Novel

by George Singleton

  My mother said, “Maybe you need a martini, babe.”

  I took note.

  When I refused to learn how to swim, my father took to hand-knotting a fishing net. I’m not sure what he used for a template but he gathered a few thousand feet of cord, twine, shoelaces, and rope. Somehow he strung together a net that, when thrown properly, covered a good eighth acre. He sewed a variety of weights to the edges: spoons stolen from a Morrison’s Cafeteria down in Asheville, a couple of broken windup clocks, two or three bicycle chains, a slew of giveaway church keys. The net must’ve weighed three hundred pounds.

  James and I helped my father load the net in his refrigeration truck’s back, and when James said, “Let me go, Dad,” my father said, “No, no, we won’t have room on the way back.”

  I didn’t understand his motives whatsoever. My father said, “Instead of just buying shrimp to bring back, I’m going to rent a boat down there, catch my own shrimp, and come back. I’ve checked into all this.” My mom walked out in the driveway at this point. My father found it necessary to repeat, “I’ve checked into all this. A boat rental ain’t nothing compared to buying shrimp wholesale. Anyway, after Novel and I fill up the back of the truck, we’ll need to ride home with the net between us. There won’t be room for anyone else.”

  I didn’t think to ask my father how we’d get a wet net back in the truck, seeing as it took the three of us nearly six hernias to haul it from backyard to bumper. James said, “Does this make me the man of the house?”

  My mother said, “You’re always the man of the house, James,” which, too, should’ve tipped me off about things not being copacetic in our household.

  “So we’ll leave now, drive for six hours, spend the night in the truck, shrimp tomorrow, and get back, I’d say, around midnight tomorrow.”

  My mother held up her left hand halfheartedly. I thought of one-armed Mr. Payne, but said nothing.

  My father and I drove in silence over Highways 64, 74, down 501, and finally got to 17. We pulled up in Murrells Inlet and my father rented what most people might consider a “johnboat” at best. “In the morning we’ll take this down to the inlet. Then we’ll get some old boy to help us get the net in. There’s always an old boy hanging around at five in the morning.”

  I said, “Good night.”

  “And then we’ll go out about two hundred yards into the bay and throw the net out. I don’t know how long we’ll have to wait, but maybe we can watch some of those shrimp boats and figure it out.”

  “Good night,” I said. I turned in the passenger seat and pulled a blanket around me.

  “We don’t get any shrimp, we’ll come back in to one of the creeks and do some crabbing. I got chicken necks! I got string!”

  “Yessir.”

  “Here,” my father said. “Here, Novel.” He pulled out a flask. “You’re old enough now. In case you’re worried about your fingers freezing off in a way that’ll keep you from ever playing the piano.”

  That’s the last I remembered. In the morning my father shoved a life jacket on my torso and led me to the boat, and taught me how to row. He dropped anchor and, luckily, somehow, threw the cast net out by himself in one great motion without tipping over our dinghy.

  “Good thing we didn’t take Mr. Payne with us. I hope his legs never go out. A one-armed man with no legs can only circle around in a wheelchair on dry land.”

  I’m talking it was colder than a Junior Leaguer’s titty. There in the bay no waves piled in, but the wind cut us not unlike a man sprinkling ammonia throughout a closed-ended room. I wore my mittens and watch cap. I wore a bad fake-fur-collared coat bought at Sears. Chattering, I said, “Shrimps aren’t like mammals. They can’t feel the cold.”

  My father said, “Goddamn it to hell.” He pulled in his net line. “I don’t think the net made it to the bottom. Take off your life jacket and pearl dive down to see if the net reaches bottom.”

  I was old enough to discern my father’s crazed look, as opposed to how he looked after yoga club. “I can’t swim,” I said. “I’d drown.” My father jerked the life jacket over my head—I still have scars beneath my armpits from the strap burns—and threw it in the water.

  “Damn you, Novel. I didn’t plan on your being such a pussy.” He threw the net back in, took off his own preserver, and jumped into the Atlantic. I’m not proud to admit that my first thought involved rowing back to shore immediately. Before Dad surfaced—and this might’ve been two seconds after he submerged—I constructed an elaborate explanation and/or alibi that involved a giant freakish tidal wave, the anchor coming loose, my riding the flat-bottomed boat sans net all the way into shore like a surfboard, and so on. I considered a shark attack, too, of course.

