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  I said, “I get what you’re getting at,” though I wasn’t really sure unless my fellow citizens believed that every purported good thing was bad, and vice versa. Or maybe I landed in a town of Christian Scientists. But I did catch that “He’s the only man or woman ever took his own life in Gruel, supposedly.” The “supposedly” might’ve been placed strategically, on purpose. If Jeff the owner knew the word “ironically,” he might’ve toyed with me some here.

  “One day everything will change, though. One day Gruel will store urban sprawl. How far are Atlanta and Charlotte away from us—150 miles each? We’ll become a bedroom community within the next hundred years, I’m predicting, with our own train station.”

  I thought, My memoir Novel could begin: Since pickling is a preservative, the townspeople of Gruel and I attempted to can our brains forever. I said, “I see where you’re coming from.”

  Jeff the owner looked at himself in the mirror across our way and said, “Now what’s your next question?”

  I learned that Jeff Downer’s wife turned out “to be a real Downer.” He didn’t mean that she walked around the square maudlin, sourpussed, recessive, and aggrieved. He meant that she turned out to be a first cousin left on the front stoop of a successful young couple over in Forty-Five, who adopted her South Carolina-style—no judge or social service worker, just an announcement in the newspaper. Jeff’s wife, Carla, received Skinner for her last name, went through public schools, got a job as a bookkeeper, met her husband-to-be at a square dance, then later learned of her once-orphaned status when some do-gooder relative stood up at Gene Skinner’s funeral in order to report a blow-by-blow account of the highlights of Skinner’s life: third place in the county track meet, Insurance Agent of the Month four times, wedding, oh . . . and that cardboard box of baby found on the front porch back in 1942.

  “It was one of Carla’s great-aunts. She assumed that Carla’s parents had told her the truth by then. They hadn’t. They were Presbyterians. The great-aunt couldn’t have known. She lived real far off, like in Spartanburg, or Richmond,” Jeff said.

  “I’m following you. That had to be a real shock to Carla.”

  “It was what economists might call ‘devastating,’” Jeff Downer the owner said.

  I made a mental note as to where the restroom was, plus the best route around the pool table. I foresaw falling off the barstool, becoming confused, then peeing outside on the sidewalk. But I still held enough rational faculties—thanks to years of speechwriting—to say, “This doesn’t explain how she realized that she was related to you from the get-go.”

  The proper Roughhouse Billiards opening time came an hour earlier. The trick-shot boys knocked at the glass door and tried to peer through cloth pull-down blinds every fifteen minutes, their cupped-faced shadows recognizable.

  “She had the smarts to know that no one in Gruel could afford a child, more than likely. And we lived here, understand. I had opened up the bar by then, though it went by Roughshack Pool. Anyway, Carla went straight to a woman who kind of kept track of everything Gruel, you know. She went to the woman who kept a makeshift scrapbook of historical facts.”

  I was way ahead of him and felt my face blush, as if I were a part of this tragic, Sophoclean truth. I said, “My ex-mother-in-law Ina Cathcart.”

  Ina liked to corner me and give me the “Jefferson Davis once slept here” monologue. She told stories of long-lost gold mines, of Confederate money cached beneath where Paula Purgason’s house now stood, of the Siamese quadruplets who lived in Gruel from 1898 until they found out about a circus that paid good money. Ina claimed to know everything that happened in this sad section of Graywood County. I said, “Wow,” to her more often than I said, “I love you,” or “Pass the corn bread” when I visited those few Thanksgivings, Christmases, Labor Day weekends.

  Jeff got off his stool, rounded the counter, and returned with a cribbage board. He set the four pegs in the game holes and said, “I’ve been looking for more of these little metal men. And I’ve been looking for the rules to Chinese checkers.”

  I couldn’t tell if Jeff joked or not. I said, “I don’t know. I used to play poker once a week with some buddies.”

  “It wasn’t Ina Cathcart. I mean, that was who Carla went to see directly. And I’m still of the belief that Ina lied in order to protect the innocent, as they say. So Ina said, ‘Lordy, Carla, I don’t know of anyone having a baby and then boxing her up all the way out to Forty-Five back the time you was born.’”

