Novel Page 13

  Miss Dickel said, “You have to be more excited, Novel. Imagine a ghost coming to see you. Imagine a vampire, or burglar, or gigantic pointy-headed Martian.”

  She wore a sequined dress that stopped midthigh. She’d gotten a haircut recently down in Asheville so that she looked like the woman playing Peter Pan. I said, “Who’s there?” even worse.

  “No, no, no,” Miss Dickel said. She threw her ermine wrap to the slate floor. “Maybe you need to loosen up a bit, Novel. Have you ever had a drink?”

  A drink! I thought. While my parents played air keyboard and my brother and sister ran laps around the mountain, I often drank. “Yes ma’am,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind some bourbon, vodka, Scotch, or anisette. Or all of the above. That might loosen me up.”

  “I have it all!” Miss Dickel screamed out. “Me, too! I’m going to drink some, too! Maybe that’s what I need so’s not to be so hard on you. Expectations, you know. Expectations, expectations.” She ran out of the giant room going, “A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” like that. I won’t say that I didn’t have a gigantic, big, monstrous hard-on. Miss Dickel came back with two sixteen-ounce tumblers of bourbon and Coke. She said, “Now try your line.”

  I drank some, then said, “Who’s there?” in a way that almost made it a question.

  This might be hard to believe, but Miss Margaret Dickel punched down her booze, unstrapped her straps, slid off her dress down to the navel, and said, “Now.”

  I’m talking her boobs hung out there like two off-kilter beacons. I could say nothing else but, “Who them? Hotdamn, who are those big fellows?” And then I went into one of my uncontrollable speaking-in-tongues “yella-yella-yella” monologues.

  Miss Dickel took my hand and led me to the couch. She said, “I might not be here next year. Let me give you a premature graduation present.”

  “Premature” ended up being the right choice of words. I’m not sure she even got fully reclined on the couch before I said, “Hey. Where’s the bathroom? I’ll go get some toilet paper for your leg.” Miss Dickel knocked on the end table a few times. I don’t know why. I yelled out, “Who’s there?” perfectly.

  19

  MY NEW TOWN might find ways to survive, I finally told myself inside room 9, unable to think up anecdotes outside lies that involved snakebites. I thought, If I hide out long enough then maybe something will happen around here worth reporting. One of my how-to textbooks pointed out that the main character must cause the action, not pray that the action come his or her way. This particular author wrote, “It’s better to have your protagonist kill somebody, as opposed to his being killed on page one.”

  What a fucking genius, I thought. What a fucking genius. And then I thought, Show, don’t tell; Show, don’t tell; Show, don’t tell so many goddamn times—and it could be that I underwent some kind of “alcohol-saturated amnesia”—that the mantra lulled me into automatic pilot, for all I know (it’s not like I could drive over to Graywood Regional Memorial and seek out a qualified psychiatrist and/or liver specialist), but pretty much I regained full consciousness all the way back in the Gruel Inn office, my mission complete.

  Well, fuck me. All I’m asking is for a little of that “willing suspension of disbelief.” There were bits and pieces that came back to me, most of which involved bad memories of my childhood, marriage, job, and past “important decisions,” but that’s about it. Snakes—I remember turning back to snake collection.

  And I kind of remember talking myself into—this is the weird part, at least how it came true—how the good citizens of Gruel would believe that I was some kind of famous writer, and how they should indubitably set up a paid position for me at their private school.

  Foreshadowing!

  Here’s a little: “I’ve changed my handle to Beethoven,” my dad said to me on one of these trips. Joyce and James had fled to their supposed homeland by this point, so I must’ve been fifteen or sixteen. “You know why?”

  “Because you’re going deaf?” He kept that goddamn CB squawking so loudly on Highway 64 that live shrimp in back died of trauma. “Because you want a trucker to beat you up?”

  One thing about concert musicians, ex- or not: They won’t hit children or walls out of anger seeing as they don’t want to chance breaking knuckles. Back in Black Mountain with my parents’ friends—all violinists, violists, and cellists—when we went fishing they wouldn’t bait a hook or take off a caught fish, forever paranoid of accidentally snipping their finger pads.

