Novel

by George Singleton

  Victor Dees, Jeff the owner, Barry and Larry, Bekah, and Dr. Bobba Lollis pitched in to renovate the Gruel Inn. Maura-Lee brought over free lunches—bialys and croissants that no one else would ever buy in town, seeing as the words “bread,” “biscuit,” and “bagel” were not mispronounceable.

  Also, a good dozen men I’d never seen before showed up strong, sinewy fellows who spoke little and wouldn’t make eye contact. I figured them to be recent convicts, if anything. I said to Bekah, “I’ll just stay here, if you don’t mind. I mean, I feel comfortable here, and I need the room to write my next book. If you don’t mind. Are you ever going back to Charlotte? What’s with our old house, anyway?”

  Bekah said, “Okay. I understand. Say, when do you start over at the school?”

  Jeff the owner said, “I found a man in Virginia who specializes in bronze plaques. He did one for when Walt Disney came through here back in the sixties. It’s over on the side of the road on Highway 72 going out to Calhoun Falls.”

  I said, “Walt Disney didn’t come through here. Goofy might have, but not Walt Disney.”

  Bekah nodded. She said she’d heard the story and seen the plaque. Jeff the owner said, “We were this close to being the Magic Kingdom.” He held his thumb and index finger five inches apart, which must’ve been about right on a regular Rand McNally page one.

  “The Magic Kingdom,” I said. “Gee, I wonder why he chose Florida. Anyway, you found the plaque guy in Virginia.”

  Jeff the owner refilled his nail pouch. I stood around kind of wondering why all these people wanted to make the Gruel Inn look like a proper abode. “Yeah! We’re going to set up a roadside historical marker out front saying you lived and wrote here. When your book comes out, you know.”

  I tried to keep eye contact. Back when I wrote speeches with big lies included I researched how liars acted, how they became shifty-eyed, or stared at their hands. When I delivered my speeches to the lieutenant governor in person on occasion every time, I reminded him to either fix his gaze one foot above the head of the backmost spectator or straight into the pupils of a dark-skinned African American in the front row. When dealing with a roomful of handicapped citizens it wasn’t a great idea to stare at their wheelchair handles. With blind people it wasn’t smart to blurt out something like, “Man, I wish I worked here—what’s the dress code? You could be buck naked and no one would know!”

  Maybe I’ve already said that one, before. It’s the booze, it’s the booze, it’s the booze.

  I said to Jeff, and to everyone inside room 1 holding hammers, nail guns, Sheetrock, drywall tape, drywall buckets, and/or paint brushes, “Well that’s quite an honor.”

  Bekah said, “Your students at Gruel Normal should feel proud and honored to have you grace their campus. A letter of recommendation from you’s going to be a coup!” As she spoke, though, she squinted—in Facial Expressions 101 that means she didn’t mean her words.

  I understood that either my time on this planet was limited or my time in Gruel would have to cease presently. “Yeah, we’ll see. Mr. Ouzts wants me starting fourth nine weeks. That’s the beginning of April, I think. I’m going in now, though, free of charge. From now until my official first day I’m going to work hard on the new book. And this time I’m just going to sit myself down in the office out there in the silo and forget about chapters per room. I’m calling it More Gruel, Please. It’s all about us, in a fictional way.”

  Jeff the owner said, “Make me a little younger, and a lot more muscular, but not in a gay way.”

  Maura-Lee and Bekah only stared. They kept eye contact Barry said something about how he knew he could make a trick shot involving a box of dominoes, a Charles Chips potato chip canister, two sock monkeys, a series of empty glass Aunt Jemima pancake syrup bottles, and a Polaroid One-Step camera—using a swizzle stick instead of a cue. Bekah and Maura-Lee stared.

  26

  FEW CHILDREN STILL lived in Gruel. I never underwent a full-fledged sociopolitical-anthropological demographic survey, but it didn’t seem far-fetched to believe that the average Gruel household consisted of retired ex-textile workers who never escaped. Maybe their children did, I don’t know. For the most part, 1999 Gruel consisted of vacant Victorian homes, vacant antebellum homes, and regular rock houses still lived in by the sparse shopkeeper population that held hope for an economic rebound.