  “Help! Help me, Novel!” my father yelled out when his head popped back up twenty yards away. He reached his arms out, and this particular facial expression—maybe he took an acting course or two at Black Mountain College—held pity, despair, anguish, helplessness, profound loss, sincerity, unrequited love, improbable hope, and determination all at once. I don’t know if Hollywood’s ever distributed a motion picture production of Johnny Appleseed, but I can’t envision Jimmy Stewart, James Arness, Charles Bronson, Bruce Lee, Wally Cox, Peter Lorre, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Alan Hale, Jr., or Meryl Streep invoking the exact same face that my father so professionally exposed.

  I jumped in. I swam to him as if my arms were regular paddle wheels, and didn’t notice that he swam toward me. When we met he took me by the torso and drug me back to the boat. After maybe five minutes of trying to get back in without tipping the thing over, we managed to get ourselves back in: Dad held the side of the boat as I crawled up, then I sat hard on one side so he could extricate himself from a cold, cold death.

  We chattered hard together, and flinched with Jimmy-limbs. “Help me pull the net back up,” he said. When it felt no heavier than the first time, meaning that we had no shrimp, he said, “Screw this,” and dropped the rope overboard.

  We rowed back in together—a nice rite of passage, really—and left our boat on the beach. Inside the truck, heater on high, I said, “Well that was a mistake.”

  “You can swim now, can’t you?”

  My father drove us back to the campground. We showered and redressed. I think it was about in the town of Rockingham on the drive back with no merchandise in back to sell later where Dad pulled over at a roadside bar he knew and insisted that we go inside, do a little drinking, and play the house spinet for tip money.

  My mother thought it would be a great idea to play charades during my thirteenth birthday party. Even mountain kids didn’t play charades. Mountain kids raised by pseudoartistic parents who made their entire family read aloud to each other didn’t play charades. Hell, thirteen-year-old children didn’t even have birthday parties in Black Mountain.

  “And now it’s time for charades!” my mother yelled out. She had invited most of my friends’ parents, which only made it more embarrassing. The men stood around drinking Dad’s booze, smoking pipes, and exaggerating what their latest paintings sold for. The women sat down on our ugly pastel furniture, drank booze, smoked Tiparillo cigars, and exaggerated their children’s accomplishments, after saying things like, “I’ve been asked to audition for some kind of musical up in New York, but I can’t do it without feeling guilty about leaving Purpose,” or Synchronicity, Raven, Cedar, Megadose, Latitude, Diopside, Sensitive, Thrombin, Rhododendron, Tritheism, or Razor Clam—some of my poor schoolmates named by drug- or karma-addled young parents.

  I think my mother expected a giant “Yah!” like that.

  “We want to play kickball in the front yard,” I said, even though we really wanted our parents to fucking leave so we could play a game I’d recently made up called “Where’s My Finger?” I had a thing for Megadose Norris, whose parents both gave up careers early on in ceramics in order to concentrate on a dual and symbiotic relationship involving bats, guano, and farming and inculcating microbiotic far-eastern vegetabl
e needs here in the southeastern United States, things like bamboo shoots, kimchee, gingerroot, wasabi, bok choy, water chestnuts, and podded soybeans.

  “Everybody write down the name of a song, movie, or book title. We’ll do boys against girls.” My mom opened two brown paper bags, one with a pink dot on it, the other blue.

  I looked at my classmates. We all looked at each other and said nothing. I don’t know if, in our DNA, we possessed a skewed version of ESP, but already I knew that this little game of my mother’s would, indeed, be a charade.

  Cedar McKenzie, a girl, extracted a slip of paper from the boy’s team bag. No one would ever know what she truly pulled out. My mother went through all of the standard charades clues: pulling on her ear for “sounds like,” flipping open prayer hands for “book title,” reeling in her eyeball for “movie.”

  Cedar opened her hands and looked at her teammates. That was it. Raven yelled out, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

  “Damn,” Cedar said. “That was fast.” She tore her paper in tiny bits before anyone could look.

