Novel Read online

  This might all be, as they say, “exaggerated somewhat.” This story of my birth and welcome to western North Carolina may be apocryphal. My birth certificate proves that I got born nine months to the day after Kennedy’s election. Black Mountain College had officially closed its doors in 1956 when—this is my theory—students and teachers alike received telepathic brainwash radio waves of some sort administered by both J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy. Then the legends of the art world quit performing daily chores necessary to operate a co-op institution of higher learning.

  So don’t quote me on anything. Joyce, James, and I were schooled in a first-through-eighth-grade setting, then high school, among both local kids and the illegitimate children of fuck-prone ex-BMC professors and students alike. I should mention that my parents—again, both pianists—may or may not have undergone hallucinatory episodes while performing a Berlioz piece in southwestern Arizona as guests of a local music professor-shaman who cultivated peyote long before the Grateful Dead took to touring. According to my mother, she and Dad simultaneously had epiphanies that rain forests died for the sake of pianos, et cetera, et cetera.

  Me, I’ve come to learn that, more than likely, they got plain bored and tired. They got to where they could play “Flight of the Bumblebee” faster than anyone else and thought, What next? They moved back to their adopted home, took in the orphans, found other jobs and avocations, and spent midmorning to late afternoon wondering when someone would compose a challenging piece of music.

  Then they came outside to yell us in for dinner as always, “James! Joyce! Novel!”

  It took me years to understand why our neighbors—ex-colleagues of my parents—yelled “Ulysses!” or “Finnegans Wake!” or “Read something else!” as my brother, sister, and I ran crazy for the front door, heading for our goulash.

  Now, I have another theory about how I, Novel Akers, went off to college, received my degree in history, got into four Ph.D. programs, then quit after a couple years. It’s not in the genes, per se, like how maybe I learned everything there was to know about America’s past and only needed to read the morning newspaper, Time, Newsweek, and the Onion in order to keep up with what future generations would view as “history.” It has to do with Santayana and that whole “those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it” dictum. Listen, you can’t expect all persons in the United States to understand and value what truly happened to their ancestors. Think of most Alabamans! So it’s going to be repeated regardless, no matter what we should know of, say, trickle-down economics; attacking poorer nations without thinking about how their inhabitants might later detest America; allowing industries to expel waste in the air and water; and trickle-down economics, trickle-down economics, trickle-down economics. If it’s going to happen anyway, then why bother studying up to stop it? Me, I’m waiting for people to start turning into pillars of salt. You’d think it would’ve happened by now.

  But I’m getting off subject. I’ll get to life in Gruel, but it might be worthwhile to know that adoptees James and Joyce, both four years my elder—though, somehow, not fraternal twins, or identical twins, or weird six-months-apart twins like Irby and Bekah—hated my parents and me. They never showed it outwardly much, like a good born-after-1980 kid will do. I’m talking these odd Irish orphans stewed.

  Here’s my prognosis:

  “Novel” means “new.” They didn’t like that one bit. It’s also, of course, a long-ass piece of fiction, and fiction is only a fancy lie. My parents—I figured this out two minutes after studying symbolism in eighth grade—understood their supposed infertility to be a lie. I’m convinced that they were so drunk and stoned throughout the Eisenhower administration that they probably forgot to screw, but I never got around to asking them.

  Anyway, James and Joyce were stereotypical Irish adoptee siblings. You should’ve seen them throw rocks! Man, from seventy yards away my brother and sister could nail anyone wearing protective headgear and holding a shield. Luckily there weren’t any motorcycle cops in Black Mountain when I grew up. On Halloween sometimes, though, trick-or-treaters dressed up like baseball catchers, and the next thing you knew old Joyce and James followed kids from a distance of two houses back. My brother and sister dumped out their candy bars in order to make space for cue-ball-sized granite orbs in their pillowcases.

