I said, "X, I guess."
"X might be hard. Do a G. Then I'll know it was you. I'll come by at the end of the week and hand you cash money in an envelope. Enough said."
I didn't have time to think about, then say, "What about my expenses? Wine's going to cost some money, per glass." I said, "Okay. It looks like we're partners, in an odd way."
We didn't shake hands.
It didn't take an interior decorator to understand how my new boss ran the only carpet cleaning outfit in the county. I got out the slight telephone directory, looked at the Yellow Pages, and noticed under "Steam Cleaning—Carpet" only one entry, namely "Kirkland's Carpet Care, Ronald Kirkland, Proprietor."
I was glad that he didn't get all cutesy and call his business Kirkland's Karpet Kare, what with the three Ks in a row. He must've not hailed from Alabama originally.
I'm not proud to say that I took to my job like ants to sugar water. Oh I ordered the house wine at Sidestreet Pizza, the Brick Oven, El Jalisco, the Vineyard, Lake Lanier Tea Room, and Dewel's Seafood. I showed up at the Tryon Arts Center when they had gallery openings, and sloshed my red wine right down in front of overpriced watercolors depicting mountain vistas. I soaked the town. I invested money in an old-timey fountain pen and leaked out my Gs in nursing homes, the lobby of the Days Inn, Town Hall, Jack's Lingerie and Orchid Nursery, the balcony of the Tryon Movie House, A. L. Watson's Everything Country Kitchen, and so on.
I slept until eleven in the morning, got up, and stared at blank sheets of paper for hours on end, still intending to write my autobiography—the highs and lows of being a lieutenant governor's speechwriter, the highs and lows of running an unsuccessful writers retreat in Gruel, the lows of learning that my wife liked women more than she liked me. Hell, I couldn't even come up with a title worth picking up out of curiosity at a local independent bookstore, much less get placed on that Discover New Writers display at Barnes & Noble.
My salary showed up every Friday afternoon around six o'clock. Ronald Kirkland never knocked, never honked his horn. He placed the Manila envelope between my screen and front door, and drove away, probably on his way to work at places that closed early—like the pathetic tanning salon—and then restaurants where he cleaned carpets in the middle of the night.
I made some money, that's all I have to say. In that first month I earned more than three grand, tax free. I finally went into Sidestreet Pizza and said to the manager, "What does it cost you to get the carpet cleaned here?"
"Quarter a square foot. Plus extra for deep stains."
I looked around the restaurant and figured that he had about four thousand square feet. I said, "Good goddamn, man. Twenty-five cents a foot. How often do you get it steam-cleaned?"
"Used to be only once every couple months. Lately, though. Man. It seems like that Kirkland fellow's over here every other day. I ain't been having to get the entire place cleaned, but that son of a bitch charges per stain, and it adds up after a while. I guess that's the price you got to pay for having an older clientele. Parkinson's, you know. The palsy. They spill a lot."
Let me say right now that I didn't feel good about myself. Not that I've ever been a capitalist, but I could tell that this fellow just tried to do the best he could with what he got. I said, "Have you ever thought about putting down hardwood floors? Maybe it's time to rip out this carpet and put down some good tongue and groove."
I don't want to come across as a genius or anything, but already my mind raced ahead and I foresaw my starting up a business, then hiring out some runaway outlaw to wear golf spikes in restaurants so as to scratch and scuff and mar the premises in a way that would cause me to get hired out more so in order to trowel in a special mixture of fine sawdust and glue.
"I've thought about it more than once, but it costs so much. You mean like Pergo?"
"I mean like southern yellow pine that comes in eight-inch widths." I said, "I'd give you my card, but I left them at the office."
This special, untaught motif is called the "blowing notes in an empty bottle until a recognizable tune emanates" approach to bullshitting. I learned it early on, at about the age of twenty-eight, when I got the lieutenant governor to convince eastern North Carolina constituents that farm taxes would drop once someone developed the four-teated sow.
"I never thought about a wood floor, for some reason. When I bought this place back in the sixties, we had shag carpet throughout. You know how hard it was to get a good thick marinara sauce out of shag?"