  My brother, stuck at a little kids’ party, went next. He checked his paper, did the movie clue, and I yelled out, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

  “All right, little brother,” he said, tearing up the sheet.

  This went on through three sets. Whatever anyone spouted out, the cluegiver said, “Uh-huh” right away. My mom, frustrated that neither she nor any of her friends got to play, said, “This is so uncanny! Are y’all watching this? I’ve never seen anything like it in my life! Remember when we used to play back in college? Sometimes it might take an entire night to figure out the right response.”

  Somebody’s father said, “Yeah, but you must remember that we delved in more complicated and cerebral ideas. We chose quotes from the world of philosophy.”

  As my friends and I ran outside to play “Where’s My Finger?” my sister Joyce said, “And don’t forget that y’all were stoned.”

  I thought she only meant that they were drunk. “Come over here, Megadose,” I yelled. I stood behind a giant tulip poplar. “Close your eyes.” For some reason I felt exactly no fear of rejection. It might’ve been because I knew how to shake hands with a one-armed man, and I could swim with my head above water.

  31

  BEKAH TOOK Maura-Lee to some kind of Baba-lovers’ retreat down in Myrtle Beach in order to recruit possible yoga gurus to live and teach where I’d finally considered my home, so I had no other option but to break into the old Cathcart antebellum mansion and snoop around. I awoke early on a Friday morning mid-May—Gruel Normal’s students traveled to Ghost Town in the Sky up in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, in order to witness a real-life Cherokee Trail of Tears production as part of their history/social studies/drama/world lit component. It didn’t bother me, as I drove the step van over, that it wouldn’t be difficult to finger an intruder’s getaway car if he drove anything other than a midsize American sedan.

  The front door had not been locked. I turned the handle and let myself in. A cup of what I first thought to be water fell on my right hand—I’d done this little joke in college—but after I sniffed my back palm I sensed gasoline. I thought one thing only at the time: Maura-Lee and Bekah must be out of money if they’ve foregone normal burglar detection devices in order to delicately balance a wax-paper cup of gas. “Stay away from open flames,” I said aloud. “There might not be working water here.”

  I don’t want to say that the place was a disaster zone, seeing as I’d lived in one since moving to Gruel, but there barely existed a path to walk through. Not only did stacks upon stacks of Barry and Larry’s forged iconic oil paintings glut what should’ve been the foyer, hall, and dual parlors, but so did industrial baker’s racks, ovens, and stainless steel rolling carts. Old man Cathcart’s giant mounted heads—every possible antlered being—still stared down from the walls. The ex-Gruel Inn furniture piled up randomly, along with all the items I had recovered—gimcracks and treasures both Jeff the owner and Victor Dees supposedly sold to people at the Pickens County Flea Market in my presence: the Picayune cigarettes, knives, spent cartridges, book matches, perfume bottles, the pleas for help scrawled out on a variety of papers, and so on.

  I felt like I had no choice but to get my hammer, cat’s-paw, and crowbar out of the van in order to check out what remained hidden in these particular walls. In the upstairs bedrooms there was nothing. I hammered ancient nails back in the best I could. The bathrooms, laundry room, mudroom, parlors, living room, downstairs bedroom, and closets held nothing outside of cobwebs, dead bugs, a couple mouse carcasses, and mishandled nails. I found no “Help Me” summons, no fingernail-scratched “I’m still alive” dictums that would certainly be displayed in a top-rate B-movie horror film.

  Behind a Hobart automatic dishwasher shoved beside the fireplace, though, I peeled back Sheetrock to find a twine-wrapped scroll. Let me say right now that this wasn’t a handmade paper document rolled up like some kind of old-fashioned diploma or land deed. Because I had no expertise in the tanning process I couldn’t positively distinguish deer, cow, horse, or sheep skin from that of human derma. For some reason, though, I understood the odd document to be nothing but shaved back skin from a small, small Homo sapiens. Let me tell you that I cringed, and got creeped out, and felt the hairs on my neck stand as I picked up this flesh tube and rolled it out, expecting to read a list of every dead Gruel orphan ever used and abused by the Cathcart machine.

