She performed half a U-turn in the Chevy LUV, and parked in a space. She said, "You never did tell me your name back when I brought you here. Is it, by any chance, Novel Akers?"
I didn't know how to suavely change the subject. I said, "You don't appear to be much more than thirty."
Cynthia didn't get out of the cab. If this scene were in a movie we wouldn't have been in a Chevy LUV pickup. We would've been in a car with automatic locks, so that Cynthia could keep me inside until I confessed. I said, "That's me."
She laughed and laughed and opened her door. She said, "I bet you're on the run, aren't you. I bet you think you have people looking for you all over South Carolina." Then she started laughing again, whipping her head around, slapping her knee out on the street.
I got out and said, "What?"
She said, "I'm thirty-three. And I know your ex-wife. Hell, I know everyone you used to know back in Gruel."
I trotted across the two-lane main drag to catch up with her. I opened the door to Preston's, and immediately saw Hut Baxter seated at the bar, his head wrapped in gauze. He held his hands up and said, I think, "You'll be hearing from my lawyer." I couldn't tell. His lips bloated out like a Hollywood starlet gone obsessive.
I said to him, "I'm sorry. I should've learned a long time ago not to lose my temper on a racist. I'm sorry."
I pointed to Cynthia the bartendress to get him another drink on my tab. Cynthia my savior ordered her own Scotch and Dr Pepper. She said to me, "You've got it all wrong. I didn't move to Gruel until 2000 after entering their art car festival. Everyone there still talks about you, though, Novel. You're legendary. Down at Roughhouse Billiards they say your ideas helped revitalize the town. Believe it or not they're talking about holding a Novel Day down there, right after that yearly thing for Colonel Dill."
"Dill Days." I said to the other Cynthia, "I'll have whatever they're having."
I think Hut mumbled, "I wish you'd've tried all this twenty years ago. Ten years ago. I'd've beat your ass." He said, "Thanks for the drink."
My Cynthia said, "Yeah. Dill Days."
We didn't drive toward West Virginia three hours later. No, she backed out of the parking space, and we passed Tryon Stone Cabins—Day/Week/Month, and kept going south, back to Gruel where I could walk on the square the returning hero. Cynthia promised that she wasn't a detective or private eye. She promised that she wasn't some kind of bounty hunter. She must've said it twenty times between Tryon and Spartanburg—a thirty-minute drive. I'd long before learned that anyone who insisted on her benevolence probably didn't deserve such. Then, finally, I opened the door and jumped out, leaving my suitcase in the bed of the truck. I rolled and rolled in a fallow field. In the end I had only traveled some eighty miles from one place I needed to leave, forty from the other.
Shirts Against Skins
LET'S PRETEND THAT I felt positive about building a wood-fire kiln out back of our two-story house, that I took care when stacking soft brick on the inside and hard kiln brick outwardly. Let's pretend that I didn't mind taking a chain saw to hew what oak and maple stood on my old family land, then splitting said logs into quarters. I tried my best to keep an appearance of wanting to continue my life in clay, but knew that I'd never create vessels similar to the ones I sold to museums' permanent collections across the country. My signature multi-nippled archetypal man would vanish, back in the town of my training, as soon as someone there got overcome with nostalgia.
I set up my old-fashioned kick wheel beneath one shed on the property, and an electric Brent—attached to a long, long extension cord coming out of the ex-mudroom—beneath another shed nearby. That first week in the house of my upbringing, I called up Highwater Clay in Asheville and got two tons of stoneware delivered at twenty-one cents a pound. Me, I stacked it all in a root cellar I'd been scared to enter as a child. The six or eight little kids still being brought up in Gruel ran to our driveway, screaming as to how they'd never seen a real truck in town.
I didn't say, "I hope you're happy," to Charlotte. I didn't have time. Hell, I didn't even see her much! She took one of those home repair books into the attic, got on the cell phone, and ordered two-by-twelves for beams, two-by-fours for studs, more Sheetrock, shingles, and double-paned windows. Somehow Charlotte found contractors, who hired subcontractors, who paid off day laborers to fix up what no longer seemed standard living.
