The Great American Suction Page 4

  “Me too,” Shaker says.

  “Too much empathy can be a curse.” The Howitzer glances around the room with an anxious attention, not taking stock exactly, just roving his overlarge, dreamless head. “Nice place, once you sandblast off the grime.”

  “You think so?” Shaker asks, a little too desperately.

  The Howitzer suckles his thermos, caps it, and begins reeling up the measuring tape he had been stretching around the room when Shaker came home and interrupted him hours ago. The accordion file is on the table, the notebook inside inked with elaborate algorithms, scientific hieroglyphics. Somewhere Shaker found them, stole them, but he’s not sure where. His home is embellished with a number of rogue items—dog collars, diaries, bleached bones, gilded trinkets—that mysteriously entered Shaker’s possession, all carefully curated yet unexplained. Shaker feels like he is one of these items himself, and so is the Howitzer now. He would like to conclude their friendly ceasefire on an upbeat note, but the hour is late, and old-fashioned hospitality can indeed be a chore.

  “You sliced apart the window screen,” Shaker blurts. “You crawled in.”

  The Howitzer scowls, a dismissive shake of his bald head.

  Shaker continues anyway. “You tunneled up through the carpet. A trap wall, a hidden chimney. You are astral-projecting yourself onto my crappy futon.”

  “That would be something, chief.”

  “I’ve had worse nightmares.”

  “This is no nightmare.”

  “Still,” Shaker shrugs, “I’ve had worse.”

  Whatever delirium he has tried all night to rebuff or deflect, Shaker has succumbed to it. He rubs his damp shirt into his damp chest. The cold shirt feels more alive than his alive parts do. The Howitzer packs up his tape with his thermos and electric stud finder and stun gun and caffeine pills. “Been missing you down at the Beagle.” He says this with a gentle yet firm stare.

  “I miss it, too,” Shaker says. “The barstool oracles. Bums sleeping in the bathroom. Christmas carols in the middle of July.”

  “Stop over and see us one of these nights. We’ll screw a few on.”

  “So I won’t get clubbed to death?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the Howitzer replies.

  There is some early sun tinting the landscape orange, its pocks and folds. Shaker finds little solace in the glow. He watches the Howitzer plod out the door to the bulky motorcycle aslant on its kickstand. The bald bouncer walks the machine down to the road before revving it awake. Shaker shuts the door and waits, wants to wait, tries waiting. But he’s already on his feet and inspecting the windows, the locks, the cabinets, his runaway furniture, his sock drawer, his socks. Shaker sprawls facedown on his mattress for ten agonizing minutes before getting up and auditing it all again.

  *

  Shaker has taken the Tully truck with the understanding that for every hour he uses the vehicle, he will dedicate an equivalent hour to slathering their house with primer, then painting over the primer, and probably touching up the paint. So he drives, thankful to be liberated from the Hooster girl’s bike. He’s steering with more care than usual. A shoebox of cassettes rests on the dashboard. Shaker turns on the stereo, and there’s already a tape inside: a bootleg recorded straight off the soundboard. Everything is glossed, the drums and organ large in the mix. The band is all session players, very suave on the ligature, but they lack voltage, throttle, a cardinal sin. The recording isn’t a show. It’s a show’s soundcheck. The same song staggers along, stops, restarts, rife with jazzy improv and jocular banter, jarred by the occasional sour chord. Shaker recognizes the chord, the song. He ejects the tape just before her voice booms through the sheen. He chunks the bootleg into the backseat and rummages the shoebox for another tape, but all the tapes are bootlegs, and all of them contain his ex-wife, her schizophrenic incarnations, and the anonymous men in crisp suits and slick hair who backed them. He squints at the handwritten label on the side of the shoebox: The Great American Suction. He pulls over, places the shoebox on the ground, and rolls the truck over it several times, then resumes driving.

  Shaker has no destination at all. He’s just driving, driving, watching himself driving.

  *

  “You jerk.”

  “Me?” asks Shaker.

  “My lotion!”

  “Lotion,” Shaker replies, barely a foot onto his porch before the girl interrupts his outdoor vodka excursion. She’s listing on a hip and stabbing a fuchsia fingernail into his paunch.

  “I left it out here, and some jerk has been wasting it. Look.” She shakes the bottle into his face. “Empty!”