  I said, “Well that’s good,” because I didn’t know what else to say. Jeff Downer the owner started to look a little like Victor Dees from the army-navy store at this point, and I—paranoid—began to wonder if my getting locked up inside this bar happened to be an elaborate scheme to eradicate me as if I’d gone to Graywood Regional Memorial hospital’s emergency room with an earache.

  “It was Sherrill Cathcart gave up the news,” Jeff said. “He stood there with a squished groundhog in his hands and he said, ‘I know what happened, I bet. You the daughter of old Quarry and Ulena Downer, Carla. I know this ’cause Quarry come home with a dead twelve-point buck and a newborn baby girl. He said he didn’t have money for the mount, so he wanted to trade. I said it didn’t seem right and sent him on his way.’”

  I picked up the cribbage board and said, “You need a deck of cards to play this game.”

  “I was there, you know, supporting my wife. She said, ‘Downer?’ She said, ‘Quarry and Ulena Downer? Hey, Jeff—that’s your daddy’s brother, Quarry.’ Well I sat right down there inside the Cathcart home, atop a cougar-hided settee.”

  I poured us two more drinks, which I thought might be the last two I ever saw. Jeff Downer the owner’s eyes showed more white than iris and pupil combined. I said, “I tell you a good game—it’s a dice game they play up in Wisconsin called ship-captain-crew. Now that’s a good game.”

  “Carla left me for good within the day and never let me know. I’d been having relations with my own first cousin for twenty-two years, eight months, and more than a couple days. No wonder we couldn’t have childrens!” Jeff slugged down his drink. “I guess it’s a blessing. The more people move off or die, the less people know around here.”

  I said, “It’s not a sin or anything,” like I had a notion of the sin market. I said, “That name—Quarry?—that’s an interesting name.” I thought of a novel opening that went something like: Quarry had a speech impediment, but that didn’t stop him from having the largest and most div erse rock collection in the South. “Well I’m about full of booze. I better get back to the inn.”

  Jeff Downer the owner grabbed my left forearm and clutched it like a C-clamp. “Ill put the weenies on. We can eat hot dogs. Listen, I don’t want to sound like a pussy or nothing, but I kind of feel good talking all this out. Pretty much it’s been Carla found out her DNA, she left, and I’ve either hid out or shut up since 1981. Reagan got sworn in on the day my wife left. I’ve always held that against him. It snowed here that day, too, and it don’t snow here much. All these people looking up at the sky with their tongues stuck out, and I’m looking at the ground hurting.”

  I told myself not to start thinking about Jeff Downer the owner as Jeff Downer the Owner Moaner, seeing as he started wailing about this point. He blubbered, blurted, and gagged. I would’ve known how to act if stupid and cold Bekah showed any emotions at her mother and brother’s double funeral.

  I put my arm around his shoulder like I’d seen men do in TV movies. I knew not to say, “Okay. Let me check back with you in a couple days after I look in on my writer guests.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Jeff Downer the Owner Moaner bleated out. “I know that everyone thought it was suicide, but I didn’t mean to.”

  I pulled my arm away. I said, “What?”

  Jeff stopped. He slapped his palms down on the bar. He said, “I’m sixty, goddamn it. I’m sixty and I’ll live to be a hundred ten like everyone else who sticks in Gruel.”

  I said
, “Are you telling me that Sherrill Cathcart didn’t really kill himself? You need to tell me the truth, buddy. My wife needs to know the truth.”

  I’m not one to believe in karma—that would be a great opening for some kind of serial killer’s autobiography, I thought—but Jeff Downer cocked his head upward like a South American jungle bird, stared at the ceiling, and said, “I’ve never owned a shotgun. I’ve never taken a geometry class. How would I know how to stick a rifle upward at a certain angle and make it look real? You can’t get me on this. You can’t get any of us in on this.”

