Novel Read online

  Panning for gold wasn’t the easy, scientific, rent-a-sluice kind of operation it is today. This was 1965 to 1975 or thereabouts. A lot of people think my parents either chewed tobacco or gnawed leg bones nonstop, what with their tiny, miniature, newborn-baby’s-fingernails-sized teeth. But I say no emphatically.

  Here’s the possible opening to either my autobiography or novel: The neighbors didn’t know how my parents tested possible gold nuggets sieved out of Rash Creek with their molars.

  There.

  Joyce and James and I learned early on how and where to shovel. We filled five-gallon drywall buckets and lugged them to our parents’ makeshift troughs onshore. We poured in the contents—mostly mud, mica, road gravel, smooth stones worthy of skipping across calm lakes near where rich kids camped summertime. My parents fished out the rubies, emeralds, sapphires—plus anything that wrongly resembled a Cherokee arrowhead—and gold. They somehow made enough money to pay off my hospital bills after James pushed me off the overhang. My parents could’ve put me through college had I not gotten some scholarship money, work-study grants, a loan, and so on. Once Joyce and James stroked back to their supposed birthplace my parents bought some extra land near Grandfather Mountain, built a series of tree houses for them and their new birder friends, and invested in high-tech binoculars and powerfully lensed cameras.

  The last time I saw my folks, as a matter of fact, was when they said something about wanting to see a rare, rare purple sandpiper, or a rare, rare yellow-breasted chat, or a near-extinct American pipit, or some kind of lesser nighthawk. They needed to take a field trip down to south Florida in order to witness such ornithological oddities. According to both wildlife rangers and deputy sheriffs, a slither of alligators evidently wanted to see a mythical pair of humans down there in the Everglades.

  It’s the truth. It made the newspapers. And now it’s on the Internet if you Google pianists/Akers/ornithology/severed limbs/overhead Miami weather crew/Cuban refugees found hiding/American pipit/binocular straps used for tourniquets/Black Mountain College/James, Joyce, Novel/“Flight of the Bumblebee”/the sunshine state.

  Look it up. Let me know if you get a “Your current search did not match any documents.” I’ll kill someone. I’ll go find Google and beat the shit out of whoever collects info.

  Or exchange “American pipit” with “Lesser nighthawk” and see what happens.

  I’m okay. Back to the mining venture: When it wasn’t worthwhile to head east for shrimp, et cetera, my parents and I hit the Second Broad River, creeks off Thermal City Gold Mine, Little Meadow, and all the Rash tributaries. Mostly we showed up two days after floodwaters peaked. Then my brother, sister, and I dug two or three feet below the beds of these shin-deep waterways, brought up our rocks, and hoped. Word was some fellow unearthed a seventeen-pound nugget once, but my parents might have only belittled us. I think the largest chunk any of us ever found wasn’t much bigger than a brook trout’s eyeball. My father said more than once, though, “We don’t need a seventeen-pound nugget if y’all excavate 544 half-ounce chinks.”

  I think it was James who always coughed out, “Racist!” when my father made this claim. Or Joyce said it. Or me.

  Maura-Lee Snipes went home to Raleigh or Columbia, sold off what she didn’t need, packed a long U-Haul, and returned to Gruel in order to unintentionally close down the Gruel Sneeze ’n’ Tone spa. I’m here to say that we would’ve closed anyway. Bekah would’ve gone more nuts and killed a high-pitched sneezer within the month. Or she would’ve killed me had I been more persistent in keeping our marriage intact.

  Through Paula Purgason—a woman who scoffed at sneeze therapy, and followed her own regimen of counting calories, exercising regularly, and downing bottles of No-Doz—Maura-Lee bought my wife’s childhood home furnished. Then she rented what was last known back in the 1960s as Gruel Vacuum. Gruel Vacuum, from what I learned from the owner of Roughhouse Billiards, didn’t stay in business more than a year seeing as people like Bekah’s parents understood how brooms cost less, lasted longer, and took about the same energy. Plus, brooms didn’t run up the electric bill.

  Maura-Lee Snipes opened Gruel Bakery, and started right off baking everything in the form of a cross—gingerbread men, crescent rolls, pecan pies. I’m pretty sure she ordered pans from a Christian organization out of Lynchburg, Virginia.

