Drowning in Gruel

by George Singleton

  We drank and drank, and no one cottoned to the "red wine with meat" rule. I sat between Kristin and Connie, and more than once felt it necessary to keep a leg glued to one of theirs. Nobody talked about politics or religion or baseball. The Maura-Lee woman across from me talked nonstop about her new yoga class taught by honest-to-goodness gurus. The Bekah woman told someone that she'd not heard from her ex-husband, a guy named Novel, in more than four years, and that she checked Amazon.com every day to see if he ever published his memoir. Kristin thought it necessary to tell everyone about her trilogy, Eat, Me, and Now. Either Barry or Larry—they looked alike and I assumed that they were brothers, if not twins—said, "I've always thought about writing a book. It'll be a picture book of pool trick shots."

  Connie tilted her head for me to follow her back in the kitchen. I got up pretending to need ice. She said, "It's a mousse, pretty much," quieter than a cockroach pissing on cotton.

  I said, "What?"

  "I've made a mousse for the dessert. But that's not what I brought you back here for. For which I brought you back." Her eyes went funny, kind of cockeyed, then crossed. I was reminded of that old Pong video game, and started thinking about if it was the very first video game ever. Connie's eyes sliced back and forth like windshield wipers. I didn't think it was the lamb causing all of this.

  "Okay," I said. "Mousse would be good. If it's not too rich. I've never been much of a dessert person, you know. Booze gives me the sugar."

  "These people are going to leave right after dessert, I'm hoping," Connie said. She bent her head forward and swayed in a way that suggested she might wish to break the traditional and unspoken colleague-on-colleague rule of interoffice romance.

  I said, "Go in there and tell everyone that the dessert didn't come out right. We've had enough to eat anyway. Hey, do you have any toothpicks?" I thought about how I couldn't undergo another slow-food session for at least another year, what with my distended stomach and horrendous guilt for eating more food over a five-hour period than most pottery-making Native Americans on the Pueblo reservation in Taos might eat in a week.

  And then I kissed Connie hard. Not that I'm any kind of Romeo, but I felt her knees slip, which made me hold her up harder. In the den I heard Kristin say too loudly, "I'm so wasted," which she probably said about every Wednesday through Saturday in the sorority house.

  I took my face off of Connie and yelled out, "The dessert didn't come out right. We all have to go home now," which caused my boss to grab my rib cage and tickle me hard. She laughed and kind of slurred out, "The Sudanese have a word for what you just did, Charlie. I forget it right now, but it has to do with getting guests to leave when the hosts have something important to do. Like milk the cow. Or build a fence."

  I heard Victor say, "You shouldn't drive. Hey, I got a spare bedroom."

  I looked at Connie and noticed that she'd unbuttoned her blouse a couple notches somewhere along the line, right down to the clasp of her brassiere. I said to her, "I feel like I'm undergoing a propaedeutic experiment. This is a trick you're playing on me."

  Connie said, "What?"

  I'd been reading the dictionary. There wasn't much else to do in Forty-Five, or Gruel, or all of Graywood County. Or South Carolina. I said, "Let's you and me just lay or lie down in bed until the morning," because it had worked for me one time when I met this woman in France while doing a North Carolina State geography department-sponsored semester abroad called European on the Land. My buddy Dan Murray and I took it half seriously, and tried to piss about everywhere publicly, though more often than not we found ourselves riverside. In between we met French women and told lies about our upbringings in the United States, both of us saying that we were children from ghettos seeing as no real French woman cared about men born to wealth or power.

  Kristin screamed out, "I forget who I am. Am I Odile? Is that the name I chose for myself? I forget. Wait, I want to be Marilyn from now on out. But not like Marilyn Monroe. I want to be a different Marilyn. I want to be a Marilyn all my own. None of you people ever played along and changed your names."

  I thought, I'm Marty Mallo.

  I think either Barry or Larry said, "Call me Bubba. I'm pretty sure I chose Bubba."

  I released myself from Connie and tried to subdue any erection that might have emanated—another dictionary word—then went into the den. "Connie says it's time to go. Y'all have to go. Slow food or not, it's not called 'slow leaving.'"

