Novel Page 5

  I pulled out the bourbon. Simkins took two glasses out of his desk drawer. “Okay,” he said. “I still think you’ll go into the CIA, or work for the New York Times crossword puzzle division.”

  We clinked glasses.

  “I don’t think I’ll be doing any of those things for a living, with all due respect,” I said.

  “What could be worse? Say, what’re you doing tonight? My wife’s gone to see her sister in Wisconsin.”

  I’d already met and courted Rebekah. I said, “Maybe we’ll come by your place later. Maybe.”

  “You’re a spy from way back when. You’re a spy. Also, I’d like to see you quit drinking for at least a few weeks out of the year. Do you think you can do it?”

  I thought about this little scene as I left Gruel Bakery, on my way across the square to Roughhouse Billiards. In a way Dr. Simkins foresaw my future—I’d torn things apart with no aim to rebuild them. Marriage. Jobs. Future plans.

  And I haven’t even admitted to the other part of my snake-driving duties, the part that may have affected every citizen in North Carolina at one time or another.

  7

  I CAN’T KNOW for sure if my wife immediately called Joyce and James, but they appeared at the Gruel Inn within a week of my repainting the sign. They brought no spouses or children, though they came armed with family photos and stories. I had stayed in touch with them slightly over the past twenty-plus years—mostly we sent cards to each other on June 16 and St. Patrick’s Day. My brother and sister sent a sympathy card on the occasion of our parents’ exotic and supposed deaths.

  “We, the both of us, almost made the Olympics in 1980 and 1984,” James said. He had a beautiful, lilting accent now. We sat in what I considered my new office at the inn. “So. What have you been up to, Novel-boy?”

  Joyce worked for the Irish Times—she had become a real writer—and James spent his days in a Dublin pub due to “disability.” He’d evidently blown out his knees from distance running and, though he’d been a secondary school teacher and cross-country coach, talked the government into believing his frailties.

  I said, “My wife talked me into this place. I quit my job and cashed in my retirement, stupid. This motel used to be a motel, then we turned it into a spa of sorts. Now it’s something in between.”

  James said, “What happened to those snakes? You’re not still scaring people with the snakes, are you?” What should’ve tipped me off that my brother and sister weren’t true, true Irish orphans back in the day was their noncommittal attitude toward what mountain snakes lived in our midst growing up—copperheads, timber rattlers, northern water snakes, and the like.

  “I had to hand over my job snakes, but I caught some other ones over there.” I pointed across the street toward Gruel Mountain. “I got them in aquariums out back in a shed.”

  But maybe returning to Ireland brought back James’s once-lost cultural instincts, for I have to say this: once a runner, always a runner when it’s time to choose flight or fight. It was a good thing that his disability officer hadn’t traveled with them to Gruel, because as soon as the words “caught some other ones” came out of my mouth those Irish “blokes” took off like Democrats in search of free government cheese during a Republican administration. And when they found themselves outside—in the land of snakes—they rushed back in. Joyce said, “Well that goes to show how long it’s been since we’ve been to the States.”

  I wish I had remembered the truth. My snakes were no longer in their aquariums. The last time I’d seen them they coiled at the ready for a patch of field mice that nested in the wall between rooms 3 and 4. I said, “I wish y’all had brought your families. Can you stay awhile? James, why don’t you take your suitcases and bed down in either room 3 or 4. Joyce, you take the other. Those are the cleanest right now.”

  There was no talk as to the length of their stay, or if indeed Bekah had invited them to look after me. “We’re only traveling around,” James said. “We both felt like we needed to come back down to the South and revisit our old haunts. What with the IRA and England getting along better, it’s not as much fun living in Ireland. I might even look for a job.”

  I handed my brother two keys. “We only have one bar in town. But it opens early. There’s no Catholic church anymore until you get to about Atlanta.”

  “You sound like you don’t want us here,” Joyce said. “One bar.”

