Novel Read online

  I didn’t ask her why she didn’t go to a writers retreat closer to her home, for I knew that she’d worn out every other director or innkeeper. I didn’t ask where she got the money, either. She had slipped-on-the-Wal-Mart-floor written all over her giant blank face. I made a mental note not to mop during her stint. “Okay. Your coffee’s ready, Ms. Green. Now get on back to your room and finish up that manuscript. You owe the reading public. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!”

  “Yes sir, Coach Novel! Them’s the kind of butt-kicking words of encouragement I don’t get at home, goddamn it.”

  I locked myself up in room 3 and called Maura-Lee. I said, “How much would you charge me for making a special laxative-glazed doughnut for in the morning?”

  She laughed. “You want to come over here and spend the night? I’m talking like brother and sister spend the night, not the other. Your guests will be all right by themselves.”

  In room 4 I could hear a Mr. Burnett typing about two hundred words a minute. In room 2 a woman who said she could only be known by her pen name—Anonymous—cried uncontrollably. I said, “I’ve made a big mistake. I’ve screwed up. Somewhere in a previous life I must’ve killed sacred cows willy-nilly.”

  Maura-Lee said, “Been there, done that, got a scrapbook of torn stubs to prove it.” She sneezed a few times and said she’d gained an inch or two around the middle. “Listen, you’re an adult, Novel. Get out that notebook of yours and write every thing down. I’ll come by and visit you for a longer stretch of time when you get to about chapter 10.”

  I hung up and opened a bottle of Old Crow. I wrote down, “I’m not sure what kind of séance correspondence course my ex-wife took with the Marquis de Sade, but I would figure it out before she got me killed, too.”

  9

  ONE OF THOSE books I got for my needful writers explained how all kinds of literature could be classified either ab ovo or in medias res. Old-timey novels, like those of Charles Dickens, tended toward the ab ovo. More modern pieces went straight to the middle of things, got right to what this particular writing professor—who had published forty-seven novels, none of which I’d ever seen in a normal bookstore—called “conflict.” I reread his first chapter twice, and memorized entire passages.

  I’ll say this: The people who shelled out five hundred a week for quiet and solitude, for the most part, worked hard for three days in a row. Over the long months that the Gruel Inn became the Gruel Inn Writers Retreat, almost every so-called would-be writer holed up for seventy-two hours before coming out to talk.

  And then they talked.

  Maybe there’s some kind of mechanism in the brain that clicks on after three days, telling the body it needs human interaction. Or maybe people who spend good money to find writing time don’t really have much more than three days of ideas. It seems to me that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to take pictures off your wall at home, tell the kids and spouse and dogs to shut up, and get about the same effect as what you got in Gruel. Someone should do a long-term study.

  The women emerged from their rooms ready to talk about their interesting characters, how difficult it was for a woman to get published in New York City, their one-of-a-kind plots that are keeping them from their just dues on the Today Show, how a famous writer up in Vermont said that he’d tell his agent about such interesting characters and plot, how their adolescent kids will one day be great writers, et cetera.

  The few men circled these women in my registration office turned smoking lounge, only thinking about getting some strange. I knew that look: I’d witnessed it twelve years running at the annual convention for lieutenant governors’ speechwriters.

  So much for ab ovo. I probably need to backtrack again.

  Driving the Viper-Mobile happened to be what is known in some circles as “a cover.” In North Carolina there were a good twenty or thirty Viper-Mobile drivers, lower-level zoo officials, pig farm run-off inspectors, black bear trackers, and so on, all of whom really got paid by taxpayers to write speeches for those who needed to but couldn’t do it themselves, namely governors, lieutenant governors, the superintendents of education, state senators and representatives, and so on.

  Going further backwards: one thing I learned while living in Gruel and watching local news—South Carolina could’ve used such a system.

  Anyway, and I don’t know about my colleagues, I got paid ninety grand a year to supposedly showcase snakes to the public. And I did that part of my job well. But at night—and most every day in the step van—I wrote out five-hundred- to three-thousand-word speeches for the lieutenant governor that both outlined and offered specific details on such topics, urgent and diverse, as school lunch menus, hurricane evacuation routes, the proper place to tie yellow ribbons on trees during state and/or national emergencies, four-way stop sign etiquette, the list goes on. It used to be part of a plan to flash my lights toward oncoming traffic when driving on I-85, I-40, I-95, or I-77 so that other drivers thought a speed trap lay ahead, but once state funds dropped dramatically due to decreased speeding ticket revenue, the lieutenant governor decided we could all live with out-of-control “vehicular operators.”