  She baked a special Jewish rye covered in what she called “Jesus crust.”

  Jesus crust, I swear! You’d think that people would view this as sacrilegious, but the opposite occurred. Even known heathens like Victor Dees from next-door Victor Dees’s Army-Navy Surplus store popped in each morning and said, “Give me some Jesus crust. I need Jesus crust. Fill my belly with Jesus crust!” and whatnot.

  I’m not sure how much real butter this woman used, but when I drove our Gruel Sneeze ’n’ Tone women into town daily, and when they discovered the bakery, something happened. It was almost as if Bekah and I saw our clients gain five pounds upon their return. It’s as if we saw happy, slimming, orgasmic women lose any ground they’d gained—or lost—once they got back in my step van.

  “We have to keep them here twenty-four hours a day. That’s it. There’s no other option,” Bekah said.

  Me, I couldn’t believe that it was our only choice. I’ll admit now that maybe I wasn’t a 100 percent team player in regards to my wife’s business venture.

  Oh—I need to tell the story about how my debt collector wife wanted to call it simply the Gruel Sneeze ’n’ Tone. I said, “If you want to call it that, then you have to put an apostrophe after then also. An apostrophe stands for missing letters. If you call your place what you want to call it, there’s a missing d,” et cetera. I wrote it out on a piece of paper, right after writing my resignation letter to the state of North Carolina. I said, “Let’s just go with the entire word’and.’ It won’t take any longer to understand. And we won’t be grouped with places that sell biscuits ’n’ gravy, liver ’n’ onions, fun ’n’ games, you know. It takes the same amount of time typing out, anyway.”

  So much for my powers of persuasion.

  “I can’t believe that our best client would turn on us,” Bekah blurted out, back to our story. The bags beneath her eyes fell down past the point where her lips would’ve turned up, should she ever smile. “Jesus crust. That’s just not right.”

  “I think it’s funny. Crustians. It’s funny.”

  My wife looked at me as if I’d projectile vomited on her blouse. She looked down at the old-timey ledger we kept for lodgers. “This is not how I foresaw everything happening. Maybe I haven’t had time to grieve Irby’s and Ina’s tragic deaths. This isn’t how it should be.”

  I looked down at the ledger. I’d made a point not to get emotionally attached to these women, and tried not to even remember their names. I didn’t want to be crestfallen should one lose hope, or get sick, and so on. I only knew that, at most moments, there was at least three thousand pounds of quivering women in my midst.

  But let me say two things: I had noticed how Bekah strode through her brother’s and mother’s deaths as if they’d only taken a Caribbean cruise and would return presently. And when I met Rebekah, I truly fell in love. That’s two things.

  I’m not sure how it happened, but my odd parents instilled a “stick with it” mind-set in my adopted siblings—obviously to them, seeing as they took off—and me, no matter how difficult the situation. I had long ago talked myself into waiting Bekah out. I had converted, so to speak.

  “Malleable” might be the word.

  Bekah said, “It was free money. My father’s three-story house. I don’t care about the heads. I miss Charlotte. I need some time. And space.”

  I didn’t say anything about Heidegger or Sartre. I said, “Ham and cheese on Jesus crust. Corned beef on Jesus crust. Roast beef on Jesus crust. Pimento cheese, chicken salad, tuna, braunschweiger. Jesus crust.”

  Bekah said, “I knew you’d take her side. I knew.”

  I didn’t s
ay how maybe I’d been looking down at the CD player, how maybe Irby didn’t flick his cigarette out the driver’s side window, how perhaps I touched his back bumper in a way that would cause him to veer over an embankment and cause Vudge Ina’s oxygen tank to explode. I said, “What’re you talking about, Bekah?”

  She said, “It’s all paid for. You can stay here and do what you want. Take room 1. Take room 3. You need to find your own way. What happened to your dream of a giant snake farm? I know how much you love those vipers.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t say anything about Novel, the novel, or Novel, the autobiography. I said, “You’re leaving? You’re letting go of everything we worked so hard to put together out here in this no-man’s-land?”

  Bekah didn’t look me in the face. “When’s the last time we had sex? I don’t need to have sex. I’ve sneezed more sex than we’ve ever had in twelve years. No offense, Novel. But that’s the way it is.”

