Novel

by George Singleton

  I said, “Yes I do.”

  “You’re lying,” said Bekah.

  “Maybe I dug them up behind the Gruel Inn, or I saved my money and bought one of each. I’m not lying! Give me ammo for everything I listed off.”

  “Okay. Sorry to have questioned you on all this. How much you want, Novel?”

  I stood tall as possible, as if I knew what I did. “Well. How about three of each, by god.”

  Bekah held my hand and walked me up the square. We left Victor Dees’s army-navy store and went north, toward Gruel Drugs, toward Gruel Bakery. I looked across the street past Colonel Dill’s statue at Roughhouse Billiards. Bekah said, “We figured you’d figure, finally. And to be honest we don’t know if you know already, or if you’re just playing possum to see when we’ll confess everything.”

  Maura-Lee came out of her storefront looking svelte as ever, wearing an apron and hairnet. She said, “Show-and-tell time?”

  Then I felt sure she said, “Have a nice day.”

  Me, I said, “You too, Maura-Lee.”

  Man, I felt like a regular pathetic nimrod infantryman asked to march through his fallen comrades. I walked up the sidewalk and entered a door I had never noticed, to a place I thought 1 had only imagined that one night. Bekah said, “You can’t write about all of this you’re going to see. You just can’t. It’ll get you killed, first off. And secondly—more than likely—no one would believe you. This is Gruel. This is South Carolina. All of us in the Gruel Association, though, we believe that you might need to know what I’m about to unveil to you as a way of understanding the town’s people better, at least over the last half century or so.”

  On our way up the thin, narrow steps to a loft above what ended up being a quarter of the square, I thought, What do you have to show me, Barry and Larry’s attempts at forgery?

  And then I saw a dozen perfect Mona Lisas, American Gothics, Campbell’s Soup Cans, Guernicas, and Haystacks stacked up against the wall. I’m talking these fakes were as cracked and crazed as any close-up detailed inset I’d seen in an art history text. There was Whistler’s Mother, Christina’s World, van Gogh with a bandaged ear, those Tahiti paintings by syphilitic Paul Gauguin, even those Pollock monstrosities.

  Then there were about a hundred images of Jesus: Jesus on the cross; Jesus talking to strangers; Jesus hitching his ass to a tree; Jesus surrounded by fish, bread, and wine; Jesus as a baby looking up at the Magi. In another corner were as many stretched canvases of Madonna and child.

  These weren’t prints available at museum gift shops. These weren’t cheaply framed prints available at Roses, Sky City, and Woolworth’s department stores. Bekah said, “Most of these have been finished off by Barry and Larry. Some are still left over from the mass production years—mostly the seventies. Mom took the most talented orphans and put them to work.”

  I said, of course, “No fucking way. There’s no fucking way. Somebody would’ve been caught by now. There’s no fucking way someone could hang American Gothic in his living room and not have someone come over to visit and call him on it. The Mona Lisa? Give me a break.”

  Bekah said, “I did the Pollocks. I had zero artistic talent—as you might remember when I tried to paint that Carolina jasmine border on our kitchen wall—so Mom let me do those. No one in North or South America wants to buy them, though, so as far as I’m concerned I’m mostly innocent in this little cottage industry. I did sell one of the Josef Albers pieces to a woman down in Bolivia. Look, Novel, how do you think it was so easy for us to put down a down payment on our first house? And why do you think I came home to see my mother and brother so often? I was in charge of shipping and of collecting accounts receivable that didn’t appear in a timely fashion.”

  Hell, my parents had been long dead. I figured that good grown children must’ve visited their parents at least twice a month if they lived within a one-day’s car journey. I’d seen it on TV. Again, every one of those how-to-write-a-novel textbooks claims, “Do not have your novel turn out to be a dream. Do not have the main character wake up on the last page and remark, ‘Golly gee, that was a weird nightmare (or coma).’” Let me say right now that I didn’t dream all this up, though I wish I had.

  “Just goddamn tell me the truth and why I’m here. I feel like this has been so predestined, you fucking weird siren. I have no free will! I have no free will! Is that what you’re telling me?” I’m not too proud to say that I almost cried.