  Gruel Normal’s student body hailed from Level Land, Due West, Donalds, Forty-Five, Antreville, Cheddar, Spruell, and Gig. I didn’t know what their parents did for a living, but by god the kids arrived in fancy late-model sedans and at lunch ate the best Jesus crust bread between Atlanta and Charlotte.

  Now I don’t know why Gruel Normal’s philosophy of recess and physical education never outgrew the 1940s, but Mr. Ouzts’s wife, Nora Haughey Ouzts, only went up to kickball. Those kids, from first graders to graduating seniors, underwent daily lessons in skipping, hopscotch, dodgeball, kick the can, four square, and jumping rope. There were no monkey bars or basketball courts. The field held no grass, only a fine silica ground down over the years since Gruel Sand and Gravel’s demise.

  I met the faculty, which consisted of Ouzts, Nancy Ruark, James and Joyce’s birthmother whom I would allow to confess, a man named Pink Sluder who taught all sciences and math, a woman named Gloria Riddle who specialized in French, Latin, social studies, world history, civics, bad English lit through Charles Dickens, and home ec. I couldn’t follow the class schedules: something about an A-B schedule certain weeks; twenty-minute classes on alternating Wednesdays; Bible studies twice a semester from a bona fide Yale seminary graduate who traveled between Richmond and Oxford in order to teach the supposed gospel.

  We sat in Mr. Ouzts’s classroom—he taught shop, of all things, in addition to his counseling/paperwork duties. Mr. Ouzts leaned his left forearm on a chop saw. He said, “I’ll go ahead and tell you, Novel, that not all of our faculty’s keen on hiring you. They think there’s something morally wrong with someone getting paid for not really teaching a class.”

  I said, for some reason, “I wouldn’t mind taking up some of the slack. I feel comfortable teaching geography, essay writing, history, civics, social studies, and anthropology.” I threw anthropology in there only because of the things I’d heard over on Gruel Mountain.

  Gloria Riddle yelled out fast, “Daggum it you just stick to your job in the silo giving our students advice in an advisory capacity.” I’d never heard anyone from Gruel speak faster than six words per minute.

  She reminded me of one particular lieutenant governor’s wife screaming at me during a fund-raising function because she thought I made her husband “look and sound like a Mongoloid re-tard.” Those were her highly politically incorrect words.

  I said to Ms. Riddle, “I’m just trying to help. I’m just trying to help. Can’t do enough for my brethren in chalk.”

  “We got the money, and we need the money,” said Ouzts. “What I’m saying is, to make more money, we need more students. And the only way we’ll get more students is if we keep someone on faculty with a name. Later on it might be an ex-president. Or Truman Capote, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway.” I’m not omniscient so I don’t know if Ouzts sat in on Riddle’s Lit-up-to-Dickens class. All of my how-to-write texts said that a first-person narrator couldn’t be all-knowing. Ouzts said, “I’m not the mathematician here, but if we get twenty grand a student, and we get ten more students due to Novel Akers, and if y’all in the room keep getting twenty to thirty grand a year—well, figure it out. We’ll be better. Think if we get, like, seventy-seven new students. This is a new day! Here we are!”

  My comrades-to-be erupted in applause. The deal seemed done. Ouzts took me to my silo. There were no books, even though shelves now rounded the continuous wall. I said, “Did you do this? How did you do this?” I’m talking round, rounded twelve-foot-high bookshelves.

  “Me and my students did it. A T square, compass, and jigsaw can do about anything, boy.”

  Like I
said, there were no books. But each shelf held ancient newspaper clippings and tons of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. I said, “I need to get my books out of storage. I can fill about a quarter of this space.”

  No windows stood inside the silo, of course. I looked up a good hundred feet and imagined sand and/or gravel plummeting my way. Ouzts said, “I have to make a confession. We have to confess. Your salary isn’t coming directly from Gruel Normal. No. No. It comes from the Gruel Association to Sanctify History. They paid the money.”

  I said, “What?”

  “It’s a select group of concerned businessmen and -women who want to see Gruel become a town where people would want to visit and stay. Oh, it’s all legitimate. Don’t think this is some kind of scam.”

  I said, “GASH? Do they call themselves GASH?”

  “Uh-huh. But it doesn’t mean anything one way or the other. It just came out that way. GASH. So what? It had to come out something.”

