by David Nutt
PART TWO
9.
Shaker rolls belly up in the sunlight. He can visualize the narrow range, one yard to another yard, his purview. He plumbs his mouth with a knuckle. He takes his air in meek lungfuls, like a beached goldfish gasping through a mouth-hole too small for its face. This face is not much in aggregate. Very little percolates under it. Conversely, a fleet of miniature aircraft continues to wheel several miles overhead. Their contrails are daubed across the sky’s concavity and beyond, reminding Shaker of his favorite brand of commercial toothpaste.
Let go my purview, he thinks.
He doesn’t notice the Hooster woman until she scoops his head into her lap. She tilts him backwards, reaches into her zebra-print bathrobe, and produces a thermos. The monochrome construction-worker kind. The thermos cap is affixed with an absurdly long crazy straw. She stabs the novelty item into Shaker’s mouth with a great deal of relish. Shaker sips the apricot swill and blinks his approval. The Hooster woman cradles him tenderly, picking the mulch and dried tear dew from his cheek.
The mongrel dogs that besieged his home are gone. The home is gone. The Hooster woman kisses his brow and returns him to his moldering spot on the ground. There is some kind of sofa sham underneath him, a homemade needlepoint. It is stitched with Day of the Dead sugar skulls, perky and bejeweled. Shaker closes his eyes and listens to the sound of the woman’s slippers padding away across the grass. The door to the former duplex shuts. Shaker is alone with the dirt and the mulch and the dark business of his own body. He can feel his heartbeat all the way up in his armpit. The gaps between his ribs are filled with toe jam. Blood spurt, muscle hum, an idiot drone. His interior currents won’t abate.
Shaker cannot remember the last time he utilized a straw that didn’t somehow end up a nostril.
*
Breakfast is wheat toast saturated with cream cheese and jelly and a side of scrambled brains. This morning’s negligee is patterned in cheetah. The Hooster woman really layers on the perfume, a debutante fragrance with floral accents to which Shaker has grown addicted, sniffing at the aroma she left in the yard. He licks his dishes and cutlery spotless and dries them with his shirt. All her fine china is arrayed tidily in the grass. He regulates his breathing to a steady bombast. He tells himself if he ever rises and returns to civilization, he will purchase this woman a modest outdoor patio set.
Lunch, however, does not come. And when dinner isn’t delivered, Shaker begins to worry he has broken decorum in some significant fashion. Maybe he was supposed to return the silverware by pitching it underhand into one of her open windows. Maybe he should have flashed around that dimwit smile of his, or said please and thank you, or vetted the newspapers that are amassing atop him in the yard. Shaker has slipped into too many kinds of flux. The flux is the only interesting thing about him. Shaker sits up and enjoys the tilt of purview. From this vantage, it’s much easier to hear the impatient throat-clearing behind him. Shaker crabwalks a half-circle. The Hooster woman is lit diagonal by porch lamp, a Rorschach blend of panda prints and lacy underthings, bare leg thrust out.
“Well?” she says. “Are we gonna pity-fuck the sadness out of each other or what?”
Shaker shakes the muddled blood from his brain, fixes his hair, and follows her to bed.
*
The Hooster woman’s bedroom is a mirror image of Shaker’s old abode. Same marled plaster ceiling and layout and dimensions, only backwards and stained with nicotine colors and smells, drizzle leak. Shaker barely notices the uncanniness of it. The sex is not surprising, either. The dirty flirters, Shaker has found, are usually the most missionary partners. They exhaust themselves on eighty different ways of uttering “mount me” until there’s nothing left to do but lay stiff-spraddled and ride out the long fuck. The long fuck is actually quite agreeable. Shaker is also partial to the woman’s post-coital coos, even if they are babbled in her sleep. He gives her a deep nuzzle and licks an earlobe. She coos more loudly, and he kisses her neck. Then he carefully pries the blanket from underneath her snoring body, capes himself with it, and returns to the yard.
*
When the rainfall finds him, it arrives sideways and in syncopated bursts spritzing him in the face, so he belly-worms over to a dry swatch of grass where the yard sprinklers cannot harass him. A note, he realizes, is pinned to his shoe. Shaker looks back at the half-house, the road, but the messenger has disappeared. The sprinkler water has blurred much of the note’s contents. Shaker wrings out the sodden sheet, flattens it, holds it up to the sunlight, and squints.
