Novel

by George Singleton

  Maura-Lee looked as if she’d not eaten since opening up Gruel Bakery. I’m talking she now couldn’t have weighed more than 120, and almost appeared somewhat emaciated due to her height. I said, “Goddamn, Maura-Lee, are you taking care of yourself? You’re not still sneezing away the pounds, are you?”

  “Hand me that boat paddle. Sometimes the dough clogs up the blades.” She wore a thin white tank top, and her biceps bulged as she worked the mixer. Her nipples hadn’t receded from weight loss yet.

  I handed her an oar cut in half lengthwise. She pulled off the safety guard from her mixer. I said, “I’m thinking you could put a meat-grinder head on this thing and run Gruel BBQ out of business.”

  Maura-Lee stroked and prodded deep inside the machine. “You know, Novel, you’ve only tried to be with me once, and then you never came back. Probably sobered up the next day and have felt embarrassed about it. Went on your way. Felt guilty, so threw me the continental breakfast bone. Well, well, well.”

  She spoke the truth and I felt horrendous about it. I wanted the subject changed and said, “You don’t have any paper hats around here instead of hairne ts, do you?”

  “Maybe that phantom sound you hear was my remaining self-esteem advancing on your position.”

  “I’ve made many mistakes in my life. If I hurt you, then I count that as one of my biggest. I’m serious.”

  Maura-Lee turned the machine back on and changed gears twice. “If it weren’t for my Jesus crust loaves going out to schoolchildren I’d really be pissed off. Your halting the writers retreat knocks me out two-fifty a week. Thousand a month. Now I’m going to have to go beyond my sales region. Hey, are you even keeping track of expenses? Do you have a business license, or tax ID number?”

  I said, “No. This is Gruel. You’re not reporting all of this either, are you.” I waved my arm, then readjusted my hairnet.

  Maura-Lee told me to roll a baker’s rack toward the table and asked if I was smart enough to figure out her automatic slicer. She said, “You fool. You’re right—if you weren’t such an outsider you could probably get away with it. But you’re not from around here and these people hated the Cathcarts, in case you haven’t figured that much out yet.”

  I said, “Hold on a minute, Snipes.”

  “Now you’ve gone and closed down the only business that brought business to the square. Way to go. I guess you can now stay away from the IRS, but how’re you going to live? Don’t tell me you plan to write a goddamn memoir. That’s all America needs is another fucking memoir, candyass.”

  I walked out, crossed the street to Roughhouse, found it closed, and didn’t know whether to wait on the step until daybreak or drive home. By now, I supposed, the advancing regiment more than likely encamped across from my place. From my vantage point I could watch Maura-Lee scoop and shape dough into pan after pan, transfer just-made dough to a walk-in refrigeration unit, and so on.

  She’ll have to hire on workers, I thought. A one-woman operation might’ve been fine for bagel-eating scribblers, but not for an entire region of staff-of-life-devouring kids being taught racism indirectly.

  If I still held bourbon in my veins I would’ve volunteered to help out. But I didn’t. I walked to my step van, started it up, and drove home bravely. No soldiers ambushed me, this time, literally.

  I looked above Gruel Bakery, to its second floor. Did I see two human shadows cross the windows? Did I hallucinate?

  At dawn I released my few snakes from their shed, asked them to always live nearby if possible, apologized for my past feeble attempt at stroking and nurturing unpublishable vanity writers instead of them. I checked each room’s doorknob from the outside, made a mental note to buy a sledgehammer and handsaw from the army-navy store, and almost wished that I owned a Gideon for an odd comfort I foresaw needing.

  I looked across the road. Was that Ina and Irby half hidden in the trees, waving, showing off their clogging shoes?

  PART II

  “Though talent be wanting, yet indignation will drive me to verse such as I—or any scribbler—can manage.”

  —JUVENAL, SATIRE I

  16

  IF I STOOD four-ten or less I could walk from my office at the Gruel Inn all the way to the far end of room 12 without bowing my head or bending my knees. Of course, if I were less than four-ten and still dealt with snakes professionally I could be the star attraction at any midlevel traveling county fair freak sideshow. If I were a little person with a large snake I would fear being swallowed whole every minute of my life, and could never offer the world Novel: Autobiography.