  Even though I did want to be left alone for a good year or ten, I said, “Not at all. I mean, no, y’all are welcome to stay forever. It’s just not going to be as exciting as Black Mountain, and you remember how boring that place was after the college shut down.” I said, “Go put y’all’s suitcases up. Then I’ll take you to the square.” I figured they wouldn’t need to clean up, really. They’d only been in transit for two days, not an overly extended period of time between baths for a typical European, I thought.

  While they hung up their clothes I backed the step van right up to their rooms and waited. Joyce came out of 3 in a few minutes. She got in the passenger seat next to me and said, “You’ve obviously done well for yourself, Novel. I’ve been thinking about writing a memoir about how our parents adopted us, and how he and I were such buttholes. I’ve always regretted running away back to my homeland. Our parents did nothing but love us, you know. In their way. We shouldn’t have driven them toward bird-watching and their ultimate deaths.”

  I shoved an early Pogues CD in the player. It still hadn’t occurred to me that my new snakes might have James cornered and/or fainting. “Tell me about your job at the paper.”

  Joyce rolled her blue eyes and shook that black, black hair of hers. “I mostly deal with local news, but there’s talk of sending me to Paris. Wouldn’t that be something? The Paris bureau chief for the Irish Times.”

  We sat in the van for what seemed to be another fifteen minutes. Joyce told me all about the flight to New York, then to Charlotte, then the rental car and how they spent an hour in Forty-Five, South Carolina, trying to find a person who knew how to get to Gruel. I said, “I better go check on James. Maybe I forgot to put toilet paper in the bathroom.”

  Like that would matter, now that I think about it.

  Joyce told me to hurry up, that she was so thirsty she could drink a St. Louis beer.

  Okay, so this American history professor I had back in undergraduate school, he specialized in William Henry Harrison and made all of his students take a YMCA-sponsored CPR course, so I thought I knew how to find a pulse, feel for breath, et cetera. There was no way I could count on an ambulance showing up within six hours or thereabouts in order to take my brother James all the way out to Graywood Emergency Regional Memorial.

  So I found James flat on his back beside the bed, seemingly gone. I looked around, thought about those mouse-hunting snakes I’d scattered around the motel, and so on. I yelled for Joyce, who helped me get James in the back of the step van. She said, “It must’ve been a massive heart attack.”

  I drove so fast my windshield wipers blew right off. On the way, over the noise coming in my open doors, I said to Joyce, “This isn’t the best hospital in the world, but I guess it’s better than nothing. I’d trust taking James to a vet, but I don’t know of any around here.”

  She looked straight ahead. Thinking back on it now, I kind of glimpsed a smile on her face.

  I wheeled into the emergency room entrance, ran to the back of the van, opened the doors, and found no brother there. Had we forgotten to load him up? Was his heart attack so massive that it imploded his body? Joyce sashayed back to where I was right about the time a young black orderly came out and said, “The cafeteria entrance on the other side. Take the bread there.”

  To Joyce I said, “Did he fall out the back and somehow the door closed behind him? Get in, get in.” Again, she seemed to be in no rush. Was this some kind of last joke on a little brother? Did James hear me say those bad things about the hospital, come to, and feel that he’d be better off rolling down the asphalt than being
treated for a heart ailment by some doctor who couldn’t find a sink to wash his hands in?

  We backtracked three or four times. “This is some kind of magic trick y’all played on me,” I said.

  “Maybe not us,” Joyce said. “Maybe us, but probably not us.

  And don’t ask why, ’cause we don’t know either.”

  My wife blamed neighborhood kids back in Charlotte, but looking back I now understand that she probably added another V to the beginning of the Viper-Mobile, thus making me drive the Wiper-Mobile for two days before noticing the practical joke. I’m not even sure I would’ve noticed it at all had I not gone to the Piedmont-Charlotte Retirement Center and had a dozen octogenarian women come out to the parking lot ready to change their adult diapers. Yes, I got sent out to retirement homes on occasion seeing as a harmless, innocent snake’s worst foe, oftentimes, is an old woman armed with a hoe. Halfway houses for our unfortunate retarded comrades also ranked high on the Viper-Mobile’s places to visit.

