Novel

by George Singleton

  The Alka-Seltzer fizzed near red on my forearm hairs. Jeff the owner felt his shirt pockets twice, pulled out a bottle of Tabasco, a six-pack cardboard sleeve of Goody’s extra-strength headache powders he’d brought along, and a giant vitamin B tablet. He dashed the hot sauce in my glass. I said, “I feel fine, Bubba. I don’t need all of this. As a matter of fact, I need to get to work on my work.”

  I didn’t say, “You would’ve brought along some milk thistle if you really cared.”

  I won’t say that I didn’t trust Jeff the owner, but it would’ve been easy to take the safety cellophane off the Goody’s, pour out the aspirin, acetaminophen, caffeine, lactose, and potassium chloride, replace it with arsenic and/or strychnine, refold the flat wax paper strip, reglue the safety cellophane, and so on.

  Jeff said, “Years of dealing with hungover customers brought me to this remedy. Raw chicken used to work until someone got a bad case of worms.”

  I said, “You go first.”

  Jeff did so and handed me the leftovers. He said, “I’m glad I’m not you. Always wondering what you don’t know.”

  I drank my share of PBR/tomato juice/Alka-Seltzer/Tabasco and washed down one powdered aspirin. “Don’t worry about me, buddy. Well I take that back. There’s something going on around here that no one wants me to know about, I know. Fuckers.”

  Jeff popped another beer. I thought, Why does everyone in Gruel drink so much nonstop? for about two seconds. He said, “What’re you working on today? Are you going from birth to death? It seems to me that anyone writing his memoir would have to have some kind of special talents knowing when he’d die, so that he could write ‘The End’ right before his last breath.”

  What else could I say except, “Uh-huh.”

  “Well,” Jeff the owner patted my shoulder eight or ten times, “you finish up this work and come back to see us, you hear?”

  I didn’t like or trust that country “You hear?” one bit, certainly. I said, “You’re way too old to’ve been brought up by Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart. You weren’t brought up here. Don’t try to tell me that you were brought up here, buddy-ro. I know better. I can tell. I’ve been around.”

  “I’m almost the same age as your dead in-laws,” he said. “And my doctor’s all confused about how long I’ve lived. He said I should’ve hit middle age at about twelve. I remember that day when I had my midlife crisis. I bought a brand-new shiny Schwinn ten-speed bicycle. Get it? Do you get it? I think about all this time as way past my postlife.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I thought about a time when I went out and bought a brand-new reclining chair at the age of twenty-four or thereabouts, and about how I neared the end of my life.

  For two days, I think, I walked off whatever remedy Jeff the owner had me down. I thought the whole time, understand. Man, I remembered crap that happened I’d not remembered in years. Here: I had a slight crush on a girl named Sherry Dalton who sat beside me in a Philosophy of Sports class. Don’t ask me how I thought this was going to help me understand history. This New Jersey linebacker named Bobby Monica lived on my hall and he said he wouldn’t beat me up in the community shower if and only if I sat next to him, enough said. So Sherry Dalton, the women’s swim team’s number one backstroker was on one side, and Bobby Monica on the other. Sherry held a pen in both hands at all times, but she never took notes. No, she windmilled her arms backwards constantly, like some kind of dyslexic paddle wheel. The professor—a tenured guy in the philosophy department who had some theories about long-distance runners, squash players, hockey goalies, placekickers, and volleyballists—brought Schopenhauer into every lecture. I don’t want to tell tales out of college, but I think the guy secretly hated athletes and wanted to get his students to quit Bobby Monica said to me midterm, “What the fuck’s this guy mean about Plato’s cave and the wishbone offense? Did Plato have a big bonfire out front and he was cooking chicken? I don’t get it.”

  I said, “I’ll write it for you. You get me two tickets on the fifty-yard line next game and I’ll write your next paper for you.” Me, I’d chosen to write on satire and Ping-Pong. Being and Nothingness. Nausea. I said, “What’s with the Windmill Girl next to me on the other side?” meaning Sherry.

  My buddy Bobby Monica said, “You like her? She’s from New Jersey, too. Well, I mean, she’s from Chicago but that’s just like New Jersey. You can have all the backstrokers you want, Novel. Me, I’m looking to nail her roommate. She’s a breaststroker.”

