of these things over enough time. I had a Duke’s Mayonnaise jar collection of gruesome rot. My second-place prize was a hundred-dollar savings bond, which I’m pretty sure my parents cashed in years later and used for their bird-watching habit.

  The rocket-boy freak had two parents working at Duke, and I would be willing to bet that they helped their kid out. My ex-piano-playing parents knew nothing of science, and thought that my experiment should involve peeing through a charcoal filtration system, then drinking what came out. They said that they used to do it all the time at Black Mountain College, then sell the charcoal briquettes to visual arts students, for some reason.

  The truly imaginative science project participant, I thought, was this tiny, mop-haired girl from Asheville who wore dreadlocks twenty years prior to white people taking up this odd and culture-wrong hairstyle. She had written a story, one that ran through my head for years:

  “A 102-year-old man lived way out in the country, and one morning he awoke at three o’clock to find out he’d smoked his last cigarette before the late news. He looked in all of his coat pockets and found nothing. He searched his ashtrays only to find butts already smoked down to their filters. The man went out to his old pickup truck and looked beneath the bench seat for a half-smoked pack that might’ve fallen beneath his feet while driving. But he found nothing. He looked in his refrigerator because, at age 102, sometimes he got confused and put things in the wrong places. One time he found his cat in the freezer.

  “Well he began the first stages of nicotine withdrawal. Since he lived in the country, it was a good forty-minute drive to the nearest open-all-night store.”

  At this point in her story I thought she might’ve been better off at the yearly math fair. I sat in the front row, with my parents, trying to remember all the details—102, three o’clock, late news, zero cigarettes, forty minutes. I thought it was going to end up one of those famous “word problems.”

  “He got in his pickup truck and backed out of his long, long gravel driveway. Then he turned onto the state road that ran right through his property. It being only three fifteen in the morning, he saw nothing but unlucky possums and raccoons that hadn’t made it through the night.

  “As he slowly meandered through back roads he thought of his wife, and how she had died twenty years earlier. He kne
w that if she’d still been alive she would’ve reminded him to get cigarettes before the Corn Crib closed—a crossroads grocery store only a mile from their farm. He turned on his AM radio and listened to an all-night station where callers from across the country talked to the DJ host about UFOs they’d personally witnessed landing, or at least hovering.”

  I was twelve. I thought, This girl’s nuts. Asheville wasn’t all that far from Black Mountain, I thought. I wonder if I can ever find a way to get her up my way. I could show her some waterfalls. I could take her outside our house in order to peek in through the window at what James and Joyce do to each other on James’s bed.

  “The old man drove and drove. It was winter, but his truck’s heater didn’t work. He reached behind his seat to grab for a scarf, because his neck felt a chill. At this point he wasn’t but about two miles from the all-night convenience store.”

  My father leaned over and said, “You got this thing won hands down.” The idiot rocket boy hadn’t gotten on stage yet and explained how one day he wanted to be the first man to tread upon Uranus.

  “When he couldn’t feel his scarf, he reached further—or maybe farther—over behind the passenger’s side. This caused his left arm to jerk the steering wheel.”

  Let me say now that this little girl’s face looked a whole lot like one of those babies you see born without eyelids, like a zombie child. I might’ve gotten my very first full-fledged erection staring at this girl as I sat between my parents inside an auditorium that could’ve housed Black Mountain’s population times a hundred.

  “His truck veered off the road just enough for him to hit a cement bridge abutment over the French Broad River. Half of the truck went down the embankment and into the water, while the other half—carrying the 102-year-old man—flipped over down the asphalt. He was dead on impact, but the part of his car he was in didn’t stop skidding until the convenience store parking lot could be seen.”

  The girl waited. She stared at a point above the last person’s head in the audience. “My science experiment shows that smoking can kill you.” She curtsied. “Thank you very much,” she said, and walked off the stage like a robot.

  People clapped, sure. They had to. She was a weird, little mop-headed girl. But even the health food nut judges in 1972 understood how the North Carolina Science Fair would lose all of its funding if it selected an antitobacco contestant.

  I applauded harder than anyone. She should become a speechwriter for the governor, I thought.

  My father grabbed my hands. He said, “There might be an applause meter on something like this, so you don’t want to cheat yourself out of an award, Novel.”

  The girl came in last place, as it ended up. Maybe she should’ve had the old man live at least another day.

  My first love faded from the pack—both literally and figuratively—and I knew that my entire existence depended on making her feel welcome to the human tribe. (That would make a good opening to a how-to-feel-good book, I’m thinking, or maybe a sci-fi novel.)

  Like I said, I thought of the poor mop-headed science fair reject off and on, and then, of course, she showed up at the Gruel Inn Writers Retreat all those years later. I recognized her immediately.

  “My name’s Novel Akers,” I said to her in the office. “We’ve met before.”

  She introduced herself as Patty Anderson—a name that didn’t fit whatsoever—and said, “No, sir. I’ve never been down this way.”

  I explained everything about the science fair, the 102-year-old man, the smoking addiction. I said, “I had a hard-boiled egg that’s shell looked like tooth rot. A Chinese boy made a rocket ship of sorts.”

  Patty Anderson came equipped with two laptops, three suitcases, and an umbrella normally used by professional golfers’ caddies. “That could be true,” she said. “I’m not contradicting you. What’s your name again? I’ve gone through many stages in my life and tried to forget about them all. You wouldn’t believe. Anyway,” she picked up one laptop, “where’s my spot?”

