Novel

by George Singleton

  “I don’t want to be the discoverer of dead bodies,” Victor Dees said. He hit the vodka. “I was never really in the armed services, you know. One day I’ll show you what’s wrong with my feet.”

  What else could I say but, “They’re flat?”

  “No. Cleft.” Then Victor Dees finished the quart of vodka in one long slug, and disappeared.

  Bekah and I didn’t marry in Gruel for a number of reasons, all hers. First off, there was no standing church left. Gruel could’ve been the only town south of the Mason-Dixon with a population over three—preacher, preacher’s wife, one congregant—without a standing house of worship. We didn’t want to ship in either preacher or judge to stand on the porch where her daddy committed suicide. This old boy named Sammy Koon, Bekah was convinced, would try to interrupt the proceeding, too. The list went on. She had undergone nighttime visions, et cetera. She’d read somewhere how it was bad luck to be married in a town that General Sherman didn’t find fit to burn down. Migratory birds often lit in Gruel, and their squawking would ruin the moment, according to Bekah.

  Why didn’t I gather all of this information back in my twenties and cancel the entire operation, you might ask. Or someone might ask. The fucking lieutenant governor at the time up in North Carolina might’ve pulled me aside and told me to skip town if he had any ideas as to what the forecast held. My few friends—mostly herpetologists and mechanics who specialized on the step van’s motor—surely noticed Bekah’s insecurities and lack of commitment. If anything, one of my less weight-sensitive buddies from the bars could’ve spouted out, “Your fiancée seems to be letting herself go, Bo. She’s putting on the pounds,” not knowing that she’d have sneezing attacks however many years later, lose all the weight, regain a hard stomach worthy of a handball court, and so on.

  But I got no help from friends. My most unpredictable rat snake had a better chance of turning Mr. Ed and telling me what I couldn’t see in the future.

  We drove down to a wedding chapel halfway between Conway and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where no blood tests were needed. I paid for the deluxe ceremony, which included two potted palmetto trees flanking the altar, twenty-four photographs, and rice that fell out of the ceiling as long as I stepped on the special button on our way out the door. We had our choice of Elvis, Willie Nelson, the Supremes, or the Beatles before and after the wedding marches in and out.

  Listen, I clearly remember saying “I do,” but I think Bekah only moved her lips, and then Lester Clark—owner-operator of the wedding chapel—said I could kiss the bride.

  You would think that we’d’ve driven the twenty miles south down to Myrtle Beach for our honeymoon. Instead, we backtracked to North Carolina and up to Virginia, because Bekah wanted to see Luray Caverns. There was some kind of stalactite pipe organ she’d heard all about, which she thought actually worked, like a player piano.

  I don’t need to go into my wedding night, obviously, at the Cave Inn.

  Victor Dees left and I sat down in front of the computer with my bottle of bourbon. I lit a cigarette for the first time since leaving North Carolina. Up until this point I had not felt obligated to keep that state’s economy going. I tilted my head back and counted 252 ceiling tiles. I got up, hunched myself all the way down to the office—something I’d promised myself not to do—found a tape measure, came back, and indeed learned that a crack in the east-facing wall was more than forty-eight inches long. It was fifty-two. I got out my hawksbill knife and chipped through eight inches of paint, the last being yellow.

  Back in the office I called Maura-Lee and woke her up. She said, “Remember, Novel, I work third shift basically. I always will. Third and most of first, then I come home from hours of kneading Jesus crust, and sleep.”

  I might’ve yelled, “How long have I been here? Oh god, how long have I been here in this self-imposed exile in order to write my autobiography?”

  I’m not saying that I cried or anything, but maybe the bourbon got me overly distraught and somewhat confused. Maura-Lee said, “Not that I’m x-ing off my calendar waiting for your return to civilization or anything, but I think it’s been either two or three days. I’m not keeping track. That’s your job.”

  Then she hung up, like she should have, of course, indubitably. I made a point to remember this occasion, should Maura-Lee ever decide to write some kind of old-fashioned bread and pastry cookbook, become frustrated over having to use the word “yeast” so many times, and call me up in the middle of the night asking for a synonym.

  The answer’s “single-celled ascomycetous fungi,” according to my dictionary.