  Kristin said, "How're you getting home? What if I decide not to leave? Then how're you getting home? You have to get home, right?"

  People filed out, offering thanks to Connie, who had emerged from the kitchen apologizing about the ruined final dish. She said, "The next one of these things we have, I'll be responsible for the dessert, I promise. I'll go on record right now as saying I'm responsible for the next dessert. If Charlie has it next ... Charlie, I got the dessert."

  I thought two things and two things only: First off, I would not be participating in another one of these goddamn slow-food extravaganzas. Life was too short to spend six hours on a meal. And, of course, I thought three-way between Connie, me, and either Kristin, Odile, or Marilyn.

  "Good night," everyone said. Victor, again, offered Kristin his spare bedroom, but she said that she wanted to drink a cup of coffee and sober up a little before taking me home.

  When Connie closed the door she said, "That was a close one," for reasons I didn't understand.

  Kristin said, "Not one of them sons of bitches will ever buy real estate. Oh they'll talk a big game, but—no offense to your Gruel friends, Connie—they're the kind of people who play it safe. They'll put all their money in a savings account getting point naught one interest."

  If this were a movie scene Kristin would've pulled a condom out of her pocketbook right when she said, "Play it safe." Hollywood, evidently, hadn't come to Gruel. I said, "I don't know why anyone would want to buy land around here, unless they planned on living about another hundred years. Investing in wasteland doesn't seem all that smart a thing to do."

  Connie stood behind Kristin. She put her finger to her lips for me to shut up, and unnotched the next button on her blouse. She backed toward the bedroom. Kristin said, "What we need around here is a myth. We need a big mass murder. There for a while the girl named Bekah who was here, she had a husband named Novel who was supposed to bring this place a claim to fame. But he disappeared before making any kind of mark, you know. He ended up being a fake novelist, I guess you could say."

  I listened to Kristin, but peripherally watched Connie backing toward the threshold of her bedroom. I said, "Crop circles. Aliens landing. A Civil War reenactment. I can think of a bunch of things y'all could do. Nudist colony."

  And then, for some reason, I kissed Kristin on the forehead, took her hand, and tried to pull her in the general direction of Connie's bed. She said, rightly, "What're you doing? I know you teach geography and all, but this road map ain't going to work."

  Connie said, "Oh come on, Odile. You weren't this way before." She said, "Are you having a sugar low? Go into the kitchen and get a Mallo Cup out of the pantry."

  Connie went into her bedroom and came back out wearing a sweatshirt over her blouse. Kristin sat on the couch, watching CNN, eating a Mallo Cup that only offered up five points in play money. The president said that we lived in a dangerous world, and that, as a Christian, he understood that no one else deserved to have weapons of mass destruction besides America. Connie said, "A real gentleman would offer to do the dishes."

  I unscrewed the bourbon's cap and poured two jiggers' worth into an unused wineglass, stared at it for a minute, then poured it back in the bottle. Connie sat down on the couch next to Kristin and said, "Do you remember that time we were having to clean up all those time-shares at Seabrook Estates? This would've been in about March, right before the tourists came in."

  Kristin said, "I need to go find a palm reader and see if I'm ever going to sell another piece of land. This is ridiculous
. There has to be some kind of career line on your palm."

  Connie looked at me. "This wasn't a giant place. As a matter of fact it used to be just a regular-sized apartment building, but as the old people died off, the owners transformed the place into condos, kind of. Anyway, Kristin and I went in there with all our cleaning supplies and a list of which rooms needed what. We had a passkey, you know."

  I poured two more jiggers in the glass and watched it. I thought, There's no way any kind of sexual entanglement's going to take place here. I thought, What am I doing teaching geography to a bunch of undergraduates who mostly hailed from Gray wood County and would never leave the area?

  Kristin kept her eyes on the television. She said, "I thought about having that key copied. There was a man for a while down at the Slave Market market who made keys."