  An ambulance went by on its way, I assumed, to Graywood Regional Memorial. I jumped. Who fell sick enough in Gruel to be transported thusly? I wondered. Everyone either humped out their sicknesses—from stroke to heart attack—or flat-out died. A minute later I heard Victor Dees driving crazy, palm pressed hard on the horn, he being Gruel’s only serious volunteer firefighter.

  I turned back to the hidden scroll to read, “You are here. Write here.”

  Well I don’t have to elaborate any about how I got the fuck out of the house immediately, as soon as I replaced the Sheetrock, hammered in new threaded nails, patched over all the minor indentions with compound, mixed some latex Porter paint to match the yellowed tint of Bekah’s walls, took out an old bandanna to wipe down all of my fingerprints, replaced all of the major bakery appliances to their original positions, and checked every corner for hidden cameras that might need destruction. Then I slid out of the house, closed the door with my elbow, and kept my face to the ground should any of the Vicksburg descendants be up on Gruel Mountain with their old-timey eyepieces.

  I forgot to replace the cup of gas.

  In the distance I heard Victor Dees’s makeshift siren he’d salvaged from an MP’s Jeep, according to him. I got in the step van and drove up Old Old Greenville Road, watching an isosceles triangle of smoke that, as it turned out, emanated from Gruel BBQ and Pig-Petting Zoo. I pulled in behind Dees, who could only watch the structure fall in on itself. “You should’ve heard the squeals an hour ago, Novel. I guess old Brother Scott is gonna throw himself a bake sale tomorrow. A fire sale.”

  It stunk, in a you-overcooked-the-pork-shoulder kind of way. I said, “What happened? What’s the story with the ambulance that flew by right before you did?”

  Dees pulled out the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt and said into it, “I’mo be incommunicado directly for an unspecified time. This has officially become an arson investigation, ten-four,” and turned the dial to off. Who knew which man or woman did or didn’t stand on the other end, or why? To me Victor Dees said, “I didn’t drive by the motel, Cuz. Where were you seeing a convoy of ambulance and me?”

  Fucking A, I thought. There’s no way I should admit to breaking into Bekah’s house. I said, “What?” stalling.

  “I didn’t drive by the Gruel Inn, and I didn’t drive by Gruel Normal—plus all those people outside of you are gone off to a field trip, Bubba. Where were you?”

  I said, “Well you know, Victor. I needed to take a walk. You drove by me a hundred miles an hou
r, right there on the square. Me, I stood there looking at Colonel Dill’s statue—as you well know I’m writing the official unabridged historical biography of Gruel, its people and environs—and you drove past me.”

  He said, rightly, “Bullshit. I took a defensive driving class a few years before you came into our midst. I know how to train my eyes in a way that involves everything peripheral. I got my side mirrors locked in all ways to view what I passed, you know. I got my rearview stuck in a way to understand what went by just. You weren’t there, pal. I think you might’ve burned down the Gruel BBQ and Pig-Petting Zoo. There’s no one else in town today. There’s no one in town. You.”

  I said, “No. No, no, no, dickhead. I’m a lot of things, but I ain’t an arsonist.”

  “I smell gas on your hands, buddy. I don’t smell gas on my hands. I’m no master of rational thought, but I might think—or the guy we’re going to bring in from the South Carolina arson investigators might think—that you have something to do with this particular fire. Hmmmm—let’s see.” Victor Dees put his index finger to his temple, like any situation comedy actor might do. “No one’s in town outside of Novel Akers. His hands reek of a flammable liquid. I never got the opportunity to take a college logic course, but this seems almost too easy.”

  Again, the building smouldered and flamed and fell in on itself right in front of us. Victor Dees stood beside his empty five-gallon drywall bucket. “Is the Forty-Five Volunteer Fire Department showing up any time soon? Is this how y’all do it here—one man, one bucket?”

  “We spend our money otherwise,” Dees said. “And we urge our residents not to burn their houses down. That’s about it.”

  No churches existed in Gruel, I knew. Did they burn down due to fire-and-brimstone preachers? Did lightning strike and eradicate them before real firefighters could show up? I said, “I got gas on my hand when I needed to siphon from my van in order to fire up the lawn mower.”