  “You shallow fuck,” I said. Oh, I said it!—I knew that he depended on looking at my test.

  Bobby Monica punched me once, that I know of. I awoke naked in the community shower, faceup, water pounding my face. There in room 4 I wrote, “One time in a community shower I either lied or laid.” I wrote, “Sometimes in college it felt like I’d been filleted.”

  If I know anything about orphans and bastard children—and I’m pretty confident that I do, seeing as I spent fourteen years of my childhood with James and Joyce—I realize that they stashed contraband inside walls, above ceilings, and beneath floorboards. When I convinced myself that Jeff the owner only cared about the restricted veins transversing my brain and that I wouldn’t have to rush toward “The End” so as not to die from “accidental” poisoning before completion of Novel: My Life and Times, I returned to room 12 with claw hammer, cat’s-paw, crowbar, and a vacuum cleaner I’d never used. I took out room 12’s bathtub first and here’s what I found beneath it: an entire unopened carton of Picayune Extra Mild Class A unfiltered cigarettes—the Pride of New Orleans. By the time I had the ceiling, walls, and floor torn out and haphazardly stacked outside, I had discovered vintage melted lipstick tubes, a cache of silver coins, what appeared to be a crude zip gun that shot straightened paper clips, a few empty bottles of Rudd’s gin and Old Schenley bourbon, a couple Bakelite bracelets, one feather hat, an ashtray that advertised Gruel Apothecary, a teddy bear with a metal stob in its ear, a dozen makeup compacts, a slew of makeshift diaries, and the perfect bones of what I understood to be a puppy. I found real silver silverware, plates, and booklet after booklet filled with S&H Green Stamps. I found baby teeth behind those walls. Man, I skittered my way back to room 4 and wrote down, “Don’t ask me how I knew that unhappy children would hide their cherished things.”

  This took days, of course. I stacked my treasures, then transported them from one room to the next. Make a mental picture, I ask—room 12’s treasures into room 11’s. Then that stack into 10. Twelve, 11, and 10’s into room 9, and so on.

  Every so often I wrote something like, “There, in the floorboard, I found what must’ve been a gumball machine ring.” And so forth.

  Oh, I’m guessing that I must’ve averaged three rooms a day. It’s not all that difficult tearing things down and eyeballing what had been hidden forty to sixty years earlier. It’s not that much different than a manic-depressive charting a family tree, finding that incomprehensible uncle, and making rational conclusions. Building—creating—ends up being somewhat harder.

  No one from Gruel interrupted me, as far as I recall, during my deconstruction phase, which made me wonder a little later how they knew I would come across a book of matches with “Help! R.C.” written on the inside flap, for instance.

  I didn’t figure out “R.C.” until I had already destroyed the entire motel. I had stripped the place down to beam, joist,and stud on the inside. “R.C.” only stood for a Coca-Cola competitor as far as I knew, at the time, obsessed with collecting geegaws stolen away by unwanted children.

  Again, no one visited. No one warned me. Bekah didn’t call up to tell me how her new life with top-notch collector Weeks made her believe in a dozen good gods. I neatly stacked my collectibles and slept well on the floor each night. Then I found a torn-out sheet of Blue Horse filler paper with “Save my sister and me, God” written on it, signed “Irby C.”

  More than once the lieutenant governor at the time let me know that I lacked the ability to connect dots when it came down to
political career-on-the-line pressure situations. I think that’s what he said. He might’ve been talking about the Department of Transportation, not dots.

  Finally, I found an unused receipt pad, the carbon paper still stuck in back. The first page read “Cathcart” in mean, scratchy, rushed printing. The next page read “Rebekah.” The third read “Right.”

  That made no sense, I thought. The fourth read, “Not,” and the next “Is.”

  Fucking lieutenant governor tells me I can’t connect the dots.

