by David Nutt
“You share it with people.”
“My people,” Darb grins fiercely. “Don’t erode me, cousin.”
He’s holding so much oxygen in his lungs, maintaining the grin, that his face reddens, his skin huge with veiny corrugations. The marble-swirled buttons on his sweater vest are ready to pop off. Shaker takes a step back, turns, and points.
“There is a strange man in gym pants watching us from your kitchen.”
“That’s him,” Darb says.
“Your son?”
“Try to avoid looking him straight in the eye,” Darb whispers as the kid comes clodding out the sliding door. He is a colossal-sized young man, neckless and chinless, with ineptly cropped hair and the palest skin Shaker has ever seen outside the municipal zoo. The boy plods nearer, tugging at his mesh athletic jersey, looking only at the ground. Then when he stands adjacent from Darb, his head swings high, too high, and the teenager’s dead stare reorients to his father’s shrinking hairline.
“I sure do love counting the follicles up in your nostrils,” Darb tells him. “Say hi to Uncle Shaker.”
“I’m reading about tetrodotoxin.”
“Wonderful,” Darb replies. “Tell the gentleman hi.”
“You go shopping?” asks the helium voice.
“Say hi first.”
“Hi first. You go shopping yet?”
“Hell, who needs hair when I got this young stud!”
Darb hugs his son so hard he almost squeezes the very DNA out of him. The kid whimpers and cringes. Shrill avian decibels escape from his throat.
Darb is doing the rapid arm-paddle again.
“Hey sorry,” he stammers. “I forgot, no touchies. Fish food’s with mom. Enter the garage at your own risk.”
Mortimer nods anxiously, brushes his bad haircut into a mannered part and immediately demolishes it, then fixes a direct stare on Shaker’s left eyebrow, which maybe—Shaker admits—could use some aggressive tweezing.
The boy concludes his visit with an impish cluck of his tongue and flees back into the house. Shaker ponders the backyard for a long while, rubbing his cheek stubble’s elusive grain.
“Tetra-what?” he asks.
“No idea,” Darb sighs, then looks up chipperly. “Wanna check out the intercom again?”
*
Darb offers to drive him, but Shaker opts to walk home alone. The autumn air feels loose and unsullied and convinces Shaker he may someday stride headlong through this mud- and snot-glutted world without having to first borrow someone else’s galoshes. In the interim, he tries not to walk too jagged a line. He had been a broad, hulking youth himself, mostly forehead and knuckle, with mangy hair before it was in vogue and a disconcerting smoker’s rasp although he did not smoke. He roamed the halls of his high school in a cruddy denim jacket faded with acid wash, and he bullied for small change but always bashfully, which made the larceny seem almost charitable. Whenever he skulked around the cafeteria or school assemblies, he had a habit of whipping his head sideward, trying to keep the hair out of his field of vision, which was already impaired, kudos his inhalant intake of the period. His complexion was sympathetically referred to as “rough.” An estranged teenager, but amiable, floundering in his own nervous juices. His sneakers were always a little too large and a little too white.
And now? He feels like an ancient coral rock or mollusk marooned on a sunburnt beach after some great tide has receded. The beach is Doris’s doorstep. Shaker pauses at the top of the stairs, trying to remember the secret knock, when the door swings open.
Doris is winterized in a snowflake kimono and flannel pj’s and cold-creamed face. She looks blazed clean, ready for bed. Shaker isn’t sure how he looks, although he knows his hair is unwashed and his lung cavity is scarred black with smoked fish guts. He nods at Doris and peers around her into the house. Several half-clothed men are seated in a circle on the floor with clothespins attached to their extremities. They are united by the ropey tentacles of a hookah apparatus. A racy powwow of some sort.
“I see you’re holding court,” Shaker says. “Room for one more?”
“Oh, you don’t want to mingle with this crowd, Shaker. You’re too much a gentleman.”
“Those fellas.”
“Yes?”
“Their genitals are clothes-pinned.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she smiles.
“You’re the only one who thinks I’m a gentleman.”
“Oh, I don’t really think that, dear. I don’t think that at all. But I like the way your expression goes haywire whenever I say it.”
