Novel

by George Singleton

  Dees stared at me. I kept hard eye contact. Victor Dees said, “You can’t tell lies to a professional liar. That’s an impossible task.” Brother Scott’s propane tank blew up about this time. I don’t know if pig or metal flew straight up in the sky, but Victor Dees and I watched it, just like in a slow-motion movie. He said, finally, “I’ve voted for some things that we shouldn’t’ve done. I’ll admit it now. Everything else I’ve thought would work out, worked out. Anyway. I didn’t think you’d go so far as kill the pigs in order to distract everyone from what you really have on your mind.”

  “I didn’t start the fire, you fucking idiot, and you know it.”

  Victor Dees tried to stare me down again. He tried to see if I’d avert my eyes or develop a nervous twitch. I pulled my shirt up over my nose in order to eradicate the smell of burning flesh. “I know. I know that. I’m playing with you.” He said, “There are people who want to see you fail and fail. There are people among us think you’re a little highfalutin, having your own autobiography due out any day now from Harcourt. That’s the word, right? That’s what’s happening.”

  Another trick, I thought. I said, “Harcourt’s the word, if that’s what you mean.”

  Dees rested his hand on the camouflaged truck. Above us, buzzards circled like they normally did above Gruel Mountain. “I don’t think Graywood County Fire and Rescue owns a map of the county, taking this long to get here. I called them up two hours ago.”

  What sounded like firecrackers going off emitted from the barbecue stand. “There’s no telling,” I said.

  “Listen.” Victor Dees picked up his walkie-talkie, held it to his mouth, and said, “I’m back, ten-four,” like that, though he never turned the on switch up. “Listen,” he said to me. “There are people.”

  “I didn’t start any fire. As a matter of fact I’d broken into Bekah’s house looking for anything I could find concerning me and mine. Or at least me. Me and hers, what with that odd upbringing. There are human remains in the wall over there, I tell you. There’s a rolled-up tanned back side of somebody, and they’ve written a note to me on it. It’s like a giant curled pork rind, I swear to God.”

  Victor Dees looked off somewhere in the distance—I swear to God-and yelled, “Cut! Cut! We got the truth out of him.”

  From the back side of Gruel BBQ and Pig-Petting Zoo Brother Scott stood up. He said, “I hope this was worth it all, goddamn it. I got to sue somebody for smoke inhalation.”

  “Oh fucking shutup,” Victor said back. “You’ll get enough insurance money just like everyone else did. You’ll either be able to retire forever or rebuild a real barbecue joint worth going to.”

  It wasn’t difficult to understand how my fellow citizens had plans of their own outside my historical Gruel biography. I said, “I’m wearing a tape recorder! I’ve got a tape recorder!”

  Victor Dees said, “Oh shut up, Novel. No you don’t. We got you pegged. You’re too stupid to do something like that. Your parents should’ve named you ‘Short Story,’ if anything. Or ‘Poem.’”

  Brother Scott came up and shook my hand, smiling. “Well that was fun. I have to get on the horn and call a contractor to come rebuild. Who’s hungry?”

  I drove my step van over to Roughhouse Billiards and parked sideways right in front. No one lolled on the square, and I knew it only meant that people used this day of nonchild leisure to procreate, which I thought to be a sad, myopic occasion.

  “Hey, Novel. I thought you’d be up in Maggie Valley today,” Jeff the owner said. He reached in the cooler for a PBR.

  “Nice try.”

  Barry and Larry stood like idiots before their pool table, no trick-shot paraphernalia evident in their midst. For the first time ever I noticed that these brothers weren’t speckled in old paint. As a matter of fact, their arms appeared to be singed somewhat. I took my beer and said, “How’s about that Gruel BBQ and Pig-Petting Zoo burning down?”

  Jeff the owner shrugged. “I didn’t hear about it.”

  “What about y’all, Barry and Larry—if that’s y’all’s real names—what do you think about the barbecue place burning down? What a shame. All those nice pigs.”

  They stood like minutemen holding pool cues. They both slanted their eyes to the left immediately. Barry said, “I ain’t heard.”

