The Great American Suction

by David Nutt

  *

  Shaker stirs until nightfall. He has showered all the hot water out of the manor, toweled his skin furiously, and removed his mutton-chop sideburns by burning off each individual hair with a lit match. He tries not to look at the foot. Intermittent rain batters the rooftop and windows with the plinking cadence of scattershot artillery. Shaker limps around the upstairs, nosing his whole face into the woman’s warm roll of laundry. Next comes a quick trip to the basement to wrangle up some ancient board games for Royce. He changes the sock every ten to fifteen minutes. One hour and a half-dozen argyles later, Shaker is presenting a snarl of jump ropes to the invalid man, a deck of tarot cards, three roller-skate wheels, and a nonfunctioning dehumidifier. Royce watches the exchange with a box of Chinese takeout wedged in his lap. The chopsticks are taped to his fingers. Several rooms away, the woman is retching into the echo chamber of a porcelain toilet bowl. A sound so tawny, so hollow.

  “Morning sickness,” Shaker says. “At eleven o’clock at night.”

  He spears a lump of noodle strands and dangles them into Royce’s mouth. Then he takes Royce’s jaw and jiggers it open and closed. Royce emits a succinct gurgle of happiness. It’s the most emotion the man has exhibited all year.

  “Sounds like she’s really going for it in there,” Shaker says. “The vomit-triumvirate.”

  Holding the box to his own face like a feed sack, Shaker slurps a few entwined noodles and chews them with scholarly consideration. “Sometimes people say the name Shaker to me, and my only thought is furniture. Really feebleminded furniture.”

  He can feel Royce gazing up into the hairy murk of his nostrils.

  “You may be the better man,” Shaker whispers at him, “but both of us are highly flammable.”

  Shaker scans the hall again to make sure the woman is still in the bathroom. He lifts his leg, drops it across the table, and peels off the bloody sock. Royce doesn’t react, but Shaker gags at the sight of his foot, swollen and gory, an unpleasant plum color.

  He struggles to resheath it with a clean sock.

  “When I came home this afternoon, I found a flaming pile on our doorstep. I tried to stomp it out.” Shaker reaches into the kitchen trash and pulls out the charred mass of numerous blowfish glued together, spikes jutting, bent, bloody. He slams the ball back into the bin. “Any guesses?”

  The bathroom echoes are reverberating down the hall. Shaker takes up the chopsticks and begins to frantically shovel more noodles into Royce’s mouth, a riotous swarm in at least one of their brains.

  *

  The woman is dozing on a collapsible deck chair among all the overgrown nature inside their shimmering, imperial greenhouse. In addition to hunger striking, she has undertaken an ambitious vow of silence. Several of them. The plant life around her is raw and thriving. Royce is also asleep, his wheelchair leveraged against the bay window on the second-floor landing. He is immersed in his favorite lumberjack flannel, a beret tilted rakishly on that beautiful, gray head. The Winchester replica is propped in his hands. The gentleman looks like he is settling in for the long siege.

  The house is quiet. The quiet is cacophonous.

  Shaker clambers into the truck and drives, but he cannot find any indication of Spall. The mop-haired arsonist has either receded too far into the distance or is lurking just outside Shaker’s peripheral vision. Shaker finds himself gliding along the same circular path that delineates the outermost edge of town. It’s late, it’s dark. Darb is not at the dome, but the dome is still standing. Shaker has armed himself with a flashlight and roadmap, and he marches the field’s barb-knotted border, its shallow depressions, its ambiguous seepages, not entirely sure who or what he’s pursuing at this point. A mordant image soon comes to mind. He sees his cousin hitchhiking to Tuscaloosa with a belt of trophy scalps, cat bone necklace, a Tupperware full of ash under his arm. Darb has always been so fussy about his totems. His clinging nature betrayed the soft naïveté under all that stubborn delirium. Shaker suspects his own clinging, by contrast, has always lacked that honor, lacked that wanton love.

  Shaker takes in the landscape, wide-spanning, here to there, the ultimate purview. He’s lightheaded from so much squinting in the dark, and it does something extraordinary to his vision. The periphery looks radio-actively aglow at this hour. Overhead are runaway satellites and planetoids and free-floating exobiological stations, a million stray tons of space junk burning up on reentry. Maybe one or two astronauts marooned in the soup. There is a faint rim of scarlet that announces the tree line. The sky looks rouged. Shaker groggily climbs down the bric-a-brac hemisphere of his cousin’s dome as if descending the wired-together bones of a museum brontosaur, the sky ablaze with rock dust and dying light.

  For almost an hour, he drives the town. He even visits the landfill, but there is only the tall stack of his tower. His tribe is gone. The hazmat is packed up. Back inside the truck, Shaker fixes the lank monument in his rearview mirror and decides to keep it there, always behind him, a solitary grave marker with some glue-poisoned fool barnacled to its flank. That guy can stay there, too.

  On the way back to Agog Manor, he stops at the Tully compound to return the hazmat. He’s even stuffed it in its original gift box. Their house is dark except the living room. Shaker smutches his face against the windowpane and can see some furniture and various personal effects in outline, the aquarium’s phosphorescent gleam. Rather than slam into the door and re-break his collarbone, Shaker takes the prudent action and knocks. The door swings wide. He shrugs off the sense of déjà vu, scuffs the mud from his steel-toed shitkickers, and moseys inside.

