Drowning in Gruel Read online

  "I don't even know what I'm doing half the time, I guess. I promise you that I try to be a good person usually. I don't think of myself as bad. I don't go to church or anything, but I've known way worse people who went twice a week."

  Downer sits down beside his friend. "When I was a little boy I used to walk past Wilkie Tolbert's house every morning. I need to explain that I had an unhealthy craving for cheese all the time. Evidently the Tolberts did, too. So twice I walked by and noticed how the milkman had come by and left a quart of milk and cottage cheese and a big old chunk of American cheese there on their front porch. You remember how they used to do, how the milkmen used to do. Both Mr. and Mrs. Tolbert worked second shift at the mill, so they didn't get up sometimes till past the time Wilkie'd already headed off to Gruel Normal."

  "It's a shame how Wilkie died. I never heard of anyone falling out of a truck on his way to get inducted. That was right about Christmastime, too."

  "He probably did something wrong earlier. Which gets me back to my story. I snuck up there twice and stole the cheese they'd ordered, and which got delivered to them. My father found out all about it when, trying to be a good family member, I stuck half of each chunk of cheese down in the dairy section of our own refrigerator. To make a long story short, I worked for an entire year for free doing chores, and had to give what other money I made straight over to my father. When we had enough saved up, he bought a milk cow and made me tie it up to a tree in front of the Tolberts' house on Christmas Eve."

  A man comes in and asks where Paula Purgason lives. He says he heard that she was the only real estate agent in town. Godfrey and Downer look the man over, then say she's gone senile and can't work anymore. They say there's no real estate in town for sale, and no agent to sell it in the first place, which isn't true. The man doffs his cap, thanks them, then leaves.

  "Did you see that guy's shoes? There wasn't a scuff on them," Godfrey says.

  "Last thing we need in Gruel is a clean-shaven man."

  "Say," Godfrey says, "I've known you all my life and I never heard of this cow story. I've known Wilkie Tolbert's parents, too. I don't remember them having a milk cow at any time."

  Downer lowers his head. He takes his thumbnail and etches into a stain on the counter. "Well, as it ends up, they saw it as a beef cow. For about a week."

  The cedars completely disappear in two days. Godfrey sells the last stolen trees for twenty dollars each. He puts the cash in a metal ammo bin with the other fourteen hundred plus dollars he took in from the first round of sales. Only one woman had dickered with him whatsoever, and more than a few customers paid money in advance and said they'd come back. The dickering woman—she insisted on writing a check, insisted that it wouldn't bounce, insisted, "If you're living on this planet, then you should know me"—was named Cecilly. She picked up the next-to-last tree, the one blocking the frey on Godfrey's sign. "If I'd have known that it really wasn't God's Christmas Trees, I probably wouldn't've bought anything from you. Next year, change your sign, if you want to sell to me again."

  Godfrey had said, "Have fun bullying Santa Claus, ma'am. Hey, I know a good place where you can buy coal and switches for your husband and kids." Then he disassembled his sign, put it in the back of his truck alongside his last cedar, and drove to the square in Gruel.

  Godfrey takes the largest tree to Downer, and Downer sets the tree in an extra hot dog pot, leans it between the men's room and some exposed duct work. He plops a baby aspirin in the water and says, "I read in one them magazines, do this, plants last forever."

  "I wouldn't know about that," Godfrey says. "I heard about taking an aspirin a day to thin the blood, but I think the aspirin industry made all that up. What do they know?"

  Downer says, "I got me a cousin Morris who's one them hemophiliacs. He eats nothing but sausage and Crisco all the time, trying to thicken his blood. He's coming over for Christmas dinner and I guarantee you he won't touch nothing but dark meat and ham." He looks over at the tree. "You ought to come over, Godfrey. What're you doing for Christmas Day? The wife won't mind. Roughhouse'll be closed. We always have plenty of food, outside of dark meat turkey when Morris comes on down from Slabtown."

  "I'll probably stay at home," Godfrey says. "I appreciate the offer, but you wouldn't believe how much I got to do. Plus, I'm on this strange diet due to the cancer. It's too hard to figure out."