  I turned straight to the last page, found “Please,” and flipped the pad like an old-fashioned cartoon. I don’t want to say that I caught everything on that first go-through—there was an enormous amount of asbestos particles floating in the motel room, clouding my vision—but pretty much the gist of it went, “Please, someone, get us out of here We’re not prisoners, exactly, but our daddy keeps us against our will We did not ask for this life My brother seems to be injured both mentally and psychologically There are dead animals and scary mean children everywhere who aren’t our relations Barry and Larry keep touching me The girls don’t like sewing They make guns that shoot needles The mommas living here cry all the time The other boys run away into the woods You must believe that it is not right Rebekah Cathcart Why Why Why Please help us now please.”

  I flipped through it about six thousand times. I believe that my exact words out loud to myself went, “Well this kind of explains some things.” I didn’t place Rebekah’s order pad for help on top of my other auction-worthy treasures.

  If she’d been famous, I might’ve. If she were married to a famous person, I might’ve. If her dead mother and father ever accomplished anything worthwhile—like committing history’s worst examples of infanticide—I might’ve sent the booklet straight up to Sotheby’s, or that other house.

  I’m not proud to say that I thought about calling Gene Weeks’s house and saying, “Goddamn, Bekah, you really had a problem with run-on sentences back in the day,” on his answering machine.

  But I didn’t. There were more important things on my list. I waved my arm, wondered if Victor Dees sold masks, found my notebook, and wrote, “I married a woman who never told me her unfortunate upbringing.” I wrote, “This probably explains why we never danced in our marriage. She wouldn’t go to parties. She wouldn’t invite people over to our house. A boys-only night was out of the question. At night she either curled up at the foot of the bed, or got up completely and slept on the couch. I’m sure a certified psychologist could explain why I never heard her singing.”

  I figured that I could go back and rewrite this passage, make it sound more lyrical. One of my textbooks called this type of writing “heat-of-the-moment nonstop regurgitation.” It didn’t escape me that Bekah’s flip-book stood in this same genre.

  I coughed and coughed, thought about going outside for fresh air, heard the oncoming army approach, and turned off the light. I stood in the middle of my hidden-prize-filled room, wearing short pants and kneepads.

  It’s not how I foresaw my life, back when I promised strangers how the shellfish weren’t tainted yet.

  22

  I DON’T WANT to say that Irby Cathcart strained to grasp simple concepts, but the only college that would take him in was tiny Anders College over in Forty-Five, an institution of “higher learning” that forever teetered on legitimate accreditation. Irby chose General Studies as a major because he’d seen the movie Patton and figured he had a head start

  It took until his senior year, after he’d taken every 101 class in every department as part of the General Studies program, before realizing that no one on the faculty planned to offer in-depth seminars on Washington, Grant, Lee, Eisenhower, or MacArthur.

  So he dropped out and took over his dead father’s business. Irby did pretty well in some of the General Studies courses: He made As in Volleyball 101, Badminton 101, Bowling 101, Board Games 101, Shuffleboard 101—Anders College administrators believed that their Leisure Studies graduates would matriculate to productive and successful lives in the cruise-ship industry—and Culinary Arts 101, all of which were one-hour credits. He squeaked out Ds in English, history, psychology, sociology, economics, finite math, and so on. Irby failed Philosophy 101 because he misunderstood his “professor” and kept writing, “I think there, four-eyes Ann,” whenever possible. He misquoted Socrates with, “The only thing I know is that I—no!—nothing.”

  Irby had saved even his failed tests and papers in a box he kept in his mother’s house, along with a list of animals he wished to stuff one day. “Unicorn” held the top spot.

  In every part of life where Irby spun his wheels, his sister drove full speed. And vice versa. Irby would’ve been a wonderful, trustworthy, loyal, levelheaded, committed, faithful husband had he not flicked cigarette embers carelessly.

  “Irby was one of a kind,” Jeff the owner said to me ten minutes after I chiseled out the last piece of Sheetrock, pulled out asbestos packed tighter than inch-thick felt, and found an evaporated bottle of perfume, atomizer intact. “If he could’ve lived longer I believe he might’ve made a mark in this world. Well, like, I mean, if he could’ve lived to be three hundred. I remember one time Vic Dees brought him a big old largemouth bass to get stuffed. Irby shoved giant glass eyeballs usually reserved for sailfish or bison on the ten-pound fish, which gave it an overly surprised look. It was perfect. Dees had to get rid of the thing it spooked him so much.” Jeff the owner looked around my naked, unadorned, skeletal motel.