  “Somebody changed the name of my step van,” I said one afternoon to Bekah.

  “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me or I—I always forget the correct English. I don’t know anything about it,” Bekah said.

  This was a month before her mother’s hospitalization and subsequent death of questionable means. For the record, I had wanted Ina Cathcart treated in Charlotte, not Graywood County. Irby got drunk, called me up, and said, “Between me and you—or I and you—it might not be all that bad for Mom to have some shoddy care. There’s a lot of money tied up in the old homestead. I’m thinking fifteen, twenty thousand, not counting the deer heads and stuffed turkeys.”

  I said, “I’m not following. Do you need to borrow some money? I can lend you a few hundred or thereabouts.”

  Irby cleared his throat and tapped the receiver with something. He said, “I’m not in jail.”

  “Hey, your brother’s not in jail,” I yelled back to Bekah in the bedroom.

  She said, “Good.” She said, “That’s something worth writing down in a diary.”

  I said to my brother-in-law, “You haven’t been down here any lately, have you? Somebody put some graffiti on my step van as a joke, I guess. I don’t know how long it’s been on the side panels, to be honest.”

  Irby said, “I’m serious as a cup of lye, man. She’ll die one day anyway. She’s got to die some time. I figure Rebekah and I could split the money up equal, bury her right, and still have a bunch left over.”

  I had no other choice but to say, “Irby, you’re out of your mind. What would you think if you had kids who wanted you in a less-than-respectable hospital? It’s your mother, by god. It’s your momma.”

  “You’re right,” Irby said. I heard him stomp his foot down, or pop himself upside the temple. “Goddamn I’m glad I got you on the other line. What am I thinking?”

  At the time Irby was in between a regular construction job and serving four to six months in jail for destruction of private property. Me, I always liked him. He couldn’t make it to our wedding for reasons that changed over the years, but he did send a picture of himself wearing a blue tuxedo and said he’d be honored if Bekah and I propped it up where a best man might stand. “I can send you a thousand dollars,” I said. “You’ll be able to pay it back someday, right?”

  In the background I heard Ina Cathcart yelling for Irby to get off the telephone. He said to me, “Two thousand could get me out of Gruel and back to the United States.”

  8

  I STAYED IN TOUCH with Bekah weekly while I made new plans. She called, she apologized, she blamed it on premenstrual syndrome, post-traumatic stress, premenopausal depression, post-401(k) shock once her retirement plan proved to be slow moving. Notice how there was no present. Every one of her problems either dealt with an unfair past or a bleak future. “I’ve gone back to my old job. I’m living back in the old house, too. Lefs just say that the renters decided to break their lease.”

  Let me point out that the times we spoke she started off every conversation with, “I’ve gone back to my old job,” and so on, like she suffered some kind of Korsakov’s Syndrome.

  I didn’t know if she meant any of this to be a lure, a sign that her mental health had stabilized. I always said, “Well getting your job back should take your mind off things. That should lift any depression, hanging out with people who prey on poor remission-ridden cancer patients.” I had long believed that half of all female nurses went into the field only to meet doctors, and all female hospital bill collectors only to meet administrators and lawyers. But I also believed that all male mechanics had a need to grasp their greasy tools eight hours a day.

  “Gene Weeks here thinks I’ve let you off too easy. He says you ought to be renting the Gruel Inn from me. Or that I should be getting upwards of 50 percent of net.”

  Remember that all of this situation took place in less than six months. I don’t care that it sounds unrealistic—that if this were my autobiography Novel, you might yell out “I’m not willing to suspend my disbelief!” Not everything moves at a twenty-year-old crankcase oil’s pace in the South.

  I said to Bekah, “You can have 90 percent of the gross, for all I care. As far as I can tell it doesn’t cost more than fifty dollars a month to live in Gruel. I can make that with two lost truckers a month.”

