This was a ten o’clock in the morning episode on a Sunday. I walked out back, hit the switch, and right away scanned earth as if I ran a floor polisher.
Victor Dees pushed me to the right, out behind room 9. He said, “I’m thinking this might be the place.”
Later I would understand that he knew something I didn’t know.
The little Geiger counter beeped nuts, that’s all I have to say. “There might be something valuable down here somewhere,” I said.
Dees nodded. He said, “You got a shovel? If you want, I can go back to the store and get a collapsible entrenchment shovel. They’re handy.” I set down the detector, jogged to my shed, and pulled out an old-fashioned spade.
Let me say right here that I stood transfixed for a moment, that I noticed a ton of snakes in my shed, all balled up in aquariums that I thought I’d thrown away. Somewhere along the line I’d gone back out and, using my knowledge, recaptured either the snakes I had released, or caught new ones hiding beneath stumps, and caged them up in my old shed. They all had lumps midway through their bodies, which meant I’d thrown mice in there, too.
I didn’t come back and say any of this to Dees. No, at the point in question I might’ve gone six inches into loam before hitting a clanky-clanky hard substance. Victor Dees pointed at the back gutters at the Gruel Inn. He said, “You might want to check up there too. Later on, you know.”
Within the hour I found a cache of butcher knives buried behind my motel. By “cache” I mean a good dozen, all at least ten inches long, rusted—I think—or bloodstained. In the gutters, oddly, I found two shotgun shell casings.
Maura-Lee showed up either a minute or week after Victor Dees left. She brought along a loaf of pumpernickel, which may or may not have had the drop of lamb’s blood Jesus crust. Maura-Lee hadn’t seen the motel skeletonized. She said, “You look like shit. Victor Dees ordered white coats for us, and a straitjacket for you in case it comes down to our needing to come pull you out of here. You’re nuts.”
I tore off a chunk of bread and ate it. “I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks for the update, though. You look great, M-L. You look better than ever, dear.”
This conversation occurred, maybe, in room 2, where I’d been holed up between four and ten days, I estimated. The knives and shotgun shells sat scattered in a circle around my desk. I had tried to work on my story but couldn’t get an image of Bekah, or Irby, or Vudge Ina—or a combination of them—killing father, husband, taxidermist Cathcart.
“My parents wouldn’t’ve approved of how my life turned out,” was the only thing I could get out on paper. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but it became obvious that a giant mean trick got played on me, that everyone in Gruel participated, that the entire Ina and Irby death scene and funeral was a setup, a hoax, a grand plan to teach Novel Akers some kind of lesson.
I believed that my last lieutenant governor, somehow, orchestrated the entire operation.
He might’ve had good reason: One of his last speeches, covered on the Greensboro/High Point Fox affiliate by morning anchors Brad Jones and Cindy Ford, occurred at a paper mill located somewhere in western North Carolina on the Pigeon River, near Canton. The lieutenant governor had received undying support from the region, both nonunion and union-friendly workers who thought that they needed less environmental standards and more job security.
Well let me say that I felt differently, seeing as my father and I’d discovered more than a few three-eyed trout, two-headed salamanders, and half-witted slope-headed local fishermen in the area when we ventured for gold dust on what Dad hoped were unchartered creeks worthy of de Soto. Oh I swear I didn’t want anyone losing his or her job—I’ve never wanted such, except for hospital debt collectors, telemarketers, Republican strategists, overpaid and whiny professional athletes, attorneys who represented the health-care industry, anyone with a lame Ph.D. in education, insurance company CEOs, pitbull puppy farmers, most advertising and public relations executives, and so on.
From what I saw on the news, all the way over at my home in Charlotte, my lieutenant governor was saying what I’d written, namely, “To heck with people who believe in evolution. If we as a species progressed like the scientists say we do, then why don’t we have a tiny water-squirt mechanism right below our tailbones? Am I right or am I right? Why aren’t we equipped, by now, with an inboard bidet so we don’t have to wipe ourselves? I’ll tell you why—it’s because God wanted us to cut down trees and, among other things, make toilet paper out of them. You doggone right!”
The audience members, all right-wing conservatives, “erupted in laughter,” as they say. More than a few slope-heads yelled out, “You damn right!” and “We been wiping our butts for years!” although I doubt any of them had ever seen or heard of a bidet.
My lieutenant governor said, “I don’t care if we cut down the last tree in our planet’s forest as long as good North Carolinians have a fine two-ply roll in which to unsully themselves. How many trees do y’all see over there in the Arab countries? None. It’s a giant desert. Do we want to be part of a populace unconcerned with people who have to walk around all be-nastied? I don’t think so.”
My lieutenant governor never got such an ovation. I kind of felt bad about it. But after the news spot, boy, levelheaded people started calling in to the station, wrote letters to the editor, and stood up at school board meetings throughout the state. It seemed that no one cared to be represented one way or another by a man who even visualized a ready-made squirting bidet popping out of the human spinal cord.
I feigned innocence when the lieutenant governor called me up two days later in the middle of my snake show at an inner-city after-school boys club. I said, “Did the paper mill people boo?”