  “You ain’t heard,” I said, getting up off my barstool. I walked over and picked the striped eleven ball out of the closest middle pocket. “You ain’t heard. Well I’m of the belief that y’all set the place on fire. I’m of the belief—this isn’t paranoia—that some people want to peg me for it. I’m of the belief that Gruel will keep burning down, establishment by establishment, until I’m gone. I think some people don’t want other people to know the truth.”

  Immediately I wished that I had had time to rehearse my little speech. “Establishment by establishment” came off weird metrically. It also sounded forced, and one of those how-to-write textbooks warned about forced-sounding writing.

  “What did you say?” said Larry.

  I held that eleven ball back up like a pitcher faking toward first base. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Jeff the owner came up behind me and tried to grab the ball. “That’s enough. We don’t want no fights. We might be called Roughhouse, but that don’t mean we want any.”

  I hate to say that I shook. There’s got to be some kind of physiobiological term for what happens when a person gets to that am-I-really-about-to-do-what-I’m-about-to-do point. I was there, baby. Would I cock my arm further and hit Barry or Larry with the eleven ball square on the forehead? Would I gain enough strength to turn the pool table over? Or would I realize that perhaps I should pack up my few belongings and slouch my way out of Gruel? I said, “Thank you” to Jeff the owner, like a big baby.

  Barry said, “That’s right I don’t think you want to mess with us.”

  I turned to Jeff and said, “Please. Please. You can keep the ball. I won’t use the ball, I promise.”

  “I’d kind of like to see this,” he said. “What the hell.”

  And then I was on those boys like tarnish on silver.

  Maura-Lee and Kah showed up at the Gruel Inn. Me, I’d bedded down in room 11, thinking it was some kind of sign. I came out the door and looked down to who knocked on the office entrance. I yelled out, “I’m here. What do y’all want?” from however many feet away.

  Let me say now that I knew that these two women loved each other, and held a lesbian relationship that they didn’t want anyone in Gruel to know about. Let me say that it didn’t bother me, that I never felt emasculated, and that I wished for them nothing but the best in South Carolina.

  I yelled out, “Hey you two lesbians, come on down this way and give me a show!” like a fool.

  Maura-Lee and Bekah looked at each other, and looking back on it all now I understand that they smirked. They walked up my way. They didn’t hold hands, but they kept up one of those side-to-side kind of walks best used by tired weight lifters. Maura-Lee looked out at Gruel Mountain. Bekah said, “I’m not a lesbian, Novel. Maura-Lee’s not gay, Novel. We just like each other.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said.

  Maura-Lee said, “Hey, Novel. I’m writing a book. I’m writing a book about all the things I think might help people live better, like in a different light. There will be recipes, of course. But there will be other things in between. Like jokes and conundrums. Say, why do you think when you pull olive loaf out of a package, all the olives fall out? And then, at the end of the resealable container, how come there aren’t a hundred olive slices stacked up?”

  I couldn’t tell if she offered a joke or a riddle. I said, “You finish that book up and I’ll put in a good word to my agent.”

  The women walked into room 11 and gyred around. Bekah said, “This place looks so much better than it did after you tore all the walls out being nosy.”

  Now, I couldn’t remember fully if Bekah had ever come into the Gruel Inn after its innards got re
furbished after my demolition work. How did she know how it looked before my town-mates showed up on a volunteer basis to refurbish the place for possible gurus? I said, “I can only surmise deductively—and you know for a fact that I’m able to do so, after successfully passing a graduate school course called When Statesmen Refuse What Seems to Be Apparent, and How’—that you’ve been inside my abode at a time when I toiled over archival Gruel photographs.”

  Maura-Lee touched the wall. Bekah said, “Well that certainly might be a crime, Novel. That’s an odd and weird and scandalous accusation. Because someone broke into our house as of late. Fortunately I installed one of those home protection movement cameras in the fake eyeball of a mounted dik-dik. Technology’s amazing, isn’t it? It keeps so little from being a mystery, Novel.”

  Right away I knew that Bekah couldn’t’ve made all this up off the top of her debt-collector head. The fucking dik-dik, I thought. When I looked around the rooms it never occurred to me that she might desacralize one of her father’s prized stuffs. “Well,” I said. “Maybe I’m just trying to figure out what bizarre deus ex machina plopped me down here in Gruel, you know.” Damn me to hell for being the kind of person who wants to understand tragic flaws, past-life indiscretions, or doomfiil predestiny.

