Novel

by George Singleton

  Bob Murray looked behind himself. I scanned his desk at this point: a glass paperweight with seashells inside; a Mr. Peanut figurine; a bag of peppermint stars; two of the same photographs of Bob and what I supposed was his wife and son, all of whom wore grins and short, short hair; a postcard of Samuel Beckett, oddly. “Gruel,” he said. “I know Gruel. Back in the day my Little League team got trounced by Gruel all the time. They had kids living there, then.”

  I kind of lied about my role. “I’m just trying to figure out some facts,” I said. “You know—about the people. The place.”

  “I’ll tell you about Gruel, my friend. First off, don’t go there. Second—if for some reason you get stuck with a flat tire or whatever, run. Run at a diagonal from the sun. Or moon. Get away. Do you know how many people considered ‘missing’are probably buried in a Gruel shallow grave? Fucking A—do you know how many people considered missing actually moved to Gruel so that no one would ever find them? The answer to both questions goes a little like this: too many to count.”

  The chair in which I sat might’ve been a reject. The legs seemed six inches too short all the way around. I sat there stupid like a man asquat in a public restroom. I said, “There are some strange people living in caves up on Gruel Mountain, from what they tell me.”

  Bob Murray said, “Strange? There are felons living up there running a gaming industry that makes Las Vegas look like a place to shoot marbles. Whaddya got for me, man? Whaddya know?”

  “Not much. You know more than I.”

  “I’ve been trying to hire out a detective, Novel. Absolutely no one will take this project on. One day a couple months ago I took a hike upside the mountain from the old, closed-down Gruel Inn site.” I didn’t say anything about the new Gruel Inn’s inside opulence. “Well I walked and hiked and trudged until I found what I thought was an open grave. The weird thing was, someone had laid down a bunch of carpet up the trail, as if asking anyone to follow it. Anyway, luckily I’d brought along a backpack, and in it I had a collapsible retrenchment tool I’d bought at Victor Dees’s army-navy store, along with water. And my AK-47.”

  I said, “Huh,” and felt my face turn red.

  “Well what I dug up was this.” Before Bob Murray turned around, opened up a file cabinet, and pulled out a metal fireproof lockbox, I knew that he would pull out my pathetic memoir in rhymed couplets. He did. Luckily I’d been smart enough not to type a title page with name and address—something the how-to books said a writer should do, along with word count. “The people living up on Gruel Mountain keep some kind of history of themselves and evidently bury their records for future generations to discover. I’m no archaeologist or believer in UFOs, but I’m of the mind that those people up there might be readying for an alien invasion. Or a mass suicide.”

  I looked at my sorry excuse of a manuscript and foresaw what would drive me straight out of Gruel on a giant wave of ridicule and embarrassment. “Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t publish this thing in the Forty-Five Platter. It’ll only cause a general panic. Anyway, what I came to you about was this history of Gruel book I’ve been contracted to write, and I wanted to know your thoughts on why no one there voted ever.”

  Change the subject, change the subject, change the subject, I thought.

  Bob Murray thumbed through my sad, odd tome. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe no one remembers voting day. Maybe no one cares. From what I can gather, those people hold a grudge against the government. Ours, and the old Confederate one.”

  I pretended to listen as he went on to tell me what I already divined, but to be honest I could only think about stealing back my epic poem and burning it. Unfortunately, though, he replaced the thing in the lockbox, replaced the lockbox in the lockable file cabinet. I said, “Well thanks for your time.”

  “Hey, if and when your book comes out, let me know. I’ll write a piece about it in Lifestyles. I don’t think we’ve ever done anything on a book, you know.”

  I told him he’d be the first person I would contact.

  On my way out of Forty-Five I stopped at the Dixie Drive-In and ordered two chili cheeseburgers. Looking back, I figured that I had a death wish, that I wanted to clog my carotids, undergo a stroke, and lose that part of my brain that stored short-term memory. Or I simply wanted to faint, get sent to Graywood Regional Memorial, and die from unknown causes.

  33

  “I GOT A CALL from a man named Murray over at the paper,” Bekah said. She showed up unannounced at the Gruel Inn. I couldn’t tell for sure but I swore that I saw someone hunch down hiding in the backseat of her car.