I didn't pay attention. I foresaw what would, inevitably, happen.
"I've talked to Dr. Bobba Lollis at Gruel Drug, and Jeff, the owner of Roughhouse Billiards. Let me say that they've been positive about my ideas," Charlotte told me about a month into living back in my hometown. At this time I'd not ventured out onto the square. Me, I couldn't figure out how to direct our satellite dish toward a regular channel, outside of a scary Japanese station and what seemed to be twenty-four-hour Mexican soap operas.
I said, "I don't know how to say this, Charlotte. I'm sure you've gone into great detail as to what you're about to do, and I apologize. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a little on the self-absorbed side. I've been that way for as long as I can remember." Oh, I went on and on, but to tell the truth I only wanted to stall what I knew my wife would bring up. "What, again, is your moneymaking idea?"
"Did you have, like, four nipples at some point in your life?" Charlotte asked me. "I saw a picture of you, and some hairy guy, and these fellows with freckles all over their legs and chest. Y'all were on some kind of church basketball team that hadn't lost a game in the entire season."
I said, "Those were moles. On those two boys, not me. On me, there must've been some kind of smudge or blot of ink on my chest." But I didn't make eye contact, and I felt my face redden. Charlotte knew when I lied. We stood in the backyard, between house and my work spaces. Two full fig trees looked as though they needed to drop fruit soon or bow to the ground. In a weird way they appeared to have massive brownish nipples poking out.
Charlotte said, "I couldn't tell. The newspaper had turned kind of yellow. But on you?"
I said, "I told you it wouldn't be good if we came back here. I told you that you wouldn't want to know my background better."
Most good wives, I would think, would say something like, "Ohhhh, you poor thing. I bet you got teased to no end," and then kiss their husbands on the cheek, et cetera. My wife said, "Those were really nipples? Goddamn, it looked like you could've nursed a litter of kittens. Those things were in perfect alignment down your chest. Let me see the scars. I've never even noticed the scars."
I walked to the front window when I heard a dump truck back into the driveway. When the driver unloaded what ended up being a six-foot-high mound of gravel, I said, "Uh-oh," thinking maybe the guy meant to go to one of our neighbors.
Charlotte jumped up and down somewhat and said, "All right! I can get to work now!"
At least it took her mind off my past. I went in the bathroom, closed the door, and searched for two scars that, up to this point, I thought had disappeared years earlier.
Our point guard sported matching port-wine birthmarks, chest and back, that looked like either the continents of Africa or South America. For some reason God decided to sear that stain right through little Cleve Haulbrook's torso, and although I never said anything in the locker room, I wondered if an X-ray might point out that all of his organs got purpled in the process, too. Ray Sanders, our six-foot center, underwent an odd puberty that caused the worst case of acne I'd ever seen from sternum to navel, and a mat of wild hair on his back that stood straight out three inches when he got excited. Our forwards—the Dickey brothers—had more precancerous moles than someone brought up inside the Savannah River Nuclear Station. Whereas Cleve Haulbrook had the two continents, these two boys had entire star-filled galaxies spread around their bodies. Even our benchwarmers had their visible flaws: warts, rashes, oozing sores, and misstitched scars. We had an albino named Half-blind Kenny squinting at the lights.
Me, I played shooting guard with four nipples.
These were tough times for junior church league basketball teams, what with the oil shortage, gas prices skyrocketing, and people asked not to drive and/or fill up their cars on certain days of the week. From what I understand, a lot of people quit going to church regularly and used the "Oh, I forgot what day I could drive" excuse. Preachers complained every Sunday and Wednesday about not enough money coming in on the passed plates, and talk was that congregations would have to undergo sermons in the dark to save energy and electric bills, or not meet altogether.
"We can't even afford to print up new jerseys for our basketball team," preachers said on miserably hot Wednesday nights in August.
No one, trying his or her best not to slip off the pew in a pool of sweat, groaned all empathetic.