  18

  THE STUPID PLAY PRODUCTION!

  In the eleventh grade I got forced to audition for a part in a theatrical extravaganza that my English teacher wrote based on the life of Thomas Wolfe, the excommunicated Asheville novelist. My English teacher went to Black Mountain College as a poetry major, of all things, and then underwent experimental electric shock treatments from some guy named Thigpen down in Augusta, Georgia, before matriculating to a normal women’s college in Greensboro and obtaining her degree in secondary education. Her name was Miss Margaret Dickel, heiress to the Tennessee bourbon empire, and she spoke freely of her time with battery cables on her nodes almost every class period. Miss Dickel said things like, “I’m thinking that if Mr. William Butler Yeats underwent shock treatment like I did, he might not’ve written rubbish the last years of his life.”

  I’d done well enough on my PSAT to get named a Furman University and UNC scholar. College reps from schools I’d never heard of said that I, alone, could bring their averages up fifty points, though I think they meant “mean,” not “median.” Or vice versa—I never learned what that stood for in math, or why it mattered. Math, though, played a part in my later years, as I’ll explain.

  “The Sad Boy Inside the Boardinghouse Blues,” Miss Dickel’s play, attempted to portray young Thomas Wolfe as a precocious lad intent on making a mark on the planet. I would play the part of young Tom, Miss Dickel the part of Tom’s mother, our assistant principal—I forget his name, but he, too, had spent time at Black Mountain College as a sculpture student—as Mr. Wolfe the dad, then as Thomas Wolfe the grown-up. Every other student and citizen of Black Mountain had what’s known as a “walk-on role” as a boarder, shop owner, neighbor, or literary figure from the canon who showed up in young Thomas Wolfe’s dreams: Shakespeare, Marlowe, St. Augustine, Cervantes, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Charles Baudelaire, Dickens, the Apostle Paul, Harriet Tubman, Plato, Melville, Queen Victoria, Phillis Wheatley, Voltaire, Carl Gustav Jung, Dante—everybody. I’m talking Miss Dickel got out the Norton’s Anthology and found a way for Thomas Wolfe to hear the voices of about anyone who’d put pen to paper. She even went into a sci-fi mode and got living writers to show up in Thomas Wolfe’s dreams. Truman Capote spoke up, as did Kerouac and that Allen Ginsberg celebrity. This was 1977 or thereabouts. Joan Didion showed up, Susan Sontag, the guy who wrote Jaws.

  Needless to say, the entire house had a part, which meant there would be no audience. My lines pretty much went, “Who’s there?” I was to sit up in bed, say “Who’s there?” and then someone, let’s say playing Oscar Wilde, would say, “You must go open your mother’s chest of drawers, inspect her panties, then write about them in full detail!”

  I was supposed to nod, maybe raise an index finger in the air, and go “Aha!” like that. Then I would roll over and write—using a Bic pen that didn’t exist at the time, by the way, in 1910—in a Mead composition notebook that didn’t exist at this point either. The play ended with my pretending to type about four hundred words a minute, and then I would rip out the last page of Look Homeward, Angel.

  Notice how I’ve used the verb “was supposed to.”

  In the preforming old days, oysters weren’t good unless the month had an R. That meant September through April. The school play was set for the last week in April, and my father—who had agreed to play Faulkner in one of the sci-fi
dream sequences—decided that I needed to help him down in Charleston more than I needed to lay on a boardinghouse cot and entertain the history of literature. He said, “I got forty people wanting a bushel bag apiece. Summer’s coming and they don’t want to wait, son. What with Joyce and James running back to Ireland, I have no other choice.”

  I knew right away not to put my wants first. I said, “But how can Miss Dickel run her show without Faulkner? Nobody but you could play Mr. Faulkner, Dad.”

  He lifted his can of beer. “Well fuck that Faulkner, Novel.”

  Jeff the owner showed up in the middle of my wondering why room 10’s ceiling held only 228 tiles. The bathroom wasn’t any larger, I’d figured out with my tape measure. I counted and recounted the ceiling at least a couple hundred times, both east to west, then north to south. I found the midpoint tile and swirled around it clockwise and counterclockwise twice. Every time I ended up 228. I went back to room 12, then 11, and counted them again.