“I found Darb.”
“I didn’t know he was missing.”
“He was,” Shaker says. “I brought him all the way back from Tuscaloosa for you.”
“Well, I don’t want the diseased trash. I don’t even know where Tuscaloosa is!”
Shaker rubs the middle of his chest, the hard sternum, the dead fish.
“The other side of the earth,” he tells her.
8.
The supermarket aisles have a heavenly veneer that prevents Shaker from feeling too embarrassed about the ensemble. The suit is secondhand, a thrift-shop special, cornflower blue. His hair has been greased into a sharp pompadour already starting to avalanche on one side. He admires his reflection in the high freezer doors and smooths the pressed creases of each pant leg, touches up the isosceles hairdo, and moves onward around the meat bins and poultry racks. In the next aisle, a stock boy is lining and leveling a shelf of celebrity-endorsed sour creams. He offers Shaker a friendly salutation. Shaker responds with a careful bow of his gelled head. Then he opens his wallet and gives the young man a coupon redeemable for one free vanilla milkshake at General Custard’s Last Stand. The young man squints curiously, trying to distinguish Shaker in all the manufactured brightness. Shaker has already moved on down the aisle, a swing in each step, feeling like a joyously brain-damaged Fred Astaire.
*
But nobody answers when he knocks. Shaker juggles the package to his other arm and tries the doorbell. The house is half-lit, the rear half, the half he can’t quite see. So Shaker gives the screen door a peevish kick, and when that doesn’t rouse anything he goes to the garage, where he’s able to discern the woman folded into an origami knot on her yoga mat. The garage is locked. Shaker waits for eye contact. He tries to tell himself there is nothing arousing at all about the knuckled shape of a female in spandex. He puts his warm forehead against the cold pane and pounds the pair of alien surfaces together until Lorelei rises, a skinny stalk in tights, and rolls open the garage door.
“I can stand here all day,” Shaker says.
The woman smiles her pretty, blank smile and uncorks an earplug.
“Good afternoon,” Shaker says, the middle of evening.
Her smile remains. The blankness, too.
“Dinner,” he says. He holds up the prepackaged chicken breast, vacuum-suctioned to a Styrofoam slab.
“I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she replies.
“He’s somewhere else tonight?”
“It’s already been a week.”
“A week.”
Shaker gazes at her serene and healthy face, a smile that could not be taken off with a claw hammer or shovel. A single BB of sweat is slugging down her sleek neck.
“Those tights really are something,” Shaker mumbles.
Lorelei absently brushes at the sweaty bangs pinned above her hairline. The barrettes are plastic butterflies, colorful, a child’s. She pinches a piece of spandex, stretches and snaps it, and she leads him into the house.
The kitchen with its cream walls and Japanese tapestries appears not to have been used since Shaker’s last visit. The cupboard holds three plates, three bowls, three tureens. Lorelei points at the mat on the floor, and Shaker sets it with a couple utensils and cloth napkins. He’s examining the series of complicated oven dials with a sense of subtle yet encroaching horror when she makes her move for the garage.
“I don’t
even like poultry,” he blurts.
Lorelei halts in the doorway, regarding him with that intense and empty smile. Shaker’s mouth muscles are weary, so weary, of trying to match it. The chicken meal has been set on the floor. Now Shaker nudges it with a scuffed loafer.
“You are a funny one,” she says and slips out the door.
Shaker ambles into the den. There is only blank wall to occupy him. He leans over the couch and sees that Darb’s rump indentations are circled in red paint, a large bull’s-eye stained on the cushion. Shaker sniffs the industrial acrylic and recognizes the brand. Then he sniffs some more—extravagant, lungy whiffs—and he stares at the hypnotic design until his vision wobbles and he must leave the room.
The intercom in the hall with its slack wires and shoddy encasement is no closer to completion. Shaker shores himself up in his silly little suit and opens the basement door. The boy meets him halfway up the staircase. At least Shaker presumes this is the boy. Mort. Mortimer. Liberteen. The big-boned savant is concealed inside a polyester tracksuit and a gasmask inherited from the halcyon days of international trench warfare.
“Gas leak?” Shaker asks.
