The Great American Suction Read online

  “Like you’d do anything from that lazy chair.”

  Shaker shrugs.

  “You already had one visitor tonight,” she tells him.

  “I did?”

  “The crazy sign guy.”

  “My cousin.”

  “Everyone hates that guy.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “He was banging on your front door, trying to jimmy your windows. Mama had to chase him off with a shish-kebab skewer. That dude looked rough.”

  “I like shish kebabs,” Shaker replies.

  “He looked just as bad as you.”

  Shaker waits for the girl to depart, and then he rears back his head, sucks some deep-rooted phlegm from the recesses of his throat, and launches it skyward, aiming for the fleeing sunlight and missing it by just this much.

  *

  The wheeled cart is loaded with black bags, tube apparatus, a pungent cargo. The cart’s operator is one of Shaker’s yard crew, a pill-and-pipe addict who also has a special fondness for chinchillas and mixed martial arts, named Thin. He’s waiting outside the town head shop with one hand hooked on his belt loop, the other shakily harvesting snot crust from his nostril. He wears the sloughed-off expression of a meatloaf drooping under too many watts. Inside the shop, Shaker recognizes the tortured profile of Thin’s roommate, the Minnesotan, bent over a case of bongworks and pipes. The Minnesotan is shellacking the glass with his saliva, several lustrous coats. Back on the sidewalk, Thin is ready to wheel onward until Shaker blocks the path of his cart. “Almost didn’t recognize you without the Weed Eater strapped around your waist.”

  “Yeah, that’s me,” replies Thin. “Mr. Weed Eater. That’s me full time.”

  Each of Thin’s nostrils gives a rabid twitch, like a rodent deranged on pharmaceuticals. One of his precious chinchillas, perhaps. A month ago, Shaker saw the man rove his Weed Eater over his own sneaker, ventilating the toe tip. And the expression on Thin’s face when it happened, a bored expression, unimpressed.

  Thin impatiently jiggles his overloaded cart, a silver cage on three wheels.

  “Missing a wheel,” Shaker says.

  “Only supposed to have three.”

  “Looks tipsy.”

  “You’re blocking my way, hoss.”

  “Just a sidewalk,” Shaker says.

  Thin tames his nostrils, looks up into the lamplight without blinking or flaring anything, and looks back at Shaker, the same lidless stare.

  “Hear you taken up with Tullys,” he says.

  The corners of Shaker’s mouth are dry, too dry. “I owe them some work.”

  “That right?”

  “Just a day or two more.”

  “Got a question for you, Quaker.”

  “It’s Shaker.”

  “Why you think there ain’t any jobs for us after November?”

  Shaker shrugs. “Nothing to rake or mow,” he says.

  “Can you salt, shovel, plow?”

  “Sure,” Shaker slow-nods.

  “It’s a whole skill set,” smiles Thin. “And there’s a lot of fat contracts with the township to do winter work. Roads, parking lots, libraries, facilities. You got any idea why we’re not doing it?”

  “Nada.”

  “Those militia twins got connections, back-channel, black-market, under-table shit. It’s all monopolized, man! Fucking Tullys run the show! And you’re in bed with the enemy. You’re in the muck.”

  Shaker tries to smile, but it feels like his face is yawning apart at the seams. Thin jiggles the cart back onto its three wheels and sneers, “Dude, you don’t even mow that machine straight.”

  Later that night, Shaker sits for some soup in Crimon’s Diner, where he slurps his creamy tomato goulash in relative calm, wondering if maybe the Tullys might use their institutional strings to sling him better work. They have transportation at least, affiliations, repute. Meanwhile, the lawns are beginning to go dormant and the muck is encroaching. Shaker could use a brief sabbatical from the muck. He shifts his attention to a TV held by brackets above the hostess station and the familiar image on screen. His ex-wife, the National Sensation. The TV shows her flanked by a coven of bald and cragged attorneys in some stark courtroom scene, an ocean of faceless spectators smeared with the background, unfinished. It’s a sketch artist’s rendering. Shaker is sure it is her. The shapeless muumuu sack dress under a bouffant wig. Her pouty lips fixed in a mercenary smirk. Shaker lets the word mercenary soften in his mouth like a piece of moldering fruit. He thinks he can hear whatever faltering hydraulics are located deep at the bowels of the earth, lugubrious and rain-gray, slowing to a sad, dry creak.

