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I learned all of this in a haphazard way: When my parents died they left a couple boxes of what I considered useless “ephemera”—a word I didn’t know until Bekah forwarded a letter addressed to me that had made its way to the lieutenant governor’s office. When I was eighteen or twenty I referred to “ephemera” as plain old “useless notebooks.” Anyway, these personal items landed in the Black Mountain College Research Archives, which, in the year 1999, lost its funding due to government cutbacks. I had two days to come pick up whatever boxes still belonged to me, in a lawful and technical sense.

  I borrowed back my step van and took off, made my way up I-26 eventually, and learned that, had my parents ever made a name for themselves in the music world, their belongings would probably be transferred to the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, with most of the general files, faculty reports, and photographs stuck in Black Mountain. Some of the materials were donated and accepted at the Smithsonian, according to the archivist.

  “Nothing against your mom and dad,” soon-to-be-unemployed registrar Milson Willets said to me. “They didn’t live long enough to make what we might consider an ‘eternal impression’ on the arts. I’m sure that these catalogued notebooks and letters will be invaluable to you, but they’re not up to par in regards to a state repository much larger and more complete than poor old Black Mountain College Research Archives Center and Storage.”

  I said, “No need to apologize. I’m kind of excited about getting these back. I probably shouldn’t have given everything up back when my parents got killed. I guess I couldn’t understand value back then.”

  Milson Willets parted his hair in the middle, I supposed, but the part was a good two inches wide. It was as if he sported a reverse mohawk. “Now, there could be extraneous circumstances. For example, the letters of Faulkner’s mother are quite worthwhile in the archival world. What have you made of yourself, Mr. Akers?”

  I almost proudly announced my Viper-Mobile and speechwriting days, the Sneeze ’n’ Tone abetment, the Gruel Inn Writers Retreat. “I’ll just go ahead and take these back home. Maybe between now and my death I’ll do something worthwhile and lasting. Then I can donate everything back to someone.”

  I had snakes living in four-sided habitats larger than the box filled with my parents’ important papers. There were four notebooks, two of which seemed to be an unfinished experimental composition my father wrote titled, “RE: Quim for Mozart.” Some snapshots of James and Joyce settled down at the bottom. There were none of me, though maybe I had “purloined” my Polaroids in hopes of showing a prospective girlfriend in the history department how cute I was panning for gold or popping the heads off shrimp.

  When I got back home to Gruel I noticed immediately how Dr. Bobba Lollis—whose given name was “Bobby,” really, and who didn’t have a medical degree or Ph.D.—moved his free portable blood pressure machine out onto the sidewalk in front of Gruel Drugs. He’d taken the three vinyl chairs out there also, the ones that stood against the wall next to the pharmacist’s station, beside the systolic-diastolic device with Heart Rate Feature! I returned from Black Mountain as I went—prodigal son in neither direction—at dawn after getting Jeff the owner to watch my writers for a night.

  Certainly I could’ve made it up there and back all in daylight hours, but something told me that I might not be in the best mental shape. Maybe I’d seen too many afternoon talk shows. Perhaps deep down I knew that I would be scarred for life should I open the marbled covers of my mother’s notebooks. It could’ve been the wood nymphs that called me nightly from deep in the woods across the road, I don’t know.

  I made it to a KOA campground outside Pumpkintown, where a slew of Wally Byam Caravan Club Airstream freaks parked. I paid my campsite fee, parked, and got out my mother’s secrets.

  Remember that my parents thought they had no children because of dual infertility, that they “adopted” James and Joyce from early Irish Republican Army instigators, that I came along more or less—this wasn’t a grand surprise to me—as an accident, a novelty. One: Joyce and James were as Irish as my corn snakes. Two: Joyce and James sprang from the loins of a modern dancer who didn’t want her career ruined with children, right there at Black Mountain College.

  I’ll give my parents bonus points for taking on my brother and sister. Oh, I’m as pro-choice as they get, but I’ll applaud my folks for taking in unwanteds—kind of like what I do at the Gruel Inn, though on a smaller scale.

  Three: My mother had exactly zero respect or faith in my father’s ability as a composer.

  Four: My mother had a half-dozen “miscarriages” before Joyce and James, then not another between their arrival into the Akers fold, then mine. That’s how she wrote it. “Perhaps I thought more about my once-promising career than I did about checking the calendar monthly. God those ‘miscarriages’ hurt. There should be a law . . .”

