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  Randi said, “Hey.” Rex got up on the front bumper and stuck half his body over the motor. Randi might’ve mouthed, “Go slam the hood down and kill Rex. At least knock him out. Me and you could have some fun on one them Vibro-beds.”

  Rex yelled out from beneath the hood, “Open the back back up and see if Mr. Novel might be interested in a wreath.” He said, “I think it’s only a loose belt. Loose belt and a time chain. Time chain and clogged carburetor. Clogged carburetor and about ten other things I can fix with one socket, a pair of Channellocks, and a screwdriver.”

  Man, I thought, this guy can list some things. I made a point to make lists when I got back in the room, maybe list everything I knew right on the wall. Randi said, “We gone lose our load we don’t get New York by Thursday, sell it all at once.”

  I said, “I don’t really need a wreath. I’m not planning on celebrating Christmas. Wreaths kind of spook me in the first place. I don’t think anyone’s planning to die in here, you know, how they put wreaths on the front door.”

  Randi kicked off her leather clogs, unbuttoned her pants, and shimmied out of them. She wore no underwear, not even a thong! And she owned no tan line, which meant she truly lived in Florida buck naked, or visited one of those fluorescent salons almost daily. I never understood tanning salons thriving between Texas and North Carolina, between Florida and mid-Tennessee.

  Randi began a series of gymnastic maneuvers that involved the U-Haul’s back bumper and the roadside stripe of Old Old Augusta Road. I watched her cartwheel naked straight up into Gruel Jungle, up Gruel Mountain, on the carpet path I’d rolled out sometime before room 12.

  Or maybe she reopened the back and said, “We got pine wreaths, palm frond wreaths, palmetto wreaths, orange twig wreaths, lemon tree wreaths, and kudzu wreaths.” In a lower voice she said, “Are you a smoker? Rex and I kind of have to be careful. Behind the wreaths we got about nine thousand cartons of cigarettes. All-flavors Marlboro, all-flavors Camel, all-flavors Winston, all-flavors Virginia Slims, Kool, Doral, and even some special-order Picayunes, Larks, everything you heard of.”

  “We even got Tareyton!” Rex yelled out “L&M—you don’t see those every day.”

  “Up in New York City, they pay twice much what we pay down here. Gas money in a U-Haul ain’t great, but what can you do?”

  I wanted to say, “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck,” but one of those books warned to avoid clichés whenever possible. I tried to multiply nine thousand by twenty bucks, or by forty. But I quit trying when I remembered how I’d taken logic, how cigarettes in Florida probably cost more than twenty a carton, the average going rate in both North or South Carolina. I said, “You all are transporting cocaine from Point A to Point B. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I’m not still wet behind the ears. North Carolina’s the state to buy cheap cigarettes.”

  “Wrong-o,” said Rex. “Show him, Randi. We might have to stay here and I don’t want him thinking we’re drug smugglers.”

  Randi said, “Fuck. Excuse my language.” She raised the back again, and started stacking wreaths away from the real haul.

  Rex said, “There’s something called import-export. We get our cigarettes in North Carolina. You’re right. Up in New York we get real bagels and bialys and knishes. We bring those back down to Florida. You may have heard or read how a bunch of New Yorkers live down Miami way, and they miss the old days. Then we pick up wreaths, or seashells, anything. We do what we got to do. Today we had to make a detour from Asheville down this way, ’cause we heard about a mighty nosy highway patrolman on the interstate.”

  I said, “Goddamn. My father used to—”

  “I’m betting this fixes it,” Rex said, tightening a nut.

  “Hey, there’s a woman in town who makes some nice authentic bagels. And some kind of bread she drops lamb’s blood into and calls Jesus crust.”

  “Get in, Randi. Is the back closed back up? Close the back and let’s try this out. We need to get.”

  I thought, Don’t start, don’t start, don’t start. I thought, I could deal with Rex and Randi as friends. What Gruel needed I thought, were more scam artists. Any underdeveloped town could use such new citizens.

  At the time I didn’t know what really went on in Gruel, understand.

