A fearsome paranoia took over me about this point. I foresaw my soon-to-be guru-relocated abode burning down, my poem printed in the Forty-Five Platter by Bob Murray, and my moving atop Gruel Mountain in order to undergo some kind of arranged marriage with one of Mac McAdams’s nieces in order to enhance the gene pool, among other disastrous personal events. I envisioned someone from either side saying, “Welcome to science fiction, Novel.”
Mac McAdams took another beer from the refrigerator. “I’ve heard of Pabst Blue Ribbon. It’s not that bad. Up where we live we kind of make our own double-run peach bounce. It’s not that hard. Not that I want to sound like a cookbook, but all you need is a crop of corn, a steady fire, some water, and sugar and yeast Peaches.”
I said, “I’m worried about the meat outside. Are you sure everyone out there knows when to turn the pig? Me, I usually keep a timer.”
Mac McAdams said, “Good segue. A timer. We have a variety of timers up where we live. Like I said, I live in a regular house. It might be more than regular if four thousand square feet qualifies such. Anyway, we’ve been using the caves as darkrooms. What our ancestors learned and passed down, we have used to our advantage. Now. Whereas the Cathcarts began selling forged paintings, all of us started selling Civil War photographs. You’ve seen that picture of Robert E. Lee with Traveler the horse? That’s probably me. Oh, they might have an original in Washington and Lee University, but about five hundred people think that they have the original. My relatives and I pose, and we take old-fashioned pictures that don’t succumb to carbon-14 dating.
“Any of those still photographs of ex-soldiers staring straight ahead? Go outside. You’ll find Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, Pierre Gustave Beauregard, George Blake Cosby, and Secretary of the Treasury Christopher Gustavus Memminger. Hell, boy, you’ll find Scarlett O’Hara. Here’s what we do, and what makes those snot-nosed elitist portrait painters so angry: We have backdrops up there, we take our flash photos, and then we go out to flea markets, fairs, reenactments, swap meets, conventions, NASCAR stock car races, ACC basketball tournaments, every catfish ‘feastival,’ chitlins festival, boll weevil festival, Claxton fruitcake festival, and peanut celebration. Maybe people think they’re buying originals, and maybe they think it’s a simple reproduction. I don’t know. I’ve never taken a survey. We set up a tent, and we say, Wouldn’t you love a photo of,’ say, ‘John Singleton Mosby?’ and then I point to an eight-by-ten that they’ve probably seen in one of the history books. Maybe my still shots have gotten half faded, wrinkled, and/or cracked and crazed in the week or ten days since I took the shot.
“No one asks me questions, and I don’t offer explanations. Anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred dollars. So you can see why the people in Gruel have a hard-on about us. It’s been going on since photography came on the scene. Painters hate photographers. They see themselves as better than us, and think we take away honest work from them. But you don’t see my group setting up to pose for a Last Supper photograph, do you? I believe it’s time for this little petty war to end. And I’m of the hope that you can arbitrate the situation.”
More than likely I missed most of what he said because I kept thinking about how people don’t speak more than two or three lines of dialogue at a time. I looked at my watch and was surprised to find that we’d not eased over into the next year. I said, “Well that’s a fascinating story, Mac McAdams. Do you want me to include it in my forthcoming book More Gruel, Please?”
Mac McAdams said, “I’m usually not a betting man, but I would wager that none of your books ever sees a bookstore shelf. Especially that long poem.”
He reached into his uniform coat pocket and pulled out what appeared to be freshly printed Confederate paper money.
34
MAYBE I FELL ASLEEP slumped down by the ex-check-in desk, next to my refrigerator, near the table where I finally officially collected the history of Gruel. Maybe. One minute Mac McAdams told me the long-winded and highly unlikely story of how his people suffered more than a hundred years, and the next thing I knew some lady wearing a Zouave uniform rang a goddamn cowbell in my ear and said we could eat barbecue breakfast, lunch, and supper.
Mac McAdams said, “This may be your day, Novel. You should spring to your feet.”
He stood as erect as a gray tiki doll and either didn’t seem to suffer from sleep deprivation or just awoke. I said, “My day. My day. What’s that supposed to mean?”
