The Great American Suction

by David Nutt

  Shaker sits up and shines the flashlight. The beam catches her seated on a breakfast nook stool with her legs folded under a camouflage-patterned nighty-thingy, mud mask on her face. It is midnight at the earliest. Beside her, Spall sits on an identical stool, listening intently to her speech, nodding, nodding, still nodding.

  *

  He wakes on the living room couch with an unopened package of disposable paper plates balanced on his abdomen and some sort of tofu-cracker-paste concoction smeared around his mouth. Still nighttime, but all the lights are on. As far as he can remember, he dozed off elsewhere. He’s not sure when he gave up sleeping in the basement. The living room is too hot for blankets, bedclothes, skin, blood, etc. From his nest on the couch, Shaker is in close proximity, although he has to peer around the packaged plates to see it fully.

  The Tudor adjacent to Agog Manor is engulfed.

  The orange fireball is so large and incomprehensible Shaker can’t help but whistle. Someone shushes him, and Shaker realizes he is not alone in the living room. The woman is pressed to the sliding glass door, her figure small and shapeless inside a mismatched pair of Royce’s animal pajamas. Shaker joins her, realizing, too, that in all this bedlam he has neglected to put on pants. Triangulating the pair is Spall, a sleep mask pushed high on his forehead, hair shag spouting out the top. The enormous flames across the yard are pointed like steeples and tails and lash around, unsynched against the roving police lights. All the spasmodic color bounces off Shaker and his dirty t-shirt, which is not quite stretchy enough to hike down over his dangling genitals. Fire engines ram the street with noise. The room throbs with secondhand heat. Shaker peeks at the spot of bare skin where the woman has rolled up her pajama leg to scratch a fresh welt. The vestige, he suspects, of some blindly hurled slag.

  Shaker puts an arm around the woman, and she lets him keep it there a moment. He makes a wisecrack about holding an impromptu pot luau at the greenhouse. She smothers a halfhearted yawn. Spall swabs a fingertip around in his ear and smells the finger. On the other side of the glass, a pair of firemen—who are dousing the blaze with a torrential gush of water—exchange glances, confer with their wristwatches, then hand off their hose to another batch of firemen. The pair withdraws to a shadeless area beside their truck. They wrench off their gloves and helmets and hunt around their bunker coats. One fireman brings up a pack of cigarettes, the other furnishes a lighter. They stand in the false daylight and smoke, watching the Tudor flames bulge and leap, a still life of pitiless solitude, nonchalantly spanking the embers that stowed away on their clothes.

  *

  The morning light angles through the beaded curtain to incriminate Shaker alone on the kitchen floor. A tablecloth wraps his waist in a kind of antiquarian kilt, and his face has been mysteriously washed clean. He looks through the doorway to the den. Royce remains a stoic boulder sculpted into his wheelchair. The invalid’s eyes are open, his vision unwavering. The TV is blank glass. Somewhere below them in the basement, the woman flits around with an omni-directional mic and thirty feet of kinked cable, recording every strain and stress of the manor’s foundation, the stillness, the absence, the new frontier.

  Spall is outside at the brown seam of the backyard where fake grass turns to cinder. He’s holding a washcloth in one hand and a book of matches in the other, bobbling both.

  Ordinarily, Shaker would board up the windows and nail shut the doors, fill the chimney flue with saltwater taffy and broken glass, every entrance and orifice occluded, closed. He’s already composing the punch list in his head. Then he remembers all his construction materials were absorbed into the monument long ago.

  *

  The Tullys have their usual consortium of rakes and tweezers and sieves loaded in the truck, and they don’t grab any of them, either. Rather than panning for remainders, the Brothers are kicking a clean avenue through the Tudor rubble with Shaker drafting in their wake. They ignore the smoldered heap of patio accoutrement, a heavily dimpled dartboard, several ceramic busts of Beethoven and J. Robert Oppenheimer, a tetherball glued with razorblades that the blowfish junkies must have exploited in some hallucinatory parlor game.

  Spall loiters on his small area, watching them blankly.

  “The thing is,” Shaker tells him, “we’re gonna need you to go ahead and vacate the, uh, the whole, you know…this whole place. Think of it as a Spall-free zone. My associates are ready to assist in any way.”