  I almost said, “Something came out of your wife’s birth canal that ended up being my mean, distant, conniving, ungrateful brother and sister.”

  “What we’re hoping you’ll do is sift through all of this material and come up with a beautiful history of Gruel that would be of interest to our people, of course, but also to anyone living in a forgotten small town south of the Mason-Dixon Line. What we’re looking for is part southern history text and part coffee-table book.”

  I reached to the closest shelf and picked up a yellowed eight-page Graywood Gazette—long since defunct—and read the 1923 headlines: TWO BROTHERS SAY THEY FLY. It didn’t take a historian well-versed in North Carolina lieutenant governor speeches to know that Kitty Hawk’s maphood occurred twenty years earlier.

  “You can either get paid monthly, biweekly, or weekly. It doesn’t matter to us. Right now we know that we have enough money to keep you on for two years, if things don’t go right for you. With the way the mutual funds are going, hell, we might be able to keep you on forever. Interest, you know. But in reality, we’d like a book before 2001. That’s Gruel’s unofficial bicentennial.”

  I tried to not figure math in my head. “That sounds about right. Y’all already have the pictures. I promise to work hard and fast and do my best.” What else could I say? I kind of envisioned one of those bigger-than-a-breadbox books sitting between a couch and a TV set, maybe with a photograph of Roughhouse Billiards on the dust jacket, Gruel! on the top and Novel Akers below.

  Mr. Ouzts clapped my shoulder blade twice. He said, “That’s the answer we expected and wanted.”

  “Who, again, is in this GASH?”

  “Everyone you know. You’ve known everyone except for me since you’ve been here. Now you’ve met me. There you go.”

  “My soon-to-be-ex-wife, Jeff Downer, Victor Dees, Maura-Lee Snipes, Barry and Larry. Dr. Bobba Lollis. Everybody in between whom I never see on a day-to-day basis. That’s what you’re saying?” I thought about asking if it would be too much to ask for a space heater. The ex-silo wasn’t exactly warm.

  “My wife says she owes you. Or that she owes your parents. She won’t go into details with me, but she says since your parents have passed on, she needs to explain some things. Nora won’t go into it any further. I trust her.”

  I said, “Do I have to call you Mr. Ouzts every time I talk to you?”

  “We like for the students to only hear us by our formal names. You’ll always be Mr. Akers.”

  I didn’t say, “You didn’t answer my question.” The wind whipped up outside, which caused an instant tornado inside the silo. “This won’t work out,” I said as everything flew off the shelves.

  Mr. Ouzts said, “I guess if we should ever meet in Forty-Five you could call me Derrick.”

  I thought Derrick Ouzts, Derrick Ouzts, Derrick Ouzts, Dairy Coots, Dairy Coots, Dairy Coots. “I’m good with addressing you Mister.”

  “She won’t go into it any further. Anyway, I trust you have your own typewriter and/or computer to disseminate all this information.” Mr. Ouzts looked at his watch. “Oh. I have to go. I’m teaching the third and fourth graders how to use a pneumatic nail gun.”

  I drove straight to Roughhouse Billiards and strode in like I meant business. Jeff the owner said, “I’m surprised you ain’t driven over to Forty-Five and traded you in for a more desirable luxury automobile than that step van of yours. You being the newly appointed local historian and all.”

  Barry and Larry—I’ll say right now that I’m convinced they practiced and waited, waited and practiced—said at the same time, “You ought to go get a Lincoln, seeing as he was a man from history.” I looked at my brothers-in-law. They didn’t hold cue sticks, which I should’ve taken as an omen.

  “Tell me what else I don’t know.”

  Jeff slid a PBR my way. “I’m not going to live forever. Don’t burden me down with such a request, Bubba. If I told you everything I know, then you’d be as smart as me.”

  Larry and Barry stared for a ten-beat, then emptied their pockets on the pool table, readying for a new trick shot.

  I sat on a stool near the door and told Jeff the owner everything I’d learned about my new job, which, of course, he knew already due to his position with the Gruel Association to Sanctify History. “Well I bet you don’t know that the fucking PE teacher over there’s the biological mother of my brother and sister. How about that? How’s about a little of that, man?”