  I said, “When, again, did Mr. Cathcart kill himself?” I didn’t say it in a way where Jeff the owner could hear me italicize or “double-quote” the word “kill.”

  “A long while back. I don’t know. I guess you should ask Rebekah about that. You can’t ask her momma or Irby. Hell, I can’t imagine anyone around here remembering for sure.” Jeff pretended to examine the roof trusses, I thought. He wouldn’t look me in the face. “We’ve all tried to erase that day out of our minds, here in Gruel.”

  I said, “I heard that. I knew it. Somebody killed Mr. Cathcart.” I asked Jeff the owner to hold on. I found my notebook, dusted off the cover, and wrote, “I married a woman involved in patricide.” Back to Jeff I said, “Hey, did you bring any booze with you? I kind of have a hankering for a vodka tonic. Usually I only like vodka drinks on the first day of spring. But for some reason vodka feels right right now.”

  Jeff the owner walked to the end of the Gruel Inn. He passed my stacks of found contraband and said, “Hotdamn. You got yourself some antiques here, son.” He said, “No. I didn’t bring you any vodka. I didn’t know. I brought beer and bourbon, per usual. You need to pay up your tab, by the way.”

  “Beer and bourbon’s good,” I said. I said, “Don’t touch anything over, there, it might be contaminated.” At the time, too, I cared about fingerprints, in case some fellow showed up later on and declared, “I’m a detective, Novel.”

  “No one could prove anything. You got to remember that first off. How many cops you seen in Gruel? Zero. How many sheriff’s deputies you see driving on the square in a normal day? Zero. How many real coroners? Zero. We don’t even have our own funeral embalmer anymore now that Mr. Blythe died. Shit, he had to be sent all the way over to Forty-Five when he passed. It’s kind of like the riddle about a one-barber town and who has the longest hair.”

  My plans changed. It wasn’t exactly working the way I’d set out, anyway. I held up a finger for Jeff the owner to hold his thought. In my notebook I wrote, “It was hard to distinguish truthful people in Gruel from the ones who lied.”

  Jeff the owner said, “Let’s pretend that you’re going to finish this little project of yours. Let’s pretend it gets published. Well what’re you going to do then?”

  I didn’t let on that deep down I knew the entire notion was a farce, a joke, a pipe dream—that at best I should try to write short stories. I said, “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “You goddamn right you never thought about
it. Are you planning to stay here in Gruel, in this place? Look around.” Jeff the owner waved his arms around my now naked hovel. “I didn’t think anyone could lower the property values of Gruel proper, but you’ve managed. Way to go, fucker. For all of us.”

  Somehow I had the ability to make people hate me, I thought. I thought, Write that down. “When I sell my autobiography, I’m thinking about settling down here and opening up a junk shop. An antiques store. Believe me when I say that I’m committed to helping our community prosper. Go ask Maura-Lee. I’ve told her all about it.”

  Jeff looked at his wristwatch. “I put Barry and Larry in charge of the bar. I better get back. But I’m holding you to everything.” He tapped my sad chest with his finger, just like a movie gangster.

  I called Maura-Lee at home, then at the bakery. I got no answer at either place. On both answering machines I blurted out, “I’m going to stay in town I have all this old paraphernalia People will make special trips to Gruel It’ll help our economy What do you think about my renting the old vacant Gruel Five-and-Dime building?”

  Then I sat on the floor. I’m sure I must’ve written, “As a child, it wasn’t hard for me to understand the importance of synchronicity.”

  Here’s a funny thing: I began to wonder if my orphans and bastard kids buried things out in the yard, and then Victor Dees brought by a metal detector soon thereafter. I’m talking twenty minutes after I conjured up the idea. I kind of wondered if I had said aloud to myself, “I sure could use a metal detector,” and Victor Dees heard it through secret devices, or if he had a telepathic communication ability. Victor Dees showed up with what looked like a Weed Eater and said, “I got this on sale back at the shop. You want me to put it on your bill?”