I said, "The only thing I can think would be better to clean up than a hardwood floor would be a glass floor. But that might confuse your customers. They might think they were on some kind of boat ride down in the Okefenokee Swamp, you know, or one of those clear springs in Florida."
That seemed to stump him. I shouldn't have asked a restaurant manager to visualize.
Of course, in addition to not wanting my name advertised and my whereabouts known, I was too lazy and unskilled to really open up a flooring business. I didn't want to blow all my savings on real business cards, or on offering unskilled laborers insurance. No, wait—I didn't want to hire out unskilled laborers and not be able to offer them insurance, as most businesses in both Carolinas got away with, what with the lack of unions. And I couldn't afford it, anyway.
So I spilled my Gs less and less, and talked to a man named Hut Baxter who worked as a semiretired handyman of sorts, but mostly spent his afternoons drinking champagne cocktails down at Preston's Bar. Hut made his money down in Texas back in the 1970s as a master carpenter during one of the oil booms and after being a star high school quarterback in Midlands but blowing out both knees the summer before entering either the University of Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, or A&M—depending on how much he'd drank and with whom he spoke.
I said, "Hut. I know you're getting up there in age and whatnot, but I think I have a deal you might be interested in."
He said, probably because he was from Texas, "Old hell."
"Yeah, okay. Anyway—and I know you'll respect me enough not to ask how I know what I know—I think I can talk about every business owner in Tryon to rip out his or her carpet and replace it with either high-priced Pergo or regular tongue and groove. I'm only asking that I get 10 percent of the net. You can charge an ungodly sum of money to make up for the 10 percent. Don't ask me how I know these people will go for it."
Hut held his champagne cocktail to his lips and spoke in a whisper. "I won't do parquet. You have to promise me that there'll be no parquet involved. I got a thing about parquet. And as you asked me not to ask you about everything, I ask you not to ask me about everything."
I couldn't quite follow him—and I'd met other Texans who spoke in non sequiturs back when I was a speechwriter but kept eye contact that made them look like they almost knew what they talked about—but stuck out my hand to shake as if we had a deal.
We did.
I said, "This is a little bit like spraying Raid and hoping the bugs travel off course and fly into it by accident, but I think it'll work. I can meet you here and tell you what's up."
Hut nodded slowly. He took a sip from his flute. "My goddamn mutual fund ain't what it used to be," he said. "Salmon going downriver these days. Sunflowers turning backwards at dawn. Prairie tornadoes don't know which way to turn. My last wife got it in her mind that little kids in South America were worth more than our own. She might've been right."
I held up my finger to Pam and said, "One Jim Beam and Coke. One champagne cocktail, whatever that might be."
I thought, I have made yet another big mistake in my life.
Hut said, "Cynthia," and looked off into the distance.
I've never been one for believing in signs, but something about his wife being named Cynthia didn't set well with me. I held up my glass, though, and said something about bigger and better things. Or at least something about things.
Hut clinked my glass and said, "I can't afford another wife, I'll tell you that much. There toward the end of the marria
ge she only wanted to go by Cyn. Like Sin, you know."
I said I knew. But I didn't go into detail how my ex-wife, Rebekah, went from that, to Bekah, to plain old Kah, like a crow.
Now I could've moved out of my one-room stone cabin rental. I could've more than likely called in the retirement money I had never touched, and bought a house in one of the developments: Horse Trail Acres, Steeplechase Acres, the Links of Tryon, Tryon Falls, Tryon this and Tryon that. There weren't apartments per se nearby, outside of assisted living sprawls. But I liked the anonymity, and kind of relished my life as one in need of hiding out. A qualified psychologist might call it "delusional" or "paranoid." I didn't care.
