The Great American Suction

by David Nutt

  10.

  Shaker has a savvy aptitude for siphoning fuel that utilizes a plastic tube inserted into his lips and a surfeit of sucking, spitting, sucking, etc., that climaxes in a brief bout of gasoline poisoning and bed rest. Once recovered, he is able to revive the abandoned mower and roar his narrow slices across the yard. The yard is flat and soft and practically grassless. Soon the machine, and Shaker behind it, are stranded in a foot and a half of mud sludge. Shaker yanks the mower’s ripcord until the engine floods and the cord breaks. He tries to give the machine a hearty kick and loses his hiking boot in the muck. From the manor’s bay window, he can feel them watching him. The imposter woman and her invalid husband. Shaker isn’t upset about the surveillance. He just wishes there was something more captivating—like bloodthirsty wildlife or open-heart surgery, or some unholy combination of the two—for them to stare at all afternoon.

  So far, he has gargled several flasks of mouthwash and a liter of cream soda. The rancid gasoline tang is still the only thing he tastes.

  *

  He dwindles through the ensuing day with one of Royce’s leg blankets draped on his shoulders, a pair of pliers tucked in his waistband, something viscid snailing down his left shinbone. He has sequestered himself indoors and avoids windows and natural sunlight. He examines his body for abnormal lesions and bruises that might symptomize divine wrath or foul play. The sun sets behind a horizon of unfinished homes, but Shaker doesn’t see it. He’s standing in the bathroom, sucking the blood he has bitten from his lip, baring his gorgeous pink fangs. Then he resumes his wandering of dark shoals until dinnertime.

  They eat together at the long dining room table, the three of them laterally arranged so all individuals are spared direct sightlines. The woman spoons a pea-colored pesto into Royce’s mouth with an impressive hook-armed technique that Shaker greatly admires. When she catches Shaker admiring her, he lowers his glance and takes another slug of his dank vinegar drink, which he is hoping will reduce the peppermint mouthwash’s grotty aftertaste. He looks up and finds the woman glaring at him.

  “One bonnet,” he replies. “Many, many bees.”

  After the table has been cleared and Royce is wheeled off to his bath chamber for bubble-and-sponge hour, Shaker visits the upstairs library. He sits with the blanket over his head and phone.

  “The ultimate misadventure,” he tells the Tullys. “Probably best not to involve the authorities. Or the Irish.”

  The Brothers arrive after nightfall. Shaker stands watch on the street corner in one of Royce’s brown velour jogging suits, Mortimer’s gasmask on his face. Tullys One and Two enter the Tudor with a large gunny-sack. Ten minutes later, they exit hoisting an even larger sack. Shaker helps them heave it into the truck bed, and they pull him inside the truck, too.

  Brother One unfolds the hanky in his fist. A squished puffer.

  “A little late to name him,” Shaker says.

  They ride in silence until the landfill, where the trio handles the sack with the unhurried competence of parttime furniture movers, progressing deeper and deeper into the gray valley, searching for an inconspicuous area. Midfield, they dig. It doesn’t take long to excavate a burial hole six feet in depth, the Minnesotan not having much width to account for. Shaker ratchets his gasmask hard against his face to create an airless suction, but he’s still struggling to breathe. The landfill decay is full bore. The men set their shovels aside and roll the body into its snug and eternal chasm. Hesitantly, they regard the chasm, then one another, teeing up for a eulogy or group prayer. No one is very keen on removing his mask to speak. The Tully nearest Shaker elbows Shaker.

  “Geronimo?” Shaker says.

  The pallbearers-cum-gravediggers-cum-mourners-cum-priests trade pious nods and begin to rescoop the mud and ash and scoria, burying the Minnesotan in his sack.

  Shaker is shoveling parts of appliances, caramelized fabrics, wire mangle and messy soot, a piece of electrical sprat, a plank inscribed with mystical runes—wondering if any of this is Mort—when the idea occurs. He lags at his shovel and gazes up at the blenched rim of moon, chewing on his big thought. One of the Tullys catches him dallying and beams him with a brick of wadded product. Shaker grumbles and starts shoveling again, but the idea is still with him the whole drive home and throughout the wordless goodbye, the hustle upstairs, the twenty-minute shower in which he forgets to incorporate soap and shampoo. It’s all he can think about, this idea. Even when he’s climbing out of the tub and realizes the woman is in the doorway, arms folded, chin jutting.

