The Great American Suction Read online

  “Shaker?”

  “Ignore me.”

  “Pinky or thumb?” Tobin asks.

  The Howitzer holds Shaker’s wrist in a puddle of beer suds as Tobin produces a mallet tethered to the cash register with nylon rope. He holds it overhead, a Nordic warrior pose, and hums a medieval dirge. There’s simply too much pinky in the world, thinks Shaker, unable to shut his eyes against the spectacle. The heads are hushed. Then Tobin sets aside the mallet and smacks Shaker a hard one on the cheek.

  “Your punishment, deadbeat, is to hustle over to my house barefoot and give my beagle dog his heartworm medication.”

  “I am sans auto,” says Shaker.

  “Better get started then,” Tobin tells him. “I’m over on Spruce.”

  “That’s six miles.”

  “Six and a half.”

  “Barefoot?”

  “It’s the only brown house. Door’s unlocked. Pills are in the cabinet. Mena is doing her go-go gig tonight so it’s just Prince-Prince at home.”

  “The beagle,” says Shaker.

  “Bare feet are optional.”

  Shaker leans out of the Howitzer’s hug and glares at the window. “Looks like flurries.”

  “It’s August out there, Shaker.”

  “Sledding,” he whispers.

  Two steps on the sidewalk and already the wind is rubbing the feeling off his face. August, yes, but unruly. These crazed breezes invade at night, knocking around traffic signals and turning TV aerials into lethal javelins that can be found stabbed among rows of pretzeled patio equipment the next morning. Shaker has to hopscotch through a slick spread of bakery trash. There are loaves in pile, muffin crusts, aborted dough. He pockets a chocolate éclair to pacify the mongrel mutts in his neighborhood, assuming he ever returns home, and he continues down the road’s middle, thumb up, half-hoping to flag a ride. He has already mulled his various escape routes and excuses and alibis, but he feels somehow committed to the mission. Make the trek. Go to dog. Save dog. Try not to draw homeward any more hungry strays. He imagines this endangered breed of beagle flopped on the kitchen tile, neglected and nursing a calamitously wormed heart. Then he pictures a funeral service for the animal, a stone memorial in a public park somewhere, Shaker weeping on the sidelines. The distance is only six miles, six and a half. Shaker forces each leg forward and tries to remember the last time he heard any rumor about wayward hitchhikers blown off the tarmac by mysterious winds.

  Mainly, he misses his old auto. A two-tone, white-and-red-paneled utility van in which Shaker installed a plywood loft for the storage and transportation of musical equipment, back in the days he roadied on the local bar band scene. That was how he met his future ex-wife, the National Sensation. She was fronting her first band at the time, The Fake American Embolism, a scrum of heartsick thugs, blue-skinned alcoholics, and moonlighting attorneys who specialized in twangy heartland rock. Shaker watched them perform in every rural tavern and spaghetti restaurant across Ohio, one godless sandbox after another, Shaker always occupying the middle of the floor, rocking his head at radically unmusical tempos and suppressing a lustful moan, while the young woman cavorted in her own private funnel of spotlight onstage.

  His nickname for her was either a snarky flirt or flirty snark; Shaker was never sure which. Soon enough he and the National Sensation slept together, cohabitated, broke up, slept together again, eloped. He helped her christen the next incarnation of her band—The Proud American Stigmata—and she promoted Shaker from occasional roadie to touring bassist, although he had never touched a guitar in his life. He was confounded by the length and ballast of the instrument. Playing it was like bearing down on a span of suspension cable with only a Q-tip. Also, he never really mastered the art of plugging the thing in. His new wife’s musical tastes were already mutating from country-western to more adventurous genres—experimental punk, avant trash rock, urban noise—that were not sought much on the county fair circuit. The band was demoted from outdoor amphitheaters to VFW halls and basement squats, smaller and smaller rooms. Shaker found himself likewise demoted after his wife met a millionaire venture capitalist whose idea of a relaxing evening cocktail was double-malt scotch mixed with sheep placenta and human blood. Shaker’s six-month marriage was dissolved with a sticky note she left affixed to the fridge: My dearest glue-sniffing spouse. Don’t forget to sweat the eggplant. Gone forever, N.S. Shaker lurched around the motel kitchenette, squinting at the kinks and ligaments of her eloquent cursive through a muddle of tears. His own fingertips twitching, he knew, on all the wrong notes.

