I said, "Hey, hold on. What's he talking about, Evelyn?" Like I didn't know, what with my luck.
Evelyn slid her feet across the floor. She held a finger to her lips, then pointed at her head. She took her other hand, shaped it like a pistol, and pretend-shot me. "All men," she said. "Every man on the planet."
When Evelyn left the room Dr. Stevenson said, "You might want to run, son. To heck with walking. You might need to run for your life." He looked at my incision, smiled, and left.
I didn't need to ask any hospital employee if my old friend Evelyn resided on the third floor. I didn't ask anyone about possible self-inflicted gunshot wounds or how long the waiting list stood for people destined for the state asylum. Already I foresaw my leaving the hospital alone, maybe taking a taxi over to Gruel, looking up my boss's misguided brother, and stealing back my empty van. I would return it to the company. Then, scarred and not fully healed ever, I would move on, probably to my place of early training, in order to ask questions and recover what history I'd somehow missed.
Slow Drink
IT STARTED OFF with a simple need to deposit some money, not even a paycheck but a one-dollar rebate from Marty Mallo. I didn't ask her how much she spent on Mallo Cups in order to receive a dollar, not to mention how it cost probably a thirty-seven-cent and a twenty-three-cent stamp to mail off five hundred cardboard points. Some of the candy packages only offered up five points, some ten, the rarer ones twenty-five or fifty. If, somehow, a person were lucky enough to find a fifty-point Mallo Cup coupon ten times in a row, that would be something like ten bucks of candy, for a dollar rebate minus the sixty cents in postage. Then there's the cost of gasoline to get to the drive-through bank, and so on. But I didn't say anything. I sat in the passenger seat and pretended that she'd almost won the lottery.
"Open up the glove compartment and hand me a pen," she said. "I need to sign the check and fill out my deposit slip."
I didn't say anything about how maybe she should wait until she had a regular paycheck, or some kind of stock dividend, maybe birthday money from a great-aunt who still sent five-dollar bills inside a bad greeting card. I had a great-aunt like that. For my thirtieth birthday she sent me a coupon she'd cut out of the paper for ten dollars off toward the purchase of a hearing aid at a place called Hear Ye, Hear Ye in Youngstown, Ohio, where she lived, some thousand-whatever miles from me in South Carolina.
I didn't say, "You know, sending off an envelope full of Marty Mallo Cup points, and writing out a deposit slip for only a dollar—that's environmentally bad, seeing as you're helping kill trees for no real financial gain." To my own great-aunt, of course, I wrote a thank-you note and said that, should I ever go deaf, it wouldn't be rational to drive for two days and only save ten bucks, but thanks just the same.
Maybe my aunt thought it was a joke—like to tell me that being thirty was the beginning of the end, you know, like I gave a fuck.
Anyway, I opened the glove compartment and shuffled through a series of old quarterly paid car insurance registrations, oil change and tune-up receipts, paper-covered straws from fast-food restaurants, a box of Kleenex, cellophane-wrapped flavored toothpicks, and yellow napkins. I found some unopened mail, a photograph of what appeared to be immigrants, a Phillips head screwdriver, and a Swiss Army knife.
Then there was a roach clip, jammed right beside a giant bottle of Valium. I didn't say, "Who takes Valium anymore? Why aren't you on Prozac or Xanax or Zoloft?"
I found a push-top pen that advertised Venlafaxine HCI Effexor XR extended release capsules, and handed it to her. But I have to admit that I kept my eyes on the slightly amber Valium vial, and noticed that the "date filled" section wasn't even a week earlier.
In a weird way this was all serendipitous, seeing as I had forgotten her name. Right there on the pill bottle below the Rx number was "Kristin Pack." I handed her the pen and said, "Hey, Kristin, if my last name were Pack and I had a child, I'd name him or her Rat. Or Back. Battery."
She scrawled her name on the back of the rebate check. She said, "What?" and lodged the plastic cylinder in the pneumatic tube. Her Ford Taurus wagon vibrated. My old Jeep remained in the shop while John and Johnny—two great mechanics—awaited a rebuilt water pump. I vowed to never listen to my friend Connie again, a coworker and boss who said that my house was on Kristin's way, et cetera, and she'd arrange my pickup on this Friday afternoon, so we could join Connie and about ten other couples at her inaugural slow-food dinner party.
