Drowning in Gruel

by George Singleton

  The glug-glug-glug gift ended up being a quart of aftershave, something I would use in about five years. Judith got a new shower curtain, some more watercolors, a white leather Bible, and a slew of knee socks. Me, I got underwear, some knee socks that were probably meant for Judith and mispackaged, and one of those miniature black Magic 8 Balls that you shook to get a Yes or No answer. I'm ashamed to admit it now, but when my father said, "Ask it a question and see what comes up," I secretly asked myself, "What does the future hold for me, in regards to Gruel?"

  I hadn't quite gotten the hang of how to ask it questions, obviously. The answer came up, "It's in your future." I kind of thought how maybe Mrs. Latham came from the family that manufactured these things.

  So we sat around the table for a few hours seeing as my father needed to pull off a two-hour grace, he couldn't carve the turkey right, and my mother kept throwing away entire cans of congealed cranberry sauce when they didn't slide out unmarred. "It's bad luck to have dented cranberry sauce," she said. "We must turn dented into tended."

  Fa la la la la, la la, la la.

  My mother shaved, honed, scraped, and pulled what turkey carcass scraps she found soon thereafter, chopped the meat into dust mote—sized bits, set them in a pot of boiling turkey broth she'd saved, added enough jalapenos to cure the world of head colds. The next day she got up earlier than usual, took the lid off her turkey hash, sampled a wooden spoonful, and declared, "One day I might open up a diner here in Gruel. What this town needs is a good diner."

  I waited for my mother to turn one of her words into another, but she didn't. No, she seemed happy and confident and optimistic.

  When Mrs. Latham came over at noon, my mother took off her apron, answered the door, and performed a perfect sweeping arm gesture for my seventh-grade teacher to follow into the den. Mrs. Latham said, "Merry belated Christmas, Mr. Noyes," to either my father or me, I couldn't tell. She didn't use the normal No Yes form of salutation.

  "Judith, come on in here and meet Gary No Yes's teacher," my mother yelled out, though. I prayed that Mrs. Latham wouldn't have to go to the bathroom during her visit. Sure enough, Judith had taken her new watercolors and painted a nice representation of Grant Wood's American Gothic, but instead of a pitchfork the farmer only held up his middle finger, and the farmer's wife had blood running down both sides of her mouth.

  Judith came out all smudged and said, "I guess you'll be my teacher in two years, if I don't fail on purpose. My last name's Noyes, not No Yes, by the way. You have from now until then to memorize it."

  I said, "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Judith got a new Bible for Christmas."

  Mrs. Latham said, "If I'm here in two years you can go ahead and shoot me in the brain, Judith," as my father pulled the dining room chair out for her. "Did Santa bring you that set of encyclopedias you wanted, Gary No Yes?"

  My mother pulled out her own chair and sat down. "How come you insist on people calling you Mrs. Latham when you don't even have a husband?"

  My father said, "Dorothy Marie." I never knew my mother's middle name up to this point.

  Judith said, "Marie? Marie?!" and ran back into the bathroom to paint something else.

  I said, "We are humbled by your presence here, Mrs. Latham," because I'd seen it in a movie.

  My teacher scooted up. She looked at my mother and didn't blink. "My husband was in Special Forces. He was killed in 1968, somewhere in a Vietnamese jungle. I don't know about you, but where I come from we keep our deceased husband's name. We'd met in college up in Chapel Hill, and I asked him not to volunteer, but he was too patriotic. His father and two uncles all died in France and Pearl Harbor. My husband had straight As right up until he left college his junior year. He studied philosophy and religion, and minored in literature. He had hopes of one day teaching elementary school either in an inner city or way out in the country—kind of like here in Gruel—so kids could have some kind of future. My husband didn't so much believe in the war in Vietnam, though, let me make it clear. He thought that he'd studied enough Buddhism to talk the enemy into giving up altogether. He's buried down in Florence, at the national cemetery there, should y'all wish to ever visit and place a small American flag on his grave. The one I placed yesterday should be faded by the end of January or thereabouts."

  My father stuck out his palms to hold Mrs. Latham's hand and mine before he said grace. I looked at my mother and noticed how I could've taken every available linen napkin, wadded them up, and still not filled the space her open mouth created. My father only said, "Let us remember our heroes and victims. Amen."

  Judith shouted from the bathroom, "Amen."