  I didn’t tell my ex-wife—or, technically, my estranged wife—that I’d not had a boarder since my sister and brother checked in for a quarter hour. And I certainly didn’t tell her about my future plans that, ultimately, would put me precariously close to both prison sentence and extended stay at the asylum in Columbia. Look, I had noticed in those back pages of Bekah’s women’s magazines a cluster of “artists retreat” and “writers haven” places for rent, usually in Vermont, Colorado, western North Carolina, northern Georgia, both coasts of Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, the Sierra Nevada, Maine, Tahiti, and Belize. There were so-called writers and artists out there willing to spend twenty-five hundred dollars a month to live in a cell and cook on a woodstove as long as there were “scenic views” and “lush trails.”

  Well I got out my machete and Weed Eater and blazed a good one-mile lap across from the Gruel Inn almost immediately. Then I paid for this advertisement in the back pages of all those magazines: “Writer’s paradise: come live and study with secluded Novelist in quaint, uncluttered, pristine location. There’s nothing else to do but hide out and write with Novelist.”

  At least that’s what came out. I had written “Novel Akers, secluded in quaint, uncluttered, pristine location,” but the copy editors in the ad department saw it otherwise. I offered no grants or stipends, no Grand Master Writer-Teacher/Master Writer-Teacher/Teacher/Upcoming Writer/Writer/Sycophant/Waiter type of hierarchy. It would cost prospective “students” five hundred dollars a week, with only a continental breakfast provided, a cash bar happy hour, plus a change of sheets every other day.

  It took me a good eight hours to think this through, no lie.

  One day after my ad came out I got fifty calls. By the end of the month I had reservations going into the next year. These were mostly wives of the wealthy, scattered across the country, all ready to bear down on a reader with tales of their pathetic, boring lives. I didn’t care. I “couldn’t have cared less,” as they say in the “writers haven” field.

  But I kind of wondered why more than a few of them asked if I was Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, or Charles Portis.

  Maura-Lee and I met about the plan and devised a bagel/croissant/biscuit breakfast when the would-be novelists showed up. I talked to Jeff the owner and he said the cash bar happy hour didn’t sound too promising as far as his business dealings were concerned, unless I let him sell me minibottles of booze and a special Bloody Mary mix he’d learned from, of all people, Sherrill Cathcart.

  I called about everyone in Graywood County in order to get Internet service lines installed for the laptops I foresaw being brought in. Most people said, “What the hell�
�s Internet? You mean like badminton and volleyball? You might want to call up Graywood Hardware and Sporting Goods.”

  I drove to Atlanta, found a used bookstore, and bought every available text on writing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays should any of my guests ask a difficult question that involved plot or character. This one book I got offered a hundred anecdotes about famous writers hating each other and the fights they endured both physically and emotionally. I buried my machete.

  Well it didn’t take my first night with nine old women and two old men—I put myself in room 3 what with my brother’s possible specter living inside, plus the possible snakes, and kept the office open with coffee urns and ashtrays—before I knew that plagiarism might be in my future. If I wanted to live up to my name, what would be a better way to start than, “My slutty daughter isn’t going to go far in life seeing as she dropped out of eighth grade on the third go-round, then got a job at the carpet factory as the official carpet burn tester”?

  This is, word for word, what one Mrs. Donna-Rose Green told me while waiting for her special decaf to brew. Donna-Rose Green said that she didn’t intentionally marry her husband of twenty-seven years so she’d have a memorable, Christmas colored name, though ever since she had a vision to tell the story of her life she knew that the name would be an asset. “It means ‘beautiful rose green.’ In Italian. Well officially I guess part in Italian and part in English.”

  In fucking Crayola, I thought. “Carpet burn tester, huh?”

  “She gets to wear short pants to work every day. You can’t say that about anyone else still working up in Dalton,” Donna-Rose Green said.