  Bekah laughed. She put hands to knees, bent over, and shook her head. “Don’t even talk to me about predestination, you idiot.” She said, “Here’s the God’s truth: There was a time when we sold our works as originals. This was long before the Internet or global knowledge. It wasn’t hard to find a man in Idaho or Canada who’d believed he got an original, say, Rembrandt. He couldn’t conduct any kind of research so easily and see that the original hung at the Tate, or Louvre, you know. Then came the time where we are now, where Barry and Larry admit that it’s a one-of-a-kind reproduction, et cetera. Perhaps, mon mari, that’s why we’re down to two painters trying to keep Gruel afloat. Good lord, in the past we had twenty or thirty kids and young adults whipping these things out. My dad paid them 10 percent of whatever he got—10 percent of a quarter-million-dollar sale ain’t bad. Do I need to go on? My father and mother kept a percentage, and the rest kind of went into a fund to pave roads, run water and sewer, everything a large town has.”

  I said, “What about Irby?”

  “Irby—as you know—was stupid. He could only do Miro. They didn’t sell.”

  “Okay. What makes the paintings look so old and cracked?”

  “Heat and steam from Maura-Lee’s bakery downstairs. Before that, when her father ran the place.”

  “I thought she came from Raleigh or Columbia. I thought she showed up to the original Sneeze ’n’ Tone to lose weight.”

  “You would. Dope. There’s going to be so much left unanswered that you won’t know whether to rub your own butt on the carpet or sniff your finger. There’s no way you’ll figure out everything. No one will.”

  I didn’t know what any of that meant. I asked, “Who killed Irby, Ina, and your father?”

  “Namaste. Namaste. Namaste.”

  Oh it wasn’t “Have a nice day” that Maura-Lee said on my trek up to the little shop of forgers. It was one of those weirdo yoga terms. One time the lieutenant governor talked to a group in Asheville and I had him say both “Ahimsa” and “Ojas,” which meant “nonviolence” and “life energy.” He got a standing ovation. To be honest, I thought the guy would mispronounce those sacred words so execrably that he’d be placed in the untouchable caste forever. So much for my knowledge of karma.

  “What’s with all the religious paintings?” I asked Bekah. I said, “I don’t know if you’re drinking much anymore, but I could use a bourbon or six about right now. Let’s you and me go drink. Let’s do some hard drinking like the old times.”

  Bekah walked across the creaking floor atop Maura-Lee’s bakery, the downstairs of ex-Gruel Printing, the loft above Gruel Drugs—this space must’ve been six thousand square feet—and finally stopped. “We sell all of the religious paintings religiously—forgive my pun—to Bob Jones University up in Greenville. They boast the largest sacred art collection in the world. I guess that it is, if you count what Barry and Larry do as sacred. What a slew of other people have called sacred. That’s been our major buyer, that college, since way back when. If you think back over the years you might remember that I’ve never said anything bad about a Christian, Novel. Those people have made us a fortune in their need to fool the public.”

  A slight steam rose through the floor, but it didn’t smell like regular white, sourdough, or pumpernickel bread. It didn’t smell like rye. I said, “I smell garlic.”

  “Maura-Lee. Come on. Let’s go downstairs and see what she’s up to. It’s nan. It’s pita. We’ve all decided that once you’re gone Gruel can become an ashram for yoga lovers.” My wife said, “My fault to
tally. When I ran the Sneeze ’n’ Tone—those women were either too pessimistic or too cocky. And when you began the writers colony—good god I thought you’d’ve had enough sense not to do anything like that—those participants ended up too pessimistic or cocky. There’s not a ton of difference between a fat woman wanting to lose weight and a want-to-be writer wanting to gain the weight of Truth, Justice, and the American whatever.”

  I began walking downstairs. Bekah followed. On the sidewalk Maura-Lee stood there smiling. She said, “Have a nice day,” again. But of course this time I heard her right.

  On our way over to Roughhouse Billiards I said, “Let me see if I can get this right, part two: Y’all have saved all your money—as a tiny town—over the years. You’ve all lived off these proceeds, I take it. For some unknown reason y’all have gathered together and voted me in as town historian, but I can’t write about what’s ever gone on.”

  “It’s kind of like the Cherokee nation’s descendants getting money off those bingo parlors and casinos. Well it’s exactly like that, now that I think about it. And maybe we had too much money left over, money we didn’t know what to do with. Town historian sounded good to us, as opposed to anything else. We toyed around with the idea of an airport, but too many people feared noise for one, and crashes into our houses for the other.”

