Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  PART II

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  PART III

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2005 by George Singleton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Singleton, George, 1958–

  Novel/George Singleton,

  p. cm.

  1. Autobiography—Authorship—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. City and town life—Fiction. 4. South Carolina—Fiction. 5. Young men—Fiction. 6. Secrecy—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.I5747N687 2005

  813'.6—dc22 2004023462

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-101128-5 ISBN-10: 0-15-101128-1

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603091-5 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603091-8 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-547-79047-3

  v2.0714

  This one’s for friend and coconspirator André Bernard,

  publisher and editor, who didn’t say the word “novel” to me, ever.

  PART I

  “For sheer nerve, there’s nothing beats a woman

  caught in the act: guilt fuels her fury and defiance.”

  —JUVENAL, SATIRE VI

  1

  MY BROTHER-IN-LAW should’ve left his car window rolled up when he chose to smoke with his mother beside him in the passenger seat, oxygen strapped to her nostrils. They were driving between Graywood Emergency Regional Memorial hospital and her home in rural Gruel. My mother-in-law, Ina—whom I called “Vudge” behind her back, insisting in my head that her middle name was Ina—had gotten released after a lung-surgery stint. According to oncologist Dr. Rolander, they should’ve filmed the procedure it went so textbook. A third of one lung got clipped out, no chemo or radiation would be scheduled, and Vudge could go on to live another seventy years. Rolander might’ve been the only good real doctor in all of Forty-Five, South Carolina. When he came out of surgery he told all of us—brother-in-law Irby, my wife, Rebekah, and me—“Man, that went way better than I ever thought!” I tried my best to sigh relief.

  This, of course, all took place outside the surgery waiting room exactly five days before Irby rolled his window down, which caused the ember of his cigarette to fly off, perform some kind of trick acrobatic backflip witnessed normally during Christmas, Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve, or Confederate’s Day celebrations in South Carolina when bottle rockets get minds of their own, and finally embed itself between Vudge’s left nostril and the rubber tube spraying pure-tee oxygen in her face.

  The resulting explosion was merciless, as you can imagine—car, in-laws, and metal canister lifting skyward like a regular Scud missile. It got mentioned on a local television station newscast sixty miles away, not just on Forty-Five’s local access.

  But let me get back to the surgery waiting room and explain what went on there, and what must’ve been a daily, ongoing routine. Evidently a six A.M. surgery admittance of a friend, relative, or long-lost acquaintance becomes the social highlight of the year for everyone in Graywood County. My wife and now-dead brother-in-law took cushioned seats between the giant-screen TV—morning cartoons, no national news—and the complimentary doughnut/coffee/hot chocolate/PayDay candy bar rolling kiosk. Blacks and whites gathered in groups of their own, and I noticed right off that one set of well-wishers dressed as if going to a funeral, the other as if on their way to a tractor pull. But I don’t want to generalize whatsoever. I don’t want to categorize my wife’s people. I’m sure that some white people wear bib overalls and stained, bent LET THE BIG TIRES ROLL caps to loved ones’ awkward eulogies.

  People called out to each other from one side of the room to the other. Introductions were made and more than once I heard, “Oh, I ’member you! You went by Little Bubba when you was a boy,” or “I ’member you! You had a brother in my grade name of Little Bubba, back when you was a tiny girl,” or “Hey, you ’member me! I went by L’il Scooby by some. Big Stuff by some. My sister was Shonuff,” and so on from across the way.

  Not a magazine had been read on the wall rack, as far as I could tell. Both Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on Richard Nixon’s daughter’s upcoming wedding in the White House.

  I said, “Hey, Bekah, we should’ve brought some cards. Or pin the tail on the donkey.” I should mention that Rebekah bragged how her name got spelled exactly like the Bible woman. Then four years into the marriage she decided to go by “Bekah.” Bekah thought with such a moniker she’d come across as more easygoing, sympathetic, open-minded, and friendly. She cared. It was important in her job as a debt collector.