  "You got to watch what you eat and all. I thought you was in remission. You got to take care of yourself, I'm guessing."

  "Shew. You wouldn't believe it. Hey, I think I'll have a bourbon today instead of beer. Unless you've made up some eggnog."

  Downer doesn't reach behind him toward the mini-bottle rack. He stares at Godfrey. "You remember what I said about the Tolberts' cow, now, don't you. I feel like I have to invite you over because I feel bad about all that—about stealing the cheese, then having a milk cow get slaughtered accidentally."

  "Oh, I remember. They didn't fry out my brain cells when they took out most my neck."

  "What're you going to do, then? You can't just sit around all by yourself on Christmas. I bet you didn't even save a tree for yourself. You don't have no kids. What're you going to do?"

  Because Roughhouse Billiards serves booze in plastic cups, Godfrey doesn't feel bad about taking his drink to go. He walks out to his empty-bedded truck, cranks it, then swings around the square a few times before heading home. He thinks to himself, I need to think this through.

  He knows what will happen: He'll go home, open the Bible haphazardly, and find a verse to fit his needs. He'll spot Jeremiah 6:4, or Deuteronomy 11:5, or 2 Chronicles 1:10. Godfrey will sit at home with his ammo box of money until Christmas Eve, then drive down to a nursery in order to buy seedlings and herbs. He'll plant the seedlings in all the spots where he stole cedars and pines, all the places where other future desperate men might steal trees during economic or personal downturns. He will box up the herbs in festive wrapping paper, open them alone beneath his own tree, and later take the herbs himself, hoping to stave off any possible cancers. On Christmas Day there will be no canned cranberry sauce. No, he'll drive the countryside in and around Gruel, keep himself busy, sort through everything he'd ever done, try to keep tabs on how he needed to change his ways should there be more to this life, or an afterlife.

  In the coming year Godfrey will locate old grape arbors—of pergolas and lost lattice—and connive a way to harvest old tangles of vines in order to make holiday wreaths, perhaps. Meanwhile, he knows that he'll only think about that milk cow from now on, and that he'll hold it against Downer for ever telling him such a sad tale in this, the holiday season.

  Soldiers in Gruel

  AMANDA FUTCH SAVED her three indoor cats' claws for twelve years, not knowing she'd do something spectacular one day. She pried them out of carpet nap, from a variety of scratching posts, off the sides of her couch, out of her aerobics outfits. Amanda dropped each glycerin comma into an empty mayonnaise jar, and with every one she thought and thought. This started right after college, when she got a job waiting tables, when she got her own apartment, and after she visited the Humane Society for the only time. Amanda graduated with a degree in women's studies from Smith, though she took other courses at Hampshire, Amherst, BC, BU, Tufts, Wells, and Emerson. She spent summers those early years anywhere from Ann Arbor to Warsaw, participating in seminars that ranged from Environmental Antiart to A Complete Look at the Feminine Characteristics of Gargoyles.

  Amanda moved to New York City, for she knew about postmodern feminism, about glass ceilings. Her bookshelves were lined with everything ever written by or about Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, Camille Paglia, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Jane Goodall, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, and Margaret Mead. One day, Amanda knew, she wouldn't have to wait tables anymore; Amanda wouldn't have to spit onto pecan-encrusted grouper or yellowtail crudo, or poached lobster ordered by men who called her honey, babe, doll, sweetie, sugar, dearheart, sweetcheeks, or bitch. She'd make a difference. />
  "I don't know how y'all shed so many claw nails," she had said to her cats every morning. "What's up with that? What do y'all do when I'm at work?"

  Amanda's three yellow felines, turned to fat, wove around her legs each late morning as she made coffee, prepared to look for jobs, then ended up reading essays about the evolutionary mistake of Man. The cats sat atop the couch as she half listened to CNN. They eased their necks onto the top of her head, made biscuits by her shoulder tops, left claws everywhere. Eve, Gertrude, and Alice attacked any near boyfriend's shins who ever slept over. Amanda didn't know how many claws she'd missed, left in the stretch socks of her seemingly open-minded suitors.