  “Maybe it evaporates.”

  “Mama seen you out here slicking yourself all over.” The girl leans in. She sniffs Shaker down and up. “You smell like my apricots!”

  “I work in the sun,” Shaker shrugs. “And I like apricots.”

  “Gawd.”

  “I’ll buy you more. A lifetime supply. Just let me have my vodka in peace.”

  The girl glances at the empty bottle with its crusted spout and gives it a sharp, concluding squeeze.

  “Listen,” says Shaker. “Not all of us can lambast our way so smoothly across the tundra.”

  “What’s that even mean?”

  Shaker stares at her blankly.

  “Does it have to mean something?” he asks.

  “You are such a frivolous dude.”

  “Frivolous?”

  “Yeah. It’s a word.”

  “Someone has improved the water pressure on my shower nozzle. They swept my floors and took out my trash. They’re trying to drive me crazy.”

  “Speaking of driving.” The girl tosses the bottle and crosses her arms. “Have you seen what happened to my bike? My beautiful, mangled, broken damn bike?”

  *

  A long day on his machine has reduced Shaker to a genteel cast. He feels slack and accommodating as he ramps his mower and straps it on the flatbed with bungee rope, a canvas tarp. Hob and Munk and Arnold and Flander are gathering the hacksaws and pruning shears from their triage area around a sick elm. Thin unbuckles himself from his Weed Eater and bags the lengthy contraption in a duffel that’s almost his own height. Shaker watches him stealthily while pretending to double-check the flatbed fasteners, the knots and pulleys and locks. Shaker no longer wears that wonderful apricot smell his coworkers have been snickering about, but his tan is near-golden. He is maintaining a glorious pair of mutton-chop sideburns. His nerves are mostly intact. After Thin has dragged the sacked contraption onto the flatbed and weighted it in place with another duffel full of tools, Shaker removes the bandanna from his forehead and wrings the sweat and says, “You were right.”

  “Was I,” says Thin.

  “The Tullys. They’re bum news. My mistake.”

  “Of course it was your mistake. Just like that jungle gym.” Thin points to the titanium skeleton that Shaker accidentally strafed with his side bumper not one hour ago. The play equipment now leans too prominently to the left.

  “Careless, I guess,” Shaker says.

  “I’m seeing contrails,” whispers Thin.

  “Pardon?”

  “Everywhere, man. Streaks and halos. Sunsets and controlled burns. I’m popping pills by the fistful, and I’m still weed-whacking my shit straight.”

  “You are that good.”

  Thin has his thumbs hooked over his trouser waistband, deputy style.

  “So you really done with Tullys.”

  “I am,” Shaker says.

  Thin takes a lazy yawn and arches an eyebrow. “This mean you’re partying?”

  Shaker mimics the yawn and says, “Maybe.”

  “Well, the maybe truck is gassed to the maybe brim and about to pull the maybe fuck out,” Thin replies, but Shaker is already scrambling into the middle seat.

  The party site is not a ramshackle cabin or double-wide trailer as Shaker expects, but rather a two-story Greek Revival with garage and porch and tire-swing in the backyard. Shaker
follows Thin and Munk into a cathedral foyer that culminates in an arched window of stained glass, kaleidoscopic colors filtered around the staircase and walls. Shaker shambles along, dazed by the surreal palette. He enters the kitchen where Roderick Bartholomew is already at work, breaking apart a brown brick.

  “Cap’n Bartholomew took a personal day,” Thin tells Shaker. “Prep time, you understand? Plus expenses.”

  Thin’s hand is extended in anticipation. Shaker self-consciously inspects his own hands, noting a fine crescent of black gunk under each fingernail. Then he realizes he’s being solicited. He tweezes a twenty from his wallet and tries not to visibly wince as he forks it over. A whole week in grocery funds.

  “Danke,” says Thin. “Make yourself at home.”

  “Where’s the pisser in this place?” Shaker asks.

  Thin spins around the kitchen, innocently perplexed, like a young tourist who has strayed too far from his hostel. “Anybody know where el baño is at?”

  “Negative,” Roderick murmurs as he sorts through a collection of razor blades fanned across the granite countertop. He selects one, tests it on his thumb cuticle, and begins slicing the brown mound in surgical increments. “Minnesotan is locked in the attic. Dude was spooking me so much I couldn’t concentrate on Sargent Rock here.”