  Rex and Randi didn’t wave or throw a wreath out like some dog biscuit to a roadside stray. I still stood at the edge of my property, looking down Old Old Augusta when Maura-Lee and Nancy Ruark drove by, going maybe seventy miles an hour. They yelled. They hooted. I might’ve heard, “My voice is my instrument,” from one of them.

  A couple hours later, back in my high heels, I admitted to myself that Randi never acted all supermodel. I got out my notebook and must’ve written, “Sometimes, even now, I don’t know what I should fear.”

  I’ve never purported expertise in the realms of the paranormal, science fiction movies, parallel universes, or abnormal psychology, but I would be willing to bet that a government panel of behaviorists might conclude that a town inhabited mainly by ex-college arts professors and ex-artists across the board can only result in a foot-dragging, wild-eyed, misshapen-haired populace that roamed around shouting non sequiturs.

  My belief in communication with the dead began in front of the Black Mountain Candy Store one afternoon, maybe the summer between sixth and seventh grades. My parents and James and Joyce and I had just come back from Rash Creek where we’d sifted through about two tons of river grit and gravel in order to steal out a half ounce of flake and dust. This was a dry, dry season, and what nuggets held fast below the Rash Creek current couldn’t have been pried out with Caterpillar scoops and biblical floods.

  I had about three quarters to my name and wanted a paper bag of Squirrel Nut Zippers and Mary Janes. This ghost man stood two feet from the doorway and said, “The dentist is not in. The dentist only works from afar.”

  A polite and mannerly child, I said, “Excuse me.” I didn’t say it with a question mark. I meant, I’m going inside the store and you’re in the way, geezer.

  “The dentist is not in. The dentist only works from afar.”

  As much as I knew there were no dentists in Black Mountain. My parents took us all the way into Asheville once or twice a year. So in a way zombie-man spoke the truth. I said, “Yessir,” and tried to squeeze past him.

  “I have come from afar myself, young man, in order to save you from a life of pain,” he said. The zombie didn’t wear a halo like an angel, or tattered, dirty brown clothes like a normal walking dead person. No, oddly, he sported a painter’s smock, a beret, and chinos. I can’t remember for certain now, but I think he had high-top Converse All-Stars on his feet He hadn’t shaved in a week, though. And one eye wandered like a North Pole compass.

  Listen, two or three grown adults walked right through this supposed apparition into the candy store. And they came out, armed with Russell Stover mixed boxes, seeing as Father’s Day neared. Nowadays I understand that I only suffered a temporary astigmatism. I said, “Hey. I got seventy-five cents.”

  The man shrugged. He said, “If you had a dollar and put it in the bank, you’d have well over a thousand dollars by the time you retired. If you had a hundred dollars, you’d be a ten thou-sandaire at age sixty-five, Novel.”

  That made no sense to me, but then again I didn’t understand prime interest rates and had no clue in regards to mathematical options. But I knew enough to say, “How you know my name?”

  He said, “Go on, now. You must leave the premises if you know what’s best. Go on!” He stomped his zombie foot. I ran like hell without tripping—which might happen in the movies—thus proving I did have some athletic ability.

  Let me say that for an entire year I encountered such ghosts, always at the candy store, movie house, other convenience store, and a place that sold dirty magazines in the back. These men stood in front of our few dress shops and women’s shoe stores, too.

  I took it seriously. I put my extra change in Black Mountain Bank a
nd Trust. How do you think I have enough money to sit on my butt and almost write my memoir, outside of Bekah’s “generosity” and my leftover savings from writing specious lieutenant governor speeches?

  My mother, as far as I could tell, never bought a new dress or wore shoes, except the galoshes during gold mining adventures. Somehow I understood how that image would make me a better person later in life—kind of like it would for a man from, say, Arkansas who dreamed of making it in the world of politics.

  21

  ONE OF THE So You Want to Be a Writer! texts I kept in the office offered this advice: Go into a bare room, close your eyes, pick a season, and remember scenes that occurred for you at ages five, ten, fifteen, twenty, and so on.

  Give me a break. I picked winter and thought sleet, sleet, sleet—at age twenty I had a roommate from Florida and an eight ball of coke.