The bank teller sent back a receipt and told us to have a great weekend. Kristin said, "Thanks!" told me to put the receipt in her glove compartment, and honked her horn on the way out. "A free dollar!" she said. "Another day, another dollar."
I didn't say anything about how it wasn't really a dollar, et cetera. I didn't say anything about how the most attractive human being in the world, male or female, became nothing but hideous once he or she resorted to clichés.
I opened the glove compartment and looked at the Valium again. Then I used the opportunity to rifle through what I had not spied earlier, pulled out an old Polaroid, and looked at it to find three preteen girls—one of whom was obviously Kristin—standing in what appeared to be a 1970s living room. The three girls all wore monogrammed pullover sweaters, each adorned with the letter K.
This isn't a good sign, I thought. KKK. I said, "Is this a picture of you and your sisters?"
"Me and Karla and Karen," Kristin said. "They don't live here anymore. They moved up north. Karla's in Virginia, and Karen's in Kentucky."
I wanted to ask if her father kept a sheet hung up in the closet, but didn't. I knew. My mother always accused one of our neighbors of being in the Klan because, as she said, "He never would let anyone look in the trunk of his car." She thought that's where he kept his hood and robe, et cetera.
I put the picture back in Kristin's makeshift photo album, then the pen. I closed the door and said, "So, this slow-food thing Connie's having—is it supposed to last a long time, or is it, you know, like food that took hours to cook but we can eat it in a normal amount of time?"
Kristin turned onto Highway 72 and drove toward Gruel. She said, "I've known Connie a coon's age. I'm surprised me and you've never met." She pulled into the parking lot of Forty-Five Wine and Cheese, a new store that never had a car out front until nightfall seeing as none of the locals wanted anyone to know that they drank, I figured. Or ate cheese other than Kraft American slices. "We should bring a bottle of wine. Connie says she's making both fish and beef, so I guess we should bring both red and white."
I thought, This is a good idea. I thought, In a weird way it's probably good that Kristin picked me up, seeing as I hadn't read any etiquette books in a while.
I walked in behind Kristin and noticed for the first time that she might've had the same figure as any of those women who perform aerobic exercises on cable TV at dawn. Kristin might've stood five-eleven, too, which I couldn't tell when we sat scrunched up in her car at the teller window.
Again, though, none of this mattered, seeing as she unwittingly advertised the KKK in her childhood.
I'm not quite sure how I got stuck buying two bottles of wine that came to $120. Who buys wine that costs over seven bucks a bottle? Kristin had said, "Slow food deserves wine that's fermented more than a couple days."
I said, of course, "I agree a hundred percent. Indubitably," and opened the driver's door for Kristin. I got in with my double-bagged brown paper sack and said, "Do you know who else is going to be at this little dinner?"
Kristin drove out of the parking lot. "Are you Connie's boss, or is she yours? I still can't believe that we've never met. Me and Connie used to be sorority sisters down in Charleston. And then we both got jobs down there working for Merry Maids, after we graduated."
I didn't want to know any of this. What kind of bad degree only offered up opportunities as a housecleaner for time-share condominiums? And because I admired and enjoyed Connie's friendship, I didn't want to know that she once live
d in a sorority house, singing stupid songs. I said, "What do you do now?"
Kristin said, "What's your name, again? I'm kind of embarrassed about this, but I can't remember your name."
We drove down 72, which had recently been turned into a four-lane for reasons unknown to anyone, seeing as people didn't go to Gruel very often, and Gruelites tended to be an uncurious, nontraveling citizenry. I said, "I can't believe that you don't know my name. Hey, if my last name were Pack I'd name my boy Ice. Ice Pack." I said, "My name's Bernard, but everyone calls me Charlie," which was true. As a child I kind of owned a big round head and large ears. "Connie probably told you that my name was Charlie."
She said, "Charlie." Kristin slowed down and took a right on Old Old Augusta Road. We passed the Gruel Inn, rounded by Gruel Mountain, and headed toward the square. Kristin said, "I'm thinking about writing a trilogy of novels. The first one will be called Me. The second one's Now. The third one will be called Eat. Then when they're all on a bookshelf in the library, in alphabetical order, you'll read Eat Me Now on the spines. What do you think about that? In the meantime I'm selling real estate. Even though everyone talks about how Graywood County's growing, I ain't sold a house or lot in something like two years."