  I said, “Why’d he call you?”

  We sat in the office, and I offered her a cup of special coffee I’d bought in Forty-Five, a little something I couldn’t get anywhere in Gruel. I offered her some fucking Folgers. “Bob Murray’s daddy and my daddy were friends. I guess he knew I’d come back. How or why he called me up isn’t the question, though, Novel-baby. The question is, why were you over there snooping around more than you need?”

  Let me say right now that I’d only seen Bekah bow up fighting mad a few times during our marriage, and two of those occasions occurred during our honeymoon. “I need to know some things if I want to write a true account. I need to know some things. I need to know. A true account is what it’s all about, am I right or am I right?”

  Bekah crossed, uncrossed, and recrossed her legs. “You know enough. You know more than enough. That’s why I voted against this whole project long ago. I knew you weren’t the right man for the job years ago.”

  My wife stood up to leave. I said, “What?” and thought about a philosophy course I took in college revolving around free will and nothing else. Well about free will and predestination.

  “I thought you’d puzzle out this mystery, Novel. Before now. Maybe you fried too many brain cells working for those lieutenant governors I never knew about, I don’t know. It seems to me it wouldn’t take a history major to understand how you and I ran out of—years ago—romance, Novel. Maura and I have been lovers since something like the eleventh grade.”

  It’s not like I hadn’t figured it out, kind of. When I look back now and think about how she returned to her hometown too often—even if it was to run the forgery business—something about the rug burns on her knees and chin should’ve told me something. Or how when we made love she always wanted me to tuck my pecker between my legs and hump her pelvis.

  I said, “Maybe I should’ve written more speeches promoting gay unions. Maybe I should’ve fessed up about my real job, and gotten the lieutenant governor to give speeches about the importance of Softball in the schools. Why the hell did you marry me in the first place? Were you bisexual back then?”

  Bekah rolled up the sleeves to her lumberjack shirt, which I thought was a little too warm to wear in mid-May. “You confused me. Back then it hadn’t been all that long since you stood on the side of the road with your daddy, selling shrimp.”

  That hurt, I have to tell you. At this point I understood how Bekah prospered as a debt collector. I said, “That’s politically incorrect. You can’t say something about how lesbians are attracted to the smell of fish. That’s just not right, Bekah.”

  She said, “Get ready to move out of here. The gurus are coming to take you over.”

  The stomping emanated from atop Gruel Mountain minutes after Bekah left. I reconsidered Supergluing every outside doorknob again. I thought about stuffing everything from cotton balls to those nickel slugs found lying around near electrical outlets on newly built house underlayment into my ear holes. I tried to talk myself into believing high blood pressure caused the throb-throb-throb that drove me paranoid. Maybe it’s the sound of my heart, beating, pounding, surging oxygen into my brain in order to allow me to think some rational thought, finally, I thought.

  I looked out one of the new Venetian blinds only to see pure darkness. Cicadas! I tried to talk myself into believing. Tree frogs, crickets, locusts, one of those bad urban child bands b
anging trash-can lids.

  I walked in circles and found myself thinking about how I could only write my autobiography after leaving Gruel, and that as hard as it would be to “willingly suspend disbelief”—a term mentioned over and over in all the goddamn how-to-write-a-novel books—I would have to forgo ages one through Gruel: I’m talking leave out my entire upbringing, the sad college years, and then the snake education/speechwriting years.

  Forget the course I took on predestination and free will, Bubba. Bubbette.

  Right as I walked into my parking lot in order to drive far, far away—or at least to my silo hideaway to really finish up the bogus and encompassing biography of Gruel, South Carolina—maybe twenty black men met me from across the street.

  I said, of course, “I’ll be damned. Y’all are the first black people I’ve seen all this time in Gruel.”

  “They talk about us still, I’m sure,” a man said, a man I considered the spokesman, the leader. He stood in front of his vee of comrades. On closer view, he looked more sandy than black. More gray-skinned than bronze.