  I still didn’t trust my wife, and wondered if I ever did. I said, “You could’ve started up one of those outlet malls.”

  “It’s kind of like Atlantis. Our number one export’s drying up fast. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the overstock. We’re looking ahead, Novel. Don’t judge us for foresight. We tried my clinic. We tried your stupid writers thing. Now we’re going to turn Gruel into a regular full-time ashram. Maura-Lee’s adding traditional Indian breads to her list. Before long you’ll have to move out of the inn so we can make room for all the yogis we got on order.”

  We passed Colonel Dill’s statue. I’d never noticed before how much he resembled my father. “I feel damned either way,” I said. “If I write what I know, y’all will kill me. If I decide to not write at all, y’all will kill me. It all comes down to my knowing the past secrets.”

  Bekah said, “Let’s play a drinking game. We haven’t played a good drinking game since Chapel Hill. Like quarters. Like that you’re-the-captain-of-a-ship game, and you decide what everyone gets to take aboard.”

  We crossed the street and I held the door open. “Turning this town into an ashram won’t be beneficial for anyone involved. Believe me. I once wrote an entire speech about it.”

  29

  MY PARENTS practiced yoga long before it became an American necessity. They got stoned every Wednesday night, and their friends came over in gym shorts in order to salute the sun or do the crow, cobra, and facedown dog. James and Joyce jumped out of their bedroom windows, snuck around the side of the house, and tried to take photographs of my parents’ friends’ butts without using a flash. Me, I stood in my upstairs room with a yo-yo above everybody, trying to do tricks.

  What pisses me off about neophyte yoga enthusiasts is the same thing that gets me about people who come back to the United States after visiting Paris for a year. It’s not impossible, I believe, to just say the fucking English word that you mean. It’s easy to say at a sit-down formal dinner in Charlotte, “Oh, this duck is great,” as opposed to “Oh, this canard is magnifique.” In terms of syllables, the English wastes less breath.

  So about the last thing I thought Gruel needed was a slew of thin-headed women and men whose years of psychoanalysis didn’t work, showing up to say things in front of Gruel Bakery like, “Boy, today I sure enjoyed my sixteen hours doing Sarvan-gasana” when they could’ve A) said, “shoulder stand”; and B) done something goddamn constructive like plant tomatoes on the square for everyone to enjoy. I didn’t want to come across a woman saying, “I’m having problems doing a perfect Upavistha Konasana,” when she could’ve said, “wide-angle seated forward bend,” or when she, moreover, could’ve gone, “I’m having problems helping my elderly wheelchair-bound neighbor understand that it’s imperative that I clean her chimney flue so’s not to cause a fire this upcoming winter.”

  Hell—call me stubborn, unyielding, and old-fashioned—I wanted to punch out about anyone who said, “This here clarified butter will enhance your Ojas” even if he or she translated it. By god, just say, “Eat this shit, it’ll make you feel better.” Why say, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to fill you up with my Shukra Dhatu,” when you could as easily say, “Oops, I just came inside you”?

  That’s my theory.

  Don’t ask me how I know these words. Once upon a time I tried to balance my dosha. Obviously it didn’t work out.

  I ordered my wife a triple. Barry and Larry, covered in paint, sat up at the bar for once. They used their cue sticks as swizzles. Bekah said, “You boys can let your shoulders down. I told him everything.”

  They said, “We know.”

  “Not everything,” I said. “I still have all kinds of questions.” To Barry and Larry I asked, “Do you boys run a Monotype press sometimes?”

  “Our work is all hand-painted,” Barry answered.

  “Do you have some kind of machine that makes a noise nightly, over and over and over—kind of a stomp-stomp-stomp sound?”

  “Our kerosene heaters make a noise in the winter. We got a fan that sucks out fumes yearlong,” Larry said. “That’s about it, as far as noise. We’re not up there listening to rap music, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Jeff the owner shook his head and smiled. I asked him what he knew. “I’m pretty sure what you hear at night are the descendants of descendants of descendants of descendants of Vicksburg.” I thought he’d taken up a stutter for a second. “They’re like gypsies or Irish Travelers. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  My wife downed one shot. She said, “Vicksburg, Mississippi.”