  My mother let the canned cranberry sauce fall out at will, on a silver-plated stick-butter plate. She served the turkey hash atop cheese grits, with homemade bread to the side. Mrs. Latham finally said, "My husband had straight As, just like Gary does. That's maybe why I'm a little hard on your son."

  My parents said nothing. Even Judith knew not to say anything about how she wanted to be a tattoo artist later on in life. We ate, Mrs. Latham left, and my father and I spent the next week visiting his micro-miniblind customers to see if they'd tried out their surprise feather dusters. When I went back to school for the second semester, Mrs. Latham took me aside on the first day right before we filed off for a lunch of cling peaches, black-eyed peas, corn bread, steamed cabbage, and sloppy joes. She said, "Yes or No—that story I told your parents could've gotten me a movie award."

  I looked into my teacher's eyes and realized that I would be getting such questions for the entirety of my life. I wore my sister's knee socks that day, though no one could tell seeing as we didn't have a PE class at Gruel Normal. But I felt the smile coming on, and let it go before laughing out loud. I said, "Christmas." Mrs. Latham put her hand on the top of my head and walked with me toward the cafeteria. She said, "Every day."

  Polish

  NELLIE SIZEMORE TAKES every bottle of her dead mother's fingernail polish out on the front porch, props her bare legs up, and spots each chigger bite a different color right there in full view of anyone passing by a half block off the town square. Later she will rummage through the bathroom cabinets looking for rubbing alcohol to wash her blackened fingers, the result of blackberry picking. As a girl Nellie harvested the surrounding land's patches with her mother each July. They made tarts together, pies, ate the berries cold with whole milk. If anyone had asked Nellie to imagine the blackberry patches of her youth she would've guessed that they'd been plowed under by now, lost to retail drugstores, subdivisions, maybe a cleared horse pasture. But in Gruel, South Carolina, the blackberries thrive more so, it seems to her. Whereas most adults look back and notice how something that seemed so large in earlier days ends up minuscule, Nellie finds her old thorny acreage at least doubled in size. She swabs her ankles in Pink Arctic Ice, and wonders if her mother might've gotten lost back there in the blackberries in future years, should she have lived longer. Nellie knows that she cannot move back, no matter what the financial benefits, the lack of temptations.

  Sammy Koon spies Nellie's exposed legs as soon as he turns the corner at Roughhouse Billiards. He knows that there's an estate sale tomorrow and hopes to get a look inside first. He changes street sides and uses trees for camouflage, his eyes on her legs.

  Nellie doesn't change positions when Sammy shuffles through her mother's side yard. She holds the applicator in her right hand. "Sammy Koon," she says.

  He wears khaki pants ironed the wrong way, and a short-sleeved white shirt. Two pens pop out of his cigarette pocket. Nellie thinks, One thing about Gruel: The men all keep their hair in the same style as twenty years earlier. Sammy says, "I heard you come back, Nellie. Hey, remember that time we was driving to school together because your daddy's car broke down, and we seen that bloated cow? Goddamn. Hey, what you doing?"

  "I got some bad chiggers. I'm killing them with fingernail polish." Between her ankles and knees she's used Purple Passion and Jasmine Jubilee. Sammy stands in front of Nell
ie and pretends not to look up her sundress.

  "Peanut butter works, too. Vaseline. You can use lighter fluid to kill them off. One time I fell asleep out in the woods one night and woke up with over three hundred bites. I thought about writing them people at that world record place, but I never did. I had chigger bites on my eyelids."

  Nellie drops her feet to the porch floor. "You still living here in Gruel, Sammy?"

  "I'm thinking about opening up an odds and ends store, you know. I can get a storefront on the square for just about nothing, seeing as the square's gone dead."

  Nellie uncaps and sniffs Red Dynamite Flare for her upper arms. "You never know what might take off in Gruel."

  Sammy shades his eyes. "K-Y jelly works for chiggers, too. Whatever can keep them from getting air through your skin. They got to suffocate, you know."

  "Yeah, well, I don't think I have any K-Y jelly in the house."

  "You gonna come back here and help run the pharmacy? We hear you got all the way up to being a pharmacist somewheres."

  Nellie pats each bite three times, then goes on to the next. She'll have to go inside and use a full-length mirror for her backside. "Nashville. But I'm not a pharmacist anymore. Let's just say I got a little too close to my work."