  My father looked like he wanted to hit me. He said, “Bait oven. It’s my little joke. Truckers think I’m saying ‘Bait Oven’ instead of Beethoven. Let me tell you, Novel—if we ever had the cold unit go out on one of these back roads that’s exactly what we would become. A bait oven.”

  He drove ninety miles an hour down the two-lane. Beethoven. I should mention that both of my parents believed in karma, yin-yang, what goes around comes around, good and evil, apples and oranges, serendipity, Sodom and Gomorrah, ham and eggs, you name it: They believed that every action had an inevitable reaction, et cetera. And that’s why, most Friday and Saturday nights when I should’ve been out parking with Wickie Portis—the love of my then life and daughter of two ex-Black Mountain College students who, like my parents, flat out gave up in order to run a produce stand filled with peaches and pecans—I had to sit in my father’s refrigerated shellfish truck, CB on, and warn truckers of phantom Smokies running radar on I-26, or I-40, or up and down 74, 108, and any four-lane road that went in or out of Asheville.

  “Weekends are when most accidents occur, Novel,” my father told me, as if he’d gotten the statistical information from a soothsayer. “You got your just-paid drunken construction workers, and your high school sweethearts either celebrating or grieving their high school football team’s game. So if we can somehow get everyone thinking the highway patrol’s out there, I believe we can save some lives. And if we save lives, then we’ll go to heaven if indeed there’s such a place.”

  I didn’t know why he couldn’t do it himself—why he wasn’t concerned about reaching fucking heaven, you know. I always said, “Truckers will know it’s a trick. They’ll hear my voice and know it’s a kid talking.”

  My father said, “This’ll be a great time to practice voices. Miss Dickel thinks you have a talent. I’m of the belief that this little exercise might help you get a college scholarship, Novel. Try some different accents.”

  I realized later that my parents spent Fridays and Saturdays smoking dope and fucking while I sat out in the driveway going, “Breaker one-nine, this is the Carolina Kid—a Smokey’s over on the exit ramp taking pictures,” in my best Clint Eastwood, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Richard Nixon, or Mr. Ed voice, over and over, occasionally agreeing to a made-up rendezvous with a woman trucker down in Asheville at the Sambo’s parking lot. I never thought about how some male transvestite truckers might’ve envisioned a life in Hollywood, too—that they disguised their voices in hopes of meeting another trucker in the parking lot for a little something other than what I supposedly offered.

  And there’s a snatch of Jeff the owner showing me up to say, “Barry and Larry finally made a shot on the pool table.”

  I said, “I don’t know Barry and Larry.”

  “Your trick-shot brothers. Well they kind of made one. Barry had three balls arranged at a weird part of the table. I’m saying they weren’t in the center of the table, or on the rack dot, or in front of a side pocket, or up against the rail.” I nodded, nodded, nodded, and waterwheeled my hand for him to get on with the story. “I think Barry used the one, three, and five. He used odd numbers for this one. He had some kind of theory about how evens hadn’t worked out for him. Anyway, these three balls were in a triangle, you know, way off in a no-man’s-land of the table. Then he had some those Matchbox cars circling his balls. I think they was all Corvettes, you know.”

  Room 9 had the same number ceiling tiles as room 11. The wall behind where the bed stood held vei
ns that, if you squinted, looked like a giant cannon. I said, “I get it” to Jeff.

  He twisted off my Old Crow cap, got up, and walked to the bathroom. “Where’s your glass?”

  I think I had broken it into little bits and flushed the shards down the toilet in case my upbringing brought up suicidal, wrist-slashing thoughts. “Oh. I don’t know.”

  I thought, I’m going to kill Bekah, more than a few times, and sometimes wondered if I already had done so.

  Somewhere along the line between room 9 and my reemergence into the world of real Gruel I began writing Hallmark greeting cards, and my first one went “Roses are Red / Violets are Blue / So are My Balls / Get on Over Here as Soon as You Can.”

  Jeff the owner must’ve been there at the time, because he said, “This place when it was the original Gruel Inn,” he waved his arm, “used to be the midpoint between here and there, you know. Greenville and Augusta. Asheville and Savannah. Charlotte and Atlanta. I’m talking before 1960 or thereabouts. New York and Miami. Boston and Los Angeles.”