  All right. I feel better now that I’ve admitted this part of my life, one that Bekah never knew. Hell, she thought I only earned hourly wages and a nice benefits package as a Viper-Mobile specialist. I had a hard time staying quiet when she piped up about something stupid the lieutenant governor said on the six o’clock news like, “If we all recycle our outdated telephone books, then there will be more trees available in the future for telephone poles.”

  I wrote that one on purpose one day when I was angry at Jesse Helms for one reason, or another thousand reasons. I’m contrite about taking it out on our lieutenant governor. Another day when I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore I wrote out a speech detailing how North Carolina welcomed new businesses to locate in the Research Triangle, from burgeoning nations such as Chad, Rwanda, and Niger. His mispronunciation of that last country really got him scolded, and maybe lost him a few votes the next election.

  “The role of the writer is to tell his story in a less convoluted and more mesmerizing way than the average man on the street. We could all learn from the dolphins and whales,” I announced during happy hour of day three. I’d rehearsed this little speech straight out of one of those how-to-write-a-novel-in-your-sleep textbooks.

  My campers and I stood around outside the office, listening to what may or may not have been howler monkeys in the forest across Old Old Augusta Road.

  Of course it was Donna-Rose Green who said, “In my novel, I have dolphins swimming with my main character who’s got cancer. These dolphins come out of the Atlantic Ocean, swim up the Savannah River, cross into North Carolina via the Chattooga and Ocoee rivers, cross the mountains, and end up at Frozen Head State Park outside Oak Ridge, Tennessee, right there next to Brushy Creek federal prison. Believe me, I had to do the research. I had to find a atlas.”

  Mr. Maurice Gall, a retired junior high English teacher from Kansas who worked on his novel about a large family of Christian do-gooders living on a prairie, said, “I have witnessed pods of dolphins as far north and west as Omaha, right on the Platte River. Come to my room, Donna-Rose, and I’ll show you pictures.”

  Donna-Rose Green said, “Okay!” like that.

  Listen, out of plain meanness I said, “Why, again, would dolphins—that must live in salt water—find their way to Tennessee, through all of those category four rapids in order to swim with a girl with cancer?”

  Maurice Gall said, “It’s fiction. Anything can happen.” He tried to put his arm around Donna-Rose’s shoulder.

  “Because the little girl’s there to see her grandpa, who happens to share a cell with James Earl Ray, the guy who killed Martin Luther King” said Donna-Rose. “So this little girl knows some things about what really happened in Memphis, and she’s got to live long enough in order to expose everything once all the old-school FBI men either retire or die off. The dolphins have c
urative powers, you know. And they are all-knowing about what went on, and goes on, in the human world.”

  “The FBI had something to do with MLK? I thought it was JFK and RFK,” said Gall.

  “That was the Mafia in those cases,” Donna-Rose said.

  “Tell us how you would handle the scene, Novel the novelist,” Anonymous said. “Most of your books are a little more realistic, I know. Because I’ve read them all.”

  Anonymous had cried all three days up to this point. I had a feeling that she once owned a palm-reading venture near where Reagan lived during presidential vacations. Anonymous knew some scary things, I could tell, outside of contemporary American fiction.

  I topped off everyone’s Bloody Marys and said, “No charge. This round on the house.” I stalled and tried to think of another little aphorism from one of the books on craft. “Throughout the first draft of your story, keep one finger on the pulse of your rising action, and one finger on the jugular of your reader. Neither let you or the reader fade out entirely, or have a stroke. Always be careful not to go too far.”

  I’m not exaggerating when I say that it looked like I was surrounded by a gaggle of baseball bobbleheads. It looked like those brainwashed victims at an Avatar Basic Attention Management weekend seminar, nodding up and down relentlessly to such drivel as “Your beliefs will create your life events.”