So months went by, and I bought my groceries over at the IGA and cooked what I needed on a hot plate. I left my windows open in the summer and listened to frogs in a nearby mountain pond. Occasionally I chatted it up with the owner of Tryon Stone Cabins—Day/Week/Month, a woman named Dora Sizemore who said to me one morning, out of nowhere, "We've had some desperadoes stay here in the past. We believe that Eric Rudolph stayed here for two nights right after they charged him with those abortion clinic bombings. I didn't pay attention at the time, and he signed in as Steve, but without a last name. He said he was like Cher, or those other one-named stars. He even pulled out an ID card that only read 'Steve.' I wished I'd've known then what I know now. Because I know, now."
Dora might've been sixty, or forty. I stood there to pay my upcoming month. I said, "You might could've gotten a reward."
"Before I owned this place they say that F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed here. He was either supposed to be up in Asheville or someplace with his wife, but he'd gotten drunk and couldn't make it that far. That's what they say. You might not know who I'm talking about."
I thought, Rub it in. Make fun of me. How did you know I've been meaning to write down my life story? I said, "His name rings a tiny handbell."
"Some of Nixon's people stayed here in the early seventies when they said they were up at that camp, but really they met here in order to get some privacy and plan some things out."
I didn't believe that one, but didn't respond to it. I said, "All right. Well, Dora, here's my money. I plan on staying at least another month."
"You know that it's customary to tip the chambermaid, don't you? I've been meaning to tell you that. The chambermaid's mentioned how you don't put out a dollar or three when she comes by."
I said, "Oh, man. I didn't even know. It's been a long time since I've seen one of those etiquette books."
"I'm the chambermaid, by the way," Dora said, winking. I went back to my room, got out a clean sheet of paper, and wrote down,
After everything I'd done over forty-plus years, or had happen to me—the parents who made me sell shrimp on the side of the road up in the mountains; the parents who made me pan for gold the high school drama teacher who made me practice my lines while speaking directly into her uncovered breasts; the lieutenant governors who didn't know when I toyed with them when they gave speeches to Optimist clubs, 4-H clubs, the DAR, the DWBS, the Tobacco Farmers of the South, or Republicans for No Environmental Laws; the wife I married who came from a long line of forgers; the job I held at the Normal School as a fake historian-in-residence; the snakes I handled in a teaching capacity and the copperhead that finally bit my ankle twice—I believed that my latter years in Gruel would prove to be either the apex or nadir of my time on this planet, with nothing in between. And then I moved into a 256-square-foot room and pitted the carpet believers against the hardwood floor zealots.
It might've taken me two hours to get all that down on paper. I read it and reread it, and said aloud to myself, "That first sentence probably needs more appeal."
Yes, I talked to myself. And it just so happened that Dora Sizemore showed up to change my sheets and refill my toilet paper dispenser. She knocked and said, "We had a man stay here one time killed four, five men and stuffed them beneath his floorboards. His sentence got an appeal, and the next thing you know he's wanting to move back here for good."
I jumped. I grabbed a towel and put it around my waist—somewhere along the line I'd read where one had to be completely naked when writing one's history. I don't think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, though.
Within a month I went out and spilled more wine, ink, or found ways to traipse red clay into an establishment and grind it into the carpet. Meanwhile I found ways to set up impromptu meetings with owners and managers alike, never admitted that I was the cause of their carpet-cleaning worries, and talked up the wonderful benefits of hardwood floors. More than one person said to me, "You get a population of elderly people, though, they come in here on a rainy or snowy day, track water in, and the next group of people falls down and breaks their hips."
Would this endless circle ever cease? I thought. I thought, Now I need to find someone who installs sandpaper-covered duct tape.
Needless to say Mr. Kirkland's business dwindled. I gave out Hut Baxter's phone number to those merchants who seemed most interested, and maybe a month into this entire double-agent fiasco, Hut met me in Preston's Bar and said, "You got to ease up a little, son. I'm an old man and they ain't but so many day laborers around here." He handed me a Manila envelope similar to the same ones that Ronald Kirkland left at my door. Ten percent of a half-million dollars ain't chump change, I thought.