  Thin looks at Shaker and shrugs. “Happy hunting.”

  Shaker wanders back to the foyer and ascends the staircase, blinking at all the wild peacock colors, and tours the unfurnished upstairs. Bathroom, bedrooms, closets, all empty. The only indication of human life is the footfalls and squashy thumps from the attic. The Minnesotan—who is, in fact, a seventh-generation Ohioan—has long maintained a fabled reputation among the local community of huffers, snuffers, dullards, and ne’er-do-wells. Shaker has witnessed the man stumble through a rich array of social milieus and wilt rather splendidly in each of them. But Shaker can’t remember ever once seeing him open his mouth and actually speak.

  Shaker finds no papers to rummage, no trunks to ransack. He enters a nice, wide room and urinates in the middle of it. He hops over the briny lake of effluent, already starting to stink, and inscribes his initials in a dusty windowpane, then heads down the staircase. Munk meets him in the foyer, squinting up through the religious sunlight, a sack of kitty litter under each arm.

  “Hey, new guy,” says Munk. “Gimme a hand.”

  Shaker grabs a bag. “I’ve been on that machine all summer. What’s new about that?”

  “New guy always gets put on the machine. Working with clippers and rakes and spades, those are professional hallmarks.”

  “Hallmarks,” Shaker nods.

  “Look at me, son. I am an artisan with an artisan’s hands. Touch them.”

  Shaker looks at the hands. Plenty of black gunk. Shaker hefts his bag as if it’s lighter than it really is and carries it past the kitchen to an alcove in the darkened den, where the drug squatters have relocated. Thin and Roderick and Flander and two people Shaker doesn’t recognize are hunched around a table. On the table is a fish. The two strangers are operating a large bicycle pump/bong hybrid, one pumping it, the other inserting its transparent tube into the fish’s mouth. The fish is spiny, zebra-colored, and it inflates to light-bulb size.

  “Okay,” one says. “Quick quick quick.”

  Thin, sliding on a pair of robust metalworker gloves, grabs the fish and holds it at nipple level, tilts down his head, and he simultaneously squeezes the sea creature and sucks its smoky, juicy output. His pale face is clenched, his arm shaking. The men all unleash a festive football cheer while Shaker stares, his own stomach in a grotesque torque.

  “Well?” Thin gasps, his face brick red, handing the fish and glove to Shaker. “You partying or not?”

  Two days later, Shaker is still trying to get home, schlepping the same strip of churned gravel again and again, facial muscles in frantic conniption, searching for his shoes and socks. The undersides of his feet are blistered and inscrutable as artichokes. The black gunk is prevailing. His shoes and his socks are somewhere along this dark and dirty road. He knows they are.

  His teeth will not stop humming.

  *

  When Shaker was a schoolboy and first asked for a dog, his mother sighed theatrically, set her perennial wineglass aside, and sat her son on her knee. “I asked for a puppy, too, when I was your age,” she told him. “A boxy-faced Schnauzer that was uniquely coarse-haired and spritely and even in its best moments carried a strong smell of liverwurst. The first day out of the crate, it ran off the porch and bit the milkman. We had milkmen in those days, dear. Real bastions of civic integrity. The milkman sued us for the dog bite, and my parents countersued because he wasn’t technically our milkman, he was our neighbor’s milkman. We may have also sued the neighbor. The municipality got involved because the puppy wasn’t licensed, and the code-enforcement gestapo intervened because half our land fell outside the city line and was only zoned for livestock and poultry. At some point, my parents hired a private investigator, although for the life of me I can’t remember why. There’s no happy ending to this story. The boy wants a puppy, he will have a puppy.” She pinched a small piece of Shaker’s young cheek. “But the moment you take your eyes off that dog, I will let it off its leash, open the front gate, sit back, and watch the fireworks unfold. Because life is all about the little lessons.”

  *

  Some nights, Shaker rants so loud in his sleep, he awakes with a bruised throat. For a long time, he wondered what he was saying, so he borrowed a tape recorder and clip mic and tacked together an ad hoc system to monitor his slumber sounds. It took him several attempts, but he did capture one of these nocturnal monologues. It consisted of a single word, repeated over and over, like a sacred mantra: Shaker, Shaker, Shaker, Shaker.