  Sammy Koon lights a cigarette. "Well it's good to have you back home, no matter. I was sorry to hear about your momma. I was sorry to hear about your daddy when he died. How long ago was that?"

  "I have no clue." Nellie looks at her collection of bottles lined up on the railing. When did my mother ever get the chance to wear these colors? she thinks. Where could she go all dolled up? "He died, and that was that." Nellie chooses Daffodil Delight for her left forearm.

  "Say, you know if they's any Tupperware in there?" Sammy points to the dining room window. "Tupperware, or maybe some Case knives? I believe I could resell those kinds of things if I had my odds and ends store."

  Nellie turns around toward the house and opens her legs accidentally. She says, "Only thing I know is that I'm keeping a sideboard, the single iron bed that was mine, and the yellow ware. There are a bunch of my father's Shriners hats. Those fezzes. Come back tomorrow and you can grab those up. They're odd, and it's the end—so I'm sure they'd sell at an odds and ends place."

  "Say, let's you and me go over to Roughhouse tonight and have us a beer or two. You know the whole town's going to be by here tomorrow morning. You might need someone with you tonight to explain all those spots on your body. People around here, they talk. They might start saying you got that disease."

  Nellie thinks, I'm not supposed to have booze, either. She thinks, I'm not supposed to ingest anything that would further damage my liver. "I'll meet you there at eight o'clock if and only if you don't talk anything about my living in Gruel in the past, ever."

  Sammy Koon grins, doffs an imaginary cap, and walks backward.

  When speckled Nellie Sizemore walks into Roughhouse Billiards, the regulars turn her way. Two trick shot specialists quit setting up their balls for impossible combinations. Nellie orders a double bourbon and a bottle of Pabst.

  She sits on the barstool closest to the door. Her chigger bites don't itch as much as they vibrate; there's a certain amount of electricity surging beneath my skin, Nellie thinks.

  By nine o'clock she realizes that Sammy Koon's inside her house, either stealing wares or waiting for her return. She hadn't locked the front door. No one ever locks doors in Gruel. Everything—always—remains open here. Nellie Sizemore stares at her fingernails, knowing that she'll drink until it's safe, again.

  Snipers

  ON VALENTINE'S DAY Victor Dees pushed gas masks. Twelve months earlier he convinced the citizenry of Gruel that mess kits were all the rage, not chocolates, flowers, or tennis bracelets. In previous years Victor Dees talked sweethearts into buying each other tarps for romantic nights beneath the stars; ammo boxes, as a joke, to envelop really sentimental gifts bought in towns with actual stores; peacoats, wool blankets, ponchos, Seward Trunks, and pith helmets. Victor's owned V.D.'s Army-Navy Surplus on the square since 1976. He had no competition in Gruel, South Carolina.

  "There's never been a time in the history of the United States when infiltrators from American-hating countries—on top of crazy madmen anarchists of our own—want to come in with their nerve gas and whatnot. What, in this time of high anxiety and mental strife, could prove your love more than a gas mask?" Victor asked every Gruel resident who walked in.

  And we were all there, daily. Roughhouse Billiards, Gruel Drugs, Gruel Home Medical Supply, and a diner that specialized in twelve different types of oatmeal were the only storefronts remaining. The statue of Colonel Dill still stood in the square's center, but not much else prospered. My one friend Chink Larue took antique furniture and knickknacks out of his own house and displayed them inside old Gruel Business Supply twice a year—when lost Floridians went to Asheville summers or back home winters. That's it.

  I said, "A bomb shelter. That'd prove my love for Lynette." My wife's birthday fell on February 14, too. For fifteen years I gave her a variety of presents on this date, and let her guess which stood for which occasion. On her fortieth birthday I gave her a first-aid kit, a bottle of wine, and a piece of Beatrice Wood's pottery that I bought elsewhere. Lynette got drunk, then asked me if I wagered to put her ashes in the urn should the first-aid kit not be sufficient. I told her that I'd've bought land mines from the army-navy store had I such plans.

  "Gas masks this year," Victor Dees told me. This was February 13. I'd driven nearly to Charlotte the day before on business and chosen for Lynette a box of French chocolate and a handful of mums. I'd stopped at an antique joint in view of the giant peach water tower on 1–85 and bought a pocket of genuine Cherokee arrowheads—which I thought could be translated into a Cupid-like love—and an ancient, silver, hand-forged watch. "I've almost sold out. Hey, Sim, you don't want to be known as the only man in Gruel who don't love his wife enough to save her from biological warfare, do you?"

