Novel

by George Singleton

  “No you won’t,” Grover the Marxist said.

  “Watch me.”

  Someone changed the channel. We started watching a bunch of guys hanging out inside a bar, then we left to go down Franklin Street, burn or tear up any Reagan-Bush or Jesse Helms bumper stickers aptly applied to sidewalk garbage cans, and pretty much made nuisances of ourselves.

  We walked on over, as I remember—maybe a dozen of us, all sad Democratic voters—to Cat’s Cradle, not knowing that the UNC Young Republicans would be holding their celebration inside. And we lined up across from those red bow tie, blue oxford shirt, khaki pants-wearing accountants-to-be. I swear it looked like every one of them had gotten a fresh haircut within the hour. This one fellow named Driscoll—he’s probably out of federal prison now for fraud, embezzlement, and insider trading-pointed at us losers and said, “Too late to register with us, Cuz. But we appreciate y’all coming down here to congratulate us.”

  Now, this episode in my life hadn’t come to memory until I saw the sad fistfight below me. Back in Chapel Hill, the Republicans mostly slapped and kicked and pulled our hair. My buddies and I were so wasted that our windmill punches only took us to the slimy bar floor. Later on, though, a couple boys in the physiology department on our side stuck their fingers down their throats and released what cheap white wine and government cheese burbled in their alimentary canals, right onto the jubilant mass of lemmings. I swear to God I heard one of them yell out, “You’re going to be getting a dry-cleaning bill for this!” as we got thrown out onto the sidewalk by a 120-pound kid with a railroad spike in his nose.

  Which brings me to what went on in front of the Gruel Inn. Papa Locke and I descended. He walked over to a sizzling rack of ribs, tore off about four, and started eating.

  Me, I rounded the back side of the motel and told myself not to get involved. No, I would only participate in this sad melee as a referee of sorts, as an arbitrator. Not fifty yards away I heard screams and accusations from both sides: “You’re not a real artist, you’re a human photocopier,” for example, though I couldn’t tell if it was photographer or forger speaking. The same went for, “You bunch of backward poseurs!”

  And I would’ve continued toward the people I knew—James, Joyce, Bekah, Maura-Lee, Jeff the owner, Derrick Ouzts, Bob Murray, Victor Dees, the men and women who posed as, or with, General Robert E. Lee—but I stopped and thought, Another fucking rhyme.

  And then one of my ungrateful, bitter, taciturn, released copperheads, probably out of its winter hole for only the second or third time since spring broke—a big, thick four-footer in search of field mice and anoles—didn’t cotton to my foot being so close to its head. When he struck, when he sank two inch-long fangs into my lower right calf, I only thought bramble, bee sting, or briar. But when I reached down instinctively and the same snake hit my inner wrist, I knew.

  Not that I possess a complicated and twisted system of veins, capillaries, and arteries in my right arm, but that goddamn copperhead’s fangs, somehow, got tangled up in such a way that made him go into an alligator-like death roll, trying to release himself.

  I screamed out the only primordial, subconscious language that I could muster, namely, “This ain’t how my life’s supposed to end! I got other things to add, I got things to do!” like that.

  Bekah started the step van. She cried, and helped me into the passenger seat. My wife blurted out, “I’ll admit a lot of this got planned long before we met, Novel. But we didn’t mean to have anyone get hurt. You have to believe me. I come from a long line of tricksters.” She put the van in first gear and stuttered forward. Everyone quit fighting, they waved good-bye to me, and in the rearview I saw them walk side by side to the barbecue out back. I can’t say that I squinted an eye in disbelief, but I should’ve. Instead I watched my arm and ankle swell to the width of prize-winning gourds. As Bekah took Old Old Augusta Road toward Old Old Greenville Road I said, “My heart’s beating two hundred times a minute. This isn’t good.”

  “I only hope they have antivenin at Graywood Regional Memorial. There’s no telling. They might have to airlift you to Greenville or Atlanta.” She didn’t seem to be pushing the accelerator very hard. We traveled down the cobbly asphalt maybe thirty-five miles an hour.

