The Great American Suction Read online

  The other men are too rapt with their own stupors to commiserate. Shaker returns to his seat, kicks his bare feet back up, and notices a second and third fish dangling from the flab of each thigh. Defeated, he reattaches the original fish to his swollen artery, which he guesses is an aorta of some sort.

  After a while, Shaker can’t resist. He raises the arm, rotates it slowly in the low tiki light, admiring his new appendage, and that’s how he catches sight of the female clerk from the pet store. She is standing in the kitchen, passing a basketful of spiky fish—all of them bagged in gleaming water, like prizes from a boardwalk game—to Roderick, who in turn trades her a clam of cash. The woman recedes from view.

  Shaker is already on his feet and stumbling around the side of the house, but he gets snarled in some pine branches. By the time he extracts himself from the foliage and glimpses the woman again, she is disappearing into the passenger side of a damaged hatchback. The calico vehicle’s fender is secured via rope and electrician tape, and there is a Caution: Student Driver placard in the rear window. An unfamiliar man, slump shouldered, menacing in size, looms at the steering wheel. The car backs down the driveway, going a little crooked across the yard and grazing the curb. And then it is gone.

  Roderick is still in the kitchen straining some foul-smelling seawater through a Rube Goldberg filtration system, convoluted tubes and fizzing funnels, all jury-rigged together.

  “That piss smells delicious,” Shaker says in a slur, still unable to feel his mouth.

  “You do not interrupt Michelangelo when he is lying on his back with his private parts mashed against the ceiling, paint oozing in his face.”

  “I guess not.” Shaker gagging on the nautical stench. “Unless you are offering a bribe.”

  He points to the Tupperware tub of spiky, new deliveries. He tucks a twenty into Roderick’s chest pocket.

  “You got an aquarium at home?”

  “Yes,” Shaker says.

  Roderick removes the surgical mask from his mouth. “Take the runt. Give it a good home. Do not give it a name. Trust me, man. Never name the thing you plan to someday smoke.”

  Shaker grabs the runtiest bagged fish and holds it in his cupped hands, peering down at it like a Magic 8-Ball.

  “Good morning, Junior Shaker,” he says, making googly eyes at the purple fish.

  *

  The pet store is closed and the parking lot empty, and Shaker still insists on occupying the sole handicap spot. He can’t explain his compulsion to drive back here. Maybe some simpatico toxin is still working its way around his bloodstream. Maybe he just needs a quiet place to rest. He sets Junior Shaker on the dashboard and watches the fish twirl in its big bag. Then he watches the homeless men and women across the highway. There is a whole encampment of them established on this flat parcel of rural roadside: sheets hung from tree limbs, fire pits, cardboard slabs tilted into huts. Shaker is fascinated by the industrious nomads who are not beholden. They have rearticulated the lie at the root of the frontier myth. Shaker thinks about visiting their shantytown for a few hours, sharing the homemade libations they have concocted from stale fruit and crusted gym socks, roasting varmint meat on sticks. But he just watches the show instead. His knee judders on the lifeless stereo console. He talks sporadically to his fish. Sleep comes in fits and starts and the starts of fits.

  When he wakes the next morning, the sun is sautéing him through the windshield and the truck’s temperature has risen to near-volcanic levels. Shaker, slantwise on the rear seat, finds his cheek is adhered to the hot vinyl with a clump of dried drool. He digs under the cushion and discovers an expired credit card that he uses to chisel his face free. Simultaneously, a random idea is jostled loose: Shaker doesn’t own an aquarium at home. He has no large container or backyard pond—not even a decent-size pretzel bowl—to lodge the fish. But it doesn’t matter. Shaker cranks down the window to let in some ambient breeze. He fans the air with his hands to no effect. Junior Shaker is still resting on the dashboard in his shiny plastic bag, magnified in hellish sunlight, and no longer purple.

  The puffer is not only dead. The blameless little guy has been poached white as an egg.

  Shaker tries not to think about it. This time he uses the bunk credit card to scrape the skin off the pale corpse. At first, the scales peel easily, but Shaker is too zealous with his technique, and soon he is frantically grating the puffer like a hunk of Parmesan cheese. Shaker stuffs the skin shreds in the ashtray and plops the meat in his mouth. He swallows the evidence in a single, dutiful gulp.