Sorry about the house, chief. Just doing my job. I tried not to damage the landscaping too much, but you of all people must appreciate how unwieldy large lawn machinery can be. My employers are really satisfied with the project. There’s a group of them, a kind of committee. I realize now you don’t remember what you did to deserve all of this. Too late to worry about it, I guess. If it’s any consolation, they’re all pretty nice folks, and they pay well. If you’re ever looking for a little work…
Shaker balls up the note and eats it for a noontime snack.
*
Shaker’s torpor is interrupted only by the mailman and local children at play, garrulous dog-walkers dragged along by their yipping, leashed packs. He also has a fuzzy recollection of an unknown pedestrian trying to scalp him with an ice scraper, but maybe that was a fever dream. Shaker suspects the attack would have been totally justified, although he’d rather not investigate the exact source of his remorse. He just knows the remorse is stashed away in a mungy pit far inside him, accruing interest slowly—moss and lice, too—for review at some future date.
And now the Tullys. Both Brothers are costumed in one-piece hazmat suits, the type worn by waste-handlers, bomb squads, asbestos removal teams. Their faceplates are smogged over, their respiration labored. The Tullys crouch near him. Shaker winces upon seeing the haggard man, sunburned and bum-bearded, reflected in their helmeted heads. All that’s missing from the vision are catheters twisting out his every dim hole, a colostomy pouch.
Tully One seems ready to speak, but Shaker immediately interrupts.
“Please, no talk,” he pleads raspily. “That’s the shtick. If you don’t break shtick, you get to keep your catheters in place.”
Shaker raises his hands to count.
“Twenty days I had that truck. Figure eight hours’ labor a day. Factor in the late fee, the service surcharge, the sales tax, the black-market payola. Maybe I dig you guys an in-ground pool or construct a tornado shelter out of popsicle sticks.”
The second Tully has taken a newspaper from the yard and knocks it apart for Shaker to read. The fallout has made the front page. Darb is estimated to get six months in the clink for throttling the first responder. Lorelei has already been remanded into the custody of Tuscaloosa authorities on several outstanding warrants, most involving identity theft. Shaker hypothesizes she will go on to be reformed and resocialized and perish in a poignant act of self-immolation via gasoline-soaked yoga spandex or tofu poisoning. And the boy, the poor boy. Local media have vilified him variously as a precocious drug-ring mastermind, bumpkin trash, a klutz, although no one can agree what drug he manufactured. Shaker doesn’t even know if there was enough of the boy left to bury. No mention is made of the origin of the blaze, i.e., if it involved a poorly re-repaired intercom system or not.
“Probably not my fault,” he says, ignoring the sick pinch in his stomach, and he waves away the paper.
The first Tully has taped a new sign to the truck’s flank. TULLY BROTHERS REMAINDERING AND WRECKAGE REMOVAL. EVICTIONS. DOMESTIC CATASTROPHES. EXPLOSIONS BY MISADVENTURE.
Both Brothers are fiddling with the windows on their heads.
“I get it,” Shaker says. “You want me to do a ride-along. Work off my hours by sweeping up their dust. You realize what happened to my house is a miracle, too.”
The Tullys mash around in their baggy moonsuits like slumland cosmonauts, communicating with each other through a
secret vocabulary of masked muffle, subhuman grunts. The sofa sham and blanket that once underpinned Shaker seem to have vanished. The sun has grayed, and the clouds are cloudy. The Tullys stride for the truck, moving in real time, fidgety and graceless. For some reason, Shaker had expected the sensational slow-mo of professional athletes immortalized on vintage film stock.
He tries not to let the disappointment sour his evening.