“No. But the state’s not made up solely of paper mill workers, Novel. We got tobacco farmers. We got white-collar workers in Durham and Chapel Hill.”
I said, “Well. You might’ve brought up your concerns on the first read-through.” The lieutenant governor never read copy before the actual show. “The governor might have been able to foresee such a predicament.”
I had glued that line—“The governor might have been able to foresee such a predicament”—to my Viper-Mobile dash. I knew to say it regularly. Here’s how I kind of lost my job, right before Vudge Ina kicked off anyway: Every incoming lieutenant governor thought that if it weren’t for my speeches, he’d not’ve been elected. See, every brand-new lieutenant governor realized that I wrote bad, weird speeches on purpose in order to get the sitting lieutenant governor deposed. Then the new lieutenant governor rehired me, thinking I was on his side.
This takes too long to explain.
What matters is, no one understood that—as a history major—I recognized every unrelenting supposed statesman’s urgent and needful downfall. The next hammerhead elected felt convinced that I wouldn’t abandon and sabotage his undulating and flimsy platforms, beliefs, platitudes, and promises.
You’d think that I’d’ve been stressed out during these years, that I needed to attend cheap weekly YMCA yoga classes or hire out certified massage therapists each Wednesday afternoon. I didn’t. There’s no sociological, or anthropological, or neurological evidence concerning my beliefs, but I’m of the thought that constant shrugging kept my blood pressure, conscience, and alimentary canal settled, not to mention regular knotty, stress-filled shoulder blades pounding from lactic acid.
All of that happened to most of those Roman emperors, by the way, from what I figured out during my postgraduate reading of the great satirist Juvenal.
Not that any of this matters. No, to stay on the subject, Maura-Lee showed up with a loaf of pumpernickel. She said, “You can’t sweet-talk me unless you almost mean it. I didn’t want to imply that you’ve aged since we met, but you’ve become more unkempt. You have to know what I mean.”
I said, “Where’s that community theater woman of yours? Did I scare her down to Alabama?”
“Now you’re just being mean.” Mau
ra-Lee cinched her blue jeans and tucked in the thin light green blouse that she wore. “I don’t know about your standards, but right now I’d like to say that the number one toilet manufacturer in the United States is called American Standard.”
That all probably made sense. At the time, though, I didn’t follow Maura-Lee’s little analogy. Me, I had to worry about a big wind blowing away my tin roof, seeing as I’d peckered away even the particleboard underlayment—which shouldn’t have been there in the first place, seeing as it kept the roof from breathing—in hopes of finding, I don’t know, say, hidden newspaper clippings.
“Give this all up and let’s shoot some pool,” Maura-Lee said. “I got some time. Did I ever tell you about how I’m now selling to some private schools? I got their bread contracts.”
“Are you insane? Didn’t you borrow my step van when this all started way back when? I didn’t dream that up, did I?”
Maura-Lee tapped her head. “Oh.” That’s all she said: “Oh.” I could read her face, though. It showed, I have to get out of this area pronto.
I said, “Hold on,” found a scrap of paper nearby, and wrote, “I finally noticed how I had to get out of Gruel.”
At the time I didn’t envision this simple statement as being pure-tee “foreshadowing.”
Maura-Lee said, “With the chance of sounding desperate, I want to tell you something. Sometimes in the middle of the morning, when I go home and try to sleep, I imagine us leaving here and starting a new life together elsewhere. I’m not daydreaming about Alaska or Costa Rica, or even Florida. Just somewhere. There’s exactly nothing to do here, or over in Forty-Five, outside of drinking away two livers. Outside of staring at that statue of Colonel Dill in the middle of the square and wondering when the Civil War will really end.” She picked up my bottle of Old Crow off the sill and uncapped the screw top. “Outside of wondering about your real mother and father. Didn’t your brother and sister come visiting here once? They should’ve stayed. They’d’ve been perfect for here, making up trick shots with Barry and Larry.”
I said, “Stop.”
“Have you ever seen your birth certificate? I mean, have you seen your original birth certificate?”
I said, “Hand that bottle this way. And be quiet. I don’t like to think about all this.”
Maura-Lee walked circles. She said, “Not that I believe in predestination, you know, but I was adopted. You got all these people living here spawned from the Cathcart orphan farm. James and Joyce kind of visiting, but getting out in their own way. I would wonder, if I were you.”
If Maura-Lee had been a man I would’ve shoved her up against the exposed studs supporting my naked ceiling. I said, “I have work to do. I’ll see you after I get done.”
“There are secrets to be discovered, Novel,” Maura-Lee said on her way out. “Enjoy the pumpernickel. And if you ever want to get married, I’m here. Don’t let some other man grab me up. Or woman. You and I could have kids who weren’t orphans.”