  James and Joyce told me later on in my adolescence that my parents lied, that my first word wasn’t “Daddy” or “Momma” or “car.” I didn’t say anything until I hit three years old, and must’ve bottled it up like a noxious gas. My brother and sister complained throughout my growing up how Mom and Dad doted on me, how they pulled out a Brownie camera every time it looked like I might smile, frown, or tilt my head angelically. Meanwhile they talked to me incessantly, I was told, hoping that I would absorb state capitals, the periodic table, Roman emperors, Shakespeare’s tragedies, the presidents in order, winners of the Academy Award, French, pi out twenty decimals, art history, botany, planets and stars in the Milky Way, Don Quixote, World Series winners, poker ranks, third-world countries that they knew would get worse once Republican administrations started screwing them over in the future for oil, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, a list of bourbon brands out of Tennessee and Kentucky, even a list of past boxing champions.

  I only remember all of this because I was told more than once. To be honest, there’s no recollection, really, of my being flat on my back in a crib with big faces looking down at me listing off things they wished I’d remember later in life. James and Joyce told me all of this behind our house in Black Mountain, when I was seven, nine, eleven, and thirteen, as they pinned my shoulders against the heart pine exterior. That’s what seeped in.

  My first word, according to everybody, was “Shutup!” I could walk and run by this time—I could ride a trike—and evidently I finally screamed out “Shutup!” Nowadays I like to say my first words were “Shut the fuck up!” or “Could you please shut your goddamn grits-hole up!” but probably I went for brevity.

  “Shutup!” was what I yelled at my writers retreat participants when I returned home and found them suddenly pissed off and unionized. “Go back to your rooms! Don’t y’all have any ideas whatsoever?”

  Man, I saw this as a James/Joyce/Jeff Downer/Bekah/Victor Dees/Maura-Lee conspiracy of sorts. I had a brand-new woman who’d paid dues named Tania who purported to write a novel about three generations of office supply store owners. When she checked in and signed her name in the guest book—I made a big thing about how I would one day sell this guest book filled with famous writers’ signatures—I said, “Like the SLA Tania. Like Patty Hearst.” She looked at me as if I’d spoken in one of the Star Wars dialects. I said, “Welcome to the Gruel Inn Writers Retreat. If you need anything, pick up the phone and dial zero. Or the number for Roughhouse Billiards listed on the ‘Things to Do in Gruel’ laminated handout.”

  I shouldn’t have wasted a whole sheet of paper for the handout. I could’ve listed everything on a fortune cookie slip.

  “You are not a real novelist you lured us in I’ve gotten on the Internet and can’t find one item about you or your books on Amazon or even Google there’s no Novel Akers listed this is a hoax and sham I’m going to expose and sue you for everything you got Writer’s Digest will hear about this in order to warn people about you.”

  I thought, Boy, that’s a good example of run-on sentences, because I had read all about their use and misuse in one of those Write Now! textbooks. According to some professor, it was okay for Latin American writers and Faulkner to use such convoluted structures, but no one else. So of course I said, “Tania, I can’t let you leave Gruel sounding like that. The New York publishing industry will not allow for such subject-verb-object-subject-verb-object-subject-verb-object construction.” I didn’t say anything about how I had no clue what she meant by “Google.”

  This took place in my office/smoking room space. Every other participant stood there, too. Women wore ascots and smoked pipes. Everyone stood there with arms crossed over their chests, like offensive linemen between plays, like diplomats tired of détente, like parents unbelieving of their children’s tardy stories, like rap stars. I said to Tania, “Wait a minute. Go through all of that again, please.”

  “You’re not who you advertised to be,” an effeminate man named Rico from Kentucky said. “You advertised how a novelist would be running the show.”

  He’d actually been crying. I said, “Somebody go get Rico a paper towel to get off that running mascara.” I said, “No I didn’t. The stupid magazine ran a misprint. My name’s plain Novel, nothing else. I dealt with snakes before getting stuck in this business. Anyone want to go look at the largest blacksnake I’ve ever seen?”

  Rico raised his hand.