  Well I don’t know about you, but I’m all fucked-up finding out that my mother probably stuck hangers up there.

  I read and reread, then joined a crook of Airstream enthusiasts who invited me over for a delicious supper of creamed corn, whipped potatoes, mashed yams, and lime Jell-O. We drank sweet tea and listened to some banjo music a fellow named Lloyd picked up on his super-duper AM radio. Everyone camped around me enjoyed their last flickers of life, and when I left at dawn I hoped that someone would shoot me in the head before I ever spent twenty minutes commenting nonstop on creamed corn and banjo music.

  Which gets me back to the blood pressure machine. My favorite geezers, Conrad Hulsey and Swenson T. Jones—both of whom hated me because I wasn’t born and raised in Gruel—went inside the pharmacy daily and checked their blood pressure. I’m talking mid-1970s until Maura-Lee opened her bakery. For some reason these two men never thought to make who-buys-the-beer bets over at Roughhouse Billiards. Once Maura-Lee’s Jesus crust became all the fashion, though, Hulsey and Jones got competitive. Maybe they liked her looks better than Jeff the owner’s.

  As it went, whoever had the worst blood pressure got a free coffee or bagel from the other. I witnessed their bickering many a morning—then noon and night—when I went into the drugstore to buy condoms for my miserably hopeful and confused male novelists, usually Wednesdays and Saturdays.

  “One ninety-one over 90 is worse than 170 over 100,” Hulsey might say. “Do the math. You owe me a bagel.” They both probably couldn’t remember the day they retired from Gruel Sand and Gravel, back when it still furnished much of Graywood County with driveways and horseshoe pits.

  I puttered my step van into the square and saw them flipping a case quarter to see who went first. “When did Dr. Lollis move this out of the store?” I asked.

  Maura-Lee waved through her plate-glass window next door. “This ain’t none your bidness,” Swenson T. Jones said. He insisted on being called Swenson T. I asked him what the “T” stood for only once. He said, “Tongue,” but the look on his face let me know that any other day it might be “Tumultuous” or “Tallywhacker.”

  “You can’t play,” Conrad said. “This is our little game.”

  They stood in the half-light, across from a statue of Colonel Dill, Gruel’s second founder and Civil War hero. I’d not lived in the area long enough to appreciate the annual Dill Day celebration. “Y’all should see who can have the lowest blood pressure,” I said, seeing as I was a nice, normal, sane ex-speechwriter. “Y’all should see who can pull off a 120 over 60 or thereabouts.”

  “I’m eighty years old,” Swenson T. said. “You going to tell me how to live a longer life?”

  Conrad lifted his cane as if to strike me. “I’m eighty-one, goddamn it.” He reached in his denim shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims Ultra-Lights, lit one, and inhaled. “I’m ready to take the test.”

  I looked down at the orange extension cord snaking through the misaligned front door of Gruel Drugs. Swenson T. took a bottle of schnapps out of his hip pocket and took two swigs. He said, “I’m feeling mighty tense this morning. I’m
about stroke-ready.”

  I wanted a gun. It was like living on the set of a cowboy movie solely made up of character actors named Cookie. “Kill yourselves,” I said. “Y’all should eat some fatback sandwiches more often. It’s men like you that’re causing health insurance rates to rise every day. Start smoking real cigarettes and drinking real liquor, for god’s sake. Hurry up and die. You’re costing the rest of us too much money.”

  Well I’m sorry. I didn’t really want anyone to die, but human beings could still be nice to one another, I thought. I said, “I got a couple vipers over at the motel. How much will one of you pay me to get you bitten on the forearm? You want your blood pressure up? A good dose of copperhead venom will do the trick I’m betting that with my help I can get either of you old fucks up to 250, maybe 300, over 150. I can get your heart rate right up there to world-record status before you keel over with your free cup of coffee.”

  They didn’t look at each other. Jones and Hulsey stared at me, their foreheads raised, mouths open. “World War II didn’t scare us,” Swenson T. said. “Being in Boy Scouts on jamboree didn’t scare us, and neither do you.”

