Novel Read online

  I don’t remember if James said, “Douche” or “K-Y jelly,” but it certainly caused my parents to reconsider his curfew.

  The shrimp might’ve lived a grand total of two days. Their collective mass death and the subsequent stench attracted panthers in the area. Turkey vultures circled our home nonstop. My father couldn’t get to his still-thriving crayfish—or perhaps he feared what food chain catastrophe might occur back there on the creek—and they eventually died, too. I think they’d become so accustomed to free daily steaks that they couldn’t hunt for themselves anymore. Kind of like dolphins and whales raised in captivity from birth.

  Our neighbors weren’t happy with Dad. The telephone rang nonstop, and a couple of ex-drama instructors threatened to burn our house down. The unofficial mayor said he would look into condemning our property, that both the short- and long-term effects of our dead shellfish-thick stink wouldn’t help him out when he tried to obtain state and federal grants that would jump-start Black Mountain proper’s tourist industry.

  We smelled like a bait oven, of course.

  My father gathered the family one evening and said, “Goddamn it to hell, you can’t blame me for trying. At least I tried to help Americans enjoy beef-flavored fish.” My mother fashioned kerchiefs for us to wear over our mouths and noses. I’m talking we looked like the Akers Gang sitting around the table, going over a Wells Fargo stickup-to-be.

  I don’t want to come off as maudlin, sentimental, eager, embarrassed, cosmic, family-oriented, or whorish, but as I sat there looking into the eyes of my adopted siblings and my misdirected parents, I decided to write a long, heartfelt, pleading letter to the governor of North Carolina in order to explain our plight and past aspirations. I don’t remember the entire plea, except for the final, strongest point: “Wouldn’t it be great to entertain foreign dignitaries and tell them how we also had beef-flavored tobacco in the works?”

  I don’t think the governor ever read my opus. One of his interns sent me a flyer advertising the annual lieutenant governor’s essay contest. That year’s topic went “Something I Love about North Carolina that Everyone Should Know.” From what I learned later, every other kid wrote about his or her teacher, parents, or preacher—all sucking up. Me, I wrote about our timber rattlers. I won first place. The judges, evidently, didn’t understand what, years later, my Gruel Inn Writers Retreat textbooks labeled “satire.”

  I must’ve stared at the computer screen a good hour one day, then typing paper, my empty composition book, until I realized that room 8’s cracks on the front wall looked a whole lot like America’s interstate system. So I waddled to the office, opened the front door, made sure it was wedged open so as not to lock myself out, sprinted to the shed where I once held nontrainable snakes, picked up a spray can of black Krylon, got back to the room, and stood back. I got a pencil out first and outlined the continental United States, then, meticulously, spray-painted a third of North America. Because I knew I might need to remember major ideas in my memoir Novel, I had a variety of highlighters, and used them to trace out Interstates 65, 40, 95, 10, 77, 85, 5, 20, 94, 90, and 15. I could’ve done parts of 1 and Route 66, but didn’t. I didn’t know enough about Alaska and Hawaii, but they would’ve ended up on the ceiling and shower wall anyway, which would’ve been weird.

  And I don’t think it was a dream when Maura-Lee said, “What’re you doing?” from the passageway between rooms 7 and 8.

  Needless to say I had three heart attacks and streaked a new freeway between Las Vegas and a point seven hundred miles outside San Diego somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. “Goddamn. How’d you get in here?” I could feel my body shudder uncontrollably, not unlike the first time I got bitten by what ended up being a velvet-tailed rattlesnake, not unlike the first time I asked Bekah to marry me.

  Maura-Lee laughed, walked through the threshold, and said, “I came through the trapdoor, fool. Hey, your door was wide open. I thought maybe it was an open house.”

  I walked directly to room 8’s bathroom and peed. I yelled back to Maura-Lee, “You scared the hell out of me. What’s been going on?”

  “I came to see how you were doing, Novel. Nothing else. I’m taking it that you’re serious about holing yourself up forever. Jeff and Vic have come by to get fresh bagels in the morning, and they’re both a little concerned.” She walked straight into the bathroom right as I waggled myself. “Talk about little.”