  He doesn’t bother deciphering the info ticker scrolling the bottom of the screen. The bad painting is enough. Shaker stands, shoves napkin and silverware in pocket, and slips noiselessly out the door, leaving his soup unfinished and the bill unpaid.

  *

  His cousin’s apartment is a basement bunker with a single stone entrance. Shaker has arrived after midnight. No one answers, so he tries the landlord’s apartment upstairs. The older man who opens the door is shirtless and saddled with nipples the size of sand dollars, a copious girth. Shaker is made self-conscious about his own skinny holdings. Malnourished and rangy, he widens his mouth but cannot fit the “ummm, yeah, errr” sounds out.

  “I’m awake anyway,” the landlord says. “You look awful. Shit-colored. Dead. You suffer the insomnia, too?”

  “Pretty much just coasting on thermals at this point.”

  “Want some warm milk? I boil it hot, so hot it scalds.”

  “Temperature hurts my teeth,” says Shaker.

  “Easy enough to fix that.”

  The man pops the upper shelf of denture from his mouth and rotates it in the porch light. Shaker’s stomach performs a similar levitation and spin. “Please put those monsters back in.”

  The man shrugs and eats the fake ivories and grins, tight and crooked. He maintains a stance that gives too much view of all the fuzz he is amassing in his navel’s tiny pucker.

  “I’m here for my cousin,” Shaker says.

  “That wild goose is long gone.”

  “Gone where? He just stopped by my place last night.”

  “Wish I could help. Really do. Unfortunately, Section Eights are notoriously fudgy. That moron could be anywhere. But let me just say, if he thinks he’s getting his security deposit back—”

  “This isn’t about that.”

  “Not yet, it’s not.”

  “Can I snoop around?” Shaker asks. “See what he left behind?”

  “I hope you like crazy crap,” the landlord replies.

  Standing in the claustrophobic concrete hovel that Darb rented the last few years—four walls full of samurai blades and ninja chucking stars, a broken toilet, no radio, no TV—Shaker understands why he’s never been invited inside. There isn’t even enough clearance for Darb to practice marching with his sign, which rests in the corner, hemmed by a milk crate bookcase and urinated mattress.

  “He paid $500 for this cave,” Shaker says.

  “Paid it happily.”

  “You took advantage.”

  “No more than anyone else,” the landlord says.

  Shaker examines the bookcase. Photocopied pamphlets and survivalist manuals and fliers and other paranoiac ephemera. Around it are taped pictures of cats, cat calendars, cat toys and cat knickknacks, all gruesomely defaced. Shaker peeks into a shoebox by the bed. His cousin’s medication. Anti-depressants. Anti-psychotics. Reds and blues and greens. A whole anguished rainbow.

  “You want any of this, take it now,” says the landlord. “I got a new Looney Tune moving in next week.”

  Shaker considers snagging some kind of keepsake, a nostalgic totem of his cousin, but it’s all accidental kitsch, dementia mementos, crazy crap.

  “Have yourself a pleasant bonfire, I guess,” Shaker says. He is squeezing through the cramped confines towards the door when the landlord grabs him.

  “I saw y
our old lady on the news.” The fat man grins, his dentures steady and fixed, and then the grin wanes. “Boy, you just can’t hold onto a single goddamn thing, good or bad, can you?”

  Shaker purses his lips tightly.

  “You scare people, you know,” says the man.

  “My thermals,” Shaker responds, pushing for the exit, “are thinning out.”

  *

  The Hooster girl is asleep on the porch under a burlap blanket, her head plugged into a fragile, white device so small Shaker can barely read the print on its encasement. He lifts the iThing off the girl’s stomach and inspects. He thumbs some buttons, but it won’t scroll. A familiar refrain, tinny and digitized, crackles through the earpiece. The title track from the second LP, The Unquiet American Coquetry Presents: Everything and Dander.

  She opens her eyes and looks up at Shaker holding her expensive toy, but she doesn’t reach for it yet.

  “You like this one,” she says. “I always hear you turning it up.”

  “That’s not me.”

  “This was your album. That’s you on the bass, your sloppy filigree. You must have made money.”