  Something was wrong. I didn’t like this at all.

  “Whoever done your grouting put too much grout in this room,” Jeff said. “It’s not hard to figure out. Look, man—let’s say you got you twelve one-by-one-foot tiles, and you grout them an inch apart. What’s one inch times twelve?”

  I said, “A foot.”

  “You damn right. Twelve inches. One times twelve equals twelve, even in Gruel. Now. Let’s say you got twelve one-by-one-foot ceiling tiles but you only grout them a half inch apart. What’s that come out to?”

  I should mention that in my preliminary memoir itinerary I knew to stack clean socks, underwear, shirts, and pants in order in each room right atop the toilet bowl reservoirs. On this day I wore a pair of blue work pants and a yellow shirt, plus a cap I’d gotten somewhere that advertised Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. I said, “Six. Six inches. Half a foot.”

  “Why’re you dressed in blue and yellow? Is that some kind of school colors for cold feet and chicken backbone? Don’t fuck up on me, Novel. We got bets going on down at the Roughhouse.”

  I shrugged. “Have you heard from Maura-Lee? Has Bekah called up Victor Dees?” I asked. “Hey, that rhymed. Maybe I should be writing poetry in here instead of my autobiography.”

  Jeff the owner said, “Maybe you are, boy.” Then he popped me upside the head. “Okay. Let’s say you have twelve one-by-one-foot ceiling tiles. There’s a five-eighths grout inch between half of them, and a three-eighths grout between a third, and a one-inch grout between the rest.”

  I said, “I’d kind of like to know whatever happened to Miss Dickel. I assume by now she’s taken over her ancestors’ bottling company, you know.”

  Jeff hit me upside the head again, twice in a row. “You’re not paying attention. I knew this might happen. I’ve seen it before! What do you think happened to the previous owner of this place, back in 1940? You have to concentrate, boy.”

  “Did you bring me any more booze? I got the money. People keep coming over here and drinking on me free. I got money,” I said. “What time is it, anyway? Shouldn’t you be back running the bar?” Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop up the side of my head happened before I could raise my hands in self-defense. I said, “I’m going to kill you if you do that again.”

  “Now that sounds like my little Novel. Now you’re talking. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t drifted off to Alabama-land. I only wanted to make sure you knew the difference between pain and glory. Please tell me you ain’t planning on moving out to Wichita to think you deserve to have this work of yours printed up just because you lived in the middle of nowhere for a spell, like some kind of poet.”

  I had no idea what Jeff the owner meant. I said, “No,” because it seemed more likely that I wouldn’t get hit. “If all that grouting was the way you said, it would still average out an inch wide between. It would end up the same as an inch wide.”

  Jeff the owner held up a finger and backed out of room 10, Gruel Inn. He returned with a quart of bourbon, a quart of cheap vodka, and a bottle of red wine. “Wine’s on me,” he said. “Stay the way you are. Don’t give up. Write the truth. Or at least write. And remember me well. I’m not asking for any kind of dedication or epithet, goddamnit. I only ask that you speak of me well when it comes to the Gruel years.”

  I said thanks. He left. In my notebook I wrote down, “Jeff the owner said ‘epithet,’ then cursed.”

  We weren’t brought up in a religious household, though everyone outside of me spoke in tongues. My parents made us go to every area church once, and drove us down to a synagogue in Asheville one Saturday. “If something sticks, then go with it,” my father said. “I don’t care. It doesn’t matter, if you ask me.” He’d been brought up Episcopalian somewhere in Maryland; my mother grew up Church of Christ in Connecticut. Grandparents on both sides didn’t seem to notice how their own children were a little more than fucked-up, and even Grandpa Akers came down to visit one time and said, “James, Joyce, Novel—you’ll end up nothing but confused. Stupidity is better than confusion.” To my parents he said, “How many stupid people live long lives? The answer: a lot. How many confused people—and I’m talking confused early on, not being old and stupid—how many confused people end up not taking their own lives? The answer: zero.”