  So she went by Bekah for another four or five years. But for all I know, since the deaths of her mother and brother she’s cut it all the way down to plain Kah.

  Kah, Kah, Kah.

  Back in the surgery waiting room my wife said, “People act in different ways when faced with diversity. Don’t judge so much.”

  I felt pretty sure she meant “adversity,” but who knows? If I’d’ve predicted Vudge’s and Irby’s demises, Bekah’s inheritance, our odd investment, the hospital’s willingness to settle quickly out of court, and then Bekah’s departure two months into our new life in Gruel, I might’ve spoken up. I said, “Why you so quiet, Irby?”

  Irby and Bekah weren’t twins but somehow got birthed only six months apart and both of them weighed in at eight pounds, something ounces. If it matters, Bekah came out first. She and Irby looked and acted similarly throughout life, though my wife went to college and became certified to teach first graders, then got a six-week paralegal degree in order to make a living in the Carolinas. After about a year of working for lawyers she somehow got hired on by a guy who tried to collect from ex-patients with no insurance who, for various reasons, chose not to pay their medical bills.

  On a side note: I watched my wife watch everyone else in the waiting room. You could tell she picked out those who’d never paid and those who never would pay. It was uncanny.

  Irby, on the other hand, spent a lot of time working odd jobs in between court-ordered community service projects. I liked my brother-in-law. If I’d’ve been able to predict everything, I would’ve yelled out for Irby to either not smoke altogether or to at least roll up his window so as not to chance the spark-fizzle-boom.

  Irby stared at Fred and Wilma Flintstone on the TV. He said, “I’m quiet ’cause this has got me scared, that’s all. I ain’t ever thought that much how you could be here one minute and gone next. I didn’t study up on history, Novel. I guess you reminded me of here-now, gone-then all the time, what wit
h your knowledge of the things.”

  I never thought about it. I said, “Lord, Irby, shut up. Your mom will be okay, and you’ll probably live forever.”

  It’s true I studied history and continued to do so right before Vudge Ina went in for surgery, came out healthy within the week, then had her face melted off like an arc welder to a sheet of Bubble Wrap. As a matter of fact I’d recently finished up a fascinating biography of famed pathological liars called This Won’t Hurt. To this day I have no clue what was fact and what was made up in that book.

  Which brings me to this: Maybe the oxygen blowup due to Irby’s keeping the window rolled down occurred otherwise, et cetera. Bekah and I followed behind Irby and Vudge, and it would take one of those slow-motion stop-freeze cameras to see what happened first: a spark in the car cab before veering down a long steep embankment going down to Lake Between; or a veer off the road, an impact, the explosion.

  Me, I said nothing. Bekah, though, told cops and coroner alike that she’d take a lie detector test about what she witnessed. Seeing as she had that debt collector job, I think she got to practice, unknowingly, for the polygraph any time she wanted.

  The next thing you know, my wife had inherited her childhood home, retained two lawyers well-known for keeping athletes and wrestlers out of jail up in Charlotte, and somehow settled a quarter-million-dollar negligence charge against the hospital for its oxygen tank. Bekah said, “It’s a sign that what I proved to myself during that weeklong sneezing fit last year is something I should show anyone with a weight problem. You watch and see, Novel. Watch and learn. I know what I’m talking about.”

  We’d gone through a dual funeral for her mom and brother. I said, “If you need me to quit my job,” which I didn’t want to do seeing as I loved it, kind of, “I’ll quit. Whatever you want.”

  Listen, I kind of remembered Bekah sneezing so hard and frequently two springs earlier that she lost fifteen pounds and toned her stomach down to—my opinion—a scary, scary washboard. And I kind of remembered when she had said, “You know what, Novel? One day, if I ever have the money, I’m going to open a surefire weight-loss tone-up clinic that’ll baffle scientists and dietitians alike.”