  Man, I have to admit that I was into it. I kind of wanted Bekah to witness this power I hadn’t felt since making the lieutenant governor come out looking like pure enlightenment personified by plagiarizing William Hazlitt’s “Rules and models destroy genius and art,” while addressing a troupe of visiting ballet dancers in Winston-Salem. Hell, I’d’ve taken Ina and Irby for witnesses.

  I reached behind my makeshift wet bar—which most people would’ve called “the Xerox Document Centre 220DC Photocopier”—and pulled out a bottle of bourbon, ready to regale.

  10

  “LET ME GET this straight,” Jeff the owner leaned across his bar to say. It was two o’clock on Saturday afternoon of my first week with dilettantes and I had already vowed to sell off the property and send the money to Bekah. I asked for a six-pack of Goody’s powders from his hangover relief shelf, stacked between pickled pigs’ feet and a paperback book filled with graphic photos of “male body parts” suffering from Iong-untended sexually transmitted diseases. “Novel. You’re running a whorehouse in outer Gruel, everybody there wants you to sit around and tell war stories about a publishing career that you’ve never experienced, and you’re thinking about moving? Son, we might need to FedEx a psychiatrist in here to tell you what’s what. I got a supposed trick-shot pool player who’s come in here every day for I don’t know how many years—ever since the sand and gravel place shut down and turned into a school—and he’s never made one shot. I saw him play straight pool one time and he had seven balls left on the table at the end of the game. Against a guy in a wheelchair who had to use a periscope to even see the table.”

  I unwrapped the box of powdered aspirin, curled up its cellophane, opened the box’s lid, pulled out one wax-paper-covered strip of crushed aspirin, read the box’s list of ingredients—520 milligrams aspirin, 260 acetaminophen, 32.5 caffeine, all active; lactose and potassium chloride, inactive—unflapped the wax paper and remembered writing a long, long speech for the lieutenant governor one time concerning the problem of coke in our cities’ poorer areas and how he ad-libbed how he’d always been a Pepsi man seeing as Pepsi got “discovered” in North Carolina. I stuck out my tongue as inconspicuously as possible, lay that strip of medicine down on my tongue, and washed it down with three swigs of PBR. Then I took another.

  I said, “I just finished reading a whole chapter on how step-by-step description’s a good thing in writing fiction and/or nonfiction. When I try to explain it all, though, I get too impatient. If I were going to write a good southern scene about childhood friends who went to a hunt camp every weekend before Thanksgiving it’d go something like ‘Larry shot the deer two miles away from the cabin. After supper, everyone said it was the best venison ever.’ I wouldn’t take the time to go through pulling out the dressing knife, filleting the buck out, building a fire, whatever else goes on. People have fucking things to do.”

  Jeff the owner said, “Hey! Y’all keep it wise back there,” yelling toward the back of Roughhouse Billiards. The pool hall wasn’t ninety feet deep, twenty-four wide. Jeff and I were the only ones present. “I like to keep in shape,” he said. “I try to be ready should we ever have a packed house rush of redneck scallywags.”

  Scallywags! I thought. Who says scallywags? I said, “Kind of like testing your smoke alarm every few months. Kind of like that emergency broadcast system that used to beep every day on radio and TV, back during the cold war.”

  Jeff said, “I have no clue what you’re talking about. But listen—I have a bunch of stories. What say I come over every once in a while and you tell everybody I’m a famous author. From what you told me they’d never know. Then I’d tell them a couple stories about my stories. I’ve read Louis L’Amour! I’ve read Louis L’Amour and the Bobbsey Twins! Shit, Novel, I could just tell those book reports I done at Gruel Normal back in the day, you know. This’ll be fun. This’ll be easy.”

  I’d made the mistake of telling him how, on average, the Gruel Inn Writers Retreat would hold nine women to two men weekly, all the way through Armageddon. I’d screwed up and recounted my they-can-only-write-three-days-in-a-row theory, how the women then have nothing to do but tell their pasts, the men nothing but chase panties. I said, “It would be nothing but mean, Jeff. Man, these people have hopes and dreams and aspirations and hopes again of one day being on that bestseller list. They’re the kind of people who wait for Publishers Weekly to bring them a grand prize check. It wouldn’t be right for you to prey on them.”

