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  Bekah made a big point of sighing into the receiver. She said, “There are some small-print clauses in our state’s marriage and divorce codes.”

  I didn’t think she told the truth—what codes could there be, seeing as most of North Carolina didn’t have zoning laws—but said nothing. “Well come on down here if you want I don’t think you could stay here, seeing as I’m full to capacity. I guess that Ms. Snipes woman could let you stay in your parents’ house. Or maybe Jeff the owner will let you crash on his pool table.”

  Bekah said, “Oh there’s a code, my friend. How’s about this, Novel: Gene Weeks has a new client he’s collecting debts for. And he happens to be the ex-lieutenant governor. I’ve been dealing with the guy—gee, I have a feeling that you know him—and you wouldn’t believe what I’m finding out. Yep. I introduced myself as Bekah Akers, and then he started talking about how he once had a guy on staff named Novel Akers, and then I said yeah, with the snakes, and he said . . .”

  Again, I started wondering about state capitals, state birds, state flowers and mottoes, how far the stock market had gone up since the last Republican dynasty, how every dog in existence looked funny with painted-on eyebrows, how too many small-town visual artists got interviewed in one form of the media or the other and whined, “I can’t make a living here, what with the small amount of people who buy artwork”—like they could make it in New York City or Los Angeles or Lexington, Kentucky—and every movie I’d ever seen where the camera showed a scary house up on a hill.

  “Are you listening to me? Novel, are you attuned to this conversation?” Bekah yelled into the receiver. This, by the way, was six thirty in the morning. I awaited Maura-Lee’s continental breakfast delivery, and feared that Patty Anderson might traipse in and yell out something about her character Mona Tara Lee.

  I said, “I’m here. There’s a pterodactyl or something in the road eating a stray hyena.”

  “The lieutenant governor said, ‘Akers. I used to have a speechwriter named Akers.’”

  “Yeah. So what? There are a ton of Akers in the Carolinas.” I could feel my face redden out of embarrassment.

  “He said, ‘I had a speechwriter named Novel Akers.’ How many fucking Novel Akers are there in the United States, much less North and South Carolina, you sandbagging dickhead?”

  Sandbagging dickhead! I actually wrote it down on a piece of brown paper bag as a possible title for my memoirs. “At least two, I guess.”

  “Two my ass. You weren’t a Viper-Mobile driver. You were on the inside, Novel. He told me all about it. He told me about Niger, and recycling telephone books.”

  Listen to this story: I was in the middle of handing over docile, gorgeous corn snakes to a group of Daughters of the American Revolution descendants—all nice women—when my phone rang inside the step van. I wasn’t happy, as normal, seeing as I’d just gotten into the part of my rehearsed speech concerning how snakes can’t really turn themselves into giant hoops and roll down the road. I excused myself, picked up the phone, and the lieutenant governor kind of screamed, “I need something immediately about the funeral home industry. I’m about to talk to the Greater Greensboro Optimist Club.”

  I remember that speech verbatim: “If we get a true gift from someone, then we should be able to do with it whatever we want. For example, if we get a rare Tiffany lamp for a wedding present, the giver should not be appalled when—for some sacrificial and superstitious reason—we decide to throw said lamp against the wall, shattering the shade into a thousand pieces. No giver will question the fate of a true gift. Now, what is the greatest gift God has given each of us? The answer is Life. And if it’s a true gift—and God would only offer up true gifts seeing as God must be benevolent—wouldn’t God allow us to do whatever we wanted with this gift? Therefore, suicide and euthanasia should not be considered immoral, pessimistic actions.”

  Who knew that a news crew would’ve shown up at such a picayune event? The Optimists were happy, sure. But the medical community got extremely upset—their whole livelihood depended on people hanging on forever throughout Lou Gehrig’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, Hodgkin’s disease, blindness, infertility, chronic pain, cancer, massive strokes, and plain old outré manic depression. If I’d’ve known what I learned later, I would’ve only directed people with an ache or pain to Graywood Regional Memorial in Forty-Five, South Carolina, you know.