  Before two cats died of leukemia and Eve escaped, never to be found, they meowed in unison sometimes. For a dozen years Amanda realized that they said, "Move-south, move-south, move-south." She knew. Amanda tried to conjure reasons not to return to her origins in the Carolinas, but every morning her cats told her otherwise. She dismissed them as the descendants of Flannery O'Connor, maybe Zora Neale Hurston, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, or Carson McCullers.

  Amanda auditioned for off-Broadway plays, applied to teach at experimental schools, and waited tables until she turned thirty-three. Then she surfed the Internet over a long weekend, finally ending up, somehow, on a Web site for strange and oddball festivals attended by a select group of participants. She scoured over the Red Clay Eaters' Annual Convention and Bluegrass Stomp; the Meeting of Walleyes and their Staggering Fish Fry; a Gathering of Bucktoothed Women. Without much time for reconsideration Amanda sublet her apartment to a performance artist friend of hers named &# who also waited tables, retrieved her collection of shed cats' claws at the last minute for no reason that she could imagine, took off in her 1972 VW Bug, and got on 1–95 south.

  "You don't need to be a standing member of the club, honey. There's a hundred-dollar registration fee, but that money goes into a big pot so we can pay for the winners. This'll be one plain free-for-all show," Eugene Parker says over the telephone. "There's some people who're renting these houses down in Gruel, and there's people who're staying in their cars. On top of that, there's a KOA campground right down the road. Come on down, dearheart. Me, I'm entering my Cadillac with little army men glued all over it. I call it my Sevillian Soldier. I won't win. But it'll be fun driving it down the parade through the square. They got a square in Gruel the likes of Mayberry."

  Amanda Futch sets down her magazine. She hadn't come across the Wild Wheels and Crazy Cars convention while looking up places to visit earlier, but now knows that a higher being directed her to the Clinch River Motor Inn, a room with a Bible on the nightstand and a Southern Living magazine atop the small TV, probably left over from the previous tenant. Amanda says, "Do I need to come up with a title for my car? As soon as I saw the ad, I knew what I wanted to do. But I haven't done it yet."

  "It don't hurt none to name your car. There's an old boy from Michigan or somewhere puts Kraft macaroni on his hood he calls hisself Pontiac Pasta. This one woman has Barbie doll parts all over her Bonneville. She calls it Ken Backed over Me in the Driveway, you know. She got wrote up in one of the big newspapers one time. I think they going to feature her in some movie somewhere."

  "Well," says Amanda. She thinks about the feminist implications of Barbie being violated by Ken. Perfect! she thinks.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Well I guess I'll come down there with my cats' claws. Do you think they'll blow off on the drive down? I mean, I don't want to get all the way down there with nothing. I can glue them on in the way I see them in my mind, but I don't want to have them flake off if I drive over twenty miles an hour."

  Amanda calls from a town in western Virginia that is about to succumb to a man-made dam. The festival here—which would be a onetime affair, of course—is called God, Dam This Place Now and Forever. Most of the participants and visitors were brought up in the area and either didn't want to see it submerged or they live there now and can't wait for government checks in the name of eminent domain. The festival features a big barbecue, thanks to the hogs that won't be able to swim anyway, and "the last good water that will come from here ever," namely, moonshine. Plus there will be a retrospective of Doc Watson music performed by a hundred banjo players brought in from as far away as Kentucky.

  Eugene Parker says, "We going to have a section blocked off where people can pay a dollar to see art car artists actually work on their cars. That's the category you need to belong to. You got to pay fifty dollars more to be in it, but then you get to split up fifty percent of the money that comes in from the people. The rest of the money goes, you know, to administrative costs, and insurance, and back to one of the four overall winners' prizes. We got first place in wagon, first place in truck, first place in vintage—that would be before 1976—and first place in compact. We got second place, too, but it's half what first place gets. Second place is mostly gift certificates from area businesses."

  From her open window Amanda Futch hears what sounds like a gaggle of bagpipers, but it ends up being a herd of sheep bleating toward higher ground. She says, "What's the first-place prize?"

  "It matters how many people register, sugarlips. Last year we had the convention up in northern Alabama, so a lot of people didn't show up what with their fear of snake handlers. But I believe first place in each category went for a couple thousand dollars."