*
Twilight, crickets, frostbite, and so forth. Shaker has fieldstripped a candy bar and now munches it under a dome of cosmic darkness. His legs and feet are dewglazed into the yard. Mosquitoes in tactical formation are feasting on every inch of available flesh. Shaker has never been much of an outdoorsman, but recent events indicate he may have a potential career as a kind of vagrant survivalist or suburban bandito. He envisions himself trekking across deluxe USA tundra in a ski mask and camouflage poncho, shaking down paperboys for pocket change, heisting Girl Scout cookie deliveries. The fantasy culminates in a pack of angry villagers following a trail of snack crumbs up to the Hooster yard and discovering Shaker smeared in melted chocolate and peanut butter, an invasion of pigeons orbiting him in biblical indictment. Then lightning, a last judgment, a grudging rest. Maybe a grudging reincarnation, too.
For hours tonight, Shaker has stared at the gaping hole where he used to have a home. The Hooster girl does not appear. Shaker knows she’s barricaded inside her bedroom, curled under the television’s radiant beams, hiding herself away, and she’s very right to be. He could visit. He could stand and walk the thirty impossible feet. He could even apologize for pity-fucking her mother and being pity-fucked in return. But he’s too busy dwindling into smaller and smaller iterations of mopey, hamstrung anti-being.
This nonsense, he thinks, could be contagious.
Bandito or no, I am not healthy.
*
The woman confirms this. She appears an almost total replica. Pasta hair, pasty skin, overfond of mascara and rouge and chewing gum, some shyness in the bust. She has not changed enough. The bed sheet has returned, too, clinging Shaker around the throat like a limp eel. He unsnarls himself and sits upright. Maybe it’s a lack of protein in his diet, or too much sloth, another fever image, the constant sun glaring down at him with disapproval.
Something is making Shaker hallucinate his ex-wife.
“California may have turned me stupid,” she says, taking the blanket from him and rubbing the dirt off his cheek. “But Ohio has made you a hobo.”
Now that his cheek is free of filth, she leans in for the coup de grâce. Shaker doesn’t feel the kiss. He’s too distracted with the wither and swell of his lungs, those sad, redundant organs ready to burst on their palsied vine.
“I think it’s adorable and bold, what you’ve done with the place,” she says, smoothing her skirt ruffles and twisting her mouth at the ex-duplex. “You don’t see it much on the West Coast. But maybe in a few years, all the shanties will be knocked in half.”
“Garrrr,” Shaker says. “Garrrrr.”
“Please, baby, no drooling.”
Shaker is not conscious of it, but he has begun to sob. The cause is not splendor or sorrow or jealousy or relief. It is simply the announcement of inarticulate emotion as it comes burbling up the throat. He grabs back the blanket and stuffs it into his mouth, corking the surge, while she kicks her sandal through the pile of newspapers that demarcate Shaker and his vagrancy. She finds the weekend gazette, unfolds it to an inside spread, and shows Shaker a picture of himself standing pallid and zombie-faced in the background as Darb is torn from a huddle of EMTs, the house behind them afire.
“Do I really look that paunchy?” is the first intelligible thing out of Shaker’s mouth.
She beams broadly, and that’s when Shaker sees it. Or rather doesn’t see it. Almost, he thinks. Almost.
“The eye makeup isn’t right,” he tells the woman.
“It’s close.”
“Close,” he nods. “But not right.”
“You would know,” she says. “You’re the husband.”
“I was,” he replies.
“And I am her. Our National Sensation. Live and in the flesh.”
She holds herself at a practiced angle, hips going one way, flat chest the other.
Shaker groans. “You’re an imposter, an impersonator. Birthday parties, bar mitzvahs.”
“I do some retail business management on the side.”
“Beautiful,” Shaker says.
She gives him a wistful smile, a peek of her perfect teeth and the lone snaggly one. “But I had you going, didn’t I?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve seen you walking around town and mowing yards and pedaling back and forth on that crazy teal bike. That one.” Pointing at the Hooster’s 5-speed on the porch. “What a pleasure to watch you work.”
The woman rips his picture from the paper and tucks it inside her raggedy spinster’s sweater. “Scrapbook,” she winks.
“Don’t suppose you have a name.”
“Same as hers.”
“Which one? She changed it so many times I lost count. Shouldn’t you know that?”
The woman digs her sandal tip into the ground, scoops up some dirt, and flings. Shaker submits to the bombardment with a placid smile. She smooths her skirt again, but there isn’t much skirt to smooth. “I really am from California. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity for me out there. The professional doubles scene is glutted. I figured this quicksand patch of Ohio, she’s the local legend, the territory would be ripe.”