He lifts his shirt collar over his nose, train-robber style, and puts out his hand, which the boy refuses to take.
“Looks like you’re my dinner date,” Shaker says in a muffled voice.
The boy moves with such assured dispatch Shaker thinks dreamily of endangered pachyderms and their startled stampede. It’s almost majestic, that kind of panic in concentrate. He follows the large, nimble-footed adolescent into the kitchen, watching the back of the boy’s head and the mask straps that mush his neck pork, his surly cowlicks.
Shaker and the boy sit on the linoleum like meditating swamis and wait for their chicken to cook in the oven.
“You’re going to wear that mask throughout our meal, aren’t you?” Shaker says.
The gasmask gives him a slow nod.
“Very hip,” Shaker replies.
Shaker is distractedly toying with a utensil, drumming his kneecaps, batting his earlobe. Even behind the murky lenses, he can sense the boy’s steadfast stare, mental machinery slamming back and forth like an antique loom.
Shaker puts down the spoon and unshirts his mouth.
“Your mother seems exceptionally limber,” he says. “Do you have a real father somewhere?”
The lenses only glare back.
Shaker fetches the chicken wedges, plates them, and he and the boy spend the rest of the dinner hour staring hungerlessly at their plates, not touching a thing. Eventually, Shaker points at the sliding glass door.
“Any objections?” he asks.
They step outside among the range of unfinished projects that mar the backyard.
Shaker shakes his head.
“I can’t do any better than that,” he says.
*
But the following day he’s back, standing on the same spot in his civilian duds. Lorelei is away at work, and Darb’s still gone. Shaker listens to Mortimer stir around the basement all afternoon, the teenager occasionally venturing upstairs to commandeer some knickknack or appliance, still wearing the same tracksuit, the gasmask. He ignores Shaker completely, much to Shaker’s relief. Shaker is more interested in the intercom in its sloppy hole. One summer in high school, he toiled part-time as an electrician’s assistant’s assistant, switching out light bulbs, re-ballasting fixtures and exit signs, and sweeping up the accidental breakage, flagrant amounts of it. Now he studies the intercom’s exposed guts and decides the wiring should be replaced.
So Shaker lures the boy into the truck by promising him a greasy, artery-stuffing, fast-food meal at the end of their trip, and together they drive to Softy’s Hardware Warehouse, where they wander the aisles like beleaguered trick-or-treaters, piling a basket with random supplies: brackets, lug nuts, cable, solder, anything Shaker might involve in his experimental operation. They fill the basket and start a second.
“Building an ark,” he tells the old man at the register.
“Say again?” Old Softy is square-built, his hips broad as his shoulders, all neck wattle and gland. And mostly deaf.
“An ark!” Shaker shouts into his hairy ear. “Two of them!”
Softy comes alive a little and giggles. “We’re having a sale on sump-pumps. In case of flood.”
“That so.”
“Not really.”
“I’ll take twenty-five,” Shaker says with a wink.
The ride back to Darb’s house, however, Shaker can’t stop winking. His whole head is overtaken by this aberrant spasm. His vision flickers, the eyelid aches. He swats himself on the cheekbone repeatedly, and this only makes the eye flinch faster.
Shaker is forced to pull off the road.
“My head is broken,” he whispers. “God is trying to humiliate me.”
Mortimer remains calm in his seat, staring impassively at the road and the early cold front that is unsettling so many birds from the trees. The birds rise in clusters, like foliage shedding in reverse. This adds one more melancholy item to Shaker’s growing roster. The boy straightens the gasmask on his face, pulls Shaker into the passenger seat, and drives the rest of the way home with a confidence and precision that even Shaker, half-blind, can see.
Perhaps it’s the soothing drive that restores his muscle control. Shaker stands in the hallway, blinkless and relaxed, with the hot solder gun in his hand and the smoke of newly sutured wire stimulating his nostrils. The box, the extra brackets, a plastic telephone mouthpiece, fresh wiring, all melded into a rather handsome package. Shaker tries the button. It doesn’t work. He fiddles and tries again. Nothing.
He shrugs and says, “Olé,” but the boy has already returned to the basement. The lug nuts and excess length of solder wire have apparently gone there with him.
