I cocked my head because I thought I heard marching across the road. It ended up being a sad-mufHered Chevrolet driving by at thirty miles an hour. Bekah said, “You’ll have enough money. Gruel Normal’s prepared to hire you out as their historian in residence. You don’t even have to show up every day. Basically, you’ll be available to students who want to ask questions about politics, Gruel’s role in the Civil War, and proper college application essays. That’s it. Well, and I told the guy in charge that you’d be happy to show off your snakes whenever possible.”
One of those how-to-write text scholars admonished trick endings. This guy wrote, “Don’t write a fantastical story only to have the main character wake up at the end and find it all to be a dream.” He said that it was okay to do this in the old days, like in the 1800s and before, but not in the “fast-paced society of modern men and women.”
I said, “Nice joke. Ha-ha-ha. Don’t think I haven’t figured out y’all’s entire scheme.” I made eye contact and didn’t blink. Somewhere along the line I’d read where liars either blink uncontrollably all the time or shift their gazes to the left and downward.
Bekah sat up and turned her head twenty degrees. “You’re not dead. Some people have argued that the Gruel Inn would be a better tourist trap if you died unexpectedly, before you wrote a second book. They say there has to be some tragedy to bring people here.” She stood and looked through all of the opened walls, all the way to the end. “Have you sent your memoir out yet? Are you sending it to an agent first, or straight to an editor? I’d love to read it. We all would. Nancy Ruark said she’d like to try her hand at turning it into a screenplay. She says Gruel could become the next Manteo. You know, that story about the Lost Colony where Andy Griffith got his start out there in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.”
Man, I needed a drink. I wanted one goddamn thimbleful of bourbon, which I knew would set my nerves down to nothing more than irritating twitches. I’m pretty sure that my autobiography might do that. But I swear to God, Bekah, y’all don’t want to kill me off before I finish a novel. Novel by Novel! I’ve got it all right up here,” I said, popping my temple.
Bekah said, “I’ll tell everyone. I agree that one book’s not enough. One novel by Faulkner or Wolfe wouldn’t have attracted people to their houses, right?”
One textbook writer thought that outlining an entire novel might be a great idea, but he’d never written a novel. The other tenured professors believed that the whole fun of writing waned once a template to follow got established.
Right away I figured that the people from Gruel would expect an outline.
I said, “You tell them—or I’ll tell them—that I’m writing a group of stories about the good people who revive a small southern town, and how they succeed without succumbing to irrational actions.”
Bekah said, “I have to go. I have to make some calls. Guess how many people only answer their phone calls after you let it ring once, hang up, then call again? The answer is ‘most.’ I got this woman who’s had cancer four times, among other things. Then her husband and two children got killed in some kind of freak motorboat explosion. I have to make some threats.”
My still-wife. She raked a hand through her hair. Bekah pulled at her jeans down twice from the tops of her thighs.I said, Til think about that job. I’ll believe it when I see a contract. And tell everyone in your club I’m busy on another writing project.”
“Do you want to live here, or there?”
I said, “We’ll see.”
“Do you think I’m getting fat?” Bekah asked. She turned around ninety degrees or thereabouts.
Victor Dees drove up in his camouflaged pickup truck. He backed it in close to room 6’s front door, got out, and opened the tailgate. “I have it from quality sources that you’re willing to donate what you’ve found,” he said as I moseyed up from the front office. “I’m in charge of picking it up, inspecting the goods, and deciding prices. Then I’m taking it all up to the Pickens County Flea Market Wednesday morning. You’re welcome to come along.”
I knew this trick. It’s the last thing Jimmy Hoffa heard, too: You’re welcome to come along. The followers of Jim Jones, the residents of Easter Island. Wile E. Coyote. Jesus of Nazareth. I said, “I can’t go. I’m in the middle of writing a novel. I’m waiting to hear from a number of agents, editors, and publishers. I have to work on a syllabus as the glorious and wonderful historian-to-be over at Gruel Normal.”