At least that's how I imagined it. The year before, the team had gone 0 and 72 between September and January—there were a lot of churches in Forty-Five County, and even the church league commissioner had gone so far as dividing it up into North, South, East, West, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, and Southwest regions before the top two teams in each division played a round-robin tournament held at the First Baptist Church gymnasium.
The year before—and I'd not played for two reasons: I'd not been asked, and my father made me drive around with him after school on his job teaching people how to plant Christmas trees for the Clemson University Agricultural Extension Service—our team lost to four Pentecostal teams who spent their halftime handling snakes, and twice to Jehovah's Witnesses who left in midgame to hand out pamphlets. For some reason the referees never found a reason to call a foul on the other team, and the coach actually heard one of the men say, "Aren't y'all of the belief that you've been persecuted over the years anyway?"
Let me say right now that I didn't play for a synagogue. No temple existed in all of Forty-Five County. I played basketball for Saint Francis Catholic—even though I wasn't Catholic, or even Christian, or allowed to attend church services by my father the agnostic—because of my buddy Cleve-of-the-birthmark, who said, "Hey, Phil, we need a shooting guard. We need someone who can at least make a shot from the free throw stripe."
I didn't know that old Francis was the patron saint of animals—like dogs and beasts of burden—at the time. No, I showed off my eighteen-inch vertical leap there in my front yard and shot an imaginary jumper. I said, "When's practice?"
Cleve said, "We don't really have practice. There's a game about every night, so we don't have time."
I said, "I might have to talk to my father. If there's a game every night, how can you do homework?"
"Father Nick says God will take care of that for us."
Again, let me point out that I wasn't Catholic or Christian. I said, "I thought your daddy's name was Leroy."
I don't want to get into any of that priests-as-pedophiles argument, but it was Father Nick who approached the church league commissioner and suggested that, to save money, maybe the teams could play Shirts against Skins. He said that one team could wear plain T-shirts of any color, and the other team would go topless. Father Nick said that Saint Francis would be more than happy, in the name of good sportsmanship, to always be Skins. I can only assume now that the commissioner went around the league, that he talked to Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and the like, and offered up Father Nick's suggestion. And I can only assume that the more conservative, right-thinking, modest denominations said, "Okay, good thinking, this'll save us thirty dollars."
I don't like to think about how Father Nick already perceived what would happen—how he knew ahead of time about the two continents, all the galaxies, the rashes, warts, oozing sores, and so on. I don't know what they teach in good Jesuit schools, but I have to figure that Logic 101 must've been a requirement, and that Father Nick foresaw what an opposing team would do, or not do, when a near blind albino drove the lane for an easy layup.
I don't want to re-create the entire season on up to the play-offs against Forty-Five First Baptist, Forty-Five First Methodist, Forty-Five First Presbyterian, Forty-Five First A.M.E., Forty-Five First Lutheran, Gruel Interdenominational, and Ninety-Six Quaker, but let me make it clear that we didn't lose a game. No one would guard any of us. I could drive from the top of the key right on down for an easy two-pointer without anyone touching the four-nippled boy. Cleve could do the same. The Dickey brothers never took a bank shot beyond six feet without opposing players scattering, shielding their faces, afraid that a mole might jump off of them. If a member of the other team looked like he could handle Ray Sanders's acne, Ray swung around and ran backward with his hairy back in order to make the other guy dribble off his foot, or throw an errant pass into the stands. When we were up something like 38 to 6 midway through the second half Coach Father Nick would put in Kenny the Half-blind Albino, and even the refs wouldn't call double dribbling on the guy or out-of-bounds when he veered off the court accidentally.
We were Skins. All opposing teams' coaches agreed that good, modest Protestants would not feel comfortable taking their shirts off, so there we stood at midcourt each game, stripping, standing there embarrassed. I don't know about my teammates, but I could hear girls and adults alike screaming, gagging, going, "Ugghhh!" like that. And no opposing player came near us. It might've been the highlight for all of our lives.