  Jeff the owner pulled back my beer. “I knew it’d catch up with you before long. I’m not one to make any judgments, but I took note of all those bottles you emptied while writing the autobiography. And it occurred to me that one of two things might happen—either you’d fry up all your brain cells or you’d become both paranoid and delusional. I’ve seen it happen before. It’s what became the downfall of Mr. Cathcart before that fateful day.”

  Larry yelled, “I want y’all to be witness to this. One ball in each pocket, plus the can of lighter fluid will turn over and spray out a replica of a shotgun that’ll catch on fire after the cue ball lights that Zippo over on the far bank.”

  “Do not light my pool table on fire, Larry,” Jeff the owner turned to say. He remained leaned toward me. I noticed how his Vitalised hair looked similar to a topographical map I had once seen on North Carolina’s lower Blue Ridge Mountains. I said, “Give me back my beer, peckerhead.”

  “You take that back about Mr. Ouzts’s wife. They’re two of our most successful and solid citizens. Even if they choose not to live in Gruel, or take part in any of our community functions.”

  I said, “I’m not delusional. I’m here, aren’t I?” “You didn’t take it back. Take it back now.” The pool table, somehow, erupted in a giant blaze. At least that’s how I saw it.

  27

  I PLUNGED DELIBERATELY into my historical research within the silo’s continuous wall. I’m talking I left my cot inside the Gruel Inn—it didn’t take me long to realize that moving in with Maura-Lee or Bekah wouldn’t be rational, fruitful, or beneficial to my self-esteem—before dawn and remained there throughout the school day. I blocked out the singsong escapades of Gruel Normal’s students during their outdoor phys ed classes, kept the door locked, and sorted. I borrowed six folding picnic tables from the so-called lunchroom, and stacked what clippings I found in epochal stacks: 1801–1860, 1860–1900, 1900–Depression, then in decades up to the present. The 1960s and 1970s, for some reason, stood highest.

  I learned of “Civil War hero” Colonel Dill, and how he fended off, then finally captured, a dozen Yankees up in Tennessee. I learned of Gruel’s “bustling era,” wherein people traveled by horseback in 1900 in search of fabled Gruel Springs—a pool of mushlike water located, it seemed, somewhere up the hill from across the Gruel Inn. The springs held curative powers, of course, much like an oatmeal Fountain of Youth. In one issue of the ill-fated Gruel Times an item quoted a woman from Charleston saying, “I not only feel twenty years younger, the mosquitoes no longer bite me!”

  I sorted through
glossy black-and-white photos, mostly of townspeople standing rebar-erect in front of their prize vegetable gardens, newly opened stores, and dead twelve-point bucks. I kept an eye out, of course, for Bekah and her parents, but found nothing. Bekah didn’t participate in the Christmas cotillion like some of the other debutantes. Her father, I thought this odd, never showed off a stuffed twelve-point buck mounted for, say, Victor Dees’s father, or Jeff the owner’s grandma.

  And I almost slung over a 1974 copy of the Forty-Five Platter—the Gruel Times had long been deceased—but peripherally I made some connection between a pair of skinny, skinny preteen’s eyes and two people I encountered almost daily, GRUEL NORMAL BROTHERS ANOTHER DA VINCHEE? read the headline.

  I’m not making this up: It was a misspelled front-page article. And it read:

  Barry and Larry Dill both say that there talent comes from God. The brothers just won a national contest held for high school students in America. They will receive an all-expense paid-for trip to New York City. They will get $500 each, to. “I want to go to art school,” said Barry. “I want to be a artist!” said Larry.

  The brothers, sons of Mr. and Mrs. Dewey Dill of Old Old Greenville Road, say they have to thank a number of people along the way. They say there are to many people to thank along the way.

  “We love our boys,” Mr. Dill said. He’s the great-great-great-grandson of Colonel Dill, Gruel’s most famous resident.

  “We don’t know if the Colonel painted pictures during his war time, but we feel sure he must have.”

  Barry’s oil painting depicts a bunch of well-dressed people sitting down to enjoy a picnic lunch on the grass. Larry’s painting shows a crazy man yelling, his hands up to his face. After high school Barry and Larry believe that they will either attend Clemson or maybe a art school up in New York. “We will always remember our time in Gruel, though,” Barry said.