  “That wasn’t so awful,” he tells the reflection in the rearview mirror, a sweat-frazzled and disheveled man, lacking imagination and moral authority, who does not seem to believe him.

  Then Shaker drives home, cozies up with the toilet, and voids his stomach for days.

  6.

  Once a month, the Brothers Tully host militia training maneuvers in and around the thirty-odd acres that entrench their house. Since Shaker owes the Brothers approximately a full week’s labor for use of their truck, he has been conscripted into service this Sunday afternoon. The game is paintball, and he joins the angry secessionists and meth mummies and paroled vagrants who have also been coaxed through assorted Tully-related obligation. Shaker is kitted up in camouflage and fourthhand hockey pads, humping things into position. Thanks to the dearth in available head armor, he can see a few exposed faces that he recognizes. Stool slouchers from the Beagle, grocery stockers, an alderman, a Shriner. Even Bob Mossenfeld, who managed the only used auto lot in town and sold Shaker his old van before he was fired for lagging odometers. The Minnesotan sits with a shotgun cracked open on its hinge. He’s trying to huff the paint cartridge inside. Hunkered on another tree stump is Bitters McCaulky. The reverend’s face is clamped with concentration as he velcros on his body-molded shin guards and aluminum crotch shield. He’s suiting up for some serious castle siege. Shaker hurriedly crams his head into his ski mask. Then he straightens his bullet belt and thermal gloves, his night-vision goggles although it is not night. Fully pieced together, he walks up and holds his gun point-blank to McCaulky’s cheek and gives the trigger a dainty pinch. A loud lisp of compressed air. The man’s head jerks. Red paint decorates all immediate parties. Shaker thinks he can read in the spatter the cryptic intimations of his own existential liberation. It more or less resembles red velvet cake.

  “Bombs away,” Shaker says and returns to his team of junky addicts and lonely stalkers and school board members. A Tully blows a bullhorn.

  The skirmish can now officially begin.

  *

  Shaker spends his night alone on the patio, serenaded by the baying of mongrel dogs. As much as he enjoys the dogs’ company, the animals have always been too afraid to approach him. He is bundled in gabardine against the high breezes, pretending the footsteps he hears indoors are only the Hooster woman and girl kicking with agitation over the most recent news. Their radio is dialed to a local station running breathless coverage of a string of recent B&E violations in which the homeowners were found bound with bungee rope and bent over sofas, socks stuffed in mouth, cucumbers wedged in their nether territories. There are rumors of lubrication trails, surveillance traps, psychic crime-solvers trekking in from downstate. Shaker has no firsthand knowledge of these incidents, but he feels confident he could play the role of “flummoxed bystander interviewed by regional cable TV affiliate” if given the opportunity. He has only made one significant media appearance over the years. The weekly pennysaver ran a photo of Shaker performing on stage at a county fair. He had a vicious lip sneer, his legs fixed in classic rock-and-roll straddle, his instrument very visibly unplugged. Who’s On First Bass? ran the headline. Shaker clipped the photo anyway and keeps it in a manila envelope taped to the bottom of his futon mattress.

  He has no such documentation, however, of the mysterious sleepwalking sprees that were his other public humiliation in that era. Shaker would fall asleep in his bed like any other semi-lucid civilian, only
to regain consciousness hours later—ten or fifteen miles from his house—standing barefoot in convenience store aisles, fast-food drive-thrus, the garages of startled residents. These long somnambular jaunts would leave his mental faculties a little moiled and his shanks sore for days. But Shaker’s foremost regret is he never learned where he was trying to go, if he had any tangible destination at all.

  He rises from his beach chair to raid his secret vodka reserve in the refrigerator meat drawer, but he can’t quite see the meat drawer, not exactly, not with all this fresh fluid suddenly rising into his eyes. Some galactic compression is squeezing the drunk and sentimental juices right out of him. So Shaker swings into the bathroom and fumbles for the faucet, hoping cold water will shock the sadness away. The water will only run hot. So hot it scalds. He checks the showerhead, the kitchen faucet, the spigot outside. Same and same and same.

  “Bombs away,” he mutters at the mirror, the steamy splotch that once was his sweet, innocent face.