  Oh I put her right in number 1, next to the office. I said, “You’re from Asheville, and you used to have this nappied-up hair. You told stories.”

  Patty Anderson said, “I don’t know. Are you saying we went to school together? I’m sorry. I don’t remember school very well.”

  The term “electric shock treatment” occurred to me. I said, “Maybe I’m mistaken. Anyway, my name’s Novel, and I’m a novelist, and although I expect that you know everything you need to know, I’m here if you should have any questions concerning plot, action, character, subplot, pacing, or dialogue. Dialogue’s my forte. I find that dialogue’s the toughest part for writers who have to spend money in a place like this.”

  “I just need help putting up my things,” Patty said.

  I gave her the key. These were regular keys, by the way, not those credit card-looking things used at Hyatts, Ramadas, Hiltons, Radissons, Holiday Inns, and the wonderful O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro where I stayed once during a speechwriting/herpetology convention.

  I carried Patty’s other bags. When we got inside I acted like any bellhop I’d ever met for real or seen in a movie. I pointed out the sink and toilet, the bed and lamp. The electrical outlets. I went through a brief history of the Gruel Inn, the Sneeze ’n’ Tone, and now.

  I set her suitcases on the foldout aluminum stand with sturdy webbed lining.

  And then Patty Anderson pushed me on the bed, which—I’m proud to say—had a completely washed spread as opposed to those semen-stained things exposed by 60 Minutes, 20/20, or Dateline. She said, “As soon as I read the ad in Southern Living I hoped it was you.”

  I couldn’t make this up. For some reason I said, “Hold on, Patty. I might still be married. You don’t have a rubber by any chance, do you?”

  She rolled over and said, “You’re right. It’s been a long day. Hell, it’s been a long life. But let me tell you this: During that whole science fair presentation—and I don’t know if you noticed it or anything—I focused on your face. We were both what, twelve? But I don’t think I could’ve gotten through my spiel without your face.”

  Let me go ahead and say that Patty stood about five-ten and might’ve weighed 130. It didn’t take a visionary to understand how she’d done runway work in Paris, Milan, London, and New York, that she had undergone heroin treatment twice in the best rehab centers that Sweden offered, that she’d tested the waters of Lake Lesbos, that her last chance was probably a tell-all exposé she would ultimately write in Gruel, South Carolina. I said, “I’ve had a pretty interesting life, too.” Then I tried to pull her back on top of me.

  “No, no. You’re right. I shouldn’t come out of the blue here and take out my insecurities and inadequacies on you.” Patty walked over to the desk and flipped open her laptop. “I’ve paid up for a month, right? Come back and see me in thirty days. Give me that. I swear.”

  My First Boner, My Last: that could’ve been the subtitle of my memoir Novel. I got up off the bed and started to say, “Be nice to the morning continental breakfast woman if you see her. She may or may not be a serial killer.” I said, “Are you writing an autobiography about your experiences as a supermodel?”

  “I wasn’t a supermodel. Where’d you get that idea?” Patty said. “Nope. I’m writing a regular book. It’s about a woman who’s obsessed with money. She’s the main character. Her name’s Mona Tara Lee. Get it? Monetarily. And she’s married to a rich guy who’s in the seafood business named Sebastian. Get it? Sea bass chin. Anyway, she doesn’t want to have kids, and he does . . .”

  Patty kept talking. She should’ve been a speechwriter for state reps who prided themselves on filibusters. Me, I noticed how I did indeed need to use those jackalopes Maura-Lee offered, or any of the heads my dead ex-father-in-law I never knew stuffed. I stared at myself in the motel mirror and counted cracks in the ceiling. What, again, were the state capitals of North Dakota, Maine, Missouri, Oregon, Michigan, Delaware, and Wisconsin? If Jeff the owner wanted to b
ring in new business, he should offer a big sandwich better than what Gruel BBQ had to offer. Carpet or wood floors? Should I feel bad about charging so much money for a week at the writers retreat seeing as lightbulb engineers now had their products lasting over a year?

  “. . . and then, in the end, this guy comes out of nowhere and she realizes that she’s been missing a little thing called Love the entire time, even when she was hanging around the Mafia guys. Or the retarded kids she worked with on a volunteer basis.”

  I nodded. “That sounds good. That sounds like a bestseller. Listen. In the morning don’t forget that there’s a free continental breakfast. And, God forbid, if you fall and hit your head in the bathtub just let me know. There’s a hospital not fifteen or twenty miles away.”

  Bekah called and said she needed to come down on the first anniversary of her mother’s and brother’s tragic fatal deaths. I said, “Wasn’t that about ten years ago? You mean to tell me that hasn’t even been twelve months?”

  Bekah said, “Gene Weeks said I need to come down there armed with a subpoena, change of locks, alimony papers, and a gun.”

  I didn’t say, “We’re not even divorced yet, so it would make no sense to have alimony papers.” I said, “Man, if you’re coming with all of that, you might need some more arms. Or a wheelbarrow.”

  “Well. Whatever. He said I’m getting the short end of the stick.”

  “You left me! Why’s it always the goddamn husband’s fault? I fucking followed you down here on your screwball sneeze dream, and then you chickened out and left. I’m the one who should have at least eight armfuls of papers.”