  My first job when I got home from work back then, outside of wading through Bekah’s opinions concerning that law where she couldn’t call people up before nine in the morning or after nine at night, was to fill out some mileage forms and stack that day’s completed surveys in descending order from “this bites” all the way to “definitely worthwhile” in regards to revisiting what I had to offer everyday citizens and schoolchildren alike. That’s right: “this bites” meant good. Anyway, it was part of my job description. I don’t know everything there is to know about state-funded agencies that relied on both private and public operational monies, but my boss let all of his employees know that we required valid hard-copy documentation should the legislature cut what we had to offer in the same unwincing and reckless way it did to other unneeded agencies like the North Carolina Arts Commission, the Department of Social Services, and school bus maintenance. We needed proof, by god.

  I guess my boss understood that my background in American history made me one of a dozen perfect candidates to drive the Viper-Mobile around my appointed counties. Me, I would’ve gone with Asp-Mobile, but no one ever listened. I drove around Mecklenburg County mostly, from pre-K schools to nursing homes, a trailer attached to my step van like some kind of circus sideshow attraction. I kept the copperheads, eastern diamond-backs, and cottonmouths in the trailer. With me in the step van, though, rode rat, corn, black-, and garter snakes. And mice. Don’t think I didn’t comprehend the state’s mission: Most people killed snakes on principle, not knowing that my reptiles helped control everything from june bugs to rodents, illegal aliens, and Yankees. Less june bugs and rodents meant more and better tobacco plants. If p, then q. If we purchase Louisiana, then we’ll have more crawfish. We purchase Louisiana. Crawfish. If we throw tea in a harbor, then the British will understand our backbone. We throw tea in a harbor. Littering.

  History. It continues. It went right on up to my mother-in-law, Ina, and her son Irby dying in a straightforward and almost unquestionable exploding oxygen tank circumstance.

  Bekah said, “Are you sure you won’t mind someone else taking care of the snakes? I mean—and I got to be honest—I won’t miss not knowing they’re not out there in the driveway every night.”

  I catalogued more than two hundred kids’ questionnaires, all of them “This bites,” a percentage record. I said to my wife, “I can give up the snake job.” But I didn’t tell her how I could, indeed, continue the other part of my job anywhere, what with technology. I didn’t mention it, for she never knew the second half of my working life.

  At some point between mother-in-law Vudge Ina’s third-of-a-lung removal and her subsequent release—by the way, Bekah by then planned a prosecutorial argument that involved her mother’s premature hospital release (only five days after major surgery!) and how, in a rational, humane amount of time, Ina wouldn’t’ve needed to-go oxygen—Irby took me aside and said, “I’m going to the drugstore across the way. You need anything?”

  He owned a look in his eye like the time he got mad at a construction foreman, then set his own miter box for forty-three-degree angles. It was Richard Petty’s number, Irby told me.

  “You’re not planning to rob the drugstore, are you?”

  We stood in the white smoking area, across from the black smoking area, outside Graywood Emergency Regional Memorial’s downstairs Museum of Dislodged and Extracted Objects. There weren’t actual black and white signs, of course—this was the year 1998, which meant about 1966 for Graywood County—but gene pools kept everyone treading in their own personal waters. Irby said, “No. No. Mr. Goddamn Goody-goody. I’m going over there to either buy the patch or a box of that nicotine gum.”

  Mr. Goddamn Goody-goody! I swear. I said, “Good on you, Irby. Man, you’re taking your momma’s illness seriously. Way to go.” I stifled a belch. “I don’t need anything seeing as I already quit years ago. If they got some kind of booze patch now, I’ll take a handful of them.”

  Irby didn’t throw down his cigarette butt, though the filter burned. “You think you could let me borry fifty dollars?”