  Connie punched Kristin with a throw pillow and said, "Listen to me. Do you remember?" She looked at me and said, "We'd done about three apartments—most of this was only vacuuming, and spraying down the bathrooms with mold and mildew remover—and then we went up to the top floor. I think this was a four-story apartment. Anyway, Kristin opened the door and a man sat in the den, behind a rolltop desk. He wore a suit, too."

  Kristin said, "I hadn't thought about that, in years. We jumped, and I think you yelled, Connie."

  "I yelled like crazy."

  "At first we thought we'd gone into the wrong apartment, but our boss had made it clear that no one rented out in February, and that was the month when they brought in repairmen and painters, and us," Kristin said.

  I poured the bourbon back in the bottle. I thought, I have wasted my entire life up to this point. I'll never make more than thirty or forty grand a year, I'll never fall in love with a woman in Graywood County, I'll never have kids who'll grow up to hate the world as much as I. On the news, the president joked about his days in college and kept talking about "turning the corner." I thought, There is no real justice, and tried to think about what Cherokee Chief Skyuka said right before he secretly gave up his people's land and secrets to the U.S. government in order to escape death.

  I poured bourbon back out.

  Connie said, "Kristin asked what he was doing there. We couldn't see his torso what with the rolltop desk. At the time I thought he wrote something meaningful, you know, like he was handwriting a novel."

  "Later on we figured it was a suicide note. Somewhere in between we figured that he somehow got in his family's time-share, and he wanted to hang himself or something so that when they got there during the peak season they'd find him all dead and whatnot, and ruin their vacation." Kristin got up from the couch, took all the silverware off of the plates in the den, and set them up on what used to be the sole platter. "It would make a good movie scene."

  I tried to think back if I'd thought about prospective movie scenes over the day. It's what I did, always. Sometimes when I saw poor men on the side of the road collecting aluminum cans, wearing VOTE FOR BUSH T-shirts, I thought about movie scenes and irony.

  "But he didn't seem to want to kill himself," Connie said. "He stood up and bowed, of all things, then walked right past us. Kristin and I walked over behind the desk to see what he was doing, but you know what was there?"

  I said, "What?" I took my wineglass and poured two ounces of bourbon back in its bottle. "A battlefield map of how the South should've acted once Sherman went to town. Went to towns."

  Connie said, "No."

  "That would've been worth some money," Kristin said. She picked up the channel changer and pointed it at the television, but didn't mash a button. The president mispronounced two words in one sentence.

  "He'd been etching a recipe in the wood. He printed out 'Shrimp, sausage, rice, okra, corn, bay leaves.'"

  I said, "Frogmore stew. That's good stuff. It takes a long time to make." I poured out about three jiggers, some of it by accident. "Who was he?"

  Connie took her sweatshirt off. Kristin looked at her funny, and for a second I thought she'd take off her clothes, or at least grab me by the neck and kiss me as if I were a Mallo Cup with a fifty-point cardboard prize. Kristin said, "Who was he?"

  "Somebody's unhappy grandfather. Somebody's unhappy and neglected grandfather. I never told you this, Kristin, but afterwards I went down to the Francis Marion Hotel bar and saw the same guy, just sitting there by himself. I think he was drinking brandy. That's what it looked like. One of those drinks in a big old goblet."

  "It was weird," Kristin said. "He had all his hair. He had this great white hair that stood straight up. He could've dyed it and looked like a real punk."

  "I wanted to go up and talk to him, you know, but I was waiting for some people. Why weren't you there?" Connie said to Kristin. "I guess you had a date with that boy from the Citadel. Anyway, I sat there, and waited. He drank and drank and drank, but not like a drunk. More like he reduced that brandy."

  I slugged down my bourbon. For some reason I felt like I had been tricked throughout the entire evening.

  Kristin shoved off her shoes. "I couldn't tell if he was a college professor or a CIA agent. He kind of looked like both."

  "Anyway, he was something," my boss Connie said. "He was amazing. You should've seen him. Right before I left the hotel bar and walked up to him and said, 'You seem to be the kind of man who works on making people afraid over a long period of time. Do you know that?' And he said to me, 'I've seen some things I'm not proud of seeing. I worked down in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration.' That's what he said! Then he turned around before I could say how part of me wanted to—later on in life, after I finished being a maid—teach Incan culture. He walked off before I could say any of that. He wore a nice gray wool suit."