But that didn't matter: Let me say right now that Hut didn't quite use the word "day laborers." He didn't use "migrant workers" or "unemployed citizens crushed by the myopic and ill-conceived economic policies of the current Republican administration," either. He kind of sat there with his champagne cocktail—who drinks booze with a sugar cube, anyway?—and spouted out some politically incorrect racial slurs that I never even heard in a place as seemingly backward as Gruel. I'll admit that Gruel hadn't gotten to the point of attracting any Mexican or Central American workers, seeing as there was no industry or farming left—and perhaps I never heard a negative word about African Americans because most of Gruel thrived on a preslavery mind-set—but for the first time since I'd run away from my previous troubles I felt nostalgic to return.
And I thought, also, Jesus Christ, now I have to find a way for Hut Baxter to go under, just like I'm trying to do to the inadequate and conniving Ronald Kirkland. What could a small man, in a tiny town, inside a picayune stone cabin do? I said, "Well. I'll try to slow down, Hut. I thought I was doing you a favor."
He turned to me there at the bar and said, "Well, you're not, goddamn it. If anything you're giving me more headaches."
Right before I punched him in the nose—and I'm not proud to say that I hit a guy who was more than twenty years my senior—I said, "You know that champagne cocktails are the preferred drinks of gay men, don't you? Did you know that in San Francisco, the champagne cocktail is the official city drink?"
In my defense, Hut clenched his fist and made for me first. And no one in the bar—the men dressed in plaid, the bartendress attired in a low-cut blouse and miniskirt—came to Hut's aid when he hit the linoleum floor.
I got an envelope with no money, even though I deserved some. No, I got an envelope with a note that read, "I'm in the car."
I opened my door, and it fell from behind the screen. I looked up and saw Mr. Ronald Kirkland sitting there in his Land Rover, wearing the kind of cheap wraparound blue-tinted sunglasses that I'd admired at the IGA. What else could I do but approach him with a framing hammer hidden behind my back? It's kind of like how I walked around most of Tryon and Gruel, and before that both Charlotte and Chapel Hill. I said, "Hey, Mr. Kirkland," as if I were a paperboy waiting for payment. I said, "What's up?"
He said, "How'd you know my name?" Remember that I was supposed to be doing all of this on the down-and-down. We'd made some kind of pact, remember, even though I never shook hands over it.
I said, "Goddamn, man, it's a small town. I heard your name when you bought some lingerie over at Tryon Panties. I walked by the front door and heard the saleslady say your name." I looked
at him square in the face. That's one thing I learned to do while being a speechwriter, back in the day.
"I have a feeling that you're double-crossing me. First off, I'm not getting any of the same carpet cleaning accounts receivable." Who talked like that? Who said, I'm not getting any of the same accounts receivable? "Second, people are talking about some new guy talking them into ditching my carpet cleaning opportunities and going to wood. That wouldn't be you, would it? Would it?"
I said, "I'm just a small man in a small town, man. I don't know what you're talking 'bout," even though I knew. I kind of thought about the movie Deliverance, but not the novel. I don't know why. I said, "There's no way you'd know what I've gone through over the last couple years. The last couple decades." I figured that would get me by, saying that.
It didn't. Mr. Kirkland pulled out a pistol and pointed it at my forehead.
I packed up. Give me a break: What else could I do? I had an entire town ready to find and persecute me seeing as I'd faked being a historian and memoirist—which is another story—and another town that would end up walking on dirt floors. I left. I skedaddled. That's the way things go.
Who do you think picked me up on Highway 108 between Tryon and Rutherfordton, on my way to West Virginia? The same Cynthia who brought me in, of course. She said, "I've driven through here a few times thinking I'd see you. Wha'chew been up to? I take it you didn't die of the snakebite."
I looked behind me. I said, "Nothing in this town. What a dead town!"
She said, "Before I go wherever we're headed, would you mind if we stopped in this bar up here? I got a hankering for a Scotch and Dr Pepper." She pointed at Preston's.
Now, I knew that it wasn't a good idea, but because I had become used to inviting uncomfortable situations into my life I nodded. I said, "I don't mean to get personal, Cynthia, but how old are you, anyway?"
Drowning in Gruel Page 16