  Now his ex-wife haunts him across a global cartel of corporatized media—print, radio, TV.

  And Shaker faints at the merest whiff of eggplant.

  *

  Spruce Road is a backwater artery without commercial or industrial properties that lacks the civic infrastructure granted most third-world hamlets. The streets aren’t lit or paved, the homes are not reservoir fed. The region is policed solely by local militia, which itself is only a two-man operation. The Brothers Tully. The fraternal pair were long ago banished from the National Guard for mutinous conduct and have since parlayed their military training into a career of community harassment and black marketeering. Unfortunately, the Tullys are not present to help Shaker establish which of these brown homes belongs to Tobin. There are five. Shaker tiptoes around the isolated properties, hunched low and feeling like a skeezy pervert. He removes his black wind-breaker and prays the white undershirt will broadcast his innocence as an honest amigo par excellence. He’s willing to be shot dead for a cause, just not an ironic one.

  Then Shaker sights a weight-bench in a side yard and decides he has found the correct home. He bangs the mud from his boots, scales the porch, but the door is locked. Definitely brown, he thinks, surveying the shanty from each angle. Shaker putters a bit. The windows are shut, the blinds drawn, a soft sepia glows behind the panes. Shaker arranges himself into a skeptical comport and realizes: Tobin is testing him. Will Shaker tromp all this way only to slink back to the bar in wretched defeat? Will he stand around like a skeezy perv and gaze at the locked shanty until Tobin or his stripper girlfriend meanders up the driveway in a few hours’ time? Will Shaker heft a rock and shatter a window, mindless of consequence and without clobbering the dog?

  About the dog: Shaker hasn’t heard any barks or rampant licking or canine snores. Maybe the heartworm has hollowed the poor animal already. Make your mistake, Shaker thinks. Just make it quickly. And so he gets a running start and rams the door and feels everything—wood, bone, lacquer, world—give way at once. Shaker bursts through with such momentum he slams into an immediate wall, whirls, folds, and is rug-sprawled a solid minute or so, idly inspecting his freshly sprained collarbone, until he glances around and notices the Brothers Tully reclined in identical BarcaLoungers, a wall of mounted antlers and shotguns framing them in redneck tableau.

  “What have you done with the dog?” Shaker asks, realizing there is no dog. Only the older Tully Brother reaching lazily for a long-barreled elephant gun. The other Brother is trying to peer around Shaker to the widescreen TV. Shaker can’t resist. He follows the militiaman’s sightline and sees the image on screen. Shaker’s ex-wife is romping around a historic pavilion with a Union Jack flag shawled around her shoulders, shrieking into an air traffic controller headset as she dismembers a mannequin replica of Betsy Ross with a smoky chainsaw. Behind her, a spangled backdrop announces The Fake American Orgasm. The program is some sort of tabloid hagiography, the kind of gossipy entertainment show that Shaker used to watch with the sound muted and his nasal cavity reamed with aerosol propellant or VCR head cleaner. This particular episode includes a rapid-fire montage of potato-faced pundits sweating profusely under studio makeup and blathering about this renegade musician’s chameleon aesthetics, bootstrap ethos, cutthroat biz sense. Her authenticity. One of the TV commentators refers to Shaker’s ex, without acid or sarcasm, as an unparalleled purveyor of the American Absurd. A chorus of smarm agrees.


  Shaker lifts a leg and turns off the TV with his big toe. Realizing, also, one of his boots has been flung wide and rests among pebbles and shells at the bottom of a burbling fish tank. The TV button, Shaker notes with no small pleasure, feels rather warm on the toe.

  “Seems I am the victim of the cosmic joke,” Shaker says. “But the thing is? The joke? It’s actually sorta funny.”

  “Gentlemen,” he adds, “my boot is poisoning your lichen.”

  Shaker returns his head to its comfortable cradle on the ground, staring at the creamily spackled ceiling. He’s settling in for the imminent interrogation, the long torture, the longer shame. A gun barrel nudges him in the snout. Big toe still on the TV, Shaker clicks over to channel four, wheedles the volume control, and waits for the next round of entertainment—an international rugby match in which each team is foundering badly at the wrong end of the field—to resume.