  “Just stop it,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  Shaker corkscrews his mouth until it is almost a vertical seam in his face.

  “Oh, the wearing-my-stroke-victim-husband’s-finery part, that’s what. He’s not your private mannequin.”

  “We’re the same size,” Shaker shrugs. “My going-to-town clothes got bulldozed. Do I really look so wrong in velour?”

  She grabs the rumpled jumpsuit from the floor, sniffs it, and reels away. “This smells like dead cauliflower.”

  “The deadest,” Shaker nods.

  “I should warn you I sleep with a straight razor and strop underneath my nightie.”

  “Okay,” Shaker says flatly.

  “I once burned the nose off a petulant stalker using the cigarette lighter in a 1984 Plymouth Gran Fury. That was my nickname in college: Gran Fury. I’ve hung a chore list on the fridge.”

  “Just doing my due diligence.”

  “Shaker.”

  “I had an idea, a grand one,” he shrugs.

  And he squeezes past her, drenched and shivering and still very dirty, and locks himself in the basement.

  *

  The morning is not so kind. His coffee is bitter, the manor near-freezing, sunlight nil, and Shaker’s idea is not grand at all. He’s slumped over a bowl of untouched oatmeal in the breakfast nook with Royce. Both men are side-eying each other for vital signs, noxious spores, hot flashes, any meager display. Shaker feels ridiculous. His mind is only capable of shabbiness and obvious efforts. He takes affectionate hold of Royce’s mouth and works him like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “I think you’re a smart cookie, too,” Shaker tells the man.

  *

  When he arrives, a roadblock has been constructed near the Tully homestead. Signal flares, sawhorse barricade, a spine of traffic rising up the steep hill’s gravel lane. Each Brother is wrapped in an ammo belt with concussion grenades dangling like holiday ornaments. Their shotguns are shouldered and safety locked at least, and they have Old Glory do-rags wrapping their lower faces. Shaker has previously heard rumors about militia traffic stops in this backwoods region but never witnessed one himself. He parks off-road and moves around the convoy on foot, studying the faces of anxious and irate motorists. Tully One is alongside the lead vehicle, a shark-finned coupe with suicide doors and a hazardously beehive-haired lady at the steering wheel. Brother Two is foraging around the open trunk, filled entirely, it seems, with pink cosmetic cases. The lady flashes a faceful of panic at Shaker while, at the rear of her car, Brother Two scrutinizes a jar of epidermal cream.

  “Looks like plastique, ma’am,” Shaker says.

  Brother One ignores Shaker’s comment and waves the woman around the barricade as his sibling hurriedly retrofits all the tubes and balms and froths into their original comportment. Tully Two gives a menacing glare to the next car in the queue, then shifts the menace to Shaker, tempering it somewhat.

  “Guess the militia stuff is genuine,” Shaker says. “Protecting the homeland from the hippies, the harpies, the brownies, and the blood of King David. What a bummer.”

  One and Two reorient their stances, thumbs hooked into their bandoliers. They rally together a terse moment, then turn to Shaker and nod at the truck. Shaker in turn points to the suburban utility tank he has borrowed from the manor and parked at the end of the caravan.

  “It’s not the truck I want to
take,” he says.

  *

  By his twelfth attempt, Shaker has devised an intricate method of hopscotching both feet into the hazmat at once. The action is akin to holstering a rare and impractical firearm. He worms into the armholes, zips himself crotch to chin, and latches his head. Instant cosmonaut. Shaker acclimates to the alien sensation of so much stiff rubber and disorganized mass flush against his skin. His center of gravity has mysteriously traveled somewhere near his kneecaps. He stumbles about druggedly through the landfill with exaggerated strides, slow-growing confidence. Then he realizes he has forgotten his shovel. He looks around, but there’s no similar tool on site. So Shaker uses his clunky boots to dislodge the impacted rubbish. He kicks up a shower nozzle fused to a toilet seat, a coiled garden hose, three milk crates smelted into one grated gob. These he carries to the flattest range of the landfill, careful to avoid the Minnesotan and his pauper’s hole. Shaker lays out the recoveries in deference to era and size and structural integrity. He is conscious of color scheme, too.