  Nowadays I realize that I didn’t want to get back in the step van. I didn’t want to go to a place I didn’t call home. I said, “Y’all ever thought about writing your life stories? Y’all ever think about helping other people write their autobiographies? I don’t know that I could pay you much, but I could get you free continental breakfasts. I’m talking, just to be advisers of sorts. Just to be available.”

  Swenson T. Jones said, “The ‘T’ stands for Take a Hike, Son.’”

  As best I could make out my father’s—if indeed he was my father—musical composition, there were parts in his “RE: Quim for Mozart” that employed Jew’s harps, combs wrapped in toilet paper, a handsaw, and a manual typewriter’s return ding. In the margins he wrote things like “Play fortissimo, as if killing an abstract expressionist,” and “Barely audible, like Olivia sneaking out of the house on Wednesday nights.”

  My mother’s last entry ran, “I’m hopeful that Novel turns out all right. He never gained the backbone of either James or Joyce, but that might be genetic. Novel didn’t exactly spring from dancers. The most athletic I’ve seen his father act occurred while running from a stirred nest of yellow jackets. I sure hope there aren’t many flying insects in Florida. There’s no telling how many heart attacks Ted might have.”

  I have no clue as to what made my brother and sister such great rock throwers and distance runners, and for all I know their biological parents were Irish dancers, like early Riverdance idiots.

  I pulled into my parking lot at seven fifteen and noticed every light on. I imagined all of my guests smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, typing out masterpieces that may or may not have begun with, “I’m supposed to get my free continental breakfast at seven o’clock, no later.”

  Jeff the owner came out of the office. “All is well on the southern front.” He grabbed his crotch and pumped it a few times. “Man, if you ever need any more help let me go ahead and volunteer now.”

  “Thanks, Jeff. I just saw Maura-Lee up on the square. I don’t know why she’s late.”

  Jeff lit a cigarette and asked what I had in the cardboard box. He said, “You got this woman took a semester off teaching all-girls’ college so she could write her a novel? And last night she come in the office asking advice, you know? She had it in her mind that I’d been publishing all along.”

  I sidestepped Jeff and set my mother and father’s recrudescent testimonials on the photocopier, shoving aside two bottles of Jim Beam. “Where’d she get that idea? Are you talking about Dr. Culver?”

  “Yeah. I guess she got the idea because I told her I had one book out. Anyway, the next thing you know she’s asking some serious questions about how to write a sex scene without it sounding either sappy, unbelievable, trite, melodramatic, old hat—hey, I found your thesaurus back on the shelf; I hope you don’t mind my perusing it—and the next thing you know we’re aping the fancy metronome.”

  I thought to myself, Do not forget to call your memoir Aping the Fancy Metronome.

  I envisioned my parents’ metronome, on their near-priceless piano, before giving up music altogether. I envisioned Joyce and James’s real parents, clippity-clopping, dressed like suspendered leprechauns. I said, “Maura-Lee knows how to set things up. Let’s you and me go find her, and then start drinking early today.”

  We found Maura-Lee outside Gruel Bakery, conducting CPR on Swenson T. Jones. From what we learned soon thereafter, he had regained consciousness and his heart pumped a strong seventy beats per minute resting. He said, “That was a close one.”

  Unfortunately, though, his best friend called an ambulance, which showed up an hour later and took Swenson “the ‘T’ is for Thrombus” Jones to Graywood Regional Memorial hospital over in Forty-Five. There he supposedly contracted pneumonia and a staph infection, but died when he was accidentally drowned during a sponge bath.

  Possible first sentence to chapter 1: My Gruel confederates grasped instinctively the despair a gambling man underwent when forced to test his blood pressure alone daily.

  14

  I FIGURED IF my rich writers retreat guests made it this far in life with little or no talent, and pipe dreams that only appeared in surfer documentaries or Cheech and Chong movies, that they could figure out how to spend their days in a room with faulty thermostat settings. I helped Jeff open his pool hall three hours early, then we pulled down the blinds and took to the bottles like thirsty Tangiers bandits. I said, “I’ve come across some unsettling news that has me thinking the future, Jeff the owner. I need some straight answers about this town, in case I decide to give up altogether.”

  He said, “I’m keeping tabs, Novel. I can’t afford to have people come in here drinking free. Word’ll spread and then everyone’ll want it for nothing.”