  *

  The mower is overturned in the yard with its grassgunked underbelly exposed while Shaker prepares to replace the five-foot-long machete that is the machine’s rotary blade. The old blade is dinged badly and cuts uneven, a result of Shaker skimming a water sprinkler that stubbornly had not retracted into its hole. Shaker whips the bad blade sideward like a scythe, hooking weeds and hacking them, and then he stabs it in the dirt and starts tearing the replacement out of its plastic sheath.

  The orange cottage and its fence and shed are the only structures mounted on this small hill, and the wind rams them at all angles. The sky appears to rain pebbles and grit. Black stockings ripple and kick like ghostly showgirls on a clothesline. There is a herd of feral cats under the porch, and their eyes are gleaming through the scrim of darkness like polished nickels.

  Shaker’s surgery on the machine progresses slowly. He smells ripe in all this toil and sunlight. For three days, he has been unable to shower at home, and the reek is untenable. He holds his shirt over his nose as he works. He reminds himself that in Europe natural stink is the fashion. After the blade is replaced and the shrapnel cleaned up, Shaker approaches the cottage at a casual saunter. Thin and Hob Brock and a heavyset migrant named Mach Whatever are assailing an invasive stack of hedges on the side yard. The migrant’s radio is broadcasting reggae rock. The song is mild and rubber-limbed and makes the afternoon labor feel leisurely and festive. Shaker strolls onto the porch. He knocks, listens, knocks again, and with a blasé shrug he rears back on his heels. Nobody is watching him. Even the cats are quiet. The door pushes open easily. It wasn’t locked at all. Shaker gives one last look over his shoulder before slinking inside.

  *

  Shaker’s leg feels the high winds coming. That limb, and Shaker with it, had been run over and improperly repaired the previous year, and now, in his only clairvoyant talent, it can gauge the approach of inclement weather. Six pins in all. He had been hazed on drink and muscle relaxants that night and was waiting in front of the Regal Beagle for his cousin to bring around the car. Darb overshot the sidewalk, accelerated backwards too hastily, and ran Shaker down. For more than an hour, Shaker was trapped under Doris’s rust-clung Skylark, his leg mangled, a steady stream of antifreeze piddling in his face as the drugs slowly rubbed off. That’s when Shaker, gazing up into a stretch of dark hose, had the thought. He envisioned himself stranded under the vehicle for weeks and months, centuries and millennia, as teenage delivery boys continued to bring him emergency pizzas, his magazine subscriptions got rerouted, his sex organ shriveled, and a platoon of comely dental hygienists paid him periodic visits. And just how alluring that all sounded.

  Today, the wind catches him at the right angle. Sensation runs up his leg and disperses across the tiny rods and nuts that scaffold his kneecap. And Shaker can’t help it, the thought returns, solid and unmovable, colonizing all that deserted real estate in his mind.

  Accident or not, a man’s ability to abide could be his own undoing.

  *

  In another week, Hob Brock pulls him off his machine shortly after lunch. Shaker has half the new lawn cut in crop circle patterns and nonsensical symbols, an enigmatic mess he intended to fully raze on a second pass, but he grew too maudlin about his patterns, too devotional. Now the mower is shut off, and the grass remains mystifyingly butchered. Shaker is only marginally abashed. Hob takes him by the elbow and walks him to some nearby shade.

  “Sit with me, Shaker.”

  Shaker sits with him.

  “Ms. Blaudin.” Hob points at the clapboard cottage. “That woman’s been living here ninety-three years. I know because when I was a punk kid we used to harass this house, roll it with toilet paper, pelt it with rotten eggs, crap on its porch, blare our stupid music. The shit kids do, Shaker. It disgusts me at my age, but I understand it. And I bet Ms. Blaudin understands it as well. That woman has seen a lot of dimwitted history in her tenure. She’s been bombarded. But I’m willing to bet in all her years in that adorable orange cottage, she’s never had a yard boy waltz through the front door and soak himself in her claw-foot tub during his lunch break.”

  Shaker turns quizzical.

  “The tub had claw feet?” he asks.

  Hob has an arm around Shaker. The man’s spicy musk is mingling with the gasoline Shaker has been harboring in his lungs all week. He may have ruptured a fuel line on that sprinkler nozzle. But it does feel good to be bathing daily again.

  Hob gives Shaker a brotherly squeeze and says, “How about after we finish this yard, you and me go have a drink in honor of our good friend Shaker’s early retirement.”