  We all sat in the common area of our stone house during Grandpa Akers’s little speech. Joyce and James kept their arms crossed, but gave my father’s father the finger, you know, like in a high school yearbook. Mom said, “We want them to grow up open-minded, Dad. We want them to grow up having experienced the world’s religions.”

  I’m not sure how my brother and sister rehearsed their little skit, but both of them blurted out in tongues simultaneously yelling out what I found out later to be an Arabic translation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. They waved their arms and throttled their necks.

  My grandfather waited, and watched them run outside after finishing their diatribe. He said, “I believe it was Gandhi who understood all the world’s religions best. He ended up skinny wearing diapers most of this life.”

  My grandfather got up and limped his way to the car. He drove off, as if for cigarettes, and never returned. When my parents got killed and I hired an auctioneer for everything, I found my grandfather’s suitcase in the would-be music salon, shut tight, his worn leather-bound Bible on top.

  No: My parents died, I got an auctioneer, I found the suitcase and opened it to find a bunch of Playboy magazines on top.

  Wait: teen porn and a whip. That’s what I found.

  Anyway, we went to all these churches and one synagogue, and pretty much we only learned that everybody hated each other. We learned that, for a thousand dollars apiece, we could go down to Bolivia or Brazil and build thatched-roof bungalows for the natives as part of a mission trip. We learned the intricacies of church league basketball games, how to run a hot dog sale and car wash, and the importance of giving up 10 percent or more of our weekly allowances. I bet I heard half the preachers tell a story about how they threw their collection plate money in the air and asked God to keep what He wanted, ha ha ha. When the rabbi told this story he used the terms “manna” and “Yahweh,” I think.

  I learned early on that organized religion wasn’t something I required or wanted. I yelled out pseudo-Aramaic slang whenever Miss Dickel asked me to lead the drama club in prayer, et cetera.

  This was a time before ACLU-led litigations against mandatory convocations. I would come home, my parents would ask what I learned in school, I’d tell them the truth, they’d ask how I felt about it, and I said, “Yella-yella-yella-yella-yella-yella-yella.”

  I should mention that although my parents Ted and Olivia Akers had given up the classical music concert business, they had a somewhat alarming and constant habit of playing air piano regularly, right in front of people. My parents often looked like they tried to hypnotize the person with whom they spoke. I would bet that when I screamed out, “Yella-yella-yella-yella-yella-yella-yella”—with Mom and Dad
playing imaginary keys—it looked like I would either levitate or be successfully exorcised.

  Maybe that’s what ran my father’s father back to Maryland, I don’t know. Maybe he knew better than to print out and keep nudie photos of James and Joyce, showering behind the stone house, oblivious to what the outside world might think.

  Miss Margaret Dickel lived way up Black Mountain Road, as I remember, in a house her family bought and maintained a century before. She said, “Novel, I don’t have much hope for my students and never have. I’ve gotten to the point where I can only hope that my students will learn to appreciate dramaturgy. Like if they somehow go up to New York, maybe they’ll attend a play instead of visiting the Statue of Liberty.”

  I said, “Yes ma’am.” I had been summoned to her house in order to learn my lines. Miss Dickel, it seemed, didn’t trust my saying “Who’s there?” like that. I said, “My parents want me to go to Carnegie Hall one day, if I ever go to New York City.”

  Miss Dickel’s house was like no other I’d ever seen. She’d decorated the inside with a bunch of paintings by de Kooning, whom she must’ve known. In between were empty bottle after bottle of George Dickel Tennessee Sour Mash Whisky Old No. 8 brand. Even back then, without looking up to count ceiling tiles and run multiplication tables through my head, I understood that her place ran in the thirty-six-hundred- to four-thousand-square-foot range. I should mention that I’d never had sex with a Black Mountain girl at that point in my life. “Foreshadowing,” according to one of my writing textbooks, “isn’t a bad thing.”

  “Say your line,” Miss Dickel said.

  I said, “Who’s there?” but didn’t quite get the gist of it, evidently. I kind of let it trail off, as if I knew who was there and did-n’t want her to come inside. Looking back, it was kind of like when Bekah went off to see a tributary of Luray Caverns, forgot her camera, then came back to find the motel room locked with me inside. I said, “Who’s there?” knowing it wasn’t the maid.