I finished sieving Mom thoroughly. Would I keep the other half of her remains in a glazed clay vessel for the rest of my life? Would I come back in a year and risk getting caught by Les Miles and Mr. Niblock again? Cashion picked up one of Raymond Carver's collections and opened it up in the middle. Fifteen minutes later she said that the characters came across a dead woman in the river, but did nothing. She didn't think it right. I said it was only a story, it was only made up.
We stared at the paint can for too long, then walked over to the pool hall an hour before it unofficially closed. Our parole officer never said we couldn't offer toasts to one another and to those surrounding us. I didn't say anything like, "Here's to my spending more than my allotted time cleaning up this town." I didn't say, "Here's to a woman destined to clean up after my mistakes." The bartender slid two shots our way. He said that he'd met more desperate people in Gruel, that we shouldn't get optimistic.
Bluffs
EIGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER the accident I've almost regained feeling from the neck up. My speech improves daily, but not enough to keep cops from pulling me out of the car, making me walk a straight line, touch my nose, recite the alphabet. For a year and a half I've dealt with people patting me on the head, talking to me slowly, smiling as if I were slow-minded, retarded, the kind of grown-up who served as a high school football team's lucky charm mascot. I don't mind. I understand. It has occurred to me that I've been destined to undergo near death and numbness in order to make other people feel better about themselves. It isn't beneath my station in life to gather up whatever free beer and dollar bills everyone offers. And I pretend not to hear people tell my story.
Listen, if I'd not retreated to Gruel, South Carolina, in the late 1990s, much worse might've happened in West Memphis. I'd've bet all my money on the wrong dog, found its owner, made threats, and gotten killed. I'd've gone into Memphis proper and gotten run over by a trolley or horse-drawn carriage, drunk myself silly down on Beale Street, wondered why I couldn't get a steady job playing piano at one of the hotel bars so that I wouldn't gamble professionally. Before I moved to Gruel, the only thing my future held was a weeklong stint as some kind of brunt-of-a-joke banter between the hosts of Alive at Nine! each morning, them saying, "Well it's miserable outside again today, but probably not as miserable as poor Scurry Hodgins sitting in his hospital room for what he did last week," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Or I might've done something wrong in Little Rock, Fayetteville, even Calico Rock, trout fishing on the White River. Hot Springs. Oxford on down to Jackson. Somehow I would've pissed off someone and gotten a vital organ punctured at best, if not killed altogether.
"Scurry Hodgins there used to be a world-class poker player," I hear men say at Roughhouse Billiards on the square in Gruel. "He come here hiding out, you know, trying to kick the habit. I seen him on ESPN2 one time playing that game no one knows how to play, and bluffing his way to a million-dollar prize. Nowadays I doubt he'd know a deuce from a king of diamonds."
Oh, I hear them. I sit on the barstool, watch Jeff the owner make hot dogs. I pretend I don't know what's going on when someone pulls out a deck of Bicycles and shuffles them loudly right behind my head.
"What happened was, there was this art car show come through here having their convention two years ago or thereabouts. Scurry gone over there—hey, Jeff, did he go over there with you?—and the next thing you know this old girl driving a Dodge Dart—hey, Jeff, was it a Dodge Dart or a Comet Caliente?—covered in little Jesus and Mary figurines ain't looking where she's going, and veers off the parade route, and knocks poor old Scurry right up against Colonel Dill's statue right over there. He hits his head, you know, and this is what happened."
I don't need to turn around to see the guy pointing his thumb toward the middle of the town square where Colonel Dill, Civil War hero, stands proudly in granite. I don't need to see the man turn his thumb my way afterward.
I think, Full house beats a flush. Flush beats a straight. Straight beats three of a kind.
"Word is he only had a pair of sevens, nothing else, in that last hand he won. What Scurry Hodgins won."
"Lucky sevens."
"I'd ask him, but he might only say something like, 'Mississippi River.' One time I asked him how he was doing, and I swear what he said came out, 'Best for all wick lighters.' Man, he has no clue what's going on around him these days. And with all that money sitting in the Bank of America."
I drink what Jeff slides my way. I nod at whoever buys it. One day I'll stand up and recite everything I've heard said about me, buy drinks for a month, and leave tiny Gruel. I'll return to the flat, flat expanse of western Tennessee, or farther.