  He does find a bone, a single one, maybe a femur. Too old to be the Minnesotan. In the same area is a scattering of Indian arrowheads. Shaker brushes them off, holds them to the light, and casts them aside with a shrug.

  The next round results in a malformed tuba, several roller-skate wheels, a piddle of liquefied marble, and a teddy bear doll. There are rosary beads and abstract glasswork, forged diplomas, ninja chucking stars, a postal receptacle, a lamp, crack pipe, denture jaw, ceramic bust of Sigmund Freud, a gerbil’s exercise gyroscope, skimp-black lingerie with accompanying fishnets. Shaker has laid it all into row and is now clearing out a clean swath. The center, the axis, the base. He hastens off to the SUV, filching an incomplete wrench set and saddlebag along the way, and returns with the span of baling wire he purchased from Softy’s on store credit. This he stretches around the postal box and tuba and toilet-nozzle, bricking them together on the cleared ground. He reinforces the base with a cordon of chicken mesh.

  Shaker concludes by crossing over the trash reef that encircles his little project. From this short distance, he regards the stump of wire and scorched debris he has made. He nods approvingly and thinks:

  Perhaps I have not embraced ridiculousness enough.

  *

  But then the rest of the day happens. Shaker paces around Agog Manor with nothing to stack up, nothing to mow, and he can only avoid the garage for so long. He resorts to stuffing his head with cotton and tufts of torn shirt, but he can still hear the music, an endless bluegrass dirge that has yet to proclaim its capital topic. He unstopples an ear and listens closer. The voice is male, an old-timey recording disturbed with hiss and grit. Shaker cannot take the grit very seriously. He replugs his ear, clomps into the bathroom, and crams his skull under a running faucet.

  “Shaker,” he burbles to himself, “you are making a scene.”

  He joins Royce on the patio deck. The invalid is bundled in a children’s beach blanket that advertises a cartoon varmint franchise Shaker barely remembers from his youth. Shaker sits on the patio railing, amateurishly baptized and drip-drying in the chill night air, his back to the yard, reviewing the man. When the woman abandons the garage and comes out, too, he has reduced his mind on the matter.

  “Absolutely not,” she replies, worrying a stick of nicotine gum into her mouth.

  “He needs it. The pj’s, the prune juice. Look how pasty he looks. The manor is turning him albino.”

  “Royce stays with me.”

  “Then you come, too.”

  “Me? I spent my afternoon parading around a bail bondsman’s office Christmas party, getting my muumuu tugged, my muffins groped. I did my whole lip-synch spiel, tried to sign a few autographs. Nobody knew who I was supposed to be. They wouldn’t even cover the cab fare home. If I ever leave the house again, it will be inside a body bag. A sexy, cashmere body bag. Hot funeral pink.”

  “How about a gunnysack?” Shaker asks.

  “That would work, I suppose.”

  “Let me take him.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Thank you.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I’ll have him back by midnight.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  But Shaker is already wheeling his catatonic cargo towards the car.

  *

  The Regal Beagle’s newly remodeled entrance is the type of slipshod hotchpotch Shaker can imagine an indebted drunkard such as himself being compelled to manufacture under gunpoint and duress. The door is battered and does not hold to its frame. The steps are not handicap accessible. Shaker nervously eyes Royce and his sizeable contraption. He wheels him backwards twenty or so feet. Then he gets a running start, attains supersonic speed, and rams the chaired man upward and through.

  Tonight is a weeknight, and the Howitzer is not on duty. The jukebox is off. The only commotion is Royce’s wheelchair crunching peanut shells and sand as Shaker glides him to a table in the darkest corner of the room. They settle in. Shaker notices a few curious looks and belches, but no one approaches. The Beagle hasn’t changed much. The same dartboard and fire-code citations next to the ladies room, a fresh snarl of antlers protruding from the trophy wall. Royce is attired in a cowboy shirt complete with pearl buttons and filigree stitching, and the crease in his hair has been abolished; instead, the whole gray mass is swept upright and shellacked with glamour gel. Shaker has inflicted a similar effect on his own head and swivels it in the wall-length mirror, admiring himself and Royce in their polished hairstyles and matching shirts.