  Needless to say, James and Joyce didn’t make friends and endear themselves to the community. Most kids our age took private music lessons, except for voice, or were tutored after school in the art barn by leftover Black Mountain graduates. I never mentioned it to my dead brother-in-law Irby, but I could’ve offered him banjo lessons for free. Or dulcimer, steel guitar, enough fiddle to play “Turkey in the Straw,” and Jew’s harp. My older brother took up bassoon for two reasons: no one else did, and the instrument itself made for a better projectile. Joyce went to art class and made Jackson Pollock look like a portraitist.

  And then, years later, they took off running. The last time I saw James he wasn’t five-six and weighed maybe 120. He wouldn’t join the high school track team, but ran the mile in 4:05 and a 10K in thirty minutes flat. Joyce was the same at eighteen, with a three-mile time of sixteen minutes. On the night of their graduation they approached Mom and Dad and me. I’m pretty sure now that they practiced their announcement, which—imagine a fast, lilting Irish brogue here—went “Ya bollocks ya, you only loved little Novel-boy, and let me say, ya bollocks ya, a sane man moves to the shore for fish, doesn’t drive daily all the way to salted water. No, a sane man moves to the mountains for apples, peaches, and moonshine, ya bollocks ya. Even in Belfast the parents don’t send their kids off to factories fourteen hours a day. Ya cunts ya.”

  I barely understood what they said. Their accents never came up in normal sibling conversations. Maybe I never was a great listener, though.

  And that was it. From what any of us could tell, James and Joyce turned around outside of our high school’s front lawn, ran all the way to New York, crossed the Atlantic, and joined the Irish national Olympic team.

  My mother said, “Our children don’t seem to appreciate us, Ted. Why would they say such things?”

  “I told them they didn’t need special running shoes. Look at them go in those regular dress shoes. And Joyce in high heels.”

  Well I knew why they would say such things and run off, but I remained silent. I only foresaw my having to double up summerly work with James gone, plus maybe take over Joyce’s female duties.

  Here: Years earlier, after Dad decided that he couldn’t kill another Steinway, he decided to buy a used U-Haul truck, refrigerate the back end, and bring shrimp from the coasts of North and South Carolina back to the mountains. Meanwhile, Mom and Joyce picked apples and peaches, and garnered white lightning to take back to some wild, inebriated fruit-eating people living on the coast. Oh, it was a great isosceles triangle of an excursion that never stopped. But we only had to work with Dad or Mom June 1 to August 31, Labor Day weekend, Thanksgiving holiday, December 15 to January 15, Memorial Day vacation, and any other days that my father got special orders worthy of keeping us out of school. Many of the Black Mountain College leftovers and reprobates didn’t eat beef, chicken, pork, deer, coon, possum, or potted meat. None of them knew how to tie a fly or cast a line, so they couldn’t wait to pay Dad for what bounties he brought back iced and costing twice the going rate.

  And those poor scurvied fucks outposted on Ocracoke wouldn’t know an apple from a lemon. If it wasn’t an oyster or crab, by god, it was a fruit or vegetable. My parents made a killing, I understand, looking back on the weird operation. Sometimes we hauled otherwise goods. Sometimes we picked up hitchhikers for gas money. And sometimes my father let James out in the middle of Highway 17 and said we’d meet up with him some twenty miles up the road, usually at some unmarked beer joint.

  “Do you have any interests besides dulcimer and steel pedal, Novel?” my father asked me more than once on these trips.

  “I’m not all that intere
sted in either, really,” I would say. “Are we ever going to move somewhere else?”

  My father smoked nonfiltered Picayunes, something he picked up while playing with the New Orleans Symphony, he said. “I don’t mind you playing football. I don’t mind you becoming a lawyer.” My father often drank during these family business outings. “Be honest with me.”

  I said, “I can tell you what I don’t want to do for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be in a loveless, make-believe marriage.” I had been reading a fascinating exposé on FDR. My father thought I made an allusion—a word I picked up then in the seventh grade.

  I didn’t want to be a distance runner, highway construction worker, litter control worker, or botanist, I learned after Dad let me off on the berm—after he told me to think before I spoke—to meet James at the tavern in Rockingham. Or Apex, Climax, High Point, wherever.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” my brother said more than once. “Ha. Tell Dad you want to be a penis, like him.” James would have already found ways to talk some bartender into giving over two Pabsts by the time I showed up unaware that most parents didn’t let kids off in the middle of a two-lane road that intersected tobacco fields.