  Victor Dees seemed to know what bad things would occur on this planet. He predicted correctly droughts, tax hikes, ice storms, the construction of interstates that redirected traffic farther away from downtown Gruel, and the birth of little retarded Clarence Brown. I said, "Did she get one of these things for me?"

  As much as Lynette hated her birthday falling on Valentine's Day, I felt guilty for taking gifts from her. I always prayed that she'd forget February 14 so I wouldn't undergo the embarrassment of handing over flowers, candy, and a bayonet sponsored by Victor Dees, only to find a new riding lawn mower or table saw out in the garage from her.

  "Lynette hasn't been in my store for months," Dees said. "I understand, though. I haven't seen her since the hand grenade clearance sale."

  All of the hand grenades sold were disengaged, of course, except for the one I bought Lynette. As a joke she pulled the pin, flung the thing into our backyard, and ruined any chances of planting tomatoes in a new patch two months later. We also lost bird feeders, a row of Leyland cypresses, and—maybe—a couple of the neighbor's twenty stray cats. I liked to think that the cats merely ran away to safer environs, like a back alley behind the new Jin-Jin Chinese restaurant over in Forty-Five.

  I took the gas mask and put it on, then walked around the store. The smell of pup tent, as always, both overwhelmed me and caused a series of teenage backyard flashbacks that had me asking for God's forgiveness. Surrounded by camouflaged helmets and photographs of Stonewall Jackson, I said, "I guess I'll take two of these things. I'm thinking Lynette wouldn't want to survive nerve gas without me."

  "It's exactly what my wife told me, Sim." Then he wrapped both masks in special jungle-print paper.

  This won't end up like that O. Henry story wherein a guy sells his watch to buy a comb and the wife sells her hair to buy a fob. I awoke on Valentine's Day early, got up, and started the coffee. I let the dogs outside and told them not to chase cats or fall in the crater out back, then changed all the clocks to the wrong ti
mes. When Lynette opened her watch, I figured, I could say something about how I knew she needed it, et cetera, in order to be certain.

  My wife got up all smiles and sat down at the kitchen table. "You fell for Victor Dees's weirdo pitch again, I see." She tapped the wrapping paper. Then she opened the gas masks.

  I said, "I guess it's kind of cheating to buy two. One of them's mine."

  My wife got up, poured her own coffee, then threw the cup at me. Luckily I wore insulated long johns I'd bought at the army-navy store. "Hey, hey!"

  "I know that joke—you wear a bag on your own head in case mine falls off How could you do this to me on my birthday, Sim? On Valentine's Day."

  "No, no, no," I said, then explained the threat of crazy anarchist madmen, of American-hating world leaders, the high anxiety and strife that could infiltrate Gruel. I about went into how I knew she couldn't live without me, but thought otherwise. Lynette poured another cup of coffee, said that she wanted to be alone, and went upstairs.

  When I went to the end of our driveway to retrieve the newspaper, Victor Dees's wife stood there, her dachshund lifting his leg on my mailbox. Mrs. Dees drawled out a hello, then waved haphazardly a diamond ring she'd only put on her hand an hour earlier. "These things start out as coal," she said. "Diamonds withstand heat, cold, and war, says Victor."

  I unfolded the paper and looked at the headlines. I wouldn't mention the diamond later, but I would point out how troops amassed on all kinds of borders. I would say something to my wife about how we could use our backyard to advantage should the world close in.

  Lickers

  THE MAN SAID he found his dog on the front porch one November, right before Thanksgiving. He said it was the truth, and that if he wanted to tell lies he'd've said Christmas, or Easter, or one of the other healing holidays. It caught me off guard, certainly, understand. While he went into a description of his dog's capabilities I stood there sockless at my front door trying to capture "healing holidays." Ash Wednesday, maybe? Independence Day probably made people feel better, especially recent immigrants. What about Valentine's Day? Me, I always felt ultimately worthless and destroyed on Valentine's Day—not healed in any human conception. I couldn't pay attention right off. The dog appeared to be part shepherd, part beagle, part Lab. Nothing special. She had long black and brown hair, flopped ears, legs a little too short for her body. The dog made decent eye contact, panted, and let her fat tongue loll out long to one side or the other.