I like to think that the art car woman craned her neck to check me out. It wasn't a Dodge Dart or Comet Caliente, either—she drove a Fairlane. And it wasn't covered in Jesus and Mary figurines. No, this woman had converted a Ford Galaxie—about a 1965—into a shrine for Buddha. I don't know for sure, but I can only imagine that she saw some kind of connection between Buddha and the universe. Me, I stood there all by my lonesome watching the other art cars sidle by. To be honest I focused on this woman in a VW Bug covered in what ended up being her cats' claws. Man, that car glistened. I have no clue what she wanted to espouse philosophically, or morally, but she looked like some kind of movie star, or at least a woman who offered melodramatic dialogue on a Broadway stage.
Then I found myself knocked up against Colonel Dill's rock feet, not that I remember the incident, really. And who knows how the human central nervous system operates? I didn't break a bone, but something bruised deep on my brain caused a reaction not unlike a stroke. Oh, I pulled one leg behind the other for a good six months, and got that weird curled hand for a while, and spoke to people as if I juggled three bowling balls with my tongue.
I didn't sue the woman, if that matters. Everyone's insurance paid off.
"I guess Jesus and Mary didn't like the way he held his mouth," a man says behind me at Roughhouse Billiards. "The real Jesus directed that lady's Dodge Dart right to him, you know. Like destiny."
Two men practice trick shots on the pool table, making bets with each other. I want to go over there and slap down a few pictures of Ben Franklin that they'll never get out of Gruel, but don't. Jeff the owner says to me, slowly, "Hey, Scurry, would you like a ham sandwich? You need to eat something."
I shake my head no. He slicks back his slick hair, then plops a can of PBR in front of me. I palm the counter three times.
Back in Memphis my ex-wife once bet me a thousand dollars that I couldn't go a week without gambling. I took her on. She said, "I win." Then she left.
"He gets up every morning and takes a shower, evidently. You can't smell him or nothing. His clothes seem clean enough. And then he walks over here and drinks till two o'clock. Then I guess he goes home and takes a nap. Then he comes back for happy hour and stays until closing. That's it. He don't read the paper or nothing. He just sits there."
"What a pitiful life. Say, you want to play rock-paper-scissors, see who pays the next round?"
I keep a journal in my head that I'm thinking about putting down in a notebook. One time a man came in here from Forty-Five, trying to sell Jeff flashing stick-on buttons that looked more firefly than advertisement. He said he could make them go ROUGHHOUSE BILLIARDS! like that, and everyone could wear them.
Jeff said, "Wouldn't my customers already know where they are, outside of Scurry here?"
The salesman said, "Well, yeah, but they could wear them outside, on the streets, to show people where they've been."
I sat on my barstool, feigning nonchalance to the salesman and retardation to anyone who'd been in Roughhouse Billiards more than twice. Jeff said, "I don't know about life in a big town like Forty-Five, but most of my customers try to hide the fact that they hang out in a bar. They don't like to admit it, you know." He turned to me and said, "What do you think about that, Scurry?"
I said, of course, "Aaaaagh. Aaaaagh. Aaaaagh. Aaa
aagh," and nodded my head up and down like a Hot Springs racehorse.
The salesman left after giving over two samples. Jeff's lit up HARD ROCK CAFE. I'm pretty sure that mine was broken. It read BAR AND G ILL.
When the salesman left, Jeff said to me, "If it's not one thing, Scurry. Say, do you remember the time before your head injury when we drove out to look at that old boy's new herd of llamas? That was fun, wasn't it?"
I had lost that bet: Jeff said that he could make me feel like we all lived in Peru right here in Gruel. I said he couldn't. He did. I paid up.
With the right smirk, an ace, king, queen, jack of spades plus a two of hearts in the hole beats four eights showing any day, nothing wild. Unfortunately, there are men in Arkansas who will pull pistols out and say, "Show me what you had. Show me that royal flush. Show me you weren't bluffing." There are men in Arkansas, living in dry counties, who don't give a damn about protocol.
There are men from Memphis, with or without wives, who keep a ten of spades up their sleeves.