  My father always said, “I read the want ads. Don’t be a philosophy major. There’s never a ‘philosopher needed’ section in the classifieds.” He said, “Making people laugh might be the thing to do. There aren’t enough people out there making us laugh.”

  I tried to explain all of this to Rebekah, even before she became Bekah. My upbringing came up when we met in Chapel Hill, and at my parents’ odd and fearful funeral of sorts, and when Rebekah matriculated to her position at the collection agency. I said, “My father always thought I should be a comedian. He said I made people laugh.”

  My wife never said anything about how she needed to make people sneeze.

  I got the job driving the Viper-Mobile soon thereafter. Maybe some people laughed. Maybe my wife. I know this: Either James or Joyce—more than likely James—pushed me off an overlook one time in the mountains back when Mom and Dad thought it necessary to see, hear, and delineate every waterfall in western North Carolina should we ever wander off confused. I hit my head and stayed unconscious for three days after James feigned the hero for saving me. Pretty much most of ages four through eighteen got lost because of this one episode. For me it’s only dulcimer lessons, shrimp, conniving adopted siblings, more shrimp, a crazy visual artist who spoke in a Dutch accent, a supposed composer who stood around silent for minutes at a time. Driving. High expectations because of my name. I can’t be sure, but I think I woke up in the middle of the night—maybe 1969—and overheard Joyce and James huddled in the corner, talking about bomb making. Not long thereafter, I heard Mom and Dad making promises: no more kids, no more lighters/matches/fertilizer/household cleaners in the house.

  3

  THE GRUEL INN hadn’t operated since the 1950s at the latest. You know how the interstate highway system perfected by Lyndon B. Johnson destroyed motels and diners along Route 66, or Highway 1, or 301 between mid-South Carolina and northern Florida, or 29? Well those aforementioned American byways, when first constructed, caused the Gruel Inn to fold, even though Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Charles Darwin had stayed there. William Tecumseh Sherman reportedly so feared the myth of the Gruel Inn and the wrath of its owners that he veered away toward Columbia.

  I believed exactly zero of this story, of course, but by god the citizens of Gruel, Forty-Five, and most of Grayfuckingwood County found it to be what some psychiatrists and scholars might call a “raison d’être.”

  “I want you to trust me on everything that happens from here on out,” Bekah reiterated when the final post-funeral goer left the family visitation with her Tupperware container of noodles Buenos Noches. “I don’t want to reach retirement age and realize that I didn’t follow my dream.” Bekah went on and on. We sat in the kitchen of her parents’ house. I got stuck with “to dream the impossible dream” flaring over and over in my mind—which is going to happen to you now, sorry—until I glanced around above the cabinets and saw a row of jackalopes. Sherrill Cathcart followed his dreams, too, I supposed, unless antlered rabbits roamed these parts.

  I said, “I’m here for you. I’ve had some dreams of my own.” First off, I thought it would be cool to maintain my own reptile farm—the popularity of those guys on TV had skyrocketed on PBS, Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, and a couple of the cooking shows. But more than anything—call it middle-aged crises, and a fear that my life in this solar system was meaningless unless the basis of a meaningful existence consisted of spewing gases out into the atmosphere upon death—I felt obligated to live up to my name. Or at least my first name. Hell, I figured I could write an autobiography or memoir, call it Novel, and get readers buying both ways. Or I could write a regular novel—say, Come Take a Ride in the Viper-Mobile—which would have “A Novel” below the title, then my name. Oh, it would be what behaviorists and advertising executives might rightly call “subliminal.”

  Bekah bought the Inn for a dollar from Gruel township, from what I understood at the time, with the stipulation that she would refurbish and renovate the place into a respectable building in accord with Gruel’s remaining businesses on the square: Victor Dees’s Army-Navy Surplus store, Roughhouse Billiards, Gruel Drugs and adjacent Gruel Home Medical Supply, and so on. Well, not so much so on: Most of Gruel proper’s square died right around my birth, from what I understood. Gruel BBQ and Pig-Petting Zoo thrived out on Old Old Greenville Road, just north of the town limits, but that was it.