  Luckily we had two cars. Bekah left in the Jeep. Me, I got stuck with the old step van. Behind me, a good eleven women sneezed. I knew that I wouldn’t shove allergens into their air vents again.

  Now, a lot of you people will think that I let Bekah go for the money—kind of like a person would quit writing short stories exclusively to write a novel—but that’s not the case. This story’s about reptiles. It’s about snakes. It’s about slithering animals, and my attempt to write a life story. My parents did the best that they could do. They played piano, sold shrimp, and panned for gold.

  I’m not making excuses.

  6

  I HAND-LETTERED the sign back to its original moniker: The Gruel Inn. After a month of answering the telephone, of telling desperate women that the Sneeze ’n’ Tone took no more customers—and I’ll admit that I spent most of that month calling Bekah and pleading for her to come back, plus my old boss in Charlotte pleading for my Viper-Mobile job—I went out with a bucket of latex and opened for business. This was February, the shortest month, so it’s not like I groveled myself away. No, I pretty much aired out the rooms constantly, got the various odors out—except that god-awful roomful-of-old-women White Linen that worked as one of our most productive sneeze en-ticers—and tried not to think of Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

  I caught a couple of nice blacksnakes, a couple corn snakes, and a baby rat snake. I kept them in separate aquariums I bought from some lost fellow named Drew Gaston passing through on his way to a convention of exotic fish salespeople.

  I drank daily at Roughhouse Billiards.

  “Say, that woman put y’all out of business,” Jeff the owner said every late morning when I arrived. I had no clue as to Jeff’s last name. He always stuck out his hand and introduced himself as “Jeff the Owner.”

  “Pretty much. In her own way. Maura-Lee and Jesus crust. That sounds weird. That sounds about right.”

  I started off each day with a shot of Jim Beam and a can of Pabst at this point. I always kept an open notebook, should some kind of novel or memoir idea hit me. Mostly it never happened, outside of “After the sneezing drove my wife crazy—within a year of her mother and brother getting killed from my accidentally hitting their back bumper and shoving them over into old Forty-Five landfill—there was nothing left to do except close down our spa and wait for answers.”

  Jeff the owner said, “You gone reopen the Gruel Inn as the Gruel Inn? I hope so. Gruel’s growing, man. We need us the motel.”

  Roughhouse Billiards never held more than two other customers. These guys were always covered in flecks of paint and practiced trick shots on the one pool table. If I had a case quarter for every time I overheard, “Around three banks, up the cue sticks, down the cue sticks, bounce off the saltshaker, light the pack of matches, eight ball in the corner pocket,” I’d’ve been able to add another twelve rooms to the Gruel Inn.

  I pointed down to the cooler for another beer and looked across the square at Gruel Bakery. “It’s growing, all right.”

  “Man, there’s gone be some kind of art car show here next year. You ever seen those people paint up their station wagons with macaroni and such? They coming here. I don’t know how our chamber of commerce pulled it off—well, Paula Purgason’s our entire chamber of commerce, I suppose—but they did. I wouldn’t be surprised if we hosted the next Olympics, you know.”

  One of the pool players said, “Well if that happens we got the gold medal in trick shots. Hey, watch this: around the banks, up the cue sticks, down the cue sticks, bounce off the saltshaker,” and so on.

  “That Maura-Lee woman ever come in here after work?” I asked Jeff. “I mean, after she’s done with baking for the day?”

  “She bought your mother-in-law’s place up Old Old Greenville Road, didn’t she?”

  “I guess. I ain’t seen any of that money. My crazy wife, Bekah, took that money.”

  “That dough. Get it? Maura-Lee Snipes started a bakery up.” Jeff the owner wiped down an already-clean countertop. He slicked back his already-slick-backed hair. “Jesus crust.”

  I took a beer on the house and tried not to think about Maura-Lee in a roomful of stuffed heads. I said, “We’ll have to put a stop to all this,” which I knew made no sense in regards to the conversation at hand. But it was the exact same thing one of those Native Americans supposedly said when Custer’s forces reached a hilltop.

  History!