  “You ever going to tell me what’s really going on in this town? There’s something. Are your mother and brother really dead, or was that some kind of life insurance fraud? I didn’t see them in the crowd back there.”

  “Look at your wrist. It looks like your skin might peel away. You must be allergic to poison or something.”

  I don’t want to say that I saw that light at the end of the tunnel like all of those freaks say on talk shows and religious programs. Nor do I want to admit what might’ve been a hallucination: My parents weren’t dead due to unpredictable reptiles. All of those click-click-clicks poured through my mind as to how James almost died from a heart-attack-induced snake encounter, et cetera.

  I said, “I meant to make good on my personal vow,” but my Adam’s apple didn’t clench up. “This is only a lesson. It’s only a lesson, that’s all. There’s too much more I’m fated to deliver.” Fated, that’s right. I’m not too proud to admit I said “fated,” just like Euripides might’ve, Sophocles, Aristophanes, the rest. Goofballs Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Beckett. I said, “I’ve never been to the capital of New Hampshire. Do they have a governor and lieutenant governor there? That would be a nice place to write speeches. Hey, Bekah, keep an eye out for stray dogs. I don’t want you hitting any strays.”

  I thought, Maybe I could write a fucking play.

  Bekah eased up on the accelerator more so and said, “This turned out way worse than I imagined.”

  When I jumped out of the step van—for some reason I thought that I could run thirty-five miles an hour and kind of veer my way through a field and out of sight toward a new life—and when I rolled and rolled, I couldn’t remember if I should tuck my head in, go sideways like a log down a hillside, or try to stop and drop. I thought about bowling. I remembered watching a documentary one time on the migration of armadillos. Later on, I knew, I would come back to this fallow field I had chosen and measure off the length of my impromptu side trip.

  I don’t mind if it was the poison coursing through my veins, or the sheer terror of being admitted to Graywood Regional Memorial, but instead of my life flashing before me—from gold panning to roadside shrimp sales, to a speech I’d once written for the lieutenant governor wherein he predicted not only international factories in North Carolina but also alien industrial complexes in and around the Research Triangle—I foresaw the future.

  Bekah sped onward, either unaware that she’d lost her cargo or convinced I’d be found dead and ruled a “natural cause” by Graywood County deputies and coroner alike. Back in Gruel I envisioned the townsfolk and the Gruel mountaineers congratulating each other, slapping backs, laughing on their way to a celebratory shindig picnic that might last until the next failed outsider got duped into performing whatever odd tasks he or she agreed to undertake. I imagined those poor upcoming Myrtle Beach gurus.

  I didn’t see my parents anywhere in this vision, though.

  When my momentum stopped, I remained still. You better get across the state line as soon as possible, I thought. Write up a résumé. Find someone from back in the old days whom you never double-crossed or tricked or embarrassed publicly. Never return to South Carolina.

  More Gruel, Please, I thought.

  But the soil felt warm and soft and welcoming. This particular spot would’ve been a perfect place, I thought, to bury anyone’s autobiography, their lucky tales.

  I drug myself away, though, limping, swollen, crouched, confused—yet lucid enough to tell myself, Don’t try this again, Novel. I thought, A way a lone a last a loved a long the way I must’ve done something mean-hearted in a previous life, and hoped it didn’t involve any of Gruel’s ancestors, for I didn’t want to be remembered by these people ever again—in photographs, on can
vas, or in words.

  I knew that I had stories.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank my agent Liz Darhansoff for never saying “novel” to me either; everyone at Harcourt—especially Patty Berg; Julie Marshall; Evan Boorstyn; Jen Charat; Tricia van Dockum; David Hough, maniacal copyeditor; philosopher Jim Edwards for letting me skip over that “we must pass over in silence” bit of Wittgenstein’s; and Glenda Guion for letting me drive South Carolina aimlessly, cursing.

  About the Author

  GEORGE SINGLETON lives in Pickens County, South Carolina, with ceramicist Glenda Guion and their mixture of strays. More than a hundred of his stories have been published nationally in magazines and anthologies. He teaches writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.