  The Gruel Inn, too, stood two miles outside of town to the south on Old Old Augusta Road. Here’s how daring the youth of Gruel had been over the five-decade period of a vacant, vandal-ready brick establishment, a slight one-wing building set so close to the road a child who got his two arms clipped off in a thresher still could’ve thrown a rock or bottle and damaged a window, could’ve ridden by in a passenger seat with spray paint and graffitied the place up: Outside of a bad roof and water damage in rooms 4 through 12, the place appeared to be a lifelike set for a 1940s Hollywood production that involved two buddies on a road trip who encounter maybe a couple hundred zombies.

  I need to point out, though, that across the road stood a rain forest, desert, oasis, mountain, and part of Lake Between. Any blindfolded and kidnapped fool, flown around in a helicopter until confusion set in vis-à-vis time and space, then plopped down on the outskirts of Gruel, might announce, “So this is Costa Rica—land of the most diverse ecosystem on the planet!” But then he or she would hear gunshots within a minute, and the ruse would end, seeing as Costa Rica owns no standing army.

  “I want to go on record as saying I would rather have Mom and Irby here with us today. I’m fully aware that I couldn’t’ve started up the Gruel Sneeze ’n’ Tone hadn’t Momma’s oxygen tank blown up. Lord knows your driving snakes around Charlotte wouldn’t have ever given me the money.” Bekah offered this little speech at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, a month after setting everything in motion. Here’s who attended the festive event:

  Novel.

  I stretched the ribbon across the front office threshold and Bekah cut it in half with giant gag scissors she’d bought at an ex-beautician’s yard sale down in Forty-Five. I thought about the afterlife, and how I would do my best to find and kill Irby and Vudge Ina Cathcart should I track them down.

  I’ll give Bekah this: She researched allergies and irritants and the medical phenomenon of sneezing. Not to go backwards, but on or around 1996 something caused Bekah to start a two-week sneezing binge. She couldn’t look into sunlight or fluorescent light, of course, but her seizures didn’t slack off in pure dark, either. Achoo, achoo, achoo, achoo—four a minute. Two hundred forty per hour. Fifty-seven sixty in a day, eastern standard time.

  She barely ate. We went to a doctor and his expert analysis went something like, “Did you accidentally inhale some black pepper?” That doctor called an allergist who stuck pins in my w
ife, everything from goldenrod to Charlie perfume. Nothing. The allergist—another Phi Beta Kappa genius—asked me, “Is there anything different in your household? Like a cat?”

  “A cat!” I said. I popped my forehead like Laurel and Hardy. “Rebekah, this man is a savior.” I promise on a stack of Hoyles that the doctor smiled to himself job well done. “Last week we took in a cheetah. It runs around so fast I hardly ever see it. It’s cheetah dander, Rebekah. Thank you, Doctor. Thank you. When we get home we’ll prop the door open and hope that thing runs away.”

  I took my wife out of there, musk of chimpanzee or whatever still stuck in her forearm. She held my arm like a blind woman might. She kept her eyes closed and mouth open—by this time she didn’t even attempt to cover her face, so I had to keep a handkerchief out in order to stymie the flypaper effect of hanging mucus from her nostrils.

  I’d like to say that my wife ended up allergic to lawyers, bill collectors, the Department of Social Services, the Social Security Administration, and the pathetically inaccurate judicial system—she’d recently been named “Debt Collector of the Year” for the state of North Carolina, again—but that wasn’t the case. There have been documented historical accounts of how one spouse became inexplicably allergic to the other. That wasn’t the case, though, in the Akers’s household. As sudden and unexpected and inexorable as her attacks started, that’s how they stopped. Me, I don’t remember it all that well because my favorite blacksnake—which I’d brought home to recuperate from an infection triggered by an overconfident, attacking mouse that caused the snake to secrete a strange milky substance at the end of its alimentary canal—finally died in its cage, right there at the foot of our bed.