  I said, “Ha ha,” and flushed.

  “Listen to me. I wanted to warn you that a new friend of mine’s on her way over here. I think you’ll like her. Her name’s Nancy Ruark. She’s been teaching drama over at Forty-Five High for about ten years, but before that she did a commercial for one of those banks up in Greenville. I mean, before that she went to college, and I think she tried to make the big time in Louisville or someplace. She’s all right.”

  I motioned for Maura-Lee to sit down. I would’ve offered her some of my MREs but I understood that she only appreciated fresher, better food groups. “You look like you’ve lost even more weight,” I said. It might’ve been the last thing I remember seeing on TV, some talk-show host explaining to men what good things they could drop into a conversation every so often.

  “I haven’t even been trying!” Maura-Lee said. “But I’m down to a size eight or ten, depending on the designer.” She wore what looked to me like a long tan T-shirt, a giant blue fish lacquered on the front.

  I didn’t say how I’d not gotten to eight or ten lines on Novel. “I don’t want to meet a theater person,” I said. “They’re a little too ‘on’for me, if you know what I mean. Or if they’re not ‘on,’ then they’re way past ‘off.’ They’re so beyond off they’re not even invented.”

  “Surprise!” this woman yelled out, popping from room 7 to 8, obviously Nancy Ruark. I didn’t jump as much as when Maura-Lee snuck in and I became some kind of international road designer. But I gripped somewhat. I even thought, This isn’t good for my writing schedule.

  “Nancy, Novel. Novel, Nancy,” Maura-Lee said.

  Nancy might’ve stood five feet tall, and she had a five-foot-wide smile of tiny white teeth that didn’t look unlike rows of special-order scrimshawed chess pieces. You had to love her on sight. She held a stack of booklets and said, “I’m selling coupons to help the Forty-Five High Drama Club travel up to New York City and see four plays in three days. There’s a Sunday matinee.”

  I hate to say that I fell in love with Nancy Ruark immediately. It was like having a clothed jumping bean enter my life. I said, “Okay, then. Maybe I’ll buy a couple those coupon books.”

  “You don’t even know what we got, Novel! Look here,” she said, approaching me. “Shew! It smells like someone’s been drinking nonstop in here! It smells like a big bar!

  I didn’t say, “I will quit drinking altogether if you rescue me from Gruel and take me to the metropolis you call Forty-Five, home of the fine Graywood Regional Memorial.” I said, “You’ve caught me on a day when I’ve spent all of it writing my memoir. I’ve been so caught up I haven’t even taken a shower.”

  Maura-Lee said, “Show him what’s in the coupon book.”

  I flipped through the ads quickly: Buy twelve two-by-fours and get the thirteenth free from 45 Lumber; buy one pizza and get another half price from 45 Pizza; buy 45 45s from 45 Records and get a free record player stylus; buy a wedding dress from 45 Debs and Brides and get a free veil, et cetera. I said, “I try not to go into Forty-Five. Fuck, I try not to go into downtown Gruel anymore.”

  Maura-Lee went sneaking off into rooms 9 through 12. Nancy Ruark jerked her head down and put on a sad-face look. “You can buy one of these for your friends, couldn’t you?”

  Let me go ahead and say how mean I know I can be. I’m not proud of this, but so what. Kill me. I said, “Are you one of those people who says your body’s your instrument?”

  Nancy Ruark pogoed up and down. “Thafs the first thing I say in Drama I: ‘Y’all have to understand that your body’s your instrument!
’ I think they say that down at Kayren’s House of Dance, too. I think dancers say their bodies are their instruments. I’m not sure who came up with it first.”

  I no longer had a hard-on for tiny, tiny ecstatic Nancy Ruark. I had minus erection. I owned less dick than Miss America. I said, “Well you don’t want to be a plagiarist, dear heart,” even though I pretty much labeled all actresses as plagiarists, every performance stealing from Bette Davis, the Hepburns, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Mae West, et al.