  I said to Bekah, “When did you start cussing so much? I don’t remember your cussing. I thought you told me that before we met you were Junior Miss Graywood County. I’m thinking the sponsors of that pageant asked their winners not to cuss and to never wear pants. Are you wearing blue jeans right now?”

  My wife hung up the phone. Because I lived in Gruel, South Carolina, I wasn’t able to hit star 69 and find out that she wasn’t calling from our old house.

  12

  I SAT AROUND HARD for three days hoping to attain that famous “recovered memory syndrome” in order to remember something worthwhile and significant, any little episode that might be beneficial and meaningful in regards to my life story. It was like I had writing retreat dyslexia—when everyone else didn’t think within my square rooms whatsoever, I did, and vice versa.

  I waited for Bekah. I got out my calendar and checkbook to figure out the actual date of Vudge Ina’s and Irby’s miraculous deaths. When Bekah didn’t show up on that date, when she didn’t show up three days later—like in the stupid Bible story—I let myself breathe. I quit hanging out at Roughhouse Billiards drinking nonstop, quit thinking about what advantages I might gain from wandering into Gruel Jungle for forty days and forty nights, quit expecting a long-range flood like Jeff the owner did.

  “She’s a regular-looking woman with shoulder-length hair and high-heel shoes,” I said to Jeff one night while expecting Bekah. “You and I have to come up with some kind of code whistle, in case I’m in the men’s room when she arrives, so I can stay in there.” Jeff filled out a parlay card some small-time old boy bookie from Forty-Five brought over weekly. Jeff said, “Novel. I don’t know how pickled your brain is, but you might recall that I’m from here, and Rebekah was from here. I know who she is and looks like. It’s you I don’t know.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I forgot you knew her. Hey, was she ever Junior Miss Graywood County?”

  Victor Dees walked in from his army-navy surplus store across the street. I’d only run into him a couple times before. Dees always had a look on his face like someone chased him, and on the sidewalk he turned his head around about every sixth step. He looked at Jeff and said, “Jeff.” He looked at me and said, “Speechwriter for the criminally insane.”

  I smiled and shook my head a few times. “I take it Bekah called you up to say I was some kind of bad person. I can hear her now. She said our whole marriage was a sham, built on a foundation of half-truths. She said something about how I should’ve been a Hollywood actor, the way I pretended to love snakes and all. Well, good. Good for her. For the record, she won. She’s back in Charlotte, and I’m ass-deep in Gruel. She’s got her old job back taking money from poor people, and I’m stuck running a goofball writers haven that I have no interest in whatsoever. If I sell out, technically, the money’s hers, I guess.”

  Victor Dees sat down on the vinyl stool beside mine. He pointed at the bourbon shelf, then waffled two fingers in the international sign to say one for him and one for me. Jeff the owner poured two straight shots and placed them on the counter. Dees said, “She said none of that. Rebekah called me up and asked how much I would charge to kill you. I said that I probably couldn’t do such a thing unless there was good valid reasons. Like if you went around fondling little girls and old women. Or boys. Domesticated farm animals.” He held up his glass for me to clink.

  “Well I’m proud to say that I’ve done none of the above,” I said.

  Victor Dees held his eyebrows high and cinched up his camouflaged balls. “Are you sure about that?” he said. “Do you have proof?”

  Wher
e were the trick-shot pool players when you needed them? I wanted some kind of distraction. I could’ve used the new clan of writers to find Roughhouse Billiards en masse and take me away for a series of private consultations about the overuse of adverbs and adjectives. I said, “I don’t have any photos of me fucking any of those people you mentioned, if that’s what you mean. Bekah doesn’t have any photos, unless she doctored some up the way that can be done nowadays.”

  “That’s right. I don’t have any photos, and Bekah doesn’t. But you might. Of course you’re going to lie about not having pictures of yourself with sheep, Lolita, and Grandma Moses, unless you’re criminally insane.”

  I would’ve gone ahead and punched Victor Dees in the nose if he didn’t have two bayonets strapped to his thighs. I said, “Jeff, could you please hand me the phone? I need to call Cape Kennedy and see if my spaceship’s ready to return to Earth.”