"They say he's got a concubine living up there in the house with him. She don't get to go out none in the daylight, but she drives up to Greenville and gets his groceries and whatnot. His new clothes. Look at that shirt. You can't buy no shirt like that in Gruel. They ain't even no store. She's supposedly part Mexican. They say her name's something like Who-letta."
"Who let a man like Scurry Hodgins move to Gruel, more like it. One us ought to go over there and check things out. Say, you stick around here, and I'll go look around his house. That Mexican woman asks any questions, I'll say I'm with the department of health come check out levels."
My door's unlocked. I don't care. My big house has one single bed and twelve hardback chairs. My sock drawer's filled with nothing more, and the dining room table's got a sheen on it unlike anything else in Gruel. One time the meter reader walked in all nosy thinking I was gone and found himself staring at his reflection in my sink. When I tapped him on the shoulder he turned and said, "We got a 911 call. We got a 911 call from this address, and I'm here to check things out."
I pulled a piece of paper from my back pocket, a pen. I wrote, "Nice try, amigo," and pointed toward the door. After he left I drove up to Greenville to buy new shirts, pants, some soap, and skin conditioner. On the way back I got pulled over by highway patrolmen and sheriff's deputies every mile on Highway 25.
Here's why it all went downhill: I'd been invited to participate in a clandestine poker tournament over in Pine Bluff. Six of us threw in ten grand each. Spectators and invited guests put down money as to who they thought would win. These poker players, I knew, spent more time raising gamecocks and pit bulls than they did figuring out odds in a nonrigged poker game.
I should mention that all of this took place before I won the big game in Las Vegas, before my wife left, before I moved to South Carolina in hopes of rehabilitation. This old boy Dale Ray called some kind of dead kings/one-eyed jacks/deuces wild game. I anted up. I got dealt two twos, a king with a sword in his head, and a one-eyed jack. I set down my cards and shoved all my chips to the center of the table.
"Two-hundred-dollar limit," Dale Ray said. "You can't just go and bet everything you got. Good God, man, everyone here would be trying to bluff out everyone else."
I said, "Okay," and put out twenty ten-dollar chips.
Dale Ray called. "How many cards you want?"
So I had four wild cards and a nine. I thought, Well, if I get a ten or face card I at least have a royal flush. I have five of a kind no matter.
But I couldn't remember if five of a kind beat a royal flush. Who plays poker hands where five of a kind is a possibility? Who doesn't play high-low games with this many people at the table? I said, "I'll take one card."
Two men folded. One big red-haired fellow got up and looked for a bag of potato chips, then he said he didn't want to ever play poker again—which, in retrospect, might've been smart. Dale Ray took two cards. "Up to you, cowboy," he said.
I looked at my draw card and saw that it was the four of clubs. So I either had an eight-high straight flush or five fours. Who could lose on a hand like that? I bet two hundred, Dale Ray matched and raised, I called and raised, he called and raised—no one ever said anything about a limit to all of this—and so on.
I finally called. Dale Ray had four natural queens and the ace of hearts. I flipped over my trash and said, "You shouldn't call a game with so many wild cards, Bubba," and raked the chips my way. "Hotdamn, you would've won that hand anywhere else."
When I left Pine Bluff later that night, I drove toward Fort Smith, then back toward Jonesboro, before turning south. I imagine that somehow I missed lynching that night only because I foresaw Dale Ray's roadblock.
When I got home my ex-wife said, "Did you have any luck?"
I said, "I broke even, counting gas money. Say, what did you do yesterday?"
My ex-wife crinkled her forehead, and shrunk her entire face before saying, "Have you not noticed the new drapes?"
"Well I'm sorry that I haven't, dear. I guess I'll either go to hell or have some kind of horrendous life-changing tragedy happen to me for not seeing them." I looked at the drapes in our den. "What's that called, paisley?"
My first real word must mean something. I can't say "hot dog" or "beer" or "Excuse me, I think you've accidentally mistaken my umbrella for yours." My next word or words has to be right up there with Schopenhauer, or Wittgenstein, or Hoyle.
It doesn't matter that my house has been ransacked. It doesn't matter that ESPN2 shows the 1997 World Poker Championship every afternoon at least once a week.