  The sun is slanting through the trees, the tree shadows slanting in tandem. Shaker is overwhelmed by the urge to lean along with them, but he knows the sun and shadows have already cut him loose, too. He turns back to Hob.

  “I’d like that very much,” he says.

  *

  The two men are reclined atop the roof of the aluminum shed that contains their mowing equipage. The view is other sheds and warehouses in tidy assembly, a field of crimped tin. October is almost gone. Shaker and Hob sag into their broken lawn chairs, chilled by the air that Shaker surmises is hitting them harder at this altitude. He can feel the nosebleed before it starts. He regrets not wearing a coat to work, a parka, a blindfold. The altitude intimidates him. Beside his chair is a bucket of warm lager, courtesy of Hob. Shaker sips slow and keeps his vision fixed on all that twinkling tin ahead of him, a tissue twisted in his nostril.

  “I bet the reception here is astounding,” Shaker says.

  “Maybe we bring up a TV, a sofa, pretzels in a bowl.”

  “Sports bar,” Shaker nods. “I pawned my set a year ago. I miss the noise. That jolly, ravenous box. Radio seems too ghoulish to me now. Like eavesdropping on the séances of strangers.”

  Hob drains a bottle and asks, “You fixed for rent?”

  “I’m not fixed for anything,” Shaker says.

  “Then have another beer.”

  “You drink up here often?”

  “My secret spot. It is refreshingly human-and-bull-shit free.”

  “The extra elevation probably gets you lit quicker.”

  “I take what I can get. And I know you do, too, bathtub moocher.”

  Shaker smiles at this and crosses his legs, an overweening sort of pose.

  “My synapses are a little loose,” he says.

  “They look loose.”

  “Maybe I drag some blankets up here, spend the night.”

  “This is my shed, man. If I wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast, I’d move to Vermont.”

  “Vermont’s a little far for me,” Shaker says.

  “You’re too spooked to be in your own home.”

  “Spooked isn’t the word.”

  “Spooked is exactly the word,” Hob replies. “And please uncross your legs, dude. There are neighbors.”

  When Shaker sighs, the breath squeezed through his gapped teeth sounds like an asthmatic kazoo. “It was a solid c
rew.”

  “They’re burnouts and bums and fiends. I know this.”

  “Just being cordial.”

  “Fuck cordial,” says Hob. “Cordial never saved anybody’s ass in the trench.”

  “These beers, this siesta.”

  “What about?”

  “This isn’t cordial?”

  “Shit,” Hob says. His bottle is empty, but he’s itching the label, his fingernails tacky with glue residue. He raises the bottle and pitches it overboard, grimacing at the broad arc of glass that neatly approximates the earth’s curvature. Hob’s expression stays stiff, pasted, as the bottle smashes beyond view.

  “Who gets moved to the mower?” Shaker asks.

  “It’s just a machine, man.”

  “I know.”

  “Flander will ride the thing until he kills somebody. Only a month of work left anyway.”

  “Maybe I can broker something with the Tullys. Score some shovel-and-salt work for us.”

  “Do not get me mixed up with those black-market gun nuts. And remember, you are retired.”

  “Vermont awaits,” Shaker says.

  Hob dredges another bottle from the bucket and fits it into Shaker’s hand. “Jesus, you do make the citizens nervous, Shaker.”

  “Something about my head.” Shaker points at the bloody tissue.

  “That’s right,” Hob says. “That’s very, very right.”

  *

  Three o’clock in the morning and Shaker is fully freighted with drink. The room has stopped spinning, but he’s still digging his hocks in the rug, establishing temporary traction in case the carousel resumes. The crowbar is in his lap. He sees it but doesn’t feel it. My contours, Shaker thinks. I do not fit my own contours. He looks up. The Howitzer crowds the doorway in his unzipped windbreaker and Beagle Staff shirt, skin bronzed, a neon lanyard full of keys hung around his beefy neck. He has removed his ivory moccasins, and Shaker admires the manicured toenails that accessorize the bouncer’s feet. The Howitzer fastens each shoe on a shoe-tree branch and activates a few more lamps and sits across from Shaker in a leather recliner that has brew holders built into the posh arms, an electronic control panel, digital hi-fi. The man seems to Shaker a small nation of tranquility.