  3.

  Shaker’s furniture has started to slowly creep away from him. His share of the duplex is already a spartan kind of deal. The change is blatant enough. So he marks his folded metal chairs and card table and the one grimy throw rug with chalk, noting their new angles and positions, their late-hour shadows steep in the sun. The next day, the furniture and chalk silhouettes have migrated a few subtle inches eastward. It’s almost as if the whole living room lifted up on one leg and all its contents slid loose. Shaker heads outside and asks the Hooster girl if he slept through an earthquake.

  “You on drugs?” she replies.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Maybe it’s time you start again,” she says.

  *

  Doris rides in the backseat behind a barricade of the only carpentry materials Shaker owns: hammer, rake, garden hose, four nails pried from the Hooster half of the porch, and a plastic sick bucket that Doris is trying to hold away from her face. She is chaperoning today’s field trip because she does not trust her Skylark in Shaker’s custody. “Also,” she explained while watching Shaker white-knuckle his way out of her driveway, “I suppose everyone needs a small catastrophic adventure now and again to remember why they haven’t been leaving the barracks.” Shaker is still thinking this over. He sits up front, settled snugly into the blistered vinyl, steering with one hand, a supply of timber buckled beside him. The sun ignites the car’s chrome trim like gold foil. It seems to Shaker he has suddenly found conveyance vis-à-vis the world’s most expensive condom wrapper.

  “We are the maniacs,” Shaker says agreeably.

  *

  He is three days into the repair, but he still swings with too much shoulder, still misses nails, hammers thumb and forefinger, struggles to keep his materials steady. He is braced with an elbow against the doorframe, the sun warm on his neck, while the Brothers Tully watch from their ugly crease of lawn. Both men wear the seriousness and deliberation of spelling bee judges. Shaker hits the frame and slants it. He straightens it and starts again.

  “Anyone got a bevel square? A tape measure? Rope and crane?”

  Shaker looks over his shoulder. The Tullys are into another six-pack, their empties screwed neck-first into the dirt. Doris remains in the car with a celebrity tabloid that contains a two-page full-color spread on Shaker’s ex-wife and her latest bistro rampage. Shaker has an extra nail between his teeth. He spits the nail into his palm and hacks up something unpleasant and orange from inside his lungs. His middle moves, an uneasy tide. Kicking at the frame, he tells the Tullys, “A little glue, a little paint. A lot of paint.”

  Brother Two underarms a beer at Shaker, and Shaker catches the bottle in his shirt, startled by his own whiplash reflex. “Maybe tomorrow,” he says.

  The Brothers grumble.

  “Tuesday?”

  Twin nods.

  “Tuesday.” Shaker takes an interminable sip and drains the bottle. He puts the bottle in his bucket, along with his handkerchief and nails and imitation Ray-Bans, and he carts his supplies to the car, where Doris is already retreating to the backseat. Her tabloid on the dashboard displays a paparazzi snapshot of Shaker’s ex-wife in incognito tracksuit and black mod wig, hiding her sunglassed face behind carryout coffee as she kicks a pedestrian in the crotch. At least he thinks it’s his wife. Her Ray-Bans look to be the real item. Shaker swats the magazine to the floor, then picks it up and neatly rubs it shut.

  Doris has the radio cranked, a testosterone-rich stadium anthem, but Shaker turns the noise off. The Skylark is stopped at a traffic signal, and there is movement in the dirty panes. A parade of children. They are marching homeward from some type of parochial education, uniformed in gray argyle and strapped into their backpacks like tiny paratroopers, toting lunchboxes and bruised apples and broken sticks. Each child takes a turn leering into the sedan with a manic expression. Shaker wants to pull some ghoulish faces of his own, contort his cheeks, expand his nostrils, wag tongue and wave hello, but he cannot. He simply cannot.