  Jeff slid me a beer, then a shot. He said, “What do you think you’re doing, fucker?” He pulled my shot back and downed it himself. “Speaking of which,” Jeff the owner said. He bowed his head once to the door. Maura-Lee Snipes walked in popping her hips stool to wall in a way that she never demonstrated while enduring the Gruel Sneeze ’n’ Tone. She wore her brunette hair back in a bun, wore rouge to accentuate her risen cheeks. I noticed how her shoes now fit better.

  “I figured I’d find you here, Novel,” Maura-Lee said. “Any complaints with the continental breakfast?”

  Jeff said, “Redneck scallywags. It could happen at any moment.”

  To Maura-Lee I could only say, “No complaints whatsoever. Have I told you how much I love you lately? I can’t believe the ways of fate—if my dead ex-brother-in-law hadn’t flicked his cigarette, then I wouldn’t have met you.” Jeff made a big production of finding his blender, putting in ice, slicing up a banana, pouring in rum, and making Maura-Lee a daiquiri.

  She said, “If I’d’ve known what weird dark spots those dead animal heads made on the wall once I took them down I’d’ve offered less money for your mom-in-law’s house. For paint and that Kilz stuff that covers bad stains. Hey, you want to buy some jackalopes for the motel? I think they’d look good in each room.”

  Jeff the owner popped his upturned blender pitcher with the back of his fist to properly unclog the blades. He said, “It might give them some safari ideas. Maybe the writers would look up into those glass eyes and feel like they should write some adventure items. Kind of like the ones I got stored up here.” He touched his temple.

  I thought for the first time in my life, I wish I still drove the Viper-Mobile. I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Was I about to cry?

  “Are you writing down everything in your notebook like I told you to do, goddamn it? Come on, Novel, you’ve gotten dropped into a giant vat of pure sugar spinning cotton candy, boy,” Maura-Lee said.

  Those two trick-shot hopefuls walked in all cocky, dragging their cue sticks behind them like petrified prehensile tails. I had a feeling that some of my guests wouldn’t wait till I got back before they
hitchhiked to the square. “I got a new one I thought up this morning,” one pool player said. “It involves four rusty nails, three Bic pens, two severed fingers . . .”

  “And a tampon in a pear tree,” the other guy sang out. I looked over at them. Again, they were covered in dark, dark specks of paint. What mausoleum hired them out? I thought.

  “Write that down,” Maura-Lee said. “You got shit all around you, Bo.”

  Maura-Lee, as a baker, of course, worked one in the morning until about two in the afternoon. She’d not done much to this point with her Jesus crust outside of providing breakfast to my sad clients and pissing off everybody else in Gruel who still had at least one Bible verse within them. She wore a flour-dusted red apron, but seemed neither harried nor withered. I said, “You’ve done a good job keeping that weight off. That Raleigh or Columbia weight off. I know it’s not cool to bring up a woman’s figure or weight, but you’re looking fit and trim, still.” I figured I said all of this in a delicate and complimentary manner. I waited to see if she’d let on where she once lived.

  “‘Fit and Trim’s’ a dog food brand, you stupid fucking fuck. What an asshole, prick-face. I can’t believe you’d say something like that to me.” Then she muttered something that I think she meant not to be heard. I’m almost sure I heard her say, “No wonder I love women.”

  I said, “Excuse me?”

  Jeff the owner said, “I’ve been thinking about inventing a kiwi daiquiri, but too many of my regulars don’t like to see the outside of that fruit harmed, you know. What with the way it looks and feels.”

  I had no idea what Jeff meant, nor had I witnessed Maura-Lee’s mouth as such. I’d never heard such cussing since my own wife told Vudge Ina that we’d never take over the taxidermy operation in Gruel; since one of my lieutenant governors got mad at my writing the word “fecal” instead of “fecund”; since one woman calling up to reserve writing space asked why I wouldn’t take performance poets; since James and Joyce called me “Novella” when they caught me with my pants down around my ankles one day prepuberty; since my own father cursed the non-gold-producing rivers he waded, and the non-shrimp-producing oceans he gazed upon; since I came out of the womb as my mother screamed out “Novel Akers!”