  She’d installed the only ding-door in all of Gruel. When you opened the front door to Gruel Drugs, Victor Dees’s Army-Navy Surplus, and the Gruel Home Medical Supply stores, nothing happened, but at Gruel Bakery a loud ding! sounded to let Maura-Lee know she had a carbo-loading customer.

  I walked in and said, “Maura-Lee, I want to talk to you about how you helped ruin my marriage.”

  She came out of the back room wearing oven mitts. Maura-Lee said, “Well it’s about time. What’re you feeding those women over at the spa? It ain’t bread. Don’t you love me anymore?”

  Maura-Lee looked great. I said, “Where’ve you been lately? We’re out of business and Bekah up and left me.”

  She took off one mitt, then the other. I should mention that she wore her hair in two braids, and that those braids ended right at her nipples. She looked like an off-blond woman posing for a Swiss Miss commercial. “Oh, I’m sorry, Novel,” she said. “Hey, you wouldn’t want any jackalopes over at your place, would you? They’re kind of freaking me out all over the walls.”

  You would think that a place that prided itself on Jesus crust would play Billy Graham loops over and over, or Amy Grant, or any of those gospel quartets. Maura-Lee had the Clash blaring. I said, “What the hell.”

  “Come on back here, man.” In my head I heard her going on to say I’ve loved you since we first met. I saw her juke her head, and I went around the counter as if on autopilot. She put the oven mitts back on—could this be for some kind of kinky hand job? Maura-Lee said, “I have no clue what you’re talking about with Bekah leaving you. Hey, are these cockroaches or palmetto bugs or some kind of mutant silverfish nesting back here under my’sacks of flour?”

  Maura-Lee lived up to her name, as it ended up, to my disappointment. I was lying on the cement floor of what was once Gruel Vacuum, beside a giant dough mixer, Maura-Lee not straddled across my torso. She said, “Victor Dees said he kept too much Vietnam jungle bug repellent to ever have a need to know insects. I thought maybe you’d know something about these things.”

  I said, “I thought you were going to bring me back here to tell me how much you loved me, that we should get married. I thought by now you’d have those hips gyrating like all of you women did in a middle of a good sneezing fit.”

  Maura-Lee walked past the flour sacks and opened the back door. She said, “I’m not that way.”

  “Maura-Lee. Morally,” I said.

  She untied and retied her apron. “Yep. Well I guess not completely, but I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  Maura-Lee looked like Vivien Leigh. She looked like skinny-waisted Scarlett Fucking O’Hara
with some loose skin. Ding!

  “You better get the door,” I said. “I’ll stay down here pretending like you don’t have a roach problem. Someone just came in the door.”

  “Jesus crust,” a woman yelled. “You got any Jesus crust rye bread back there?”

  I heard Maura-Lee say, “I’ve got two more loaves till tomorrow.”

  Down there on the floor I thought about how rye bread had little seeds in it that looked similar to chopped-up cockroach body parts. When Maura-Lee came back and said the coast was clear, I didn’t get up. I didn’t ask her if she’d wish to reconsider dating me, or at least fucking me. I said, “I’ll take as many of those jackalopes as you want to give up. I’m working on some new ideas, and it might be good to have a beady stare honing down on me from every room.”

  Maura-Lee turned on her dough mixer and leaned back against it in a way that reminded me of my sister Joyce when the family dryer ran. I know I might rationalize, but it made me feel better about myself.

  My history of philosophy professor, a guy named Dr. Harold Simkins, said I had a quirky mind. He said that I should either join the CIA or get a job inventing crossword puzzles. I had taken a hankering to Hume and that “blocked habit of expectation” notion. Dr. Simkins said it was an unnatural choice on my part.

  “The problem with people like Hume is, he tears down the canon, but never offers a rebuilding plan,” Dr. Simkins told me one day in his office. Looking back, I’m pretty sure he had his pants around his ankles there behind the desk. “You, Mr. Akers, need to involve yourself with a philosopher who takes chances—a man who can rightfully tear down his predecessors,yet construct new foundations.”

  I remember this day fully—outside of Simkins’s exposed thighs—because the dogwoods bloomed and a slight breeze kept the campus aglow. I held a pint of bourbon in my back pocket. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Let’s talk about people who constructed new foundations: Mussolini, Tito, Lenin, Stalin . . . who’m I missing?”