Drowning in Gruel

by George Singleton

  I said, "Listen. If you want to move to this place, you go right ahead. But don't include me. What I'm saying is, I can make my turkey calls about anywhere, but not here. And I'd rather go back to teaching four hundred students English 101 per semester than make turkey calls here, even if the University of Hell had a branch campus. Did you or did you not see those ghosts flying around in there?" I pointed at the house. Me, I saw lights flashing and buzzing about.

  "It only smells a little mildewy," my wife said. "It stinks in there, but that's it. Kind of like stale bread."

  I pointed at the house's facade. It looked to me as if ten whirling dervishes spun flashlights around inside. "If you're nuts enough to stay in there, you go ahead. I'm going to sleep in the van. And I might sleep in the van about two counties away. I'm serious, Mayann. Maine. I don't know if I can become one with this community."

  My wife wore a white nightgown down to her shins. She stood barefoot in the front yard of a house she thought had possibilities. "I think it would be kind of cool living in a place where the smartest man thinks putting minnows in rain barrels will keep the mosquitoes from reproducing. We could take over." She spanned her arms outward toward the other houses she planned to check out and make bids on.

  I didn't say anything about her "shoes in the refrigerator" theory. I said, "I need a drink."

  "Go on down there to Roughhouse Billiards. Maybe you'll see one of your old friends from sixth grade. Stay as long as you want."

  She pointed in the direction of Gruel's sad square. I told her my memory was better than she thought. Mayann said she'd be all right alone. I disengaged one of my turkey calls and slid the top into my back pocket.

  I walked the two blocks into downtown slowly, trying to remember any good feeling I might've had as a child. I heard Mayann close the door to her new house about the time I noticed Roughhouse Billiards' broken neon sign advertising "old Bee."

  "You want a hot dog?" Jeff Downer asked when I entered the pool hall. He owned the place twenty-five years earlier. Back then he looked seventy, also, I thought. "We got the best hot dog in town. And coldest beer." He didn't wear a shirt and his belly hung half inflated over his belt. "We're also the only topless bar in the area."

  I said, "Hey, Jeff. I'm Charlie Wiggins. I doubt you remember me from way back when, but I used to live here for a couple years."

  "Charlie Wiggins. Your momma and you come down here to be close to your daddy. He'd gone to prison over on the Farm for some kind of near felony. I remember you. You come in here one day and ran a table during Junior Pool Championship Week."

  I said, "Yessir."

  "Well let me give you a hot dog in appreciation of your return. You look good, boy. You look normal. Wha'chew been up to all these years? Where you been? How you want it?"

  I said, "Oh, I guess mustard, onions, and chili."

  "That's all? You don't want no bun or nothing?"

  Three grown men played a game of cutthroat. I pulled my turkey call out and squeaked it out of habit. "No sir. No bun," I said, like I knew what I was doing.

  "Now I remember. Your daddy made a turkey call so lifelike that some old boy was in the woods working one, and another old boy shot him. So your daddy got hit up on some kind of involuntary manslaughter charge seeing as if he'd've made a turkey call not so realistic, no one would've got killed."

  One of the three men yelled out, "You don't have to call your shots in cutthroat, Bo. Hell, you can knock your own balls in just to keep shooting."

  I squeaked my turkey box. No one looked. I realized that I didn't have my father's skills.

  We slept in eight different houses. Mayann soon wielded her I-have-good-credit power and bought up each of them for less than a hundred grand total. By night five I didn't fear Gruel, her people, or the ghost-ridden dilapidated houses any longer. I went to Roughhouse Billiards each night until closing, then crawled back to wherever my wife set up our sleeping bags. She always said, "I need you now more than ever, Charlie. Do you know anything about plumbing?" Or termites, Sheetrock, flooring, pump houses, roofing, French drains, blight, weight-bearing walls, sump pumps, and wiring.

  I had relearned that it only took staring at the cue ball and using bottom left or right English to make most shots. I said, "Yes," to my wife. Each of her houses had an outbuilding where I could reinvent and relocate the Wiggins Palm Clucker Turkey Call Company. It would be a better life than trying to convince first-year college students that Ice-T, T-Bone, Bone-Afide, Fi-Dough, Dough-Boy, Boy-Man, Man-a-Fest, Fest-Er, Ergo-Sum, Sum-Atra, and Jewel weren't really poets. It would be better than waiting for tourists in Jonesboro, Tennessee, to show up and tell me how they didn't really hunt turkeys, but only wanted to nail my work on the walls of their "country kitchens."