Here’s a really bad one: The lieutenant governor, for some reason, accepted an invitation to address the Gay and Lesbian Alliance over in Asheville right before I had to come down to Gruel with my wife in order to watch her brother and mother explode. I wrote the lieutenant governor’s speech. He said, “I’m all for a legal marriage between same-sex partners. As long as they’re taxpayers. No, wait—either we legalize marriages between same-sex partners or we abolish the institution of marriage altogether. I have come to the belief that the act of marriage is the number one cause of divorce in America.”
Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!—he didn’t get reelected after that one became public record.
And I haven’t been completely truthful in all of this. Maybe I kind of got fired, and took off behind Bekah, stealing the step van loaded with its wares.
On my last day of writing the memoir, sobering up, I thought about how I could write The Southern Kama Sutra next, and only include naked men and women doggie-style with different settings in the background: a patch of kudzu, the grits aisle of Winn-Dixie, Myrtle Beach’s pavilion, a Clemson-Carolina football game, in a deer stand, atop the roof of Thomas Wolfe’s ancestral boardinghouse, amid alligators at that St. Augustine wrestling pit, in the middle of cotton or tobacco fields, on the sidelines of a cock or pitbull fight.
I need to make it clear that my intentions after about sophomore year in college were to complete a master’s degree, perhaps go teach in a poor, rural mountain area for a few years, and decide whether or not I wanted to tackle a dissertation. I envisioned regaling Appalachian children with stories of the American Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, the people’s revolution, Castro’s revolution, and the Monroe Doctrine; of English kings, Roman emperors, European philosophers, American inventors, and Russian czars; of Ponce de León, Marco Polo, Francis Drake, Lewis and Clark, Admiral Byrd, Erik the Red, and—on a lighter note, maybe right before Christmas vacation—women who followed men out to California during the gold rush. I would spend an entire day on the emancipation proclamation. I wouldn’t mention Christopher Columbus, seeing as how I learned early on about his misdirection. My parents were dead, my siblings had emigrated, and I was a serious young man who tried to stay away from the Cat’s Cradle punk bar at least half the week.
And then I found out how goddamned graduate school’s about nothing more than area and focus. Whereas I’d been able to jump around junior and senior years—a little Chinese history here, a little American South there, a class on imperialism and another called Babylonia to Idi Amin—I needed to pick a mentor and grasp everything he or she knew so that (I figured later) when he or she retired I could offer up the same “facts.”
I’m no mathematician or psychologist or neurologist, but I’ve always thought that you can’t know everything that someone else knows. If generation after generation gets taught and taught by mentors, in time it’ll come down to a full-fledged professor only being about to call the roll and say, “Uh, like, the Louisiana Purchase meant a lot in the United States’ development, man.”
I sat in the office drinking retried coffee. Because I wanted to be highly symbolic, I planned to gather all scraps of paper at noon—starting with room 12 and ending in room 1. I would collect my ephemera from typewriter, notebooks, computer printer, and what scraps I had tacked to walls, then retacked to exposed studs.
The marching continued down Gruel Mountain, by the way. Whatever wayward ghost troops that haunted me from the beginning now approached, it sounded, right across Old Old Augusta Road. I didn’t peer out the window. I didn’t recheck all of my glued-up doorknob keyholes.
Here’s what I gathered together finally, in scraps, of Novel: A Memoir, in no particular order:
I came from a line of ex-musicians
who never planned having a child.
Vudge Ina had waved to her cancer physician
then the fireball I saw was no less than wild.
Oh it went on and on. I don’t want to embarrass myself with the entire opus; it ran more than a couple hundred pages, most of which I didn’t remember writing, but—as best as I could chronologically piece it together—some of it went thusly:
I don’t remember my birth.
Jeff the owner said “epithet,” then cursed.
A series of lieutenant governors ruined my life, maybe.
In college I considered being a world religions major until I took a physics course from a professor who convinced us all that beings existed in other solar systems, and that they probably had thousands of religions, too, trying to explain life as they saw it certainly.
How embarrassing is that? What an idiot I am, I thought. Show, don’t tell! Where’s my bourbon? It went on:
When the zombies spoke to me, I understood how my life might have a reason.
I’ve never been the kind of person who had a favorite season.
There were women in my life who didn’t leave unsatisfied.
There in the Gruel Inn I worried about cyanide.
; One time in a community shower I either lied or laid.
Sometimes in college it felt like I’d been filleted.
Like I said, this went on. It continued. My goofball memoir made the Odyssey’s length look like a fucking public toilet limerick:
I married a woman who never told me about her unfortunate upbringing.
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 poker 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 married a woman involved in patricide.
It was hard to distinguish truthful people in Gruel from the ones who lied.
Somehow I had the ability to make people hate me.
As a child, it wasn’t hard for me to understand the importance of synchronicity.
My parents wouldn’t’ve approved of how my life turned out.
I finally noticed how I had to get out of Gruel, and to drive away no matter what route.
I’m talking it went on and on, with too much in between. I finished it off by saying something about having a goddamn master’s degree. I wished that I’d’ve had some kind of good editor inside the Gruel Inn back when it was a writers retreat, some guy who could’ve looked me in the face and said, “You kind of have a little too much idle chitchat in the middle of your story, Novel.”
Novel Page 17