  Kristin said, "Yeah. Yeah," in a tone of voice that suggested that all men in power did those sorts of things—they walked off before people could explain their lifelong dreams.

  Me, I picked up the bottle of bourbon and went outside. I said, "I'm going out to smoke." But I didn't, of course, seeing as I'd quit and didn't have another person around to hand me a Picayune. I walked out, and looked at the slight streetlights of Gruel. There were no sounds outside of crickets, tree frogs, or the occasional barking dog.

  Inside the house I heard Connie and Kristin stomp up and down playing patty-cake or whatever. I thought, I need to save additional points for valuable prizes or send for a prize catalog. Then I looked back to the house, knew that there was no taxi service outside of Gruel, and started walking south out of town, slowly.

  What Attracts Us to Gruel

  EACH DIVORCED PARENT with child in tow claims that Gruel BBQ^stands at the midway point of their new lives. Any psychologist, though, might factor embarrassment into the equation, and point out that Gruel BBQ^—with its slight pig-petting zoo/slaughterhouse off to the side—could only traumatize children more so. Parents would counter that no McDonald's, Chuck E. Cheeses, or city parks exist within fifty miles of Gruel, South Carolina. Parents might contend that psychologists were the downfall of the original marriages in the first place. Any worthwhile documentarian would agree with the parents and nod behind his or her camera, then cut to three-year-old boys and girls kissing the snouts of piglets, of hogs lured into tin-roofed, cement-floored buildings, of ex-spouses saying, "Now don't be late on Sunday like last time. I don't want to miss Darlington," or Talladega or Rockingham or Daytona.

  Jerry McCrary is the only father here with custody of his son. On a normal Friday afternoon, up to thirty different women drive into the gravel parking lot of Gruel BBQ^with their kids, and wait for ex-husbands who possess weekend/holiday/summer privileges. On Sundays all of those men and Jerry's ex-wife Terry wait around to relinquish custody of their children. The slight town of Gruel indeed stands about halfway between Greenville and Augusta, Columbia and Atlanta, Asheville and Savannah. It's halfway between New York City and Miami, should any two parents need to make that drive.

  "Does your ex have a drug problem?" one of the divorcées usually asks Jerry, waiting on
late Friday afternoons. "Normally a child needs to be with its mother, if you ask me. That's what almost every judge in the country thinks, too. Hell, I could be hooked on about everything outside of heroin and still deserve to have custody of my little girl. Does your ex have a prison record or something?"

  Jerry diverts his focus to the petting zoo portion of Gruel BBQ, shades his eyes, yells out to his Henry, "Don't get too close to that piggy, son." He's smart enough to mean it both ways—not to get nipped and not to get emotionally attached. To the women he says, "My ex-wife's a good mother. I don't know."

  Henry always yells back, "Where's the one I liked last week? I want to pet the one from last week. Daddy, you remember that one from last week? He had freckles."

  Smoke emits from an added-on back room stovepipe of the restaurant, a clapboard building with picnic tables and three varieties of chopped barbecue, two of sauce, one of coleslaw. Regular customers drive up, brown bagging.

  On Fridays the fathers arrive, and for the most part the children transfer from nearly new Japanese cars to pickup trucks. Most of the kids run toward their daddies, open-armed, and the fathers flick half-smoked cigarettes into the parking lot before lifting their children high into the air. On Sundays the children walk back to their mothers, get a pat on the head, and ready themselves for a week of sensible rules.

  Jerry notices all of this. Any documentarian would.

  "Where you coming from all these times?" Wanda Styles says to Jerry one autumn day. The piglets chase fallen leaves in their sty. Good children throw more leaves in; taciturn kids find rocks.

  "I come from Atlanta. My boy and I live in Atlanta." Jerry points toward Henry, who's staring at the stovepipe.

  "Where's your wife living? I mean your ex-wife."