  "I can figure out about everything," I told Mayann, "outside of how to get that Jeff guy down at Roughhouse to quit asking me if I don't want a bun. You do what you have to do. Me, I'll figure out what I'm supposed to do."

  "Are you sure? This is a big, big change in our lives. Or it could be."

  We had no children. Our parents were all dead. "We could make history here," I said, all hyperbolic. "One day—if Gruel ever gets town fathers—maybe they'll erect a statue of you in place of the one of Colonel Dill in the square."

  I think my wife said, "Or town mothers" as she walked into house number six's sagging kitchen. I couldn't hear her. I was on my way out, wearing my only shoes.

  Howard and Paula Purgason entered Roughhouse Billiards as if everyone should've kowtowed to them. She wore a thin whitish stole. The state rep wore a gray vest that didn't match his tan leisure suit. I said, "So I guess you're pretty happy with the commission," to Ms. Purgason.

  Jeff said, "How y'all want your hot dogs?"

  Howard Purgason said, "All the way. Buns and everything. I'm feeling prosperous." He had on the same hat I saw him wear coming out of his upstairs bathroom. To me he said, "Wiggins," and half nodded.

  I said, "Congressman," because—although I had no respect whatsoever for him or his cohorts—I'd had two PBRs and a mini-bottle of Jim Beam. "Ms. Purgason."

  She held out her lank arm for me to kiss the back of her hand. I did, what the hell.

  Jeff said, "Something good must've happened. Y'all don't come down here to us lowlifes unless something good happened. I guess every two years when you win the election."

  When I sat down at the bar, the turkey call in my back pocket clucked. The congressman said, "Say 'Excuse me' in front of my wife."

  I stood up, pulled the turkey call from my back pocket, and showed it to them. "That noise was this. That sound came out of my turkey call."

  Howard Purgason said, "I might not be the most polished man in the world, but I don't deserve being in a place that allows men to make such noises." Jeff handed over two hot dogs. "We going down to Pawleys Island for the weekend, and I don't want to start it this way. You want to start it this way, sugar?"

  Ms. Purgason said, "No."

  I held my turkey call box above my head and squeaked it, squawked it, peeped it, purred it. "You've got it all wrong," I said.

  A man at the pool table yelled out, "I didn't need to call bank shot. You better figure out cutthroat rules."

  I looked at Jeff He didn't seem to care one way or the other. I looked down and noticed that Howard and Paula were barefoot. Now, in the real world I would've said something about why he wore a suit, she a stole, in a pool hall. But this was Gruel—a place where my own wife challenged our bank account, a sad town where right might've been construed as wrong. I said, "As we speak your shoes are in a refrigerator, aren't they?" To Jeff I said, "I want three beers and three shots."

  Howard and Paula Purgason stood stuck, as if we all played a game of freeze tag. Jeff reached down and popped beer tops off, then twisted my mini-bottles. I didn't look at myself in the mirror behind him. How would my life end up in a town called Gruel? I thought. What would it be like in five years after Mayann gave up everything, packed her bags,
and left me here? Would I spend all of my time setting quarters on a pool table's edge? Would I argue with Jeff over hot dogs until the first of us died?

  That night, as the state legislator and his wife walked out, both probably considering a world without public education, I understood that Mayann and I would end up serving three meals per day to people who would never understand the value of nourishment, that we—my wife and I—would pretend to care about strangers who pretended to care about the ways of the world. We would start up the artist colony, view our lodgers' new canvases and sculptures, and know that something was missing. Everything in our world would appear to lack something essential, like a magnolia without blooms, a dog without a collar, fish without gills, a bulldozer without its scoop, or the perfect runway model without shoes.

  But I wouldn't turn back. There had to be more turkey hunters in South Carolina, I figured. More turkey hunters, more turkey hunters, more turkey hunters, I said to myself like a mantra, as Mayann decided that each house she bought didn't really need closets should she find a deal on chifforobes.