  “You wrote a speech for the lieutenant governor up in North Carolina about how the nuthouses in Morganton and Raleigh could be operated better if more ex-patients were on the boards of directors, right? You wrote a speech about how there was nothing more depressing for a manic-depressive than having happy people run the asylum, correct?”

  I thought, Goddamn, how much did the lieutenant governor tell my wife? “I ne ver liked any of our lieutenant governors. It was a joke.”

  Victor Dees clinked my glass again. He said, “Do you know what’s the best thing about teaching at a school for the blind?”

  I tried to make the connection. I couldn’t remember writing a speech pro or con the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind. I said, “No sir, I don’t.”

  “No dress code! You can go to work naked!”

  I bought the next round. Victor Dees said he was running a special on old-fashioned two-man canvas pup tents he’d gotten at an estate sale up in Sylva, something about a survivalist who didn’t survive. I said, “Put me down for two of them. I might have someone writing a war novel who needs to act the part. I could send him across the road from my place into Gruel Jungle, or whatever y’all call that primordial acreage.”

  Jeff the owner said, “We used to call it Boy Scout camp a thousand years ago. You remember, don’t you, Vic?”

  “I’ve seen more two-headed toads back in those woods than I’ve seen regular ones.No one believes me, but I saw a unicorn up on the hummock one time, right across from Gruel Inn.” Victor Dees held his forehead high.

  “Those were the days,” Jeff the owner said.

  I said, “Hey, Vic—Jeff here’s a famous writer. Did you know that? He wrote a little paperback novel one time. Show him your novel, Jeff.”

  Victor Dees took my arm and said, “Don’t ever, ever call me ‘Vic’ again.”

  Maura-Lee Snipes started catering Jesus crust bread to every white-flight private school in Graywood County, plus schools right across the border, which numbered about a hundred elementary, middle, and high schools that “taught” how hatred was a bad thing, how the Golden Rule was a good thing, and how God would want to charge exorbitant yearly tuitions so no black person could ever afford transferring from, say, Forty-Five High to Rock of Ages K–12. Maura-Lee started off using my old, empty Viper-Mobile, then had to lease two nearly new models and hire a couple delivery drivers. Each slicked loaf cost $1.66. The average school went through four hundred slices per lunch, especially on Deli Meat! Sandwich! Day! Loaves, minus heels, got cut into thirty-six slices of bread. I don’t know what Maura-Lee’s overhead ran, but outside of the lamb’s blood dripped into each vat of dough for authentic Jesus crust, she wasn’t hurting in regards to net and gross. Do the math. Because Irby Cathcart flicked his cigarette—or didn’t—and killed Ina Cathcart, because my wife used her inheritance to start the Sneeze ’n’ Tone, because Maura-Lee wanted to lose twenty or thirty pounds and somehow had an orgasmic conversion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I made the woman who would never love me become a millionairess.

  I said, “What’re you paying your bread drivers? I spent a dozen years driving my step van. Maybe I’ll close down shop and service the Graywood/Abbeville/Ware Shoals private school region. I can read a map.” This was later on, on Victor-Dees-Makes-a-Threat Day, inside Roughhouse. Dees went back to his store in search of Brasso to “shiny up” his bayonets—his words.

  “Normal. Better than normal. A dollar more than minimum wage per hour, plus a loaf of misshapen. I’m thinking about giving dental insurance if they stay six months.”

  Gruel minimum wage had been $2.35 since the 1970s. I’m not sure how no one knew the difference or cared. I said, “Never mind.”

  “I got a call from one of those evangelists the other day saying he wanted me to appear on his show.”

  I said, “Ernest Angley?”

  “The other one.”

  “Billy Graham or his son?”

  “The other one.”

  “Not that prison dude—Jim Bakker?”

  Maura-Lee sipped from her Manhattan. “The other one.”

  “Leroy Jenkins?”

  “How do you know about so many TV evangelists?”

  I said, “The guy with the hair—Benny somebody?”

  “The other one.”

  “That woman who played Ellie Mae on The Beverly Hillbillies?”

  Maura-Lee said, “No, it was a man. You know. Goddamn, I can’t think of his name. I think he might’ve had something to do with wrestling, too.”