  I walked across the road. “What’s the noise y’all have been making?” Let me say that I wasn’t surprised, scared, or taken aback by these fellows. I said, “They say y’all are the descendants of Vicksburg cave dwellers. Is that true? From what I understand, from my voluminous reading on the Civil War—or what some people insist on calling the War between the States—only white people migrated to the hilly guts of Vicksburg. So you might need to explain. Are y’all like melungeons?”

  This is what I wanted to discover. As a history buff, I could see that these people provided a missing link, of sorts, that explained everything in regards to Americana.

  “We’ve been watching you, Novel. Good lord. We’re getting a little impatient. From the beginning we thought you were our only hope, mister. We had you popped as a compatriot.”

  “Well I’m doing all that I can try to do,” I said.

  As I looked closer, these people looked less gray than flat-out worn-out and haggard. Were they descendants of the Lost Colony? Were they a mix of Cherokee and African slaves, or the ancestors of Francis Drake, Chief Skyuka, Mississippi plantation owners, and runaway ex-Dinka tribesmen? “My name’s Mac McAdams,” the leader said. Was that a slight Scottish brogue? I thought. Did he stutter?

  I said, “Novel Akers,” and stuck out my hand.

  Mac McAdams turned to his people and said, “ Somebody go tell the women and children it’s all right.” To me he said, “You wouldn’t be opposed to some company tonight, would you? We might have a mutual reason to become, well, associates, I guess is the best word. We’ve been watching you for over I don’t know how many fortnights. We read your poem before it got desecrated.”

  One of the how-to books stressed “Know of what you write.” This particular “scholar” professed that a certain amount of “method acting” should ooze into the writing process, that if one wished to write about bank robbers then one should rob a bank, et cetera. At least that’s how I read it. So I, eager to gain experiences that might nudge me toward writing something worthy of the history books—an aside, at least—said, “Bring ’em on down. Maybe we’ll have a big cookout.”

  Oh. Perhaps this isn’t exactly “linear.” There might seem to be a missing step in the “logical continuum.” Maybe I should mention—in case anyone’s keeping tabs to my solemn and thoughtful and completely rational movements—that when I bought the Folgers Coffee in Forty-Five I also happened to pick up a dozen racks of ribs, a dozen pork shoulders, a dozen whole fryers, all on sale. I didn’t ask the butcher if they came from Gruel BBQ and Pig-Petting Zoo.

  When the good citizens of my domiciliary chipped in to renovate the Gruel Inn for yoga instructors, they furnished each room with a minifridge-freezer combination. I guess Victor Dees, Jeff the owner, Bekah, Maura-Lee, Barry and Larry et al. wanted their new guests—the contortionist men and women who’d bring Gruel back to legitimate financial bases—to feel comfortable in regards to safely storing their prized foogath, nasturtium salad, kumquat chutney, raisin bran tea, buckwheat pie wild rice fritters, turnip waffles, German watercress codfish balls, sanitarium Vitrogen pudding, gingerroot soufflés, buttermilk muffins, curry chutney, prune milk shake, parsnip pancakes, lima bean marmalade, beet fritters, date chutney, bean sprout soup, and Yellow River poached mackerel.

  But that’s only a theory.

  Research!

  Mac McAdams led thirty-six men, women, and children back at nine o’clock. There seemed to be a good five generations present, from a couple of octogenarians down to toddlers. I’d started four fires over open pits I had completed long before, right after salvaging all of the hidden outdoor treasures and secreted pleas for someone to strong-arm his way into the Gruel Inn and free the hostages. I made a variety of barbecue sauces inside my office: ketchup-, mustard-, and vinegar-based, each with jalapeños, habaneros, and the slightest hint of bourbon.

  Mac McAdams’s people wore uniforms. The men seemed split evenly between Johnny Reb tattered grays and army-issued Yankee blues. The women sported those ankle-length corset-waisted dresses. All of the kids kind of looked like models for a Tootsie Pop wrapper.

  And they all looked familiar to me. I’m talking these people appeared to be straight out of the history books, not merely folks I’d run into in the sad, crowded family waiting rooms at Graywood Regional Memorial. It had nothing to do with their garb, either, please believe me. What I’m trying to make clear is this: Even in the harsh bright, spattering light of a barbecue pit piled high with pork butt behind a twelve-room motel of questionable integrity I felt like I’d stared at these people in vivid black-and-white photographs before.