  “Buried it all in the backyard. Right next to the dog.”

  “This song,” she says. “I sorta hate it, and I sorta love it.”

  Shaker half-smiles.

  “Years ago,” he says, “my cousin had a habit of breaking into people’s vehicles. Not to steal the car or soil it or anything. He just wanted to listen to the radio. He’d hotwire the thing and sit there, just listening to music until he fell asleep. People were always returning with their kids or their groceries to find their car door busted apart, the sound system cranked, this strange man snoring in the front seat with an iron file clenched in his fist like a conductor’s baton. A real aficionado.”

  “I’d shoot him,” the girl says.

  “Repeatedly,” Shaker nods.

  She unplugs an earpiece and offers it up, but instead Shaker hands her the whole device.

  “I didn’t really play. Just held the thing. Mimed to a backing track. You know what the trick is on stage? Look bored. Everyone thinks you’ve been lifted into some higher rapture.”

  “People used to call you Shaker the Faker.”

  “I can’t do the Charleston, either.”

  “That why she shot you in the chest?”

  “Everyone adores that story,” he says.

  “Because it’s a good story.”

  Shaker cracks a knuckle on the ledge of his chin and strains for a smile. He gets only a desultory lip twitch.

  The Hooster girl sits up and drops her voice to a conspiratorial octave. “I bet she comes back here. Her and that rich husband she’s got. After the lawsuits and court trials and bribes and settlements. I bet they snatch up all the land, all the fast-food joints and beautiful houses and idiot face-socking boyfriends. They buy it all and burn it all to the damn ground like it deserves to be damn burned.”

  “Except the yarn store. The yarn.”

  “Shaker,” the girl says.

  “It calms me,” he shrugs.

  The girl wraps the device in its earpiece cord and goes indoors, trailing her burlap to bed. Shaker nods goodnight and also retires, first to the kitchen and his trove of secret vodka, and then to the bathroom, where he stands five minutes outside the door, waiting patiently while whoever is inside finishes snaking the sink drain.

  5.

  Shaker’s coworkers Thin and Munk and Roderick Bartholomew are on their knees and hunched forward so their bald craniums bulge in the sunlight as they weed the overstuffed gutters. Their attention keeps getting diverted by Shaker whorling around the property at unsafe speeds, attempting to outrun their hard glares. He has forgotten to wear his gun-range earmuffs today, and the mower noise is creating dubious euphonies in his head that Shaker tries to outrun, too. He downshifts the machine and accidentally stalls. The warm fumes updraft around him. His ears are ringing violently, not just from engine noise but also the blood swishing through his clenched ventricles, miles of pointless tubing, heavy mortar in all his holes. Shaker is stranded in the middle of the yard, some distance beyond himself. For several hours, his supervisor—Hob Brock—has been pruning a copse of weeping willows with what look to be barbershop clippers. Hob rests his clippers and searches Shaker for a sign. Shaker steps off the machine, circles around, and stabs a finger skyward without looking.

  “That seem like rain to anybody else?”

  The sky is a pure, blissful, detergent-hued blue. Shaker pretends not to notice Hob waving him over. Instead, he turns and straps in, and with a debonair flourish he restarts the machine.

  *

  After the unkempt grassland has been satisfactorily conquered, the men huddle in preparation for their weekend drug soiree. Shaker has been invited to similar soirees in the past but always declines because his life is not exactly lacking in blackouts, hangovers, bleak palls, and bleaker depressions. Amnesias, too. The men at their truck are also shunning him, although Shaker is angling for a ride home, so he moseys towards them with a sheepish look. Hob Brock stops him halfway.

  “This ain’t a rodeo, Shaker.”

  “I guess it’s not,” Shaker replies.

  “You looked like a madman out there.”

  “Out there?” Shaker shades his forehead with his hand, poker visor-like, and surveys the neat, green yard. He can only see span, distance. Far-tapered edges. “I was expediting.”

  “You’re gonna expedite yourself right out of a job.”

  “I’d hate to do that.”

  “Me too. You’re the only clean beak here.” Hob thumbs his nostril. Shaker can almost glean his point. “Even if that wasn’t always the case.”