  I said, “China and Japan. North and South Pole, in a way.”

  “That’s right. Mercury and Mars, almost. Well what you don’t know is, when the Gruel Inn finally folded, these do-gooder people took it over. They pretended to run a farm back there, and over there.” Jeff the owner circled his arm meaning everywhere. “Cotton. Corn. Beans. Everything.”

  I said, “When?”

  “A long time ago. Anyway, they died off or whatever—they had enough with people dropping in unannounced—and the next thing you know th ese folks come up from Charleston wanting to buy up the place on the pretense of getting unwanted orphan kids to help run their farm. You know what I’m saying? This man and woman went down to the coast, brought up newborns to feed, clothe, educate, and work. Twelve rooms, twenty four babies. Me, I saw it all. I was there, Novel. Me, I think that that marching sound’s a load of unwanted children stomping through.”

  I took Jeff’s tiny Ancient Age bottle and held it behind my back. I shook my head to let him know that I didn’t buy this story. “You can’t scare me,” I said.

  Show, don’t tell—like the books say.

  “It’s true. From somewhere’s near after World War II until right before Kennedy, I swear, this place was run by a mom-and-pop operation running orphans. I’m talking the mother made the girls learn sewing machines—they’s talk that they single-handedly ran old Gruel Cotton Mills out of business, but it ain’t true seeing as Gruel Cotton made fabric and these folks bought it; so really they might’ve kept Gruel Cotton in business longer than itshould’ve been—and the daddy farmed. He had his boys planting and harvesting, and shucking later, you know what I mean.”

  I said, “So?” I tried to make a mental note to relay how my father taught me how to tie my shoes, which involved chopsticks—both the eating utensils, and my mother playing that song on the piano over and over as some kind of torture until I learned how not to knot my laces.

  “Be honest. You don’t know this story?” Jeff the owner asked me.

  I thought about how I needed to write down how, one time, the lieutenant governor asked me to write him a speech pro roadside flowers on the interstates. I went through a whole thing about daisies, cosmos, daylilies, and hostas, and how what gasses these plants exuded let us live in a more healthful environment. I wrote about how travelers coming through would look around feel good about North Carolina, then both spend money at Stuckey’s and consider moving from Maine on down to Virginia, or Texas on up to South Carolina. This happened to be a taxpayer option.

  Unfortunately, I wrote down, “Oh, this’ll be beautiful. Think about motoring down the highway and seeing Carolina jasmine over and over.” The lieutenant governor—right on the Charlotte, Greensboro, Wilmington, Raleigh, Asheville, and Durham six o’clock news—said, “Jism.” He went improv, too: He said, “What would be a better advertisement for our state than for motorists to go back home and say they became entranced with Carolina jism?” Somehow I got in trouble over all of this.

  I said to Jeff the owner, “I’m sorry. What?”

  “I think you can figure it all out, Bubba. It’d explain some things”

  I shrugged. I said, “I don’t feel like playing this game. I failed recess third grade because I told the teacher I didn’t play around.” I said, “It was the Cathcarts, wasn’t it. My wife’s parents ran this place. That explains how we got it so fast. It wasn’t even for sale, really, right?”

  Jeff, I think, said I didn’t hear any of this from him. There was talk that a bunch of the orphans died here on the premises. One way or another, you know. Natural and unnatural causes, as it were. I believe he told me that Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart ran an abortion clinic, too. He said he didn’t want to be the boy what only brings tragic news, but this is the truth. That stomping sound I heard at night? Dead babies and lost orphans. Jeff said, “And there’s talk that somebody bought Gruel Inn about 1980, stayed one day, then fled. He still has all the original keys. Word is he might come back one day, madder than hell.”

  I tried not to think about how, maybe in the fifth grade, my teacher insisted that we all write an essay about how we got scared once. I didn’t think about how she made us write one day about someone we missed, though I thought of another Hallmark card: “Oceans are Deep / Deserts are Dry / So is My Vagina / I Wish You’d Hurry up and Get Back Here, Goddamnit.”

  Who could stick a key through Superglue? I figured out. When Jeff the owner finally left, I humpbacked my way to the office and called Victor Dees. I said, “Do you sell Superglue? Or do you think Gruel Drugs might?”