The sun rose as slightly as it’s prone to do, and a slick of dew rose and hovered where orphans once conjured up impromptu games. Mac McAdams’s minions ran around with tongs, forks, and skewers. Oh man there was chicken, pig, and beef, all creeping toward rare. I looked out back and tried not to think about how a clan of people up on Gruel Mountain might possess evolved and frost-hardened gastrointestinal tracts that resisted trichinosis better than the average carnivore.
At first I thought that one of the children whooped or screamed, then another, then some of the women. Who pulled out the bagpipes? I thought. Mac McAdams reached into his left boot and extracted a tiny pearl-handled derringer the likes of which I’d only seen women use on 1960s TV westerns. I said, “Hey. Hey, hold on a minute. I’m on your side, if anything. This isn’t my day to die.”
“That’s old Victor Dees coming out here,” McAdams said. In profile he looked like Stonewall Jackson holding a cap gun. “That’s the Gruel Volunteer Fire Department, plus about everyone else, I’m betting. They must’ve seen the smoke.” Mac McAdams opened the back door and yelled to his people, “Today’s the day. Today’s the day.” He pointed at a man who had to have been the eldest and said, “Papa, you’re in charge of photography.”
The sirens neared, and understand that I don’t mean this in an Odyssey kind of way. I made out Victor Dees’s regular-sounding horn—the one I heard when he passed Bekah’s parents’ house that day as I encountered the tanned human-flesh scroll—and then a couple London air raid-sounding eee-aww-eee-aww-eee-awws. I could never prove it, and no one would make an admission, but I’m pretty sure I delineated Bekah, Maura-Lee, Barry, Larry, and Jeff the owner, Dr. Bobba Lollis, Derrick Ouzts, Nora Ouzts, and maybe even that couple with their flat tire in my parking lot months before, all whoo-whoo-whooing with their heads out the driver’s window. I focused, caught Bob Murray, and in my mind saw all those cars, Jeeps, pickup trucks winding their way down Old Old Greenville Road, then Old Old Augusta Road, and right up to what might or might not have been safe-from-firing distance, both ballistically and photographically. When they all arrived it didn’t take a textile management major from Clemson to understand how Victor Dees attired everyone in his leftover helmets—regular World War II caps mostly, but some of those flat, flat doughboy things, and a couple nice German head coverings. Listen, and this is the truth: Bekah and Maura-Lee sported those nice kaiser-pointed chapeaus.
But unlike Victor Dees they didn’t have two swaths of thirty-aught-six bullets across their chests.
Oh, the smoke sifted behind the Gruel Inn heavily and one of the strange photographer-to-be children yelled out, “I want coleslaw on my barbecue, I want coleslaw on my barbecue!” like that, somewhere between pleading funny and crying outright.
I said, of course, “Well this doesn’t look good.”
“You’re in charge of Papa Locke. You got a ladder? You and Papa Locke get up on the roof and espy what battle might or might not ensue. This is finally the day! We’ve been expecting this confrontation for, aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye lo these many decades, aye.”
What else could I say but, “Papa Locke should’ve started up a locksmith company. Get it? Like, if you accidentally closed your car door locked with your key in the ignition, he could come out with one of those shims. Pop-a-lock. Hotdamn.”
Mac McAdams didn’t exactly keep eye contact with me. He looked elsewhere, namely at the stretch of Gruelites, or Gru-elists, or Gruelons lined up pissed off that photography forgers infiltrated painting forgers. McAdams said, “We know
you have a ladder. You and Papa Locke get up on the roof. We might need witnesses. Corroborators. Biographers. You’ve kind of pickled up that responsibility right till this moment—now’s your day.”
Let me point out a few things: One, I foresaw gunfire and I didn’t want to get shot in the middle of it; two, Papa Locke, I thought, might have some words of wisdom, even it he stunk horribly from a full night of smoked pork; three, I couldn’t remember if I dug a fire pit too close to the propane line going into the Gruel Inn, et cetera; four, who knew what taxidermic genes remained dormant in Bekah’s being?; five through about forty, again, I foresaw gunfire.