Victor Dees pulled his red polyester-and-mesh hat brim down low to the forehead. A stitched-on emblem advertised Gruel BBQ/Petting Zoo. “I’ve eyeballed what you got and I’m thinking I can get a good couple thousand dollars out of it if the right gay antique dealers and collectors come around. From Atlanta, you know. Savannah and Charleston. I once sold a box of octagon Holiday Inn ashtrays and another Hefty bag filled with green and white Holiday Inn towels to this old boy down Montgomery way who lost his virginity in one them hotels. He paid, I believe, three hundred bucks for the lot. Timing plays a part. Luck.”
I said, “Predestination. I’ve been thinking a lot about pre-destiny these days.”
Victor Dees nudged room 6’s door open. “I got some special alcohol at the store that’ll denature your Superglued keyholes, if you want. I ordered it right after you made that paranoid decision.”
“‘Denature’ isn’t the right word, you idiot.”
“You know what I mean.” Victor Dees held his open palms toward me, in front of his face. “Don’t hit me again.”
I shook my head. “I apologize again, Victor. I guess I got all stove up with testosterone and adrenaline. Look at my arms,” I said. My biceps, as always, weren’t much more than miniature versions of swaybacked Shetlands. “Here. Go inside, find that stack of knives, and stab me. I don’t care. I know it’s what’ll happen eventually, if I don’t get kicked out the passenger side of a car going seventy down the road first.”
Victor stuck his hands in his green cloth janitor’s pants. He said, “I’ve changed my ways. I saw this documentary a couple nights ago about a Buddhist monk woman. She couldn’t touch money. She wouldn’t touch men or food. People had to take her from here to there. Basically she couldn’t interact. I’m thinking about turning that way as soon as it’s feasible.”
I thought, That’s not a Buddhist, that’s a fucking mooch. “It’d be hard to run the army-navy store and not touch money,” I said.
“Not as hard as you’d think. It ain’t exactly gangbusters down there, if you know what I mean. I could use an ice storm once a year or so to sell Sterno, at least. Anyway, that’s why I wanted to see if you’d help me sell off this shit at the flea market. So I wouldn’t have to touch the money. So I could get a head start on my Buddhism.”
Of course, I thought, who would lie about wanting to become one with the Buddhists? Who would lie about the most peaceful religion in the world? I said, “What the hell. Wednesday. Come pick me up.”
Victor hauled a box of ancient safety razor blades into the bed of his truck, those double-edged kind best used against a sad wrist. He said, “I might be wrong, but I’m thinking that a hardcore orthodox Buddhist believes that he should walk into the woods and die, become one with Nature, forgo any kind of food or aid. He must become something called an ascetic.”
I said, “That might be Hinduism. It’s one or the other. Buddhism or Hinduism.” I’d never had the opportunity to research these sects in order to write speeches for a lieutenant governor, unfortunately. “I don’t know for sure.”
“Well I ain’t going that far. I want to go on record as saying I won’t go that far. If it looks like I might be leaning toward starvation, I’m putting you in charge of beating some sense into me.” I thought, I know this trick.
Of course there wasn’t enough room in Victor’s truck for everything I’d unwalled. So we loaded up the step van. In a strange cause-and-effect sort of way, the overabundance of orphan hidden gimcracks required Victor Dees to drop my engine back in, et cetera. We
drove in tandem up Old Old Greenville Road, to a left on Due West two-lane, meandered to Highway 25, then drove north to Pickens County. I should mention that this journey began at two thirty in the morning. We’d spent the previous two days poring over antique and collectible price guides from 1989, then doubling everything. I drove my old Viper-Mobile armed with a carved hickory stick, a butcher knife, and a two-foot-long, two-inch-thick piece of rubber-coated copper wire I’d discovered in the shed. These were my weapons should Victor Dees renounce Buddhism and try to kill me.
We arrived at the flea market two hours before daybreak and backed our vehicles up to three of the last one thousand tables. Men and women roamed the flat, flat red clay field adjacent to a twenty-foot-wide creek, surrounded by hills that fed the southern reaches of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Most everyone carried flashlights. A couple old-timers walked from table to table armed with burning torches.
“If we can sell enough by, say, nine thirty, we can get out of here without having to pay the man for table rent,” Victor Dees said. He unpacked his truck and arranged our wares neatly.