  Recovery

  I AWOKE FROM ANESTHESIA maybe one minute before Evelyn, long enough to remember my burst appendix. I'd dated Evelyn in high school fifteen years earlier, had mostly forgotten her, and in those sixty seconds inside recovery could only understand this coincidence as some kind of omen. Here we were at Graywood Memorial, three states away from our northern Mississippi upbringing, in a town that—for me at least—only stood as a midway point between Atlanta and Charlotte, between Savannah and Asheville, where I showed off hand-blown figurines, Christmas tree ornaments, the nameless bauble for a company called Kicking Glass and Taking Names! fifty-some-odd weeks out of the year. I almost remembered passing out inside a Main Street boutique, the owner of which is the wife of an internist. She evidently called an ambulance and her husband. Somebody called my ex-wife, who gladly agreed to emergency surgery, I imagined. My story's one of near fatal poisoning, of a thirty-three-year-old fish- and vegetable-eating man with inexplicably weak organs that fizzled like ancient matchbooks. Somewhere down the line, I knew, a religious person would explain it all to me.

  A hovering nurse said, "How many fingers am I holding up?"

  Evelyn's father ran a bait shop, then later a catfish farm like everyone else. Her mother taught seventh grade over in Oxford. I asked Evelyn to junior and senior prom even though she dated star quarterback Quint Stubbs, and she politely declined. But right before graduation she called me at home and said, "Listen, Jamie. I've been thinking about higher places. Who knows when a log truck going to Memphis might run my car off the road and splatter me down an embankment? I've been thinking about heaven. You've been asking me out since ninth grade. Maybe I should say yes, in case God says I've been mean. So I'll give you one date."

  I said, "Who is this? Is this you, Slade?" It was a time before caller ID. "You ain't funny. I know it's you, man."

  Evelyn had said, "They're having a festival on the square. You can take me, from eight o'clock until about nine thirty. It'll be dark by then."

  We went, she wouldn't let me hold her hand, I won her a giant stuffed animal crawfish, and she made me drop her off at the end of her parents' driveway without a kiss. I moved on to Tennessee three months later. Evelyn, from what I understood, continued her cheerleading career at Ole Miss.

  To the nurse I said, "Eleven. I see eleven fingers." But I kept my head turned toward Evelyn, still under, a sheet up to her neck. Weren't there some kind of privacy laws concerning recovery rooms? I thought.

  "Whoa. You might not be ready to go to your room."

  Exactly, I thought. I wanted the nurse out of there. I wanted to crawl off my gurney and scoot next to Evelyn, even if she had a hysterectomy, double mastectomy, hemorrhoid surgery, or cesarean. I felt like I needed to kiss her cheek, her eyebrows, the tip of her nose, the back of her knees.

  The nurse said, "We had a man come in here one time with web toes? He had this surgery for his web toes? And then he needed, too, his gallbladder taken out? And the doctor took out his appendix? So when he woke up I asked him how many fingers he saw? And I held up three like I am to you now, right in front of his face? And he said, 'Duck.' I don't know why. I guess because he had them web toes. Say, how many fingers do you see now?"

  She kept three fingers in my face. I said, "Frog."

  The nurse lifted my sheet up and looked at my feet. Evelyn awoke and moaned. I said, "Good morning, Evelyn. It's me, Jamie Hinson. From back in Water Valley, Mississippi. Do you remember me? My daddy and your daddy used to be friends, before my daddy fell into your daddy's catfish pond and drowned when he supposedly hit his head. Now it all makes sense, though: I'm thinking he had a burst appendix like I did, and he only passed out face-first from the pain. Oh, I started to go to law school, but changed my mind. I took the LSAT and everything, but didn't want to feel confined to either Tennessee or Mississippi, you know. For about four years I worked in Nashville for a company called Braid Electric. I got married, and that lasted almost nine and a half years. She ended up getting drunk every day, then went to rehab, and from what I understand is still in recovery. We didn't have kids, which might be good. Anyway, out of nowhere I met this man who corralled a bunch of glassblowers together and got them to work on some knickknacks to be sold nationwide. There's a catalog and everything. I drive a van around showing off samples. The one thing I have to worry about is not hitting potholes in the road. Handblown glass Christmas tree ornaments are fragile fragile. I got pretty good shock absorbers. So, what brings you all the way out here to South Carolina? Why're you in the hospital? I like your hat. I got one just like it, right now."