  I knocked holes in all of my walls with the sledgehammer and cut two-by-four non-weight-bearing studs. I drug each mattress, box spring, and frame out and stacked them in the ex-snake shed—not knowing that it would soon return to its original purpose. I ripped up short nap indoor-outdoor carpet, rolled it tightly, and room by room pulled it outside. After every trip I washed my hands seeing as the carpet industry saturates “floor-covering fiber” with enough formaldehyde and “other man-made essential chemicals” to kill off a midsize third world nation. Then I drug said carpets across the road on the second day of my self-imposed reclusion and rolled them out like a Hollywood entranceway to Gruel Jungle.

  Listen, if I knew back as a speechwriter what I learned renovating the Gruel Inn, I would’ve had my lieutenant governor offer up another long-winded discourse as to how the United States could conquer Cuba, Bolivia, Uganda, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Colombia, and Alabama only by dropping 24' X 24' sections of Dalton Orlong carpet from B-52s maybe every hundred yards onto these lands, thus rendering them scorched and useless.

  I exaggerate, or “hyperbolize.” With Chile it would have to be carpet runners, what with the country’s slight width.

  I took out every nightstand, chest of drawers, telephone, wire hanger, TV, and free paper shoeshine rag from all the rooms, except number 3. Here was my thinking: If I wanted to write a great memoir, then I needed to cleanse the place of my last tenants, the idiotic good-intentioned men and women who couldn’t help themselves from starting any story with “It was a dark and stormy night” or “Call me Put Name Here.”

  Listen, if any Buddhists or exorcists lived in Gruel back then I would’ve offered up half the twenty-four grand I still had in cash money saved from the writers retreat people, in order to come smoke out all the bad juju karma from my abode.

  I knocked a trail through my walls but each one owned electrical lines, for some reason, right at the four-ten mark, and I don’t know about you but I won’t touch a wire. When I was a child our house in Black Mountain had a cement-floored back room that my parents pretended to one day turn into a music room. This room stood against a mostly clay embankment, and it flooded with every downpour. Because James and Joyce formed some kind of union with stipulations that ruled out any kind of manual labor outside their normal allowance chores—scattering shrimp heads off in the woods for feral bears, cats, coyotes, cougars, panthers, dogs, and hermits—I got forced to “mop” the supposed “studio.”

  This was 1971 or thereabouts. I’m not sure where my parents obtained a prototypical, cylindrical, metal Shop-Vac. I walked into the room, mop in hand, barefoot. I thought, This might take some time. I thought, Them sons of bitches Irish adopted bastard nonworking fuckers.

  I’d learned how to talk and think this way from Willem de Kooning, or somebody who taught earlier at Black Mountain College. So I held the mop and toed the bucket forward. Then I went into the kitchen and shoved that metal canister into the flooded room. This’ll be so easy, I thought. I can suck up the water, dump it in the bathtub, and suck up some more. I remember plugging in the prong, and how it felt when I turned the toggle switch to on. That kind of vibrates, I thought. I watched the standing water shimmer as if a school of minnows frenzied on a lake’s surface.

  Where were my parents? Did they travel alone for shrimp and other shellfish? Did they pan for gold on Rash Creek? Because I might have stored up a cer
tain amount of paranoia over the years since—writing speeches for various politicians tends to cause such a condition, I’m betting—sometimes I think my own sad impatient parents, unable to weather the crescendos and diminuendos of the music world, set up an “accidental” electrocution trap. It all hit me one day as I cleaned out our gutters during a lightning storm, part of my “chores.” I thought about it again during tornado warnings when Mom and Dad asked me to sit with our neighbors down the road who lived in an ancient trailer.

  Anyway, I moved the Shop-Vac a second time and my left ring finger stuck to the switch. My arm undulated like a rabid surfer’s dream wave. I think I yelled out, “Hey, hey, hey!” or something nearly as helpless. No one in my childhood home ran to my rescue. I stood barefoot in standing water with an electrical appliance that played for keeps.