  Mac McAdams pulled me by the bicep and said, “There’s no possible way that you know how to cook meat on a grill as well as we do, aye? Have you ever heard of a certain Charlie Vargas over in Memphis, aye? Where do you think his people learned, aye? The Rendezvous, aye?”

  Mac McAdams might not’ve added all those “ayes,” but he spoke in such a melodious dialect that “aye” kind of came out understood. I said, “Okay.”

  “Everyone take care of the food. We’ll have a celebratory feast for breakfast!” Everyone else took their places as if on cue. I allowed McAdams to lead me back inside.

  He smelled, but not like you’d think—not of sweat, body odor, booze, gunpowder, woodsmoke, red clay, domesticated animals, and/or pipe tobacco. Mac McAdams emitted a, I don’t know, chemical scent, something between isopropyl alcohol and formaldehyde. I took him inside the motel office. McAdams checked the door lock and closed the Venetian blinds. I said, “Are y’all professional Civil War battle reenactors?”

  McAdams held his head directly toward me, though slanted down a bit. His massive forehead could’ve been used for a handball court. “I’m of the belief—there’s one man in Gruel who accidentally’ divulges information to me—that you already know about the forged religious icon paintings and whatnot. That you understand Gruel’s money flow.”

  I said, “I’ve learned some things I wish I never uncovered.”

  McAdams went to the refrigerator, pulled out two cans of PBR, and, in the light, looked exactly like Robert E. Lee in that famous pose. I don’t want to come across as some kind of sooth sayer or visionary, but at this particular point I could’ve held up my palm and told Mac McAdams to say no more, that I understood the whole monologue that would follow.

  We popped our beer tabs. McAdams said, “Right before the Civil War a young Scottish fellow came through named Alexander Gardner. He’d originally teamed up with Mathew Brady, the most famous chronicler of the Civil War through his photographic images. Brady, as I’m sure you know, pretty much followed the union forces in the Civil War, Novel. He got his subjects to pose there stock-still for minutes at a time.

  “Well, Mr. Alexander Gardner came down Vicksburg way, and he needed assistants. My great-great-great-great-grandfather and two of my great-great-great-great-uncles got jobs with him
. Mr. Gardner had developed a process that didn’t use copper and silver basic to daguerreotypes. He used a glass plate covered with a light-sensitive coat of chemicals. The term my ancestors learned was ‘collodion,’ and it yielded a positive photo that reduced exposure time by 90 percent. People only had to stand still for about three seconds.”

  Put a bunch of “aye?s” in the above paragraphs. I tried to concentrate on McAdams’s story, but found myself tuning in on a couple women out back screaming “Dry rub! Dry rub!”

  “Okay. So my ancestors learned. And then union blockades kept them from receiving the necessary chemicals needed. Alexander Gardner went back up North—you might’ve even seen those great photos of the Abraham Lincoln conspirators.”

  I said, “Spangler, Arnold, Payne, Atzerodt. Hanged July 7, 1865.” I knew and remembered some shit, somehow.

  “Yes. Well. So. As you recall—and the people of Gruel are correct—my ancestors in Vicksburg took to the caves. And some of them emigrated east. Some went west—but we can only believe that they successfully infiltrated and commingled with the Anasazi Indians out there.

  “My people, according to our oral history, meant to trek all the way to New York, Maine, maybe Nova Scotia. But they stopped here because of the wonderful reception given and offered by Gruel’s own war hero, Colonel Dill.

  “My great-great-great-great-grandfather brought what followers he had up onto that hill, and found similar caves in which to hide. I am aware that the people you’ve met—your wife, for example—insist that we all still live in various holes, chasms, minor indentions, and alluvial outcroppings, but that’s an exaggeration. If you’d’ve spent another half hour walking up the path when you buried your beautiful Robert Burnsian epic poem, then you would’ve encountered my home, a twelve-room stucco house with handmade, kiln-fired terra-cotta roof tiles. How do you think the rest of our people know so much about running a barbecue pit out back?”