  I picked fall and thought leaves, leaves, leaves—at age twenty I took a course on the Civil War first semester, and my girlfriend at the time said to me, “If you continue not planning to make anything of yourself I’m going to leave you faster than body mass left Andersonville prisoners.” It’s true.

  I don’t think I ever tried spring or summer. More than likely I counted cracks in the wall, ceiling tiles, the frequency of drips in whichever bathroom sink. I listened for specters, heard none, and opened the door, even at night. “The next car that comes down Old Old Augusta Road,” I said to myself constantly, “I’m going to write furiously whatever comes into my head until the next car comes by. Then I’ll look at what I have, find an idea in there, and go with it.” I said to myself, “That’s it! I should’ve done this back in room 12.”

  Maura-Lee came over once and said, “We took a vote and decided that we’re almost kind of worried about you out here,” she said. “Over at Roughhouse Billiards we drew cue sticks and I lost. I got that damn fifteen-ouncer. So here I am. We’re worried about you. Jeff’s decided to donate a week’s worth of tip money to get you help at Graywood Regional Memorial. They got a man there. And a pretty decent rehab center program up on the third floor.”

  I couldn’t believe it, of course. I said, “I know this trick. Y’all just want me out of here so you can buy the old Gruel Inn from my ex-wife for, I don’t know, a couple dollars. You think I don’t know how South Carolina’s legislature will soon vote casino gambling into existence, and the Gruel Inn would make for a wonderful resort?” I stood up. Maura-Lee shook her head side to side slowly. “Or a tattoo parlor. The legislature’s going to legalize tattooing one day. This place would make a great parlor.” I sat back down.

  Maura-Lee said, “Damn you, Novel.” She looked like she was about to cry. “I don’t think there’s been a secret between us. So I don’t think you’re so out of it to know that I’ve almost loved you ever since enrolling in the Sneeze ’n’ Tone program, you know? Even when I finally understood that you weren’t attracted to me, I tried to hook you up with my friend Nancy just so you’d stay in the area. That’s how I am—pathetic! Maybe this is just the yeast talking, but by god I can’t watch you dwindle away to nothing trying to remember why your life turned into such a pitiful existence. You have to get out of here fast. Come back to Bekah’s parents’ old house with me. I rode a bicycle built for two all the way out here.”

  Looking back on all of this, the only terms that come to mind are “reverse psychology” and “child psychology.” But I didn’t know it at the time. Maura-Lee pulled it off well, I’ll give her that. She went on and on in her monologue, by the way. I could see how Nancy Ruark affected my friend Maura-Lee Snipes. I said, “I’m serious. You should wear a helmet. I know there’s no traffic, ever, out this way, but you might have to swerve from some ghosts, and then you’d fall over in a ditch, and then you might break an arm. Next thing you know you’re at Graywood Regional Memorial hospital getting it set and you die from the Ebola virus.”

  Maura-Lee wrenched her neck a few times. “You’re in some kind of fantasy, Novel.”

  I might’ve handed her my bottle of Old Crow—which, I’d like to fake believe, I’d not touched for days on end. Maura-Lee threw the bottle up against the wall with such force that I would need a five-gallon bucket of compound to patch the dent. Luckily, though, the Old Crow people used the thickest, best glass possible, and my quart only bounced and skittered across the cement floor. I said, “Taming of the Shrew! Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. A Streetcar Named Desire!” I tried to think of other plays wherein crazy female characters got violent. I said, “Bekah!”

  I would like to say that Maura-Lee broke down, that I held her there at my nearly unused computer, typewriter, and Mead composition book until she settled down. “A good, happy ending to a scene,” one of the textbooks points out, “involves two star-crossed lovers either kissing each other, or killing themselves.”

  Maura-Lee, obviously, had taken private lessons from Nancy Ruark. Before I could even offer up one or two coupon booklets as some kind of booby prize Maura-Lee’s tears dried up, she walked out backwards of whatever room I had recently settled in, and she mounted her bicycle built for two. She said, “Later on, when people from town ask, you have to admit that I tried. Right? I tried to get you out of here.”

  I said, “I’m sorry that my mission’s to have a mission.”

  “We’re straight on this.”

  I said, “Okay. Yeah, I’ll back you up on whatever you need.”