  “There’s a coupon for Gruel Bakery,” Nancy said, flipping through it. “Buy three Jesus crust loaves and get another for nothing. Here’s a second one: Buy twelve disciple rolls and get the thirteenth free.” She hopped up and down. Her blood could’ve been transfused into coma patients in order to bring them back to being alert. “Buy a can of Vienna sausages and get a free pack of crackers from Rufus Price’s Goatwagon store. Free chili on any cheeseburger from the Dixie Drive-In. All told, the coupon book offers over five hundred dollars in savings, all for twenty dollars.”

  Maura-Lee walked back in and said, “You aren’t writing. You’re doing anything but.”

  I blurted out, “A prostitute says her body’s her instrument, too. That’s what a prostitute says.”

  I think that Nancy Ruark burst out in real tears. You can never tell with community theater actresses, though. Nevertheless, it was enough to make me buy ten coupon books and remember how this particular scene in my life couldn’t show up in Novel: The Unlikely Life of Novel Akers, or whatever my title might be.

  20

  I KNOW THAT I called Roughhouse Billiards and got no answer. The same went for Gruel Drugs and Victor Dees’s army-navy store. No one in Gruel had purchased, or perhaps heard of, an answering machine. I paced in an inward gyre once, an outward gyre once, then north to south a hundred times before calling Maura-Lee’s house. No answer. Gruel Bakery. No answer. Jesus crust, I thought.

  I talked myself into believing that it didn’t take a city manager with special seminar certificates in supernatural communication to understand that everyone left in Gruel met up together somewhere past Gruel Jungle and atop Gruel Mountain in order to re-create the marching banter of a thousand unborn children killed at the hands of a taxidermist turned abortionist. They wanted to drive me out of town the same way that the lieutenant governor wanted me out of North Carolina, how snakes wanted St. Patrick out of Ireland, how Bekah and Gene Weeks wanted me off the planet.

  With the incessant stomping going on one ridge away, I came to realize that when Irby Cathcart flicked his cigarette ash he’d intended for it to hit my eye, which would cause me to veer and careen down the embankment toward Lake Between.

  Oh I figured it all out, buddy.

  I opened the door and yelled out, “You can’t scare me off, people. You ain’t going to scare off old Novel Akers this easy. This easily.”

  At one point in college I considered being a world religions major until I took a physics course from a professor who convinced us all that beings existed in other solar systems, and that they probably had thousands of religions, too, trying to explain life as they saw it certainly. This professor believed that we’d meet up with aliens before the year 2000, in a jovial, nonthreat-ening kind of way. Man, it was too much for me to grasp. I couldn’t even name off all the goddamn Protestant denominations, much less the religions of the universe. My roommate—a country boy from Haw River, North Carolina—said, “Maybe you should concentrate on American history. Then when the aliens come down you can tell them what they’ve missed. Stuff like when the government repealed that antidrinking law.”

  Perhaps I thought of all this some time in the motel, and that’s why I stuck wads of toilet paper in my ears to block out the marching Gruelites, and/or vengeful orphans, and/or confused fetuses—in addition to my memories. I must’ve unscrewed the cap of an Old Crow quart and poured four fingers in a motel bathroom glass a few too many times. I’m saying I probably poured it to the brim, pretty much. I looked at the wall, for the millionth time, forgetting that I had no clock, approached my typewriter, and clacked out, “My college roommate might’ve talked me out of Buddhism, indirectly.”

  That much I know for sure. It showed up, on the floor, written in cursive.

  I won’t say that my sister Joyce never wandered far from James, that she didn’t slide me over in my single bed, that she didn’t take her index finger and thumb to pinch my tiny divining rod and pump it up and down seven times before saying in her fake Irish accent, “You tell anyone about this and I’ll kill you.”

  It wasn’t a dream back then. And it wasn’t my mother, father, or James. Remember that my siblings weren’t but four years older than I, and since this all started happening prebreast Joyce, I could tell, even with my eyes shut, that her hands were softer than mine, or James’s, or Mom’s. Dad tended not to wear perfume. James always smelled of a weird sweat I later learned exuded from bipolar sufferers. Mom and Dad kept that Lysol/Life Savers/incense/marijuana smell. Joyce only smelled like Joyce. She slithered into my bedroom haphazardly, pumped my pecker enough for me to wake up and wonder why I wanted more, then steal away after making threats.