From above it looked like two regular stupid armies standing length to length. The Gruel Mountain cave dwellers stood straighter than liquor store bottles awaiting selection. The other half of what I understood to be Gruel scammers stood fifty yards away, dressed in motley, looking as though they’d rather be ordering sausage biscuits for breakfast at a fast-food chain that would never be near this area.
Papa Locke wore a tam-o’-shanter. His eyebrows grew downward and seemingly covered his vision. On top of the roof he said, “Have you ever boiled some eggs, and cleaned your silverware with polish, and taken a gigantic dump in your outhouse all at the same time? Well that’s what odor’s coming from this situation.” Papa Locke smacked his lips up and down a good fifty times in a way that sounded like year-old Bubble Wrap popping. He said, “Uh-huh. I tell you something else, but this is good—boil eggs, soak them in buttermilk, wrap them in sausage, then deep-fry the bastards. Scottish eggs.”
You’d’ve thought that—after at least one hundred years of tyranny and utter seclusion—the man might start throwing shingles. Instead, he sat down on his sits bones like some kind of gum. He breathed in and out better than any oxygen machine in Graywood Regional Memorial. Papa Locke looked like he could go into a trance presently.
Like I said, everyone lined up facing each other. I would’ve gone down the ladder and retrieved binoculars I picked up at the army-navy store back about the time I overordered MREs, but it didn’t take magnified-enhanced vision to delineate two people—a man and woman—wearing green and white sweatsuits, jogging in place right between Maura-Lee and Bekah.
My bastards: James, Joyce. I yelled out, “I thought you got killed somewhere along the way!” to my brother. To Papa Locke beside me on the rooftop I said, “This is the biggest intervention ever.”
We played this game as a child: who can hit the softest. I didn’t catch on until maybe age twelve, when James and Joyce readied themselves to escape North Carolina, the United States, all of North America under the false impression that they possessed Irish blood unknown to the people of Black Mountain, though Scottish and Irish blood, certainly, coursed our capillaries, et cetera.
It went like this: “Hey, Novel, I bet I can hit softer than you can.”
“What do you mean by ‘softer’?”
“I can hit you so softly you’ll barely feel it. Come on, let’s bet a dime. Let’s bet a nickel.”
“So you’re saying that whoever hits softest—and you got to at least touch skin—wins the bet.”
“You go first.”
Early on I should’ve figured out that history wasn’t my forte, seeing as James and/or Joyce continually tricked me with this mean ploy, something that I’d’ve done, too, if Bekah and I ever had children, or if I’d’ve taught history at a private religious school in the 1990s where corporal punishment still existed.
I always went first and barely brushed my particular sibling’s bicep. Sometimes this happened in one of our bedrooms. Sometimes it occurred in the backyard while my parents either smoked pot or went off on one of their “only us” biannual honeymoon runs buying off shellfish in Murrells Inlet. Out in the middle of the driveway. The street. Somewhere on the school playground. In the car, or refrigerated truck. On Main Street in front of the candy store. Inside the boys’ dressing room at Belk’s department store every August when we got new blue jeans and shirts that might’ve been in style a decade earlier for the rest of America.
I clenched my fist and pulled back an inch or two, then at the velocity of a fireplace ash floating to the ground I would barely whisper whatever thin blond hairs poked from my siblings’ outer triceps. “That was a good one,” my brother or sister might say. “That one was epic, Novel.”
And then either James or Joyce would cock back halfway to West Virginia and clobber me to the point of a four-knuckle charley horse. “You win,” they always said. “I don’t have a nickel on me right now, but I’d rather owe you than beat you out of it.”
Call me a slow learner. What small muscles I showed off ages six through twelve were mostly swollen hematomas risen from my shirtsleeve, kind of off-kilter biceps.
I looked down from the Gruel Inn roof at my now-middle-aged brother and sister. “I thought you were dead,” I said.
My sister grabbed a bullhorn from Victor Dees. “Don’t jump,” she said. “Come off the roof slowly. We’re only here to help you, Novel. You have love from the entire community, Novel. And we’re willing to teach you self-help, Novel. Please back away from the edge.”