  I looked over at Jeff who tried to pull off a trick shot on the pool table involving a Zippo lighter and a tiki torch. It was a good thing no insurance agents ever traveled into Roughhouse. “Senator Newt Gingrich? Senator Orrin Hatch? Jesse Helms? Senator John Warner? That dickhead out in Missouri, Ashcroft? Reagan. Bush. Nixon’s dead.”

  Maura-Lee said, “I want some boiled peanuts. Hey, Jeff, you got any boiled peanuts in the cooler?”

  He shot his cue ball into the air, lit the Zippo, which lit the torch, which fell on the table and knocked the eight ball into the corner pocket. He said, “It’s not all that hard. I keep telling those boys it’s not all that hard.”

  “I know who you’re talking about—that guy who had his face blown off in Vietnam. That evangelist.”

  “No more boiled peanuts,” Jeff the owner said.

  “Not him. Damn it to hell.” Maura-Lee looked up at the punched-tin ceiling. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going on. Say, you never did answer me as to if you wanted those jackalopes for the Gruel Inn. You want those things? I’ve got them stacked up on the back porch.”

  I said, “Ollie North. Any of those guys who did prison time due to the Watergate break-in.”

  Maura-Lee turned on her seat and faced me. “I thought you were going to write a novel, Novel. What’re you doing? You know how to write, if speechwriting counts for anything. Vic Dees told me that much. How come you’re not with your people, working on a manuscript?”

  I said, “Oh. I know. That guy who ran a Kansas mile in 3:51 when he was still in high school. Him. Does he have a TV show now?”

  Maura-Lee said, “What kind of good southern bar doesn’t have boiled peanuts anymore? That’s like Gruel BBQ running out of coleslaw.”

  I said, “It’d be like you running out of yeast. Or flour. Or eggs.” I couldn’t remember what else went into bread.

  Maura-Lee got up, rounded the counter, and made her own new drink so as not to disturb Jeff, who now attempted a trick shot that involved a yardstick, two dog collars, and a giant rattrap that may or may not have held vermin not two minutes earlier.

  I called Bekah and let her know that I learned of her hired assassin, but that he and I worked things out. She said, of course, “What’re you talking, Novel? Are you out of your fucking mind? Go run the motel and quit hanging out at Roughhouse Billiards.”

  I moved away from the office window. “So you’ve already talked to Vic Dees, I take it. How else would you know that I’ve been ‘hanging out,’ as you put it, at the pool hall? Huh? Answer me that one, if you don�
�t mind.”

  Bekah sighed hard. In the background I heard a knot of telemarketers calling up poor people in order to yell at them about hurting the economy, being sad excuses for human beings, et cetera. Although Bekah could do her job from home, she still went into Gene Weeks’s office more often than not. “I was brought up in Gruel.Anybody unable to speak without a slur in his voice has been sitting in Roughhouse a little too long.”

  “Well that may be,” I said, “but it doesn’t excuse you from trying to kill me.”

  Bekah said, “Yessir, yessir, yessir,” to someone in her office. To me she said, “I don’t need to hire anyone, Novel. You’ve been doing a fine job all by yourself. Snakes. Making politicians look the fool when they talk to an audience in front of cameras.”

  I said, “Well I just want to get it straight that I know. That’s all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m leading a little impromptu seminar on the importance of lists in all forms of writing.”

  Bekah said that maybe she should start writing bestsellers immediately, seeing as she had a list of things to say. “Maybe you should tell those people how important it is to be historical, Novel. Maybe—in the state you’re in now—you should talk to them about sci-fi, Novel.”

  I wondered how long she’d been waiting to use those sentences on me. She was still laughing when she hung up.

  13

  MY MOTHER carried on a yearlong affair with a man who could’ve become one of the most recognizable abstract expressionists in the twentieth century. At the time, though, he carried around his own easel and copied from the masters, charcoaled boring still lifes, and so on. This is according to my mother’s journals, dated 1949–1952. She never wrote down his name, or used any initials, code words, or nicknames. You’d think that a person would slip up occasionally, maybe write, “Today Splash said he wanted to go for a drive, but I told him he was too drunk.”