  Maura-Lee said, “I’d almost bet that our yoga gurus will want these rooms painted in pastel shades of green. That’s the best color for tranquillity. Maybe we should paint the whole town in pastels.”

  “Or take a vote and change its name,” Bekah said. She held one eyebrow up and kept a smirk.

  I could only think about how I would honor my Gruel Normal contract, then slip out of town on my way to write speeches for a state whose lieutenant governor needed help, a place like Alabama, a place where my tragic flaws might be recognized and ballyhooed.

  32

  I COULD NOT have worn blinders for the next few weeks and been more focused. At home—no matter what room I chose—I read over all my how-to books again and again. At work inside the silo I stacked articles and photographs in chronological order: starting with news of Gruel’s own Colonel Dill’s heroic escapades, ending with a November 1984 report in the Forty-Five Platter on the inexplicable and unlikely occurrence that no one showed up to vote in the presidential election. Victor Dees, of all people, got quoted in the article as he told rookie reporter Bob Murray, “I guess we all had something to do that day. Tuesdays are important in Gruel. Most southern towns, it’s Wednesdays, what with night church. For some reason it’s always been Tuesdays in Gruel. I believe—don’t quote me on this—that Colonel Dill himself designated Tuesdays as days of constant labor, way back in 1866 or thereabouts. He believed that only good luck happened if people worked a sixteen-hour Tuesday. Something about Gettysburg or Antietam. Or the battle of Franklin. I forget. Don’t quote me on all this.” Bob Murray’s page B4 article went on to list out how every white-majority precinct—like Gruel—didn’t garner a vote. Murray ended his item with a quote from Victor Dees, which went, “So. Who won?”

  Then I arranged the photos of Gruel residents by way of forehead and eye-beadiness. I never studied genetics, anthropology, Darwinism, or models who specialized in close-up facial shots, but it appeared logically possible—from an amateur “maxillariologist’s” point of view—that Gruel’s residents would one day have two touching eyeballs and a hairline not dissimilar to the average wolfman.

  Oh, I shuffled and blind-picked, and played fifty-two pickup with forty-five thousand documents. And then I closed my eyes and pulled what I thought may be the most important Gruel pieces. I didn’t really close my eyes. That’s both “hyperbole” and “exaggeration.” The how-to books point out not to use clichés, and that it’s proper to stretch the truth, aka “lie.”

  I took everything home, to my approximately fifty-two-hundred-square-foot brick trailer, and wrote this prologue:

  Gruel, South Carolina, might be a template for small-town southern America. In these pictures and news items you will come to understand how hardworking people strive and strive to become the good, honest citizens in a world gone cynical. From Civil War to trickle-down theory, leam how a small town—a village, a spot on the Rand McNally atlas—slowly progressed from thump-on-heads proletarians to economically vibrant members of the merchant class. Live and learn. Come on down. There’s a place for a person like you in Gruel.

  That’s all I wrote. Then I proceeded with everything I’d seen in the silo.

  “Well,” said Derrick Ouzts. “That’s something. That’s a little something. Do you think your publisher would be interested and amicable about all this?”

  As you know I had zero publishers. I said, “Uh-huh. Indubitably. As a matter of fact, with so much information left over in the silo that I couldn’t use, I’d be willing to bet that they’d be interested in a second Gruel book.” Students walked back and forth in their small, weird, plaid outfits. We stood outside. “I’ll do what I can do. I imagine they’ll want to do this in paperback, what with the cost of cloth-covered, perfect-bound productions. Cloth-covered means hardback. Perfect-bound means not saddle stitch. Saddle stitch means stapled, really.”

  My ersatz boss put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m not an idiot, Novel. I’ve seen books in my life. I’ve even read a couple. Listen, I’ll tell the committee that you’re well on the way.”

  My mind could only race about a year ahead. Nobody, I knew, would ever purchase a book of useless small-town tidbits titled More Gruel, Please. I said, “There’ll be a bona fide ISBN number and cataloging-in-publication data. I’m thinking about either dedicating the book to Colonel Dill or to all the orphans who passed this way.” I looked up at what appeared to be a pterodactyl flying overhead. I said, “Who’s, exactly, ‘the committee’?”