Outdoors, the cold front relents. The sun hangs on the horizon like an irritated boil. It burns a bit brighter than usual, but maybe that’s just the sweat in Shaker’s eyes.
*
Later that evening, Shaker is back at Darb’s house with a six-pack of generic near-beer and an amorphous glow in his chest. He goes down to the basement. The room is mostly stacked boxes and blanketed shapes, and Shaker is forced to stoop to avoid thudding his head on the drop ceiling. He follows the sound of squishing liquids and an electric hum to Mortimer’s workbench in the far corner.
The wall above the bench is a pastiche of scientific doodles and schematics, pages torn from high school chemistry books, Boy Scout badges. Daisy-chained around the area on the floor and shelves is an abundant clutter of apparatus. Rubber tubing, foils, funnels, sieves and saucepans, kitty litter, multiple hot plates plugged into the same power strip, fish food, and an enormous wall-length aquarium of neon puffers. Dozens and dozens. Some are shingled, some spotted, striated. Shaker stands on the cusp, hydrating with one near-beer after the other, as Mortimer crushes a seedy powder with mortar and pestle. Beside the bench, twentysome boxes originally labeled PUFFER, but the word has been X’d out and replaced with BLOWFISH.
“You need any help with quality control? A lab rat? Guinea pig? Any free samples?” But the kid ignores him.
Shaker snatches an egg timer from the clutter and bobbles it in his beerless hand. He watches the boy, faintly and bewildered, the ticking device clutched against his chest like a second, smarter heart.
*
That night, Shaker drifts into a rambling route home. He’s putting so many miles on the Tully truck he feels obligated to wash it in the morning, refill some fluids, maybe give it a new coat of paint. Instead, he will slash its quartet of tires and leave the vehicle abandoned in a shady grove seven miles from the Tully house. That just feels like the right thing, the most Shaker thing, to do. Now he drives with the windows open and the air pushing in. He tries to take a dirt road that sidewinds up a small ridge, his secret shortcut, but he gets lost and has to backtrack. The night is starless but warm. He keeps giving the truck’s radio dirty looks.
Whe
n he enters his duplex he toggles the light switch, but the room remains dark. Shaker stumbles forward. He reaches for the lamp cord, but he can’t find the cord, or the lamp, or the table where the lamp is supposed to be located. Shaker rummages blindly around the kitchen for some candles or a flashlight and finds the drawers are empty. The only source of illumination is the single bulb on the Hoosters’ half of the back porch. Shaker props himself against the wall, arms folded, testily waiting for his eyesight to adjust. The rooms brighten, but nothing materializes. The futon mattress and wood frame, key rack, radio, dead plant, foldable chairs, the rug and card table and lamp, and the magazine pages he glued to the wall in a sorry-assed attempt at bachelor décor. Everything is gone. The duplex is as empty as the day he moved in. Emptier, even.
Shaker walks onto the patio and sees the beach chair now sits on the Hooster side. Looks cleaner, brighter, installed in a happier life. He nods with new understanding and raps on the girl’s window.
“I know,” the girl sighs. “I saw the moving truck.”
“A whole truck?”
“More like a station wagon.”
Shaker tries not to look so deflated.
“I see you got the chair,” he says.
“He said I had to ask you.”
“Thanks for rooting against the home team.”
“The muscles on that dude!”
“Yes,” Shaker says. “You’re just a teen. The oyster is your world.”
“So can I keep it? The guy left a phone number to call.”
“Teléfono, por favor.” He holds out a hand.
The Hooster girl gathers up the excess cord and stretches the phone out the window to Shaker, who is unexpectedly flustered at the courtesy.
“Thanks,” he says shyly and digs a few grubby cents from his pocket and slaps them on the sill. “For the concierge.”
The girl reaches through the window and touches a finger to Shaker’s temple.
“Think that guy stole more than your crummy house,” the girl says.
“Enjoy the chair,” Shaker replies, reading the number written in sharpie on her arm. He dials it so quick he doesn’t have time to parse the half-baked schemes and cookie crumbs and sheep manure that currently clog his mental chute.