I said, “That doesn’t sound too Buddhistic. I guess it’ll keep you from having to touch money, though. Or from my having to stick my hand in your back pocket to fish out a wallet.”
I swear to God Victor Dees said something that sounded like “Nom yoho rengay quo, nom yoho rengay quo,” over and over, like a personal mantra.
“How much you want for the truck?” a man with a torch asked Brother Dees. The man’s beard didn’t look unlike abolitionist John Brown’s. He walked behind our tables to inspect the vehicle better. “This would be a good truck to take hunting, the way you got it camouflaged realistic-like.”
I set down packs of Picayune, empty bottles of Rudd Ultra dry gin, the coin collection, one gold tooth, and a stack of early Playboys. I put out one of the knives. Across from us a man sold shotguns, VCRs, and a goat. On the other side of him men sold push lawn mowers, yellow root, and cheaply framed portraits of Elvis in velvet. I might’ve misheard a hawker down the row, but it sounded like somebody pushed child slaves on one side and first-edition half-mammals on the other. Let me say that it wasn’t unlike being in hell.
A woman came up to my table and shone her light slowly around. She said, “Picayunes. You don’t see them every day. Did you quit smoking?”
I said, “Yes, ma’am. I quit right after my mother, father, and wife all died from the lung cancer. I had to. These packs of Picayune got pulled out of my daddy’s estate, as a matter of fact.” Fuck it. I tried to conjure up a crocodile tear. We should’ve brought Nancy Ruark with us, I thought.
“Wha’chew asting?”
I said, “Five bucks. That’s a deal.”
The woman picked up one pack and inspected the tax stamp. “This here package probably went for something like less than sixty cents. I’ll give you a dollar.”
I was about to say, “What the hell, okay,” but Victor Dees whispered, “I just sold my truck and everything in it. I’m glad I thought to bring my title! Say, do you think touching a personal check’s the same as touching money?”
By the time I finished unloading Victor’s pickup, then looking over his buyer’s check and driver’s license, most of my table had been cleared. Evidently it’s flea market etiquette to haul off whatever you want should the seller not respond to, “How much you asting for this?” if and only if the prospective buyer repeats it twice, or must wait more than thirty seconds.
I pulled more found collectible merchandise from the step van. As the new owner of Victor Dees’s camouflaged truck drove off I said, “Are you donating the money you got from your truck to the Gruel Inn renovation project? Hotdamn. That’s something. I really misjudged you. Way to go. This might be the beginning of a new Gruel era. Maybe all of us should look into this religion of yours. It couldn’t be not beneficial for all of us, what with Gruel’s history.”
And at that very moment—as if a Hollywood director staged everything—the sun broke through low-flying horizontal gray February clouds into a brilliant, angel-song-inducing morn. A hush fell over both sellers and buyers alike at the Wednesday morning Pickens County Flea Market. I looked eastward and allowed a new warmth to envelop my feet. For a second I thought about how I could write a series of stories that involved the intricate lives of flea market vendors, but figured that some idiot had probably done it by then.
Victor Dees turned to me and said, “Who are you? I don’t know about you, brother, but I have church tonight, it being Wednesday.” Off in the distance I heard, again, someone hawking half-mammals.
25
BEFORE ANYONE could learn the truth of my pathetic endeavors I stopped exactly three hundred paces across the road, followed my ex-carpet, then turned west three hundred paces. Unfortunately, a creek stood there. I walked another three hundred measured steps north. Mind you I held a compass bought at Victor Dees’s army-navy store. Man, I wanted to be accurate. When I got to that point, though, there stood a poison ivy thicket I didn’t care to unburden. I turned west until, sadly, a patch of quicksand stood. Quicksand! Who’s ever really seen a slough of quicksand?! It didn’t ever occur to me that, perhaps, I should consider four- or five-hundred-yard lengths. I went northwest and stopped at what appeared to be the mouth of a volcano, then from there northeast only to discover a bottomless swamp. I didn’t look up in the trees to establish whether, indeed, howler monkeys followed me, swinging through the canopy of trees usually known to South American rain forests. Finally, afraid that I would become lost forever, I took my entrenching tool, dug down a good three feet, and buried Novel: A Memoir, my less-than-epic poem. I covered the hole and placed a midsize rock on it the same way that, I was sure, any man or woman might do if embarrassed, so that no one would ever find the thing.