Okay, listen: The motel, as you know, wasn’t but one story high. Falling or jumping off meant a sprained ankle at most. Back in Black Mountain I regularly jumped off our roof into the pile of leaves and pine needles I scooped from our gutters and threw down to clump up wet in the haphazard front yard. “I’m not committing suicide,” I yelled back. I cupped my hands to my face and yelled, “I’m not committing suicide. Y’all might be. I’m just watching.” To James I hollered, “Hey, James, tell me what happened to you the last time you were here.”
In a fake, though pretty reasonable and obviously well-rehearsed Irish accent he screamed back, “What last time, Novel?”
I said, “I can’t believe it’s really you. Hey. Hey, I’ve done pretty well for myself outside of writing lies for politicians, having a weird sexless marriage, viewing the death of my in-laws, running a useless and incomprehensible writers retreat, and devoting my time to detailing the ins and outs of Gruel, South Carolina, without telling the truth, and some other things.”
Barry and Larry stood way off holding their cue sticks. I could make them out. Bekah held up a newspaper and said, “Is this your memoir? Is this what we all hoped you’d get famous for? For which you’d get famous?”
I looked over at Papa Locke. He sat forward, squinted, and said, “The Forty-Five Platter. Some kind of poem.”
“It’s your life story. Bob Murray here says he undug it,” my sister yelled.
Fucking A, I thought, even though I had no idea what the term meant—something about the army? That would make sense. I looked below me at Mac McAdams and his troops standing there stoic. He yelled across, “Let me say again, as my ancestors have admitted, that we’re sorry about how the photographic image has replaced the need for realistic paintings.” But it came across thus: “Let me . . . say again . . . as my ancestors . . . have admitted . . . that we’re . . .” You get the picture, no pun. He could’ve been Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushing Social Security, or JFK espousing what we could do for our country, et cetera.
I watched crazy Mac McAdams, so I couldn’t quite tell who barked back, “This isn’t about you, Bubba. It’s about the novel.”
Hell, I couldn’t even distinguish whether the voice was male or female. Was that Bekah? Was it Jeff the owner, or Derrick Ouzts? I stood on the roof and said, “Hey! Hey, let me tell y’all that I’m not nuts. Everyone here’s crazy, except for me. And from what I can tell—through my thorough and relentless investigations—I’m about the only man in this county who hasn’t either killed a person or sold a piece of artwork under false pretenses.”
Bekah held up the Forty-Five Platter. She said, “Say that again about false pretenses.” Somebody from the Gruel side added, “Photography’s not art.”
I said to Bekah, “That poem’s not the same as lying. It’s how it ended up, that’s all I have to sa
y.”
But it didn’t matter.
They were on each other.
Papa Locke said, “Good barbecue downstairs.” I shrugged.
Right before I met Rebekah in Chapel Hill, I went to a presidential election party. My guy hadn’t won the Democratic nomination, but it didn’t matter to me as long as those dumb sons of bitches who shoved trickle-down down our throats and offered free government cheese as a consolation prize got voted out of power. Somebody in the history department actually qualified for a hoop of cheddar—all of us did, unofficially—and brought it to the shindig. Oh, we took out our daddy’s inherited Case knives and sliced into that orange wheel. We had thrown dollar bills and quarters into a pile, and garnered enough money to purchase a couple gallons of cheap white wine, a case of Milwaukee’s Best, a case of Schaeffer’s.
“Novel, are you still of the belief that Jefferson’s king of the United States?” this boy named Grover asked me. He’d never faltered from a Marxist bent.
I said, “Good architect.”
“Bad coin. Bad profile.”
I raised my plastic cup and laughed. At the time I owned what the latter generations might label a “mullet.” Thomas Jefferson wore one, by god, when he let his hair down, to either Mrs. Jefferson or Sally Hemings.
We watched the television set. Reagan won again.
Me, I decided to pretty much kill anyone in my way. That New Year’s my resolution was to make a resolution every year to take no prisoners the next 365 days. “Take no prisoners!” understand, was my resolution from then on out. By this time you know me, so don’t think that I’m a bad person, or that whoever publishes any of my future memoirs—again, let’s pretend Harcourt—wishes to slant poorly on the vicious, irrational, immoral Republican Party. “This isn’t a good thing,” I said to anyone who’d listen at the losefest. “Motherfucker. What’s going on in this country? I’m going to get a job as a speechwriter and work from the inside.”
Novel Page 27