  The Tullys exchange impatient glares. Shaker finds a blackened box of dog biscuits underfoot and pops a treat into Spall’s mouth. In an act of solidarity, Shaker pops another into his own. Tastes like fireplace. Both men continue chewing, nodding and chewing, until Spall plods off the property, his head slung, like a defeated second-stringer snipped from the JV roster.

  “Seems a sensible enough chap,” Shaker says, squinting at the man’s retreat. “You think that worked?”

  The Brothers are already scooping, sieving, tweezing.

  “I think that worked,” Shaker says.

  *

  When the woman wanders out back to demand Shaker return to the kitchen and finish apportioning the smoked rump of ham nobody much wants to eat for their fourth dinner of the day, she has to clear the greenhouse to find him. Shaker is still standing in the empty rubble. The Tullys are gone, Spall is gone. At his feet, a medium-height pile of mud and clay he has begun to shape into a sullen sandcastle, already crumbling.

  “Just trying to add a few extra turrets,” he mumbles.

  The woman is not wearing her usual panda makeup. She’s dressed drab, unremarkable. At the same time, some puritanical string or cable has come loose inside Shaker, made him reckless and tipsy, and he presses against her. She tolerates the kiss for a few tepid seconds, long enough for Shaker to realize that special cable inside him is not slack at all, it is stiffening, intensely carnal, so urgent he may begin to lose oxygen along with common sense and geographic bearings. The woman steps back. The kiss is vanished, a relic. Only a sad vacancy remains.

  “Explain it to me,” Shaker says. “One of your men can’t rouse himself out of his pj’s, let alone wheelchair. The other is a clueless arsonist who needs a stepladder to boost his IQ.”

  “And then there’s Spall,” she says with a sarcastic twinkle. It fizzles immediately.

  “I’m not going to mention the guys in the trucks. Your, uh, customers.”

  “All very nice, lonely blokes who have the distinct advantage of not being you.”

  “Would you like to see me eat dirt?” Shaker asks.

  “Much worse.”

  “My hair, my scalp.”

  “I used to have a terrible fear about hair. How it just keeps growing and growing and growing.”

  “The dead need barbers, too,” Shaker says knowingly.

  “In a perfect world, I could just click my heels together and send you streaking down the road with all your skin on fire, a hardboiled egg clenched between your butt cheeks.”

  “So I get to keep my scalp.”

  “I’m pregnant,” she says.

  Shaker is casting about, prodding his pockets, distracted. “Must be some matches here, somewhere.”

  She grabs his arm, harder than he expected. “It’s not your zygote.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “It’s Royce’s.”

  “How would that work?” Shaker asks. “Did you use a turkey baster? Hook a car battery up to his prostate? Maybe one day I’d like a zygote.”

  His pocket contents: gum wrapper, gas receipt, eleven different species of lint. Shaker sifts the collection with a fingernail and claps it all from his hands.

  “It may not even be real,” she says. “Sometimes my uterus gets confused. It swells up, makes me sick, then sheds itself. The dream is purged. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Biology is an irrational thing. Almost like love, you know? Love is just a lie your body believes.”

  Shaker isn’t sure what his face is doing at the moment, but whatever the thing, it makes him sh
ut his eyes. In the dim theater of his head, he can almost imagine the confused uterus, tyrannical and overpink, and all the heavenly gravities and earthly suctions that badger and bribe and ultimately bankrupt the poor organ. Just saying the word zygote has candied his brain.

  Still shut-eyed, sunk in some kind of emotional gulch, he lifts up his shirt.

  “This scar that looks like a triple nipple?” he says. “You gotta squint hard to see it. One night, I was skulking around the house, doing my old sleepwalking routine, and she thought I was an intruder. At least that’s what the police report said. I don’t remember. When she shot me, apparently I started singing. Really, really loud, bad singing. She told the cops she would have shot me a second time, just to shut me up, but the gun jammed. The gun was loaded with blanks I learned, but those things leave a nifty scar when fired at close range. Some nights, if I’m sitting perfectly still, I can almost hear the wind blowing straight through me like a harmonica. And I really hate the sound of harmonica.”

  A hand clamps his jiggling knee. Shaker opens his eyes.