  “Again, everybody, you know. The whole town. Except you, I guess.”

  I knew that answer, but stalled in order to make some mental notes—I needed to find a print shop that wouldn’t mind me using a real publisher’s name on the spine. I needed to put my money earned from being Gruel Normal’s historian in residence in a mutual fund for three months and hope for 20 percent interest in order to pay for a thousand copies.

  And then I planned to escape. I would get out of Gruel before anyone learned that no bookstore in America carried the biography—either mine or the town’s.

  I said, “What?”

  “Everybody except you, I guess. Hey, I’m betting that you haven’t met the whole town. Why don’t we plan a big party sometime next week. You can announce that the book’s done, and maybe we’ll take some prepublication orders. You writers get anything you want for free, don’t you? We can go ahead and see how many people want one for them and theirs. It’ll be a coffee-table-sized book, right?”

  Again, I daydreamed about getting the stupid history camera-ready. I said, “Writers don’t get their own books for free, believe me. Oh, we get a big discount, but nothing’s free. Listen, I’m going to need a few days off doing grunt work. I’ll need to make some phone calls. I might even have to drive up to New York City. Sometimes, from what I’ve learned, you got to pressure these people to send a contract before you die.”

  I went on and on, lying. Derrick Ouzts walked off saying, “Do what you have to do. You’re the historian, Bubba.”

  I could’ve plain flat-out left, my wallet filled after closing up an account at the Graywood County Bank. Don’t think that I didn’t consider any of this. Hell, those thoughts began right about when Maura-Lee Snipes left the Sneeze ’n’ Tone in order to perfect Jesus crust.

  I yelled out at Derrick Ouzts, “I’ll put in an acknowledgment page thanking you and Mrs. Ouzts, you know.”

  Bob Murray, in a matter of only fifteen years, had risen from cub reporter at the Forty-Five Platter to full-fledged Lifestyles editor. “Lifestyles” might’ve been somewhat misleading for the people of Graywood County: There existed no fashion, movie review, book review, visual arts review, or recipe page. Pretty much the “Lifestyles” section in
cluded anything not included on the obituary page. Letters to the editor congratulating the stupid, talentless cast of The Sound of Music, Oklahoma, The Music Man, H.M.S. Pinafore, Our Town, and Grease—mostly lawyers, bankers, high school drama teachers, and gene-impaired wealthy Forty-Five long-standing landowners—got published nonstop, all lauding the performers, the director, in addition to pointing out how fortunate all of us were to live in such a vibrant, open-minded, meaningful, fulfilling, and lustrous community. In between stood articles about the latest Sonic Drive-In opening or a man who taught nighttime home decor classes at the new Lowe’s.

  Mr. Bob Murray, maybe my age, wore a buzz cut. Front-page headlines, torn out unneatly, half floated away from the Scotch-taped anchors on the wall behind him. It didn’t take me five seconds to notice that each one held a horrific and execrable typo: MAN LANDS ON MOAN!, NIXON RESINGS!, U.S. HOKEY TEAM WINS!, CRATER BEATS FORD!, BUSH BEATS MANDOLL!, and so forth. I’m not lying. There were hundreds of them, most of which meant more to the locale, and were less emphatic: TRACTOR PULLLL AT FARGROUND, LION’S CLUB ANNUAL ROOM SALE, LIBARY HOLDS LITRACY DRIVE.

  I pointed. Murray didn’t turn around. “This is a family-owned business. It’s been a family paper since it started. My editor Frankie Mundy—who insists on writing the goddamn headlines for each item—happens to be the great-great-great-whatever grandson of our founder. This boy has a degree in phys ed from Anders College. Half the time when we’re pushing deadlines and need help you can find him in his office conjugating imaginary football plays that would never work.” He said, “Are you all right? You don’t look like you hail from around here. Hey, why’re you even here? I don’t write stories about the plight of the homeless in Lifestyles. Go talk to Glenn Flack over in Metro.”

  I’d not thought about getting a haircut. I only shaved once a week if and only if my face itched. Perhaps the hygienic regimen I employed while writing scripts for lieutenant governors, and while feigning herpetologist status, fell-off inexorably, I don’t know. I said, “I’ve been living in Gruel for too long. The town could use a barber and a haberdasher.”