  Maura-Lee pulled up her camouflaged shirt and showed me her no-bra tits. She said, “Are you queer?”

  I got a good look and conjured up all self-restraint ever possible. “You know that I’m going to have to write about all of this. It’s an autobiography. It’s about everything that’s ever happened to me.”

  Maura-Lee said, “I think you have some problems.”

  Then, as far as I recall, she rode off alone. She sang a happy song—at least that’s what I planned to write later. I would start off with, “There were women in my life who didn’t leave unsatisfied,” which was a blatant Lie.

  In the New Journalism, according to my books, exaggeration wasn’t not permitted.

  My next-to-last lieutenant governor didn’t need a speechwriter when he got voted out of office. He went back to cattle ranching. Moo-moo-moo—thafs about all I’d had to say for him. I called up Jeff the owner and said, “You come over here and say all that to my face, I’ll kick your ass,” because I had it in my mind that he’d set me up somehow, and said some things otherwise behind my back.

  He said, “You and whose army?”

  You and whose army? Who said that anymore? You and whose army? I said, “Me and my army of one,” like that.

  Well in a weird way, looking back on it all, I got my wish. Jeff the owner closed down his Roughhouse Billiards. He showed up within thirty minutes armed with Larry, Barry, two cue sticks, fifteen balls, a cue ball, an armload of bricks, two old Texas Instruments hand calculators, a roll of nickels, two six-packs of PBR, and quartered oak logs. Jeff said, “You sounded a little depressed on the phone. I thought the boys and me might come out here and try some trick shots on the cement floor.”

  I know that I didn’t daydream or fantasize this much.

  Barry walked all the way down to the last room. He yelled to Larry, “It hasn’t changed much, has it? I didn’t think I’d ever stop back in here again.”

  I looked at Larry. He peered into room 1, but you could tell he was scared. I said, “Do y’all know the real truth about this place? Y’all know that I was a history major, right? I need to know about history.”

  Larry pointed down the long, long room-dividing corridor I had made. He set his balls on the photocopier. Barry yelled back our way, “We’re your brother-in-laws.” He yelled again, “We’re your brothers-in-law.”

  Larry said to me, “If these walls could hock,” I swear to God.

  Jeff the owner looked at me and smiled. He held his shoulders up toward his ears and squinched his forehead. “You’d’ve known all this if you’d’ve been
friendlier to my daily customers. And not threatened me.”

  Barry yelled out to ask me if I had a bowling ball to roll from one end to the other. I said that I didn’t. He remarked that it might be something fun to do, if I ever found time to goof off.

  I made a point to say how I never goofed off, that I was all work and no relaxation, that I would be finishing up my long-awaited memoir before the publishing world knew what hit them.

  Then, I’m afraid, I starting humming, “Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy . . .” like a fool.

  So something oddly illegal—between child labor and flat-out slavery—occurred at the Gruel Inn back in the old days. Pregnant unmarried teenaged girls came in, delivered babies, and gave them up to Bekah’s parents who, as far as I could figure out, either took care of the kids or sold them off to childless couples in Kansas, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska, and every other state that required farmhands. Their favorites remained in Gruel, according to Barry and Larry the painters who relentlessly tried trick-shot cue-stick eight-ball eight-rails before knocking a shot of bourbon onto the five before going into the side pocket. Rebekah, my wife, for example. She got to live in the Big House, among the deer and antelope heads.

  “I can’t believe that your wife never let on about all this,” Jeff the owner said there with the trick-shot experts he brought to my motel. “Nice marriage. To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer. In secrets and in more secrets.”

  I don’t know why it seemed necessary for me to say, “Bekah thought I only drove around with that van full of snakes. She didn’t know how I really worked in an advisory capacity to the lieutenant governor. It’s not like I had to sign any kind of oath with the state government.”

  Barry and Larry left, saying they had work to finish up. Jeff said, “Oh. Well that makes it better. Two people keeping gigantic secrets from each other makes it okay.” He poured tomato juice in a bathroom glass halfway. “I didn’t bring eggs. I figured you couldn’t take eggs.” Jeff topped off the six-ounce glass with warm PBR, then plopped one Alka-Seltzer in. He handed it to me. “Hold this.”