  He’s only mildly surprised to find he is flat on the ground. The woman has disappeared inside the manor. The hand on his knee is his hand. He has no idea how much time has passed, if time passes at all, if he can pass with it. Somewhere to the west and east of Shaker, great pieces of landmass are flaking apart and drifting off into a weepy Technicolor sunset that makes his retinas ache. Empires are falling extinct, animal kingdoms closing up shop. The evicted dead are trundling through a frumpy and overpopulated afterlife, still dressed in their funeral best. At some point, Shaker knows he, too, will rise. He’ll loaf and shirk and scramble, repeating the same pitiable charade until it stops seeming like a charade. But for now, he can only lay here, raddled and prone, craning his neck like an idiot sunflower trying to bend a little bit nearer the light.

  17.

  The dome is a skeleton of studs and struts and a plywood base, rainbow hued, large and finished. It holds the children’s attention like no slouching tower of badly cobbled trash ever could. The children have formed an outer ring that shrinks around the dome until the two geometries touch. There are rebukes from their teacher, but Darb waves the woman away. Crouching at kid level, he remarks, “Damn thing is meant to be touched. Really feel it, guppies.” He hoists a girl, sandy blond and squirmy, draping her over a crossbar. Soon the entire class is bustling up the naked scaffold, forty feet in height, like a playground jungle gym. Inside the dome, two boys are shadowing their classmates’ movements and poking them with sticks, grabbing at bare feet, shoes lost. A photographer pinned with press credentials is worming around the grass, shooting from a variety of perspectives, as chaperoning parents take pictures of the cameraman with their children artfully arranged in the background. The whole scene makes Shaker want to shove a clothes-wire up his own insides and snake it around until all the plaque has been scraped loose. Make a kebab of the knotted animal. Straighten things right out.

  But he’s still feeling some residual guilt for the health code complaint that he filed last week—paperwork so far ignored by local officials—so he pays to enter the grounds, plunking his two dollars in nickels and pennies into a coffee canister speared on a pillar. The pillar is a rickety pike, a monument in miniature. Shaker gives it a little sneer and steps through the ramshackle gate that leads to more metal fence. The barbed border stretches around several acres of land. The dead oaks have been felled. The ground is carpeted in artificial turf. In a far corner rests a stockpile of donated cat food tins, repair supplies, welding equipment, a lemonade and souvenir stand. A portable radio broadcasts theme park melodies. Shaker waits as Darb helps the last child down from the dome, shakes hands with the teacher and chaperones and the media contingent, and stands in the road waving farewell to the rusted school bus retreating into the distance. Darb turns to Shaker and cranks his head in a rotary motion, left and right and left, some demure cartilage cracking in his neck.

  “This shit exhausts me, man. I’m just trying to stay busy, you know? Keep following the bouncing ball, not get distracted. But goddamn.” Darb finishes cracking himself and slaps at the collection canister. It twirls round on its lone nail hinge, a wobbly orbit. “Fucking thing is a disaster.”

  “The dome draws a crowd.”

  “Dookie has its flies, too.”

  “Are those refrigerator magnets?” Shaker eyeing the souvenir stand.

  “I got another classroom arriving in five minutes.”

  “I finally heard back from the planning department. I asked for a few zoning variances, height variances. They replied with a cease-and-desist letter. I guess the trash hill is an old, historic Indian territory. I called their bluff. Told them I’m one-sixteenth Navajo. Haven’t heard back yet.”

  But Darb is still gazing at his own dome. “The longer it stands, the more I despise it.”

  “Maybe if I rent—”

  “Dynamite,” Darb says.

  “Pardon?”

  “You can talk to your Tully friends for me. They are connected. Demolition shit, drug shit, shit shit. That’s how I got the port-a-potties installed out here. But they ain’t returning my calls about the explosives. I do love those dudes. Can you tell ‘em apart? One has a lisp impediment. Subtle, but it’s there. I think that one’s Derrick. Other one is Bo. The muscle.”

  “They’re both muscle.”

  “Muscle isn’t everything,” Darb shrugs, spitting some heavy lung curd in the dirt. “I’m talking about blowing this bastard up with TNT.”