  I said to Tania, “Listen. I’m sorry that you can’t write a fucking sentence without someone looking over your shoulder. Fucking quit. Give it up. Go on to something else. Learn how to knit. Run for a spot on your local school board. Take up swimming to prove you won’t drown. And shutup.”

  I needed to steal Dr. Bobba Lollis’s blood pressure machine and hook it up in the Gruel Inn office.

  Tania said, “I’m going to take my three generations of office supply store owners elsewhere. I could’ve gone to Bread Loaf! Come on, friends.”

  I could’ve gone to Bread Loaf! my dick. Listen—and I have nothing against people having big dreams and/or unrealistic ambitions—but the people who entered the Gruel Inn’s writers retreat couldn’t have gotten into Pita Slice. I said, “Well go on then. As a matter of fact, I want all of you off these premises by sundown!” I think someone said that in a famous movie western once, so I can’t take credit.

  I didn’t think about reverse psychology or child psychology or of Jeff Downer the Owner Moaner when I pulled out my reservation ledger and called up every other would-be novelist to say that they needed to find another haven, that I closed down, that I about had it with rich people who had no talent or direction. Pretty much I only said, “Have you been reading?” and then said, “Shutup” when they said they didn’t have time, or that they didn’t want to be influenced, et cetera. Even I knew better.

  I called up Roughhouse Billiards next, and Jeff answered without a tinge of booze in his voice. He said, “Roughhouse Billiards. Home of the Trick Shot,” like the pope might say.

  I said, “This ain’t right.”

  15

  I THOUGHT MAYBE the constant trudge I heard happened to be my last guests. In the night I sat up off my cot hungover and slightly lonely. The beginning of the Sex Pistols’ “Holiday in the Sun” might best represent what I heard, the incessant foot-stomping of irreconcilable teenagers. Don’t ask how I know that band or song. In my previous life as the lieutenant governor’s speechwriter I tried to know everything about pop culture.

  I sat up off the cot alone and cocked my head. Due to a high blood pressure I’d never acknowledge, I thought that maybe only my ears pounded. But this was different. I walked outside in my boxer shorts and looked across the way at what I had begun calling Gruel Jungle. The pank-pank-pank of clomping came from there, barely.

  It sounded like ten thousand men marching from afar, is what I’m saying. I had no other choice but to hit the Xerox machine and get me another drink, then go back outside with my battery-operated Coleman lamp complete with clock light. The onward stomping definitely moved in my direction.

  I went inside, called Maura-Lee, and said, “Hey, what’s that goddamn noise?”

  She said, “Your voice?”

  “Stick your head out the window and listen. Do you hear a bunch of people marching by? Is there a parade going on downtown? I’m not fucking around. Tell me what you know.”

  Maura-Lee said, “You can just come
over if you want a little company, Novel. I thought I’d made it clear before that I might be a little more than interested in you. Where’s your hand? You’re not beating off, are you, and that’s the sound?”

  First off, of course I thought, What the hell is she talking about, all that “I thought I’d made it clear”? I thought, I’ve got the wrong number. I locked the office door and turned off the lights. “Can you hear it through the receiver from this end?”

  “I hear cicadas. I hear crickets. I hear a man who might’ve lost his mind earlier in the day, seeing as every one of his guests has stopped by my house asking directions to the nearest hotel.”

  I said, “Idiots. Too bad one of them didn’t write a travel book.”

  Maura-Lee said she needed to work anyway, and told me to meet her at the bakery if I wanted. It might have taken me two minutes before I showed up wearing my drinking clothes from the day before. She shook her head and handed over a hairnet “You can either make yourself useful or stand out of the way. This gets messy.”

  I washed my hands, then walked over to the forty-quart mixer. I said, “What’s a machine like this cost?”

  “Your life,” she said. “So did you make up the ghost-soldiers-advancing story just to come see me? Please say that you’re not in the throes of auditory hallucinations. That’s what happened to every man in my immediate family. They thought they heard younger women beckon them to Texas. Or California, Washington State, the middle of Florida.”