  Shaker is shucking his hard-rubber soles into the earth, embarrassed but also feeling a mite bit haughty. Then he turns his head and realizes the Weekend Party Truck has just rumbled off. Only Hob and Shaker remain. And then Hob leaves, too.

  *

  Darkness has settled in, and a spot lamp is rigged and aimed upwards, knocking Shaker’s shadow against the house, a splayed and stretched double, so the real Shaker appears to be a marionette controlled by his larger, darker self. The Brothers Tully are lazing in the yard, watching Shaker try not to take off any more thumbnail with that hammer. The door is intact and almost completely hung. Shaker has even added an extra sheet of paint, which did not dry properly before he began fitting the door on its replacement hinges. Maybe the wood has swollen, or the frame shrunk, or the paint was thicker than Shaker anticipated. He’s randomly ramming away with his hammer, loud and wild and messily. But the door is no shabbier than the rest of the house. Shaker turns and shrugs.

  “How long does it take the average person to hang and paint a door?” he asks them. “Six, seven months? That sound about right?”

  Tully One looks at his double and hands him a fresh brew. Together, they sip and stare, sip and stare, drawing a steady bead on the sweat that has welled under Shaker’s eyeballs, raw and stung with bloodshot.

  “It’s winter out here,” Shaker says.

  Idly, he juggles the hammer. The living room curtains are drawn back, and Shaker has a wide view of the furnishings and fixtures inside the Tully household. An array of taxidermy projects adorn the fireplace mantle. Squirrel, porcupine, turtle, raccoon. Shaker imagines a fishbowl that contains his own severed head, pale and macabre, wearing an expression of utmost leisure. He has no idea what he would say to it.

  He also has no idea how long he spends leering into the Brothers’ house. The spot lamp has been switched off, the Tullys gone inside. Shaker is standing alone with the Hooster girl’s teal-painted bike leaned against a tree. The tree almost seems to sway as much as Shaker, his shadow, the larger world to which they may or may not still be bound.

  *

  The sun has yet to rise. Shaker goes barefoot to the kitchen and finds the faucet in the dark, guzzles from it clumsily, and—toweling his chin with his undershirt—he returns to the futon, where the Howi
tzer is taking a short rest. The man’s speech has slowed, he’s gesturing less vividly. These late-night invasions are siphoning some vital spunk from him. Shaker imagines a pacemaker seam across the Howitzer’s sternum that once unzipped would reveal a vacuum-cleaner bag full with pruned organs and a metric ton of dry mulch. The vision consoles him somewhat. Then he slaps the man’s shoulder, and the Howitzer jerks awake.

  “You must’ve been dreaming,” says Shaker, pointing at the Howitzer’s slurry chin puddle. “Got some residue on you.”

  “Doubtful,” the Howitzer replies. “I have a pretty mundane inner life.”

  “Well, it leaks.”

  “And what about you, chief?”

  “Me?”

  “What is holding our good man Shaker together these days?”

  “Bubblegum, hot solder, spiritual malaise. A whole lot of dried glue.”

  “How dry?”

  “It’s just glue,” Shaker mumbles. “Old glue.”

  The Howitzer knuckles loose a sleep chigger from his eye socket. “Sometimes, when I turn off the lights at night, I see myself sitting at an enormous banquet table. I’m wearing a nice cloth seafood bib and hip sunglasses. The table is full of dead babies. Pieces, limbs, bones, all cooked in a pile. I’ve been ripping apart and eating them like fried chicken. Horrible, just horrible shit.”

  “But that’s not a dream?”

  “Maybe it’s penance for some horribleness I’ve done in an earlier life. Or maybe a life that has yet to come. Maybe it’s all the same thing.”

  “You believe that karma stuff.”

  “I think it’s important for people like you to believe it.”

  “I see just fine up here in the nosebleeds.”

  “I doubt that, too.”

  “Can’t say that I love them,” Shaker says. “The nosebleeds.”

  “You go to a lot of movies?”

  “Nah.”

  “You read books? Do you have any subscriptions? Have you cultivated a rich interior life?”

  “That’s why I got a dog.”

  “I let some men love me,” the Howitzer says. “But I’m pretty sure I’m asexual.”

  “At least you know.”

  “It’s lonely, candy-assed carpet-munchers like yourself that truly sadden me.”