  I nodded. I raised my glass. “First off, what’s your last fucking name? Everyone just calls you ‘Jeff the owner.’”

  “It’s Downer. You must’ve heard it wrong the first time and kept going with it. Some of the boys and me had bets as to when you’d realize your mistake. I guess I lose. I said never, because I predicted that Victor Dees would kill you beforehand.”

  I got up and pulled some Goody’s powders off the shelf before I found myself too drunk to remember. “These ‘boys’ you’re talking about. Where are they? How long have I been in Gruel now, anyway?”

  “Since you got here.” Jeff the owner shrugged.

  Possible roman à clef opening: “I’d never met anyone last-named Downer. Who would go by that name voluntarily before legally changing it at age eighteen?” I said, “I can count on ten fingers the locals I’ve met from Gruel. Nine now that Swenson Jones got taken to the hospital.”

  “T. You forgot to say the T.”

  “Swenson T. Jones, and the ‘T’ stands for ‘Time’s up.’ Where is everybody? There are houses up and down Old Old Greenville Road. There are curtains in the windows. Nobody’s shutters look half unhinged.”

  The bar strobed. “I need to get me some lightbulbs last more than a week. I might need to drive over to Georgia someday.” Jeff said, “Guess how old I am.”

  I knew better than to answer this question when a woman asked. The first time I met Ina I thought she was Bekah’s grandmother. I said, “My age.”

  “Well if you’re sixty, then yes. Listen. Gruel could have a sign at the town limits that says FIRST COTTON MILL TOWN TO DIE. Graywood Mills had a big operation here that went bankrupt in 1946. Every other town in America flourished. Shit, there could be a sign that says LAST TOWN TO SEE THE EFFECTS OF RECONSTRUCTION, seeing as it ain’t happened yet.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Jeff the owner spoke so slowly I was sure he turned sixty-one midway through his explanation. “It’s not funny,” I said. “Sorry. It’s so true, though, it comes out funny.”

  One time when a matchbook factory opened up somewhere in the
middle of eastern North Carolina I wrote a speech for the lieutenant governor to give at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. He said, “I’m predicting that this here company will light a fire under our economy’s butt.” Everybody laughed and appreciated the lieutenant governor’s colloquial metaphor, until a sulfur fire caused a major evacuation, the unemployment rate returned to 25 percent in the county, and what few hog farmers remained lost their livelihood once all the meat-packing plants complained of a hideous stench that emanated off the affected pigs’ “other white meat,” meaning snouts to buttholes.

  Jeff poured us more bourbon, this time without the lemon slices we both set to the side earlier when we thought it looked bicoastal.

  “Most people up and died. A few people got out. You ever hear of the actor Grainger Koon? He’s from right here in Gruel. Oh I know he got all bigheaded later on and claimed to be from Claxton, Georgia—the Fruitcake Capital of the World—but he was brought up here. You might’ve seen him on The Munsters or Mr. Ed. He was in an assortment of those scary movies. He played ‘Scary Man on Dock,’ you know, and ‘Drunk Man Falls off Park Bench.’ His family only moved to Claxton ’cause Daddy got a supervisor position at the fruitcake factory.”

  I said, “I don’t know him.” I thought about my father wildly searching a pan for gold, my mother looking toward the mountains’ nonexistent horizon.

  “Some left, like I said. Some died. A bunch of us have stayed on seeing as, ironically—now there’s a word I bet you didn’t think I knew—we never seemed to age much, and we’re waiting for something to happen. Kind of like your Gruel Inn thing. We actually got excited about that.”

  “Well you’ve had a weird way of showing it. Nice welcome wagon, fucker.”

  Jeff the owner said, “We didn’t like Rebekah moving back, if you want to know the truth. We didn’t need another from the Cathcart clan. You see, her daddy only dealt with death in one way or the other. First, his taxidermy operation. Then some stuff in between you’ll find out sooner or later from someone wiser and more loose-lipped than I am. Then Sherrill Cathcart’s death. He’s the only man or woman ever took his own life in Gruel, supposedly. We might not be the most Sunday-religious folk in all of South Carolina—you may’ve noticed no churches left in operation—but we got our convictions. We’ve never had our own funeral home, and we’ve never had our own doctor. Most people wouldn’t even want Gruel Drugs, I’m thinking, if they had a vote.”