  Somehow I pulled away.

  At age eight I didn’t think about how it was my left ring finger, my wedding band finger—how maybe it would all haunt me later on in an area so appropriately named Gruel.

  But I stray.

  Back at the motel, I knocked out Sheetrock, cut studs, and did my best at making it look like a professional job. When bent down in the office I could look all the way down to the last room. I tried not to think of portals, or tunnels, or looking through a telescope backwards, or my subconscious.

  Notice how I left the hot plates, by the way.

  My original plan—which I hadn’t outlined even though a few of my how-to books suggested writing out a step-by-step procedure to follow—was to write a twelve-chapter memoir, using each room. I would start on the far end, deal with the first memories, leave that section on the desk, then move one room closer to the office until I finished.

  I would sleep on the floor and know that work needed doing until I reached the office holding at least 240 pages of manuscript to be sent off to a publisher that specialized in psychological treatises that directed parents how not to bring up a child, and states how not to treat employees, and spouses how not to push their mates into actions unbefitting of the human race. I foresaw my autobiography Novel being taught in both American literature and abnormal psychology classes. If I did well in chapter 11—“The Gruel Year”—maybe even sociology and economics departments might push it.

  I ordered MREs from Victor Dees’s army-navy store and paid him cash money. I asked Jeff the owner to drop off a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of vodka once a week. Toilet paper, little soap bars, shampoo, and toothpaste—I had enough of all those things seeing as I’d thought the Gruel Inn Writers Retreat would last forever. I postdated water and electric and insurance bill checks, and mailed them off. I thought about cutting off my phone service, but didn’t—just in case.

  We’re getting somewhere, I thought. I thought, Now dickhead Milson Willets will be sorry he didn’t keep my parents’ invaluable papers that would help explain little Novel Akers.

  I started on a Sunday morning. I sat down at room 12’s desk and stared at the mass-produced landscape on the wall, a wonderful desert scene that, off in the top left corner, showed an ancient cowboy hiking out of the mountains, leading his horse by the bridle. I’d never noticed it before! That’s how the mind works! I thought, and knew that I had to remember this moment when I got all the way back to room 2, “The Gruel Year.”

  I laughed and laughed. This is going to be so easy, I thought.

  Then I heard a noise outside room 12’s door that could’ve only been a hognose snake scraping its scales together, trying to sound like a western diamondback rattler. I went outside and spent most of the day looking for that particular serpent. I followed up my ex-carpets well into Gruel Jungle, checked beneath each edge—snakes like to warm up beneath flat, flat pieces of lightweight covers (go stick a piece of tin roofing out in the yard late summer; pick it up two days later; notice the good coiled reptile)—but found nothing.

  Then that goddamned marching sound started back up and I ran like hell back to my room. By this time it was dusk. I looked at my notebook, where I had written, “I don’t remember my actual birth.” There was nothing left: to do but heat up one eye on the hot plate, boil water, and eat some delicious freeze-dried stew, then curl up on a cement floor still swirled with glue remains that couldn’t hold down nap forever.

  17

  I‘M NOT SURE what gold went for in 1969, but I’m almost certain it was more than a dollar an ounce. My parents offered up that much money at the end of the day, divided by three. Me, I used that money for gum down at Black Mountain Candy. James and Joyce—I’ll give my adopted brethren this—socked their profits away, saying, “Who needs gum when we got free tar on the road?” They chewed tar! I’m talking they stood around the roadside on hot, hot days, waited for the asphalt to bubble, then thumb-and-fingered out their warm black nuggets.

  Who chews tar?

  Lookit: Dealing with the shrimp might stick in my memory more than gold panning in Rash Creek, but for the most part my family probably stood shin-deep in water more often. Oh our parents gave us galoshes—rubbers, they called them—but I’d be willing to bet any DSS worker would say that James, Joyce, and Novel would be classified as abused children these days.

  And even though I say my dad worked the pans, et cetera, he really set up illegal seines upstream, caught rainbow and brown trout, and hauled them down to Charleston chefs before picking up shrimp, oysters, and clams. And live jellyfish for the more adventurous snakehandler members of the Black Mountain Pentecostal Holiness Church.