“This Ohio?” Shaker with a rude finger molesting the ground.
“My calculations were a little off.” She picks around the rest of the newspapers, tearing coupons, lots of coupons.
“At least I found you,” she adds, a melancholy catch in her throat.
“Me,” he nods. “My purview.”
“I was actually looking for a yard sale today.”
“What luck,” he says.
“Not luck. It’s blind, stupid, perfect fate.”
Shaker stirs his own leg through the newspaper pile, another leg, grabs some traction and tries to hold it, noticing the bed sheet has once again disappeared.
“Well, are you ready? I have to get back to Royce. He’s almost due for his midday paste.” The woman adjusts the heavy hang of wood beads on her neck and shakes her lush reams of strawberry blond hair, an unconvincing wig. “Let’s get the mutton loaded before it begins to turn.”
And using both arms, she drags Shaker by the scruff of his undershirt into the waiting car.
*
The mansion sits on the easternmost lip of town, beyond the shanties and ranches and occasional bulldozed duplex. Shaker has glimpsed the housing development in passing but never slowed long enough to peer around the scrub escarpment and iron gating to witness the luxury within. It’s not much luxury anyway, no moats or tennis courts or helicopter ports, just an amplification of scale. Larger homes, larger lots. Also, larger failures. Of the twenty-plus properties on site, six are unfinished frames, eight don’t have driveways, and five are nude plots of loam and clay. The remaining mansions are bundled together at the cul-de-sac end of the neighborhood. The woman’s manor is a contemporary barrage of slanty angles and vertical glass, the type of home, Shaker imagines, that wouldn’t survive a monsoon or mudslide. Looking around the incomplete landscape, however, it’s almost as if the mudslide already occurred. The mansions have bloomed tumor-like from the rawness. Which is some kind of feat, thinks Shaker, softening to the idea.
They cross a crushed stone driveway and enter the manor, where the woman immediately scrolls down her top and airs her bare breasts.
“So?” she asks. “What do you think?”
Shaker, lost in the grandeur of a dirtless and mulchless foyer, squints from breast to breast, breast to face, face to breasts. “Are tan lines a deal-breaker these days?”
“I mean my augmentations. I reduced two cup sizes and had them make the left one a
little more lopsided. You’ve seen the real things. How do these stack up? Any tips or pointers?”
“Maybe if I—”
“No sampling the merchandise.”
Shaker shrugs. “They look beach-worthy. Now the hair—”
“The hair is real. The lip mole. The tattoo. The flutter in my left eye. Real, real, real.”
“She had special piercings,” Shaker says.
“Draw them for me. Diagrams. I want diagrams.”
“Are there tan lines down there, too?”
“You’re disgusting.”
“It is an art,” he admits.
“But you’re also much nicer than everyone says. The fumes and adhesives and chemicals must have cooked the meanness out of you.”
“These days, I’m pretty much just frying grease.” Shaker nods at his surroundings. “I am a man agog in a manor of agog.”
“In that case, come meet the sweetheart,” she says.
He follows her through a network of teak corridors into a barren library where a handsome man in a terry-cloth robe rests in a wheelchair, staring at a cold fireplace. Fiftyish, salt-and-pepper hair, royal bone structure, left eyebrow permanently arched. The woman wraps an arm around him and holds it there, as if steadying a nervous horse. “Say hi to Royce.”
Shaker smiles mildly at the invalid.
“I’m serious,” she says. “Say hi to him. He can hear everything. He’s not a vegetable.”
“Salutations,” Shaker says, grasping the man’s frozen hand and shaking it gingerly. He returns the hand to the armrest. No reaction of any kind. Shaker reaches again and massages the wrinkles from Royce’s elegant lapels. “Seems a decent gent.”
“He doesn’t look stuffed to you?”
“Maybe a little stuffed,” Shaker says.
“The poor guy,” she sniffles.
“He’s handsome at least.”
“He’s a vegetable!” she cries.
The woman squeezes Royce with both arms. Shaker is aware his own hands are twitching with intention, a need to grope. He pats Royce on the head and shoulder alternately, mesmerized by the expertly groomed layers of grayish hair.