  *

  Tonight, the Hooster woman and girl are filling their territory with insistent bicker. Shaker understands the general tenor of the argument, but the petty details elude him. Competing strains of dancehall music shiver up the walls. The woman and girl bark in the same brittle register, their voices acquiring strange regional accents the louder they go. They bang their silverware and take turns slamming the toilet seat. They drag their garbage bins too late to the curb and leave them abused by the elements all week. Shaker knows there is an awkward progenitor situation. He knows these arguments reduce to smaller and smaller themes. Like Shaker, their household is held hostage on a daily basis by the bloodless whims of the banal. Do the woman and girl also shun rayon? Do they believe the skin cream commercials? Should it be a turnpike world or a trolley world? Margarine or the other stuff? Some evenings—after a long day of dwindling portions—the banal buttresses them all quite nicely.

  Standing in his entranceway, Shaker is marinating in these and other small mysteries when his eyes focus upon the imposing scale of the Howitzer filling Shaker’s kitchen. The man’s broad back is turned. The water is running. The Howitzer is washing Shaker’s dirty flatware in Shaker’s dirty sink.

  “Almost done here,” the bouncer says.

  Shaker is too stunned to shut the door. He dodders on one foot, then the other, feeling disproportioned, kind of brain-heavy.

  “You’re letting in a draft,” the Howitzer tells him and indicates the luminous dishware on the countertop. “You should really get yourself a drying rack, Shaker.”

  Shaker may be rundown with worry and maybe a foreign germ or two, but the vision seems genuine. The Howitzer resumes rinsing a selection of chintzy plastic knives included in a pumpkin-carving kit. Shaker once assembled the kits for cash. He kept one, just one for himself, and has endured a nagging guilt ever since. He wonders if the Howitzer’s tetanus shots are up to date. He notices, not without a mild voltage of terror, the Howitzer is wearing rubber gloves. Shaker owns none.

  “How’s Tobin’s dog?” Shaker asks. “Its heartworms. Its heart.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Well,” Shaker says. “What do I need to worry about?”

  “Don’t forget that drying rack,” the Howitzer replies, cranking off the faucet’s flow and moving around Shaker to exit the still gaping door, he and his gloves, gone. Shaker is left to stare slackly around his kitchen, noticing now the rust barnacles are chiseled off the toaster, the sink is spotless, the pantry dusted, the scrub brush replenished with a superior brand of detergent.

  His whole house has been cleaned.

  4.

  Shaker is reclined on the beach chair with his radio in his lap, slumbering to a soundtrack of rockhipster laments, the preening clang of prefab angst and fashionable haircuts. He roared around on his machine for most of the morning, massacring the yards of accountants and morticians and other esteemed members of the professional caste, and he knocked a corner off a hedgerow that he tried to piece back together with wire and post until his supervisor p
ut him on peony detail for the rest of the day. Now his attempt at beach chair sloth is interrupted by some occult force. Shaker wakes in a rush, clung with sweaty cotton. He has missed the sunset completely, and somebody has removed the batteries from his radio. The Hooster girl. She has a hula-hoop around her arm and wears a nasty glare.

  “Mama says she heard shrieking.”

  “Out here?”

  “You look like you just climbed out a sauna.”

  “Several,” Shaker mumbles, unbuttoning his top and penultimate buttons, airing his burgeoning heatstroke.

  “You’re taking up all the good patio, too.”

  Shaker looks around, grabs a broom, and uses it to oar-row himself and the chair backwards a few feet. “Nice hula-hoop.”

  “Don’t be a skeezy perv.”

  “What?”

  “Perv,” she says.

  “I feel snowed in,” Shaker shrugs. “That’s all.”

  The Hooster girl’s face is red as rare steak, her freckles lost in the swell of blush. She hands him the hoop and stands at the far end of the porch with her arms pressed in, a slim rod of girl ready for the horseshoe. “Ring me,” she says.

  Shaker misses by a leg. His second throw is even worse. Then he hoops her on the third try.

  “Frisbee is my one true calling,” he says.

  “About your wife—”

  “Wife? I have no wife.”

  “Mama says you’re a lonely man who’s sitting around waiting for some honest amigo to come pull the plug.” The girl arranges her arms on her chest, shifts to one leg, a flamingo stance. “Mama’s new guy socked her so hard in the face she can’t wear sunglasses.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Mama’s plug gets pulled every damn day.”

  “I don’t know the secret.”

  “Yeah,” the girl says. “No shit.”

  “Tell me the next time he comes around. The face socker.”