But then came our downfall. One of the players for Ninety-Six Quaker had a fucking do-gooder dermatologist father. That family moved down from Pennsylvania, of course, because Daddy signed some kind of med school document saying he'd work in an impoverished area in order to forgo his student loans. Dr. Guilford scouted our team—that's the way with dermatologists, I suppose; they have time to do things at night without fear of being called in on an emergency boil—and saw where our strength emanated from no one being willing to get within five feet of us.
"I can freeze off your boy's extra nipples," the doctor said to my father in the stands. "It's painless. Those aren't really nipples—they're just abnormally large skin tags. Bring him over to the office tomorrow. It'll take about ten minutes, tops. And I won't even charge you a fee. I only want to see kids feel good about themselves, and feel good about the world. That's the way we Quakers are."
He said about the same thing to the Dickey brothers' father, evidently. And the doctor had a new pill for acne, plus an on-call electrolysis specialist for Ray Sanders. Of course he couldn't do anything for Cleve's port-wine birthmark, outside of Avon face powder, or for the half-blind albino. But I know this: I found myself in the waiting room of Dr. Larry Guilford, surrounded by most of my teammates, the day after our final regular season win. There was a week off for Christmas holidays, then the eight-team tournament began.
I would like to go on record as saying that Dr. Guilford wasn't so smart for a doctor. First off, freezing off my two extra nipples hurt like hell. Second, he could've saved himself some money by finding a way for us to wear shirts.
When I left the office, the doctor and his wife-receptionist told me to eat more oatmeal.
For two reasons my wife, Charlotte, made us move back to Gruel some twenty-five years after I'd emigrated elsewhere, gotten an education, and found a woman who enjoyed winemaking, day-trading, home improvement projects, and intercollegiate sports. That fucking pinhead in the White House talked enough of my state legislators into believing all that No Child Left Behind crap, and the next thing you know I either had to go back to college and take education courses such as How to Use an Overhead Projector in order to gain "certification," or quit altogether. I chose the latter option, out of principle.
Listen—and I don't want to brag any—but I had gone off to the Kansas City Art Institute in 1977, received an MFA in ceramics from Alfred University, taught a little at the college level, and had a number of one-man shows in New York City, Santa Fe, Atlanta, and Chicago, plus about everywhere in between. I'd received grants, awards, and recognition. I could've worked at any university in America, pretty much, or chanced living solely off my sales. I don't know if a Higher Being came down and spoke to me i
n my sleep or what, but out of nowhere it became increasingly apparent that I needed to go out and help other kids learn the intricacies of clay, fire, and glaze. Because my signature works all displayed four-nippled male figures, I thought that it was my duty to go out in the hinterlands, find a school that contained students similar to those on the Saint Francis Catholic basketball team, and teach said students how to throw pots on a wheel. Not every multiply warted, acne-ridden, unwanted-haired, albinotic boy in South Carolina had the opportunity to happen upon a kindly Quaker dermatologist, I knew. A potter worked alone. He could have his physical flaws and still live the meaningful, prosperous, and happy life of a solid taxpaying citizen.
I don't want to sound the martyr or moralist, but I found out pretty quickly that I could've stood anywhere in the state, thrown a rock, and hit a high school populated with such male students. I got hired on in Darlington County, and traveled between four public high schools five days per week. My freakish students won more scholarships and awards over a three-year period than had been garnered in the history of the school district.
And then the governor sent a letter to my principals, saying that I wasn't qualified. The principals said I could apply to a number of state colleges and universities, undergo the required education courses, and be back teaching ceramics within two years. I don't remember my exact words, but "good" and "luck" might've been included in there somewhere between the cussing.
Charlotte said, "This might be a blessing. I can not work anywhere, you know." Did I mention that she used to be in advertising, and that when the economy showed signs of a bust most of her clients quit advertising? Charlotte said, "I've been hoping to find the best time to tell you this, Phil, but what we should do is move to your hometown and take over your father's house. No rent or mortgage. We can build a kiln in the backyard. And I have some advertising ideas that won't work anyplace else, or at least not in a place that has regular newspaper delivery."
Drowning in Gruel Page 17