  “What? Y’all are quite aware that I’ve freaked out on more than one occasion, hearing a stomping sound across from my place. But I haven’t seen any gypsies. This isn’t fiddle and mandolin music I’m hearing.”

  Barry and Larry said, “It’s those people, though. Those people aren’t us.”

  “At one point,” Jeff said, “they tried to reinvent themselves back in 1866 or thereabouts.”

  “It’s been going on since then,” Bekah said. She downed her second shot and sang out, “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I.”

  “You’ll find out all about it if you take your job seriously and read some them newspaper articles closer,” Jeff said.

  Larry yelled out, “I got one! Six sets of deer antlers, six spent shotgun shells, and a goldfish bowl holding one of those purple Siamese fighting fish.”

  I turned back to Jeff the owner. “I’m sifting. I’m going through shit. I think I came across a picture of you the other day. Did you ever own a little plastic doll with only one eye?”

  Bekah got up and walked toward a poster on the back wall listing the 1978 NASCAR season. Richard Petty grinned and grinned.

  “No,” Jeff said.

  I drank my beer. I drank Bekah’s last shot. I said, “I think it’s you. But go ahead with your story.”

  “Back in 1866 a bunch of my ancestors, as a community, invited everyone to move east.”

  “Don’t tell him, Jeff. Don’t tell him. If indeed he puts it in the book we won’t like it—I mean, it won’t better us any. And certainly the people living there won’t like it,” Bekah said with her back still turned. I looked to see her pointing in the direction of Gruel Mountain. “They’re melungeons, and they don’t like to be bothered.”

  I should’ve brought a tape recorder, I thought. There was no way to keep track of these stories. I said, “What?”

  “You a historian. You know the Civil War.”

  Of course I didn’t go into how that wasn’t my area of competency. I said, “The Civil War. The War between the States. Gettysburg. Andersonville. Shiloh. Chancellorsville.”

  Bekah returne
d and sat beside me. “We let them vote up there. That’s how you got hired in a number of ways. We all voted for the painting project years ago. We voted for my Sneeze ’n’ Tone, and then to allow you to run whatever kind of operation you wanted to run afterwards. Town historian. We’re a democratic community, Novel. I think it came out 111 to 5 on hiring you over at Gruel Normal.”

  I looked back at the trick-shot kings. “In all my time spent in Gruel I’ve maybe seen thirty regulars on the street, or in this bar. Not counting visitors.”

  “That’ll tell you how many people are still hiding out in the caves of Gruel Mountain. There’s a bunch. They’re pretty self-sufficient, they probably intermarry, and not many of them have the wherewithal to escape,” Jeff said.

  I laughed. “What’re they doing up there all night long, making that noise?”

  Jeff the owner said, “Sooner or later we might take a vote to see who’ll take a machete up there and find out. There’s the conundrum, though. I doubt they’ll vote for it. And, like Bekah said, we’re insistent on giving everyone a vote, even for little things like whether or not to plant azaleas on the square. Well everyone gets a vote who’s lived here at least six years. It’s all fashioned after most universities’ procedures and laws. It’s like gaining tenure.”

  We sat there for five minutes. I tried to make mental notes of the high points. I could think of no mnemonic device to remember, and thought about this great essay by Mark Twain called “How to Make History Dates Stick.” It didn’t work. “Who’re the five voted against me?”

  Jeff the owner picked up the phone and said, “Hey, Maura-Lee. Get on over here so Novel can see the five people who didn’t trust him writing a biography of Gruel.”

  He hung up. I said, “Victor Dees voted for me?”

  My wife said, “No. He was out of town that day on business and forgot to turn in his absentee ballot.”

  Not unlike a fugitive dictator I took to sleeping in different rooms every night, and in different corners of each room. I moved more furniture per day than North American Van Lines. Barry, Larry, and the town’s master carpenters came in while I was gone, re-Sheetrocked the motel, and made it more habitable every day. These guys could’ve been top-notch developers had they lived in a place where people wished to move into tract housing, out in the suburbs. Every morning I felt blessed to wake, then drove halfway to Augusta, over toward Atlanta, and back to Gruel Normal so as not to circumvent downtown Gruel. I didn’t answer the telephone. I finished off my overordered MREs.