  It might’ve been the highlight of my life, of course. When I got older I said to myself, “It’s not like incest: She’s adopted.” When I got my parents’ individual diaries I said to myself, “It would be like only having my parents’ college friends’ daughter sneaking in every once in a while to check out my goober.”

  Joyce only put her mouth down there a few times, but that was right before she left home. I don’t think it affected me whatsoever.

  I heard nothing emanating from Gruel Jungle. Then I bandy-legged my way to the office, opened the door, plugged a stray brick doorstop against it, walked to the shed, found my hammer and chisel, got back the brick, fashioned five nice one-by-one-by-one-inch cubes out of it, got out my pen, turned the cubes into dice, took the glass out of the room, shook my homemade dice, and wondered how many times it would take to roll out five boxcars. Or five snake eyes.

  I never took a mathematics course in college. I took logic, but I never underwent one of those probability and statistics classes. It didn’t take much brains, though, to figure out that one die had a one-in-six chance to roll a six, and that the other four dice had that same chance. When it all got multiplied out—as I spent a few hours figuring—a person should roll five of the same numbers every 7,776 rolls.

  Evidently it could’ve taken me more times than that. I spent at least four successive days in that room. I got up once and wrote in my notebook, “Rolling dice isn’t anything that could be labeled mathematically pure.”

  I made sure not to bastardize standard written English and, more importantly, to tell the truth.

  Lookee here at what I know happened one day: I got distracted writing because I heard two people talking outside the room in accents that made Victor and Jeff the owner come off as Pennsylvania Dutch. I peeked out the blind and saw a U-Haul truck parked lengthwise about a foot from my building.

  “Sorry about all the noise,” the man said when I came out of the office door. I propped it open with my computer. “The dag-gum truck’s transmission seems have mind its own.”

  “And the muffler,” said the woman. “It seems think it’s machine gun previous life.”

  They were both dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts that advertised Rex and Randi’s Reaths. It seemed to be intentional, the spelling. They were leathery-skinned people aged anywhere from thirty to forty-five, though Randi looked incredibly toned. I noticed that the rental truck held a Florida license plate, but that didn’t mean anything. I said, “You need some water for the radiator?”

  They looked at me like I slithered out of Gruel Jungle. I wore boxer shorts, no shirt, a cardigan sweater, and some large high-heeled shoes that one of the near-writers left by accident. I think a man left the shoes, but that’s another theory. My entire defense concerned trying out anything that would bring forth more than one sente
nce per room for my autobiography. One of the how-to textbooks said a man should always wear a dress when writing from a female point of view. This fellow also believed you had to rob a bank in order to write a novel about a teller’s everyday fear. I wore a baseball cap from Upstate Waste, a little present from Victor Dees back about room 11.

  “I wanted a phone but don’t know now,” the man said. He pulled his hood up. “Randi, open up back get me socket set.” I held my arms up and said, “Oh! I normally don’t dress like this. It’s a little joke I play with people coming through these parts.” I went back inside, threw on some Dickies, and kicked off the shoes.

  “See? You can trust me now. I’m normal.”

  Randi pulled the U-Haul’s door back down. I barely spied stack after stack of wreaths. Rex took three steps toward me as I approached. He stuck out his hand and said, “We’re not from around here. Sometimes you hear stories about these small southern towns. These back roads.”

  I nodded. Randi handed Rex a toolbox. She might’ve arched her back, blown her blond bangs back, pulled her T-shirt all the way up to mop her brow, and asked if I would mind scrubbing her bare backside with a sea sponge. She might’ve mouthed, “We’re brother and sister, not husband and wife. Fate, destiny, and karma have landed me here to meet you, oh great autobiographer.” I said, “There’s a phone inside. Where are y’all from?”

  “Middle of orange groves in the middle of Florida, someways south of Orlando and someways north of Miami,” Rex said.

  I looked at Randi and said, “I’m Novel. I’m writing my life story inside,” as if that would impress anyone.