  The nurse walked over to her and did the how-many-fingers test. Evelyn didn't turn her head. She said, "I can't stand tacos."

  I could only smile. There was a lone Mexican fellow at the festival in Oxford who told us that we should one day celebrate Cinco de Mayo in Juarez or Tijuana. He said, in broken English, that Evelyn's stuffed crawfish looked like a pinata, and offered her three tacos for it.

  Her answer to the nurse was like a code, I believed.

  I said, "Yeah, it's me. Jamie."

  The nurse said to Evelyn, "You don't worry, honey. Your hair will grow back and your scar won't show." To me the nurse said, "Say. Are you Frank Gunnells, the man who had to have penis reconstruction?"

  I said, "No, ma'am. No. I only had an appendicitis."

  "That's right. You're awake enough to go to your room, then."

  Evelyn blurted out, "Hammond organs." I tried to make some kind of meaningful correlation as I got wheeled to my room on the fifth floor, but couldn't.

  I pray for late December earthquakes daily. This isn't something to brag about, but sometimes I wish for massive Christmas tree fires so that people have to buy more handblown glass ornaments. One time I got on the Internet and tried to figure out what kind of barometric pressure would blow my product to bits. I've talked the glassblowers into making their products more fragile at our annual meetings. They—all of them with shaved heads in order to prevent sudden combustible hair—said they'd do their best.

  But they don't, evidently.

  I spend my time at places called Antiques and Things, Collectibles and Things, Knickknacks and Things, This and That, Wicker and Things, This and Suche, Everything and Else, Arts and Crafts, Crafts and Things, and plain flat-out Things. I walk in with samples. I offer order forms. Owners choose and customers buy. Our most popular Christmas ornament involves a tiny glass baby Jesus swinging on a glass tree bough inside a clear, softball-sized orb. $79.95. Available at your favorite boutique, plus Belk, Rich's, Montgomery Ward, and Service Merchandise. Our worst seller involves Gandhi, in glass diapers. My boss, Leland Dees, tries to be both politically correct and religion-encompassing. I like him fine, and respect his tenacity. We sell a fair amount of big fat glass Buddhas.

  We could have our products carried at every Blooming-dale's in the country, but some woman named Sheralee, their head b
uyer, doesn't like the cover of our catalog. Leland Dees sent her one of the glass Buddhas one time and said if she attached a battery to it she might find it useful for her midnight needs. I didn't blame him, though it might've kept me out of about a quarter-million dollars' worth of yearly commission.

  "I'm in a hospital outside Forty-Five, South Carolina," I said to Leland over the phone right after I figured out how to use it, the channel changer, the bed-height control, the nurse call button. What I'm saying is, I called Leland Dees two hours after I returned to my room, maybe fifteen minutes after a good shot of Demerol.

  Leland said, "Please tell me you didn't wreck the van, Jamie."

  Somewhere down the hall a man moaned for a bedpan. "They thought I had a heart attack or stroke. I didn't, but they didn't know. I guess it's my fault I haven't seen a doctor sooner. I've been blacking out sporadically for the last year or so, from pain in my side. I finally exploded."

  Leland Dees said, "My wayward brother lives in Gruel. It's right next door to Forty-Five. You want me to send him over?" He said, "Wait a minute—so you blacked out and they automatically decided to operate? That doesn't sound likely."

  I reached down and felt a bandage on my lower torso. "Don't ask me. I'm alive, that's all I know. Who would operate on a person who doesn't need an operation?"

  "Watch one of those TV shows one time, Jamison. 60 Minutes. 20/20. Dateline. Those others on the other channel."

  I wanted to call the patient information person downstairs and get Evelyn's room number, then find a way to wheel myself her way. To Leland Dees I said, "It doesn't matter. My body probably needed a shock. Maybe this explains why my sales went down over the last year or so. I spent too much time not taking care of myself."

  "What do you need?" Leland said.

  "I can't drive for a while. I'm calling to say that orders might be coming in a little slower." The Demerol kicked in. I said, "The capital of Missouri's not St. Louis. Missouri's the Show Me state. Pi equals 3.1416, but it goes on forever. My ex-wife Patina could drink bourbon and vodka and beer, but not scotch or gin or wine. Maybe Evelyn only hit her head—it might not've been a tumor."