  “You’d think that people who lived on the Atlantic Ocean would get their fill of spots, blue, and snapper. It doesn’t make sense, my taking mountain trout down there. These people pay upwards of twelve bucks a meal for rainbow,” my father said most afternoons. My mom normally said something like, “James, Joyce—quit torturing that frog,” or salamander, or box turtle.

  I always said, “Can I start taking oboe lessons? Can I take violin lessons? Can I start taking ballet lessons? Would one of y’all teach me how to use a sewing machine? Can I get an Easy-Bake oven for Christmas? Can I take a correspondence course in interior decorating? Can I spend my afternoons down at Black Mountain Beauty Shop and learn how to mold a bouffant?” I said about anything that would be less embarrassing than living with parents who gave up their music careers altogether in order to scrape by in ways they now saw fit. If I’d’ve been brought up in the aluminum years I would’ve said, “Can I scrounge around Dumpsters and pick up beer cans to turn in at the scrap metal recycling center?”

  My mother slogged across the creek, laden down with maybe a half ounce of speckled dust, most of it between her molars because of the chew test. “James, Joyce—have you got any homework tonight? I want y’all to study more and quit babbling.”

  My brother and sister never answered. They limped toward the car, playing blind, running into trees, holes, the occasional authentic miner. I yelled out more than once, “Could I please learn how to play the harp?” and, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure it was only a premature death wish.

  Victor Dees came over and knocked on every door until he hit 11. I woke up and opened it. “I’m just making sure you ain’t dead,” he said. Victor wore fatigues, an olive green T-shirt, mirrored sunglasses, and a World War I German helmet with that spike on top.

  I said, “Come on in. You want a drink? I got bourbon and vodka, but I don’t have but one glass. And only one chair. Come on in. I mean it! What’s with the outfit? Did you get another call from Bekah and you come to kill me?”

  Victor Dees walked in not as rigidly as he should have. He said, “I thought you only joked. I didn’t think you meant it.”

  “Welcome to my humble abode,” I said.

  He looked at my blank notebook, the blank page riveted into the Smith-Corona typewriter, the blue, blue screen of my computer. “I’ll take vodka. It’s not as predictable. It’s almost odorless. I got to talk to the ROTC people over at Forty-Five High later tonight.”

  I handed him an unopened bottle of Sm
irnoff. “Do you know the day and date? I’ve been so submerged. Submersed. Man, I haven’t felt like this since trying to memorize the Roman Empire one night before exams.”

  “You’ve been holed up three days,” Victor said. “Those MREs I sold you were more for show and less for chow. To be honest I thought you only wanted to decorate the office or something. I’ve been selling those things like crazy to every Cracker Barrel on interstate exits near military exits. Fort Jackson. Camp Lejeune. Edwards Air Force Base. Parris Island, you know.”

  I took the bourbon and swigged three Adam’s apples’ worth. “Very cool. Hey, you sit in the chair. Be my guest, my first guest! I’ll sit on the floor. If you have any stories, feel free to type them in.” I pointed at my unused Mead marbled composition book. “Or pick up the pen and handwrite it down. I bet you got some good stories, Victor.”

  Victor Dees sat down and spread his legs out in a way that made him look like an effeminate commandant. “I don’t want you getting botulism. You have eaten some of the MREs, right? I’m just thinking—hell, sixty years—some air might’ve found its way in the package. I know no one else cares about you in Gruel, but I don’t want you dead. I don’t want that on my limited conscience.”

  I held my Old Crow between my legs. I said, “What do you mean by all that?”

  “I don’t want to be the cause of your death, you know. I don’t want me or anybody else coming over here and finding you laid out flat stiff dead because of poison. Goddamn. Though I guess we could send your body to Graywood Regional for an autopsy and it would come back that you had, what—I don’t know—cancer of the vagina.”

  I stood up and paced the room just like I’d done in room 12, like I would do in 11 through 1. I said, “Is it ‘laid’ out stiff or ‘lain’ out stiff?”