  Victor said, “He told you the story, didn’t he. Goddamn it. I told Jeff not to go off scaring you that way. And I’m willing to bet you’re going to glue shut every window in the motel.”

  I hadn’t thought of the windows. My father had tried to glue shut James and Joyce’s windows one time so they couldn’t sneak out on nightly Black Mountain forages. The glue didn’t take, with the help of a cat’s-paw, putty knife, and crowbar. “I need some nails, too,” I said to Dees. “Maybe four or five pounds of tenpenny nails and a good six tubes of Superglue.”

  I went straight to my computer and, within the hour it took Victor Dees to show up with my provisions, wrote, “On the night that I awoke to find my piano-playing parents shackling James and Joyce in the back room where they—my folks—would never have a music studio, I decided to never further my banjo career, never run away, and never believe what my parents had to say vis-à-vis ways to live one’s life.” It seemed a good beginning, at the time, though I knew deep down that I could never use it in a memoir, seeing as I didn’t want to cast aspersions on siblings or parents.

  Victor Dees must’ve shown up at some point, seeing as I found all of my windows glued shut later.

  Evidently I brooded somewhere between rooms 9 and 1 about the time my father unsuccessfully tried to raise beef-flavored crayfish. This was the summer of 1972 and, much like the Democratic Party of that election year, Dad—of course we called him “Crawdad” at this point—tried about everything. He dammed a creek on the back section of our property and installed wire mesh screens to keep the crayfish more or less penned in. Although a crayfish can crawl out of its habitat, trek across land, and dig a new den miles from its birthplace, my father believed that his experimental pets wouldn’t stray, for some reason. He threw butcher-cut rib eyes in the pool. He netted individual crayfish and injected them with bovine blood. My father said that he sent letters to the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Patent office, and the Guinness Book of World Records. He found and called a union of lobstermen up in Maine.

  And everything went fine. Crayfish with metal plates in their tiny heads couldn’t have been drawn to giant magnets as fast as these four-inch armored crustaceans hit Dad’s steaks. They pinched, nibbled, and scoured. They scurried backwards to the creek edge, mated, and went for more.

  “The thing about it is,” my father said more than once as I stood t
here with a crayfish attached to my finger, “I’m thinking about beef-flavored catfish. Beef-flavored shrimp. And when that money comes in, your mother and I are going to buy some farmland out by Boiling Springs. Shrimp-flavored beef.”

  Every week the five of us sat down and did a blindfolded taste test that involved a one-inch cube of sirloin and a chunk of crayfish. Looking back on it all—and with what I’ve read in various psychology textbooks—I’m pretty sure that the entire Akers family suffered from “self-absorbed delusional high hopes.” Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Bob Denver from Gilligan’s Island underwent similar problems. Anyway, we were all convinced that Dad’s scam worked. My mother announced one night, “This will transform the entire restaurant industry. Surf ’n’ Turf will no longer be!” Then she went down to Asheville and bought a fake fur coat. Even Joyce and James got excited. They helped me dig an auxiliary dam upstream. When we all went to the coast a few days later my father bought upwards of a thousand live shrimp, and dumped them straight into the creek water before nightfall. Unfortunately, concert pianists attend conservatories and don’t pay attention to the biological world. My father didn’t study up on ichthyology, to be more specific.

  “I’m going down to Black Mountain Feed and Seed,” he told us after we’d undergone this particular eight-hundred-mile round-trip. “I’m thinking one salt lick should be enough for the shrimp. We’ll do a little trial and error. I need to stop by Mr. Fitzgerald’s butcher shop, too.”

  These were happy, enthralling times, even though—far, far away—our troops got massacred, our president ordered break-ins, and so on. Some nights we sat in the den spouting out other beef-flavored products we might want to invent: Dr Pepper, Bazooka Joe, baby aspirin, sunglasses, postage stamps, pacifiers ice cubes, toothpaste, and envelopes. My father yelled out, “Panties!” one night right in the middle of Laugh-In. My mom screamed, “Fingernail polish for women who bite their nails!” I yelled, “Tar!” for my brother and sister.