  “Buckaroos,” Shaker tells Royce, leaning forward to align the prone man’s collar. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  Amid this primping, Tobin slides from his post at the bar and comes over. Shaker says, “A round of prune juice for me and my ranching friend, please.”

  “The circus was last week,” Tobin replies.

  “Sure was.”

  “Two clowns gone missing.”

  Shaker nods at this, hands flat on the table so as not to disturb the mound of pompadour weighing down his brain like a brick. He opens his mouth and carefully speaks with it.

  “My dogs are gone, my duplex is gone. My futon, my lamp, the single page of crinkled porn I kept taped to the tissue box for convenience. All that domestic splendor pretty much vacuumed from my life. At least grant a condemned man his beverage.”

  Someone has engaged the jukebox. A subwoofer is pushing subterranean frequencies through the floorboards, rattling the car keys and asthma inhaler in Shaker’s pocket. He can’t help it. He scratches the cold cement hair. It feels like a prehistoric crustacean latched on his scalp, harmless and endangered. He looks up from the table. Tobin has lifted his own oval head, nodding it cautiously, as if the thing is overloaded with nitroglycerine.

  “A couple prune juices,” Tobin says.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll see what we have in the fridge.”

  After the bartender is gone, Shaker turns to Royce. “That whole life? The one I was persecuted for? Feels like another person’s life anyway. You’re standing trial for moral depravities you don’t remember committing, so how do you know other people are remembering it correctly? I’m sure I’ve forgotten some good stuff, too.”

  Shaker huddles in, fixing Royce’s blank stare in his own.

  “It wasn’t much of a heyday,” he whispers. “I woke up with a lot of headaches and hernias and always the same nameless woe. There were moments, I swear, the glue seemed to be sniffing me.”

  Royce’s tongue is licking the dehydrated rim of his lip, trawling it, and Shaker senses a suppressed accusation in the act.

  He shrugs a few times, upsetting his haircut again.

  “How ridiculous is too ridiculous? I’m not making mountains out of mashed potatoes or trying to find off-street parking for the mothership to land. The mothership isn’t coming back.” Shaker digs around the pretzel bowl and pops a twisty into Royce’s mouth. “I may have blowed it up.”


  After three-four drinks in happy solitude, Shaker is preparing to wheel Royce out the door when Tobin approaches again. He has a manila folder with him.

  “Do you like the new door?” he asks.

  “Needs a ramp.”

  “It took me a couple days to rebuild,” Tobin says. “Had to close the bar on a holiday weekend. Lost a lot of money.”

  Shaker buttons his coat, shoots his cuffs, then repeats the arrangements on Royce. “You did a wonderful job.”

  “Thanks.”

  Shaker looks up. “I was talking to my gimp.”

  Tobin smiles. “That door was fucked beyond repair, man. The glass was shattered, frame smashed. Some idiot tried to set it on fire.”

  “It’s just a door,” Shaker replies.

  “Did you really think you’d get away with it?”

  “Huh?”

  Tobin opens the manila folder. “Security camera across the street.”

  He fans the photographs across the tabletop, a dozen blurry images. Not blurry enough. Shaker leans over and pretends to examine them, but his eyes are closed. His mouth is still struggling to process the prune juice’s bitter-salty aftertaste.

  “You’re a lucky dude,” Tobin says. “The Howitzer has been helping me locate my special Zen place. I’m a new goddamn man. Just call me Mr. Arts-and-Crafts-and-Prozac. I can’t say everyone shares this philosophy. We have some mutual friends who prefer to remain anonymous. Maybe they think you’ve suffered enough, they packed up their catapults, and all is forgiven. Or maybe their silence is a way of making you suffer more.”

  Shaker glances around the Beagle. Six men at the end of the bar are staring into their empty beer steins, pretending not to listen. Shaker performs a quick touch-up on Royce’s head.

  “So we’re all good here?” he asks.

  Tobin smirks. “Just as long as you don’t mind a little revenge piss in your prune juice.”

  He rubs Royce’s haircut all out of profile and returns to his slot behind the bar, where he swallows several green pills and picks up a clump of yarn, a pair of knitting needles.

  Shaker leans low and whispers into Royce’s ear, half-hidden by gel crust and shag. “I think we won that round.”