  Shaker smashed the tape recorder and burned the tape and began sleeping with a clean washcloth crammed in his mouth.

  This morning, he is hoarse again. He takes his time in the bathroom, gargling mouthwash and salt water and dribbling most of it on the floor. Then he enjoys a modest breakfast of stale cereal and three slices of wheat toast charred so horrifically unrecognizable they require forensic identification. He scarfs down his breakfast while standing in his front room, looking through the window at the Tully truck. Shaker has lost track of the hours he owes. He has convinced himself that extended possession of the vehicle now obligates him to a thorough wash/wax/towel-buff session, which he inevitably delays, too. And so the truck sits, frozen and pointless, an elegy to all Shaker’s lingering debts.

  There is only one choice of pet store. Avalon Animals is a dark, unsymmetrical affront to retail architecture; there’s nothing boxy or bright or antiseptic about it. The fluorescent lights and air conditioning are turned off, yet the store is open. Inside, Shaker wanders the long aisles. He tries not to get too distracted by the caged toucans and hermit crab colonies and ferrets siesta’ing in their nylon hammocks, not when what he really wants to visit are the tanked fish. He shuffles up to the wide glass, which is layered with his own ghastly reflection. He pinches his lower lip. Licks his hair into stead. The tank is fishless. Just brackish water and a set of car keys sunk among the bottom pebbles. Shaker approaches the bland, pretty cashier to query her about special orders, baked brains, lost socks. The woman has a loose-hanging face and creamy complexion, her cheek skin so slack a person could basket apples in it. Something about the woman perturbs him. Shaker nods and smiles and rushes out the door without saying anything at all.

  At least he is able to competently navigate himself home. Rather than park at the duplex, however, he continues to circle his neighborhood, loop upon loop upon loop, like a recent parolee awed by the restless, golden fields of freedom, looking for something warm and familiar to burgle.

  *

  This house is a rustic colonial on a county route placed far back among pines and nettles so that, seen from a distance, only the house’s gambled rooftop is announced from the green. The men are in the backyard patio
area, gathered around a sand-filled bocce ball court. Silently, they stare at the sand, a pensive brood. Some recently smoked puffer fish rests in a swirl of brown juices on the grill. The men, six of them, are utterly transfixed, as if worshiping an ancient and enigmatic shrine.

  Shaker has slunk into a hypnotic trance of his own. He’s settled among the luau-themed patio equipment, feeling oddly tender as he surveys the scene. Behind a shrub wall, the Minnesotan is spread-eagle on the grass, his face planted in a patch of poison oak. A many-tentacled bicycle-pump bong is coiled like a sea monster on a patio table alongside some blackened glass. Everything seems narcotized and inert in a shoe-box diorama type of way. Shaker takes a sip from his canteen and reclines his bamboo-stick chair. Soon he is submerged in a dream terrain of impenetrable suburban fortresses built entirely from PVC conduit and torched Pyrex.

  *

  When Shaker wakes, his throat is parched and his canteen has vanished. The sun is declining. A boom box blares a dubbed cassette of high-velocity power thrash sung in garbled Paraguayan, and someone has taken a malicious piss in the bocce sand. The urinater possessed both remarkable volume and trajectory, resulting in a dark stain six feet in diameter, a spiral vortex design. Shaker inspects the stain in genuine puzzlement and decides to seek inspiration elsewhere. He looks through the window into the colonial’s kitchen. The supply table is collaged with knives and skillet and skin and aquatic guts. Munk is taking deep hits from a plastic pen pressed to a puffer wrapped in tinfoil. Flander assists with the flame. The lit fish changes colors, turquoise-striped to speckled yellow.

  Back on the patio, Thin is spazzing his limbs in crazy windmill arcs, unable to dance coherently to the rampaging music. Shaker retracts his legs onto his chair and realizes his feet are naked and cold. His new boots are gone. There is also, vaguely, a tweeze in his arm. Shaker holds up the arm and sees a spiny fish stuck in the soft meat of his elbow. His mouth is numb, his voice box, his face. None of it can yell. Shaker stumbles off the chair, barefoot and terrified, trying to shake off the freaky thing. Only by utilizing a pair of barbecue tongs is he able to successfully detach himself.