She turned into Connie's long gravel driveway and approached the gingerbread-laden, turn-of-the-century clapboard house. Everyone else invited seemed to be there already. I counted three Volvos, four BMWs, one of those Cadillac SUVs, and a fancy Mazda.
I couldn't say anything about how Kristin hadn't sold a piece of land. Me, I taught geography at little Anders College, as did Connie. We traded off chairpersonships every other year, and this was her year. I guess after she got through with that job cleaning houses and apartments she went off and got an advanced degree, I don't know. We didn't talk about our pasts. Connie got hired on before I did. Her specialty, oddly enough, happened to be Peru, the Sudan, and northern India. She taught a course every other year called "Inca, Dinka, Urdu."
Me, I concentrated on the Native American Cherokee nation and its changes due to the casino industry. My favorite course, which none of the students cared about, either, though they should have—until ESPN started airing poker matches—was called Indian Poker. Luckily no one in Forty-Five, South Carolina, or its environs knew about political correctness, because Native American Poker wouldn't have the same draw, so to speak.
"Give me one of those bottles so it looks like I didn't forget to bring a gift," Kristin said. She held out her hand. I gave her the Chianti. She stood up on her toes and hovered above me by a good six inches. I thought to myself, Remember the KKK photograph. I thought, Whatever you do, don't fall for this woman even though you haven't found a relationship since moving to South Carolina.
We walked to the door and Kristin said, "Well, here we are. I need to make it clear that you'll need to get a ride home with someone else if I should meet a man or woman with whom I want to sleep."
Kristin rang Connie's doorbell. I thought nothing else but Damn, that was pretty good grammar. I thought, Could I have misjudged this woman? and wondered, also, if maybe I should pop the proverbial brakes a couple times in regards to her mother and father's name—and sartorial photographic attire. I said, "I understand. Yes. Maybe I'll meet someone, too. I hope not everyone here's married."
I didn't believe myself, though, for I saw the cars, knew about the guest list, and so on. There would be Connie, ten married couples I didn't know, Kristin, and me. Connie'd already told me that she didn't invite anyone from Anders College, which was okay by me seeing as I didn't want to spend an evening talking about rainfall, the difference between Porter and Sherwin-Williams house paints, the benefits of milk thistle and vitamin B for human livers, why corduroy sports coats should come back in fashion, mold, why the government knows how to keep milk from spoiling but won't let on, the history of billed ball caps, how the founding people of America spoke with English accents, bagpipes, allergies to old books, the wonders of Faulkner, and dry rot. But what did these people want to talk about? Me, I could only talk about casino gambling on the Cherokee reservation, or maybe how scared I was to find three children dressed in KKK paraphernalia.
Slow food, I thought. Kristin rang the doorbell again, then turned the doorknob and let herself in. I scuffed my shoes a couple times on the off-brown, hard-bristled welcome mat, then followed her inside going, "Hey, hey, hey," holding a bottle of expensive white wine like a pussy, to people I didn't know waiting for their fucking simmered food.
Connie came up first and said, "Y'all need to walk softly. I'm baking some almond-encrusted Mediterranean sole in a butter-and-rosemary compost for the first entrée. I don't want the fish to fall. Come on in and meet everyone." I think that's what she said. I hate to say it, but I was transfixed on Kristin's butt in front of me. I thought, What blue jean company hasn't discovered her yet, sweet-toothed child of KKK member or not? I thought, I don't think compost is the right word.
I looked at the clock in the dining room and saw that it was only 5:20. Connie had told me we would begin eating around six, and the last dessert wouldn't be served until nearly eleven. She had it all planned out. I said, "I probably need to open this red wine and let it breathe," and found Connie's corkscrew in the kitchen.
She followed me in and whispered, "So what do you think of Kristin?" all smiles.
I said what I could only say, namely, "You were in a sorority? Good God, woman, were you out of your mind in college, or what?"
"Kristin's always been hot. I guess she told you about how we were Merry Maids, too. You should've seen her in the outfit. She looked like one of those French maids in the movies."