  Lookit: Bekah and Irby’s father, Sherrill, might’ve been one of the wealthiest non-cotton-mill-owning men in all of Graywood County. He certainly had more money than anyone in Gruel proper. Sherrill died of an “accidental” gunshot wound to the lower jaw according to family myth, before I met Bekah. He owned a taxidermy outfit and stuffed deer, turkey, bass, and bobcats for every citizen in a three-county area. It never would’ve made the news, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he stuffed dodos and mastodons—that’s how far Gruel stood from civilization. Sherrill Cathcart probably stuffed a legendary dogheaded man, cynocephalus, for all anyone knew, or any Bigfoot traveling to Florida. I don’t want to get way ahead of myself or offtrack, but it didn’t shock me whatsoever when professor-led groups of archaeology graduate students from Arizona, Borneo, and the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania showed up wanting to rent long-term rooms from me once Bekah’s Sneeze ’n’ Tone spa in Gruel expired unnaturally.

  I said—and I’ll feel this guilt for years—“No. I’m not lending you more money. Somewhere along the line you must’ve gotten a dictionary that confused ‘borrow’ with ‘give.’" I don’t know if it was tension—I didn’t trust anyone else driving my Viper-Mobile route, much less handing out mice cakes the way my snakes liked them. But I reminded Irby of all the money he’d promised to pay me back, and for what reasons: interview suit, tuition money for a technical college’s culinary program, banjo lessons, a used Porta-Sauna to rent out to toxin-ridden friends, new moped tires, the occasional trip to a bona fide dermatologist. Bail money, of course.

  Irby said, “I don’t blame you one bit, Novel. And I’ll put a palm on the Bible when I say I’m going to give it up somehow, and use that money to repay you and Rebekah
.” He lit another cigarette, using a book of matches. “See? I’m already not wasting money on disposable lighters.”

  How could I have known that maybe he really would’ve quit, and only chewed gum while driving Ina home to the only three-story house one block off Gruel’s square, filled parlor to attic with unclaimed stuffed game? Because of this: Irby had no luck. If I’d’ve gotten him on the nicotine gum, then Irby, nervous behind the wheel seeing as I wouldn’t let him borrow money to get a New Mexico driver’s license a year before, would’ve popped the foil gum wrapper in his mouth, chewed hard, caused a spark, and blown up Ina’s oxygen tank anyway.

  I might never be labeled an optimist, but by god I know rational thought inside out. When I studied American history, and please remember that I still do, my heroes included Hal Hol-brook playing Mark Twain and Diogenes portraying a man who gave a shit.

  Between the double eulogies and my wife’s last remaining relatives’ burial in Old Gruel Cemetery, laid out next to sad Sherrill—a patriarch taxidermist so depressed by the depletion of his surrounding woods that he agreed to trust a normal embalmer to make him appear lifelike and ready to pounce—Bekah almost took my elbow. She said, “I hope my cell phone works in the back of the Brougham.” I opened the back door to a family-members-only funeral home limo. “I’m going to call up work and quit. I’m going through with our plan. I got a Realtor who’s agreed to sell the house.”

  I kind of remember nodding as I pretended to understand Bekah’s train of thought. Some kind of plan . . . no more calling the destitute and demanding money . . . this snake show bites . . . Kah, Kah, Kah.

  2

  I SHOWED UP in my mother’s bed Novel, an unplanned child brought up by near-normal and falsely diagnosed infertile parents Ted and Olivia Akers who, in their mid-thirties, had already adopted two Irish orphans, my brother and sister James and Joyce. This all occurred in Black Mountain, North Carolina, once home to the famed avant-garde Black Mountain College where Josef Albers, Robert Creeley, Robert Motherwell, and Buckminster Fuller taught. My parents met there as students in 1948, graduated, then went around the country as semisuccess-ful concert pianists for a good six or eight years. Finally, they returned in order to live off the land. John Cage, of all people, reportedly stood in my parents’ living room as a midwife aided Mom. He may have been the first person to actually point me out in the crib and say, “James, Joyce—Novel,” as my adopted brother and sister, my parents, maybe Robert Rauschenberg, stood in a circle chanting or whatever it was that prehippies did back then.