I found an old tie from the speechwriting days—this will sound a little Stanislavskian, but I used to dress up in wardrobes that I foresaw the intended audience wearing: starched shirts when the lieutenant governor addressed lawyers, overalls for eastern North Carolina hog farmers, a simple pastel pantsuit ensemble for members of MADD—and drove to Gruel Normal, a private school housed inside the cement block outbuildings and office of ancient Gruel Sand and Gravel. The headmaster, a fellow named Mr. Ouzts who lived all the way up in Powdersville and commuted daily—he knew better than to mingle or commiserate with the locals at Roughhouse Billiards—met me at the door.
I said, “This wasn’t my idea. I have no idea who’s behind this.”
“We’re down to twenty-four students, grades one through twelve. Our endowment’s over a million dollars. We can afford a historian in residence. Gruel Normal never needs to prove its commitment to education. We need viability, you might say.”
I thought, Hire Henry Kissinger. Hire Jimmy Carter. “I’ll do my best, should I get hired,” I said, and handed Mr. Ouzts my vitae, about the only thing I’d really written over and over while secluded in the Gruel Inn. I said, “I’ve probably written a hundred speeches for more than a couple lieutenant governors of North Carolina about viability.”
I’d not put a single lieutenant governor down for a reference, though, of course.
“I know. My wife’s from Black Mountain.”
I said, “I’ll be damned,” just like that. Already I knew that the whole episode wouldn’t be beneficial to my health. “What’s your wife’s maiden name?”
Mr. Ouzts might’ve been ten or fifteen years older than I. He said, “Haughey. Her name was Nora Haughey. She’s our PE teacher here at Gruel Normal.”
I did my best to keep a blank face. That was the dancer’s name—according to documentation I’d found up in Black Mountain when the pinhead guy wouldn’t save my parents’ ephemera—who gave birth to James and Joyce. For a slight nanosecond I thought, She might be my mother, too.
Ouzts stared at me, and I knew he searched my eyes for recognition. I said, “She might know my parents. I don’t know. She might know my parents. I don’t know.” This went on for
a good ten minutes, I bet.
“She might. We’ll ask her. Say, I understand that you know our drama teacher, Ms. Ruark. She works here as an adjunct, Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
I said, “Not really.”
I got housed in the ex-sand silo. It reminded me of the joke about driving a Clemson graduate crazy by putting him in a round room and asking him to piss in the corner. The school would build bookshelves and buy me as many history books as I wanted, starting with Thucydides. “My wife used to use this room for something she called ‘ultimate handball.’ We had to give it up when one of the Dill boys lost an eye.”
I said, “Tell me again what my duties are? I’ll be more than happy to bring in my collection of copperheads, timber rattlers cottonmouths, and what may or may not be a baby anaconda I found out in the middle of Gruel Jungle. But do I really have to teach lacrosse? Somebody said I had to teach lacrosse, and I really don’t know that game. But I understand that a bunch of rich kids get scholarships to places like Johns Hopkins and UNC because of it.”
“No. Sit. Read. Listen. Advise. We’re not asking you to teach a course. Every once in a while one of our teachers might happen by wanting advice on Genghis Khan. Or Nixon.”
I said, “And y’all are paying me for this, right?”
“It’s fifty grand. But everyone will have to give you the details. Everyone who’s part of the deal. Part of the foundation, as it were. I haven’t done the math. We don’t have summer school. It’s a ton of money per hour, I know that. The job only lasts as long as it lasts, which shouldn’t be more than a month.”
We left the silo and looked at the longest building, which might’ve been sixteen hundred square feet. I said, “How many people do you have on the faculty? These few students—how does it work?”
“Work?” Ouzts said. “That’s a good one. Ha ha ha. Our kids get accepted to colleges, that’s all that matters. Well, they get accepted.”
Novel Page 19