I opened the bottle and put its cork on top of the refrigerator. In the den I heard a man tell a story about how he needed a new real estate agent—that he'd cashed in all of his stocks and planned to buy nothing but "land, land, land." He said, "Graywood County's growing. It's a good place to raise children." For a split second I had a vision of fifty kids grazing in a field, but then kind of got stuck imagining Connie and Kristin in their French maid outfits, bending over to dust the legs of an ottoman.
Connie looked through her oven window. I said, "I need some bourbon before this all gets started."
"On the table in there," she said, pointing backward.
I went to join the party, introduced myself, and tried to remember names: Victor, Jeff, Paula, Bekah, Maura-Lee, Barry, Larry, Nellie, Sammy. Half of the people only nodded, smiled, and didn't say their own name, which I thought was kind of rude but made it easier. "Slow food," one of the women said, "is taking over the nation, you know. Everyone's tired of fast-food joints. I'm glad we can just relax like this every couple weeks or so."
Let me make it clear that there were no fast-food restaurants in Gruel. I'd been here a few times to see Connie, and we always wandered over to Roughhouse Billiards, a place that prided itself on hot dogs, which I guess counted as fast food. Thirty minutes away, Forty-Five had a Hardee's, but the McDonald's and Krystal closed down within a year back in the late 1990s, partly because they didn't offer up plastic drink cups with stock-car racers emblazoned on the sides, I always believed.
Kristin said to me loudly, "Charlie's real name is Bernard. Let's play a game wherein everyone chooses an alias. I'll start. From now on out I want y'all to call me Odile."
I went to the table and poured four fingers of Knob Creek, no ice. I thought about setting my glass on the table for everyone else to share, then carrying the bottle around with me. I said, "I have a hard enough time remembering people's real names. And I failed recess in third grade 'cause I told the teacher I don't play."
"Booooooo! Booooooo!" Kristin yelled at me. She pointed. Everyone looked my way.
"Y'all hold it down in there. I'm afraid this sole's going to fall," my colleague said from the kitchen. I didn't ask anyone if the sole had been stuffed with yeast.
Victor wore regular knit pants, but a camouflaged T-shirt. "Y'all can call me Rommel."
Uh-o
h, I thought. If Odile and Rommel get together there might be a lynching before the night's over. Jeff stood up and said, "I need a smoke. Do you smoke, Charlie? Come on out on the porch and have a cigarette with me."
I had quit some ten years earlier. I said, "Yes."
Outside, Jeff said, "Is Odile your wife, man? How long y'all been married?"
I took a cigarette from his pack—an unfiltered Picayune, of all things, which I don't think had been made in two decades—and lit up. "I just met her today. She eats a lot of Mallo Cups, saves the points, and sends them off for rebate checks. That's about all I know about her. She supposedly sells real estate. There's a picture of her in the car with two sisters named Karla and Karen, and they're all wearing monogrammed sweaters so it reads KKK in a row. That's it. No, I'm not married to her."
Jeff squinted and blew out smoke that he had held in as if lighting up a joint. "I'll be damned." He inhaled once more, then dropped the cigarette on the ground, stepped on it, and went back inside without as much saying good-bye to me. I stood alone, like an idiot. It would've been a good time to break into some houses, I thought, seeing as the entire town seemed to be at Connie's house.
I took about eight more drags, coughed, remembered why I quit, and went back inside. Kristin stood up in the middle of everyone and tugged on her ear. Fucking charades.
After the sole we ate a dish called "Duck and Cover," a mostly southwestern dish with habaneros, sage, and paprika, all slathered with orange marmalade. Then Connie brought out a sourdough bread—covered pork shoulder she called "Pig in a Comforter." It was beautiful, I'll admit. We all sat on the floor, or in chairs, plates balanced on our thighs. Each entree came with two tablespoons of a vegetable: wild rice, glazed baby carrots, yams and such. At ten o'clock she served up a leg of lamb. "I got this recipe in a cookbook called Slaughterhouse Eight. It's all about cooking cow, pig, lamb, turtle, fish, buffalo, turkey, and deer. I bought it last year when I had that fellowship to go to India. It kind of surprised me that they'd have cow in there."
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