"After he hit his head and got all fucked-up, he started liking boys," Victor Dees, the owner of V.D.'s Army-Navy Surplus, says. He's eating boiled peanuts and throwing shells down on the floor. "Luckily for us, we ain't got no men in Gruel who like other men."
"Shit," says Compton Lane. "Luckily in Gruel there aren't any women who would understand that Scurry's faking it all along." I turn around and hold my hands up. I think, How does he know? "Ain't that right, Scurry? I'm on to you, man. I know."
I turn back around and shrug at Jeff He says, "If you are faking, I want to make it clear that I've been keeping tabs on you for what you owe me. I know you have money. We all know you got the money, Scur. We all know that, sooner or later, Jesus hitting you shinbone to forehead will make you speak the truth."
Let me say that I didn't undergo this kind of stress while playing Native American Indian poker with a group of Green Berets who holed up in a hunting lodge weekly outside Blythe-ville, back in the old days.
Compton Lane says, "I used to put dogs asleep daily when I was a veterinarian. I know that look, Scurry."
I hold on. I look at myself in the mirror and pretend not to hear anything. Someone else yells from the other side of the pool table, "That woman wouldn't have hit him with her Jesus-mobile if God didn't want it that way If it weren't preordained and whatnot."
I bend my half-drunk can of beer and want bourbon next. I point behind Jeff, pull a wad of one-dollar bills from my pocket. "It was Buddha that hit me, you fools. It wasn't Jesus. There were about a thousand little one-inch Buddhas glued onto her hood and fender and roof. Get it straight before you go tell a story. Jesus isn't behind everything, believe it or not. Jesus might be the reason y'all are stuck here day in, day out, gossiping about nothing that matters, goddamn it. If there's any kind of retribution going on in the world—if there's any kind of payback for what you did in a previous life—everyone I've ever met in Gruel has done something really, really bad."
I slug down a straight bourbon, neat, from a coffee mug that advertises Hawley-Cooke bookstores, an item that Jeff either got in the mail by accident or bought at a yard sale, seeing as no one in Gruel reads books. Lookit: One time I brought a hardback dictionary into Roughhouse Billiards and everyone asked me why I carried a doorstop around.
"None us got knocked over into Colonel Dill's knee," someone says. "You can talk and talk and talk about Jesus, bu
t none us got struck by a car out of nowhere, like lightning."
I walk out of Roughhouse Billiards knowing that I can only return to my homeland, that I have no other choice but to look up my ex-wife in Memphis to tell some lies, find my old poker-night friends, and start anew. Already I know that I'll put my house up for sale, never get an offer, and give it up as a rental—that I won't care if my monthly money comes in on time. What kind of loser would move to Gruel, anyway, unless he or she hid from passions or obsessions beyond rational thought? Jeff the owner yells out how I owe him two thousand dollars. I wave my arm. It's not two grand, I think. It's only about eighteen hundred dollars.
I wish that I'd've said something better, and know I will think of the right response once I reach those bluffs above the big, big, slow, mighty river. It's always that way, no matter where, no matter what brand of cards.
The Opposite of Zero
IT TOOK UNTIL SEVENTH GRADE before I had—what I thought of initially as—an idiotic teacher call my name wrong on the roll at the first of the year. She got through Adams, Bobo, Davis, Dili, Farley—the easy ones: There were only easy last names in Gruel, no foreign names like Abdelnabi, Gutierrez, Haughey, Narasimhamurdhy, Napolitano, Nguyen, Papadopoulos, Xu, Yablonsky, Yamashita, Zhang, Zheng, Zhong—Goforth, James, Knox, LaRue, before she came upon my last name. Me, I came from a long line of Utopians who pronounced our last name like the opposite of silence. Noyes, like noise. My great-great-great-great something was John Humphrey Noyes, leader of the Oneida community, a man who believed that God spoke to him, et cetera. Mrs. Latham went through her junior high class roll and when she came to me she said, "Gary No Yes?"
I said, "Maybe."
Of course I'd been in school with my classmates from kindergarten on, and they all yelled out, "No, Yes!" like that. "No, Yes! No, Yes!" They had never noticed the possible mispronunciation, but then again I hadn't either.
Drowning in Gruel Page 11