  Although Amanda Futch never took a course in economics during her college career—she never even crossed paths in the hallways with a business administration professor—she understands that she qualifies for both compact and vintage. Amanda says, "Gruel, South Carolina. I don't even see it on the map."

  Eugene Parker laughs. "Well maybe that's why we're having it here." Then he spouts out directions that takes Amanda two pages to write down in the back of her handmade recycled-paper journal bought at the Please Let the Baby Monkeys Live! boutique back in Greenwich Village. And Eugene Parker starts off with, "Can you find your way to Greenville? Gruel's only about forty miles from there, as the bitch copperhead slithers."

  Amanda calls her own number back home, gets the answering machine, and finds out that &# changed the outgoing message. &#'s voice now says, "If you have a message for Amanda, please leave it. If you're a woman and have a message for Ampersand Number, please stick two fingers in yourself and groan. If you're a man, stick both fists up your ass and travel elsewhere."

  "Hey, Ampersand Number, this is me," Amanda says from Gruel. "I'm in a place down in South Carolina. I just want to call and say that you'll have to get me on the cell phone if you need to get in touch. It's a long story, but I'm in a campground that doesn't have a pay phone. You want something for your conceptual art, you need to come down here, woman. This is the place."

  On the way down Amanda bought Superglue in order to adhere her ex-cats' claws all over the VW. In Gruel she stopped in at Victor Dees's Army-Navy Surplus store and bought a sleeping bag, tarp, metal cookware, some Sterno, and a variety of questionable MREs. At the Gruel KOA she's surrounded only by other art car enthusiasts. There's a man from New Orleans who decked out his entire Ford Maverick with Mardi Gras beads. Ex-sergeants Russell and Konetta Threatt—an African American husband-and-wife team camped next to Amanda—covered their Impala in Chocolate Soldier bottle caps, for they met in the military. Ex-Deadheads painted dancing bears and skulls on their hoods, trunks, and roofs, as well as extended tailpipes to look like giant joints. "You and your people might be what I've been looking for ever since I didn't understand those formalists in an Aesthetics 101 course," Amanda says to a group of a dozen people who stop to look at her Volkswagen.

  "Man," one of them says. "What are you, some kind of minimalist? I don't get it."

  Amanda looks back to her as-yet-undecorated ride. "Oh. Oh, that. No, I came down from New York and I'll be converting the car at the Convert-Your-Car-Now lot. I think it's tomorrow if Eugene Parker told me right."

  They nod. One woman says, "What're you going to do?" She hands ove
r a small ceramic pipe.

  Amanda partakes, though she's not smoked weed since almost getting a part as a dancing blade of grass in an off-Broadway experimental production based on the life and times of Walt Whitman. "I got these cats' claws I was going to glue all over it. In my mind it'll look like a giant conglomeration of glycerin commas, you know." She hands back the pipe and exhales. She tries not to think about how she has no idea as to her real plans. "What's the story with this town?"

  "I'm Jessica. This is my old man, Ted." The rest of their group wanders down the dirt path to admire or scoff at everyone else's cars, trucks, vans, wagons, and one poor fellow with a moped decoupaged in blue DUI tickets.

  Ted wears a bicyclist's rearview mirror on his eyeglasses. He says, "That's the way to go if you're just starting. Did Eugene tell you how you'd get some of the door by letting people see you work?" He wears a straw cowboy hat with a kaleidoscope glued lengthwise on top.

  "Yeah."

  Jessica says, "That's how we got started. We were driving from Santa Fe east to anywhere—I won't go into detail as to why we took off with no warning, kind of on the run. Anyway, we came across one of the regional art car festivals being held that year in Asheville. I remember Ted and me looking at each other simultaneously, both of us thinking how it wouldn't be a bad idea to camouflage the Nova."

  Ted pulls on his thin beard. He points behind himself. "We're the Pecan Log-mobile. Across country we kept stopping at those Stuckey's places, you know. It seemed appropriate. The statute of limitations is beyond us, now, by the way."

  "Only thing we got to worry about is torrential rainstorms. When that happens," Jessica says, "we have to find the nearest Stuckey's and make the repairs. We got to find an overhang of some type, and then another Stuckey's."