  Shaker nods steadily. “Is this a drug thing or a schizo thing?”

  Darb immediately stiffens. When he speaks, it’s with an odd quiver in his lip.

  “That’s unkind, cousin. Where’s the sweet, old Shaker who was once my best pal and visited my woman and tried to play daddy with my boy while I was off on business? Really dug himself in. Probably happened right about here.”

  Darb stomps the ground a few times, then clasps his arms behind his back, holding himself at parade rest. “I’m just gonna let you wonder what else I know and what I think I know.”

  “Okay-o,” Shaker says slowly.

  “No.” His cousin does not blink. “Maybe it ain’t o-fucking-kay-o.”

  Darb spreads his legs into a wide stance and mimes a few jujitsu moves. “Behold the avenging spirit!”

  A high kick nearly catches Shaker in the throat.

  “Stop fucking around,” Shaker says.

  “Avenging spirit knows kung fu and tai chi and eleven kinds of karate. Got the memory of an elephant. He pays his taxes on time.”

  Shaker is unable to move more than a foot, half a foot, really, angling into the road where his cousin now looks, a vague glaze in Darb’s eyes. Shaker wants to understand the glaze. Although that would require he remain glaze-free himself.

  “You set for groceries?” he asks instead.

  His cousin sighs and unfolds himself from his martial stance. “Maybe when all this craziness is over, we drag what’s left of us to the Beagle. Grab some beers, me and you.”

  “I thought you went cold turkey.”

  “That’s right,” Darb replies. “I did, didn’t I?”

  He collects the two dollars in corroded change from the pay box, jingling it in a fist. Shaker pinches his lips and watches silently as Darb flings the coins into the road.

  *

  In open daylight, on the hills of trash, Shaker and his monument cast identical shadows, both slanting like uncertain sundials against the horizon. Shaker feels paltry, detained. His socks, at present, are dry. The wide scope of the rubbish field parallels the sky in color and grain, a suspicious optical illusion that Shaker does not trust. All these interlocking repetitions. The planet continues its nonstop eastward creep, machinery clanging. The high breezes that have whooshed in and trampled this derelict fleck of Ohio are still looping around the earth. Shaker wonders if he is degrading with each cycle, or does the repetition ratify him instead, make him more and more like himself? Wh
o would that be, exactly? And is there any real difference between all the potential versions of him unloosed into the ether, barbecue sauce on their chins, a tired glitch in their expressions? He knocks loose a rock and plays an abbreviated round of soccer, flubs his penalty kick, and that’s when he sees them coming. His homeless tribe. They sway down the cratered hill in tight automaton ranks, holding fast to the land. Shaker half-expects to hear them humming sacred fugues and dissonant hymns, but the men remain silent. So Shaker licks his cracked lips and whistles for them. He really throws himself into the act, running alongside the ragged caravan, screeching, flapping his arms. Their gray faces are downturned, shrunken in their hoods. They ignore the chirpy lunatic striding beside them in some kind of trash-field steeplechase. Shaker hurries to the front of the procession, gets a short lead, and successfully forms a one-man blockade. The group comes to a lethargic stop. Shaker is startled by the cooperation; he hadn’t expected that part. He shifts foot to foot, saliva hanging off his squished lips, chagrined.

  “Just a simple hello,” Shaker says. “Even a head nod, a handshake. Any reaction at all.”

  The leader is shortish and glum-faced under a harsh thicket of beard. A pair of scrumbled, undiscerning eyes stare back at Shaker. Shaker takes hold of the man’s chin and softly squeezes the gray cheeks, popping the man’s mouth open. That cavity is gray, too, desiccated. The man lacks a tongue. Shaker releases him and grabs the next one and squeezes. Then he grabs another and another and another. All of them tongueless.

  “You cut them out,” Shaker says. “Why did you cut them out?”

  Shaker’s shame is too much, even for him. He lets go of the last man and touches his own mouth. That pointless, frowning mass. Shaker steps aside and aims a finger at the monument.

  “It’s all yours now,” he says. “I just can’t stick my landings anywhere.”

  But the homeless men only stare at him blankly and turn and shuffle back up the trash slope, over the hill, gone into that tiny crag of horizon where land and sky cleave together and apart.