  The house is odorless, more sedate and extraterrestrial than Shaker remembers. There are respiratory sounds in the room that may or may not belong to him. The fish tank burbles. The rug is bunched underfoot. Shaker fumbles about blindly, and when he turns on a lamp he finds both Tullys splayed on the floor as if making snow angels, neat lilac bullet wounds in the middle of their foreheads. Blood is spattered in identical floral designs where the rug has been scrunched up. There is brain goop limned between the naked floorboards. Each red canal looks like a vibrant artery, still pulsing, inching along the hardwood, alive.

  The sight is too much. Shaker’s stomach surges and he’s knocked forward by the need to vomit. Yet he can’t quit staring at the dumbfounded visages the Tullys have attained in death. They look positively stupefied. Like children gone to some miserable circus—long lines, lame animals, stale cotton candy—only to be surprised they had a much better time than expected.

  The bile that Shaker spits up misses the carpet completely. He has no tissue to wipe his mouth so he uses his hand, trembling, like meat on a stick. A rustling draws his attention. Someone is resting in the BarcaLounger with a pistol balanced on his kneecap. Where the man normally has a head is only black rubber, dark lens. The empty gaze of Mort’s gasmask. It fits him rather well.

  “Did you know the word aloha,” says Darb’s muffled voice, “means hello and goodbye in Hawaiian?”

  “You executed them,” Shaker mumbles, his own gray matter pancaked against the wall of his skull. Sort of centrifugally flung there. “They’re dead.”

  “Nope,” Darb says. “They’re saying aloha.”

  Darb pushes the mask up so the mouthpiece rests on his forehead like a third eye, his cheeks smothered red. He has been crying again.

  “Death ain’t such a bad trip,” Darb sniffles. He extends his forearms with the pink scars that crosscut each wrist. The scars appear to be smiling. “I always loved being a little sad as a kid. A little sadness gives you that righteous burn. That’s the thing that keeps you intact. Bonds you with other folk. We’re all just simpatico amigos being a little sad in the world together, singing aloha in chorus. In jail, the sad got bigger each day. I used the zipper on my pants, but I slashed the wrong veins. Took them fifteen minutes to find me, and in that time I swum the River Styx and come back. Know what it feels like? Parasailing. Death feels like parasailing with your intest
ine strings hanging way the fuck out.”

  Darb rises and belts the pistol and prods each Tully with his foot.

  “Just ask them,” he says.

  “Uh, Darb?”

  “All these fucking wars in Ye Old Arabia. Pisses me off. Why can’t people be goddamn nicer to each other? We gotta be strivers, you know? That’s why the blowfish thing, the puffer fish thing. I had dealings, I admit. I took some trips. That’s interstate traffic, cousin. An entire book of federal statute they can throw at you. And, god, is it a morose scene in Pennsyl-tucky. Whole operations are seeded there, distribution centers, underground cells. A grand network. You know the trick with fixing pimples? You had a rough face as a teen, so you can attest. You gotta squish them on the first try or else they come back in a havoc.”

  He gives the Tullys a harder kick.

  “I’m just trying to be a good dude in my own amazing way,” he says.

  “They were pals of mine.”

  “Mine too,” Darb says. “But only after I squished them.”

  Shaker realizes his own foot is blocking the sanguine ravine of Tully blood. He picks it up and sets it down in exactly the same spot. “They were just black marketeers selling bootlegged crap and trading favors for favors.”

  “Let’s clean up this mess,” says Darb.

  “You blew up your—”

  “Clean with me,” says Darb, “or it’ll be four bodies that need burying.”

  He makes a pistol of his fingers and holds it to the rubber item that crowns his head. Shaker has lost mobility, voltage. He watches, tame and vapid, as his cousin reaches down and plucks the truck keys from a Tully pocket.

  “You drag, I’ll drive,” Darb says. “Shovels are already in the truck.”

  Shaker is too numb to say no. He understands that part. Really, he does. What mystifies him more than anything else, though, is the noise his mouth makes when it opens wide and announces in a mild tone: “I know the perfect spot.”

  *

  Springtime has relaxed the rubbish. Shaker slices loosely with his shovel, never needing to saw or heave or stab or whack. His arms are steered by muscle memory, repetition, as easy as tunneling through warm marmalade. Oddly, it’s a kind of joy. Then Shaker recognizes the joy, and his innards clamp up. He leans harder into the work, swinging enough shoulder and hip to knock a hole through the continental shelf, wherever that is. It’s only a hole, he thinks. Only a hole. The Tully corpses are swaddled in their rug, taped shut. Darb is whamming about with a pickax he found on the premises. Once the hole is made, he uses the pickax to undo the tape. Briskly and without much ceremony, he unrolls the Tullys into their shallow grave. Then he rolls the carpet up and drags it back to the truck.

  “It’s a nice rug,” he shrugs as Shaker gawks from the ledge of their morbid crater. “That wood floor in the living room would just depress me, and I don’t think I can get all the ectoplasm wiped away. Probably stained in there. What luck they didn’t bleed any on this beauty.”

  “You’re taking their house.”

  “Waste not,” he sighs.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick again.”

  “You know where the hole is.”

  But it’s only a dry retch. Shaker looks up, looks around. “Somewhere out here is the Minnesotan. You remember him?”

  “I do not.”

  “He’s a goddamn ghost,” Shaker says.

  “Well, now he won’t be so alone, yeah?”

  “We should say something for them.”

  Darb spins around a few times, searching for an audience, a verification of some type. “We’re burying them, ain’t we? You need more poetry than that?”

  “Yes,” Shaker says.

  “Floor is yours, senator.”

  Shaker peers into the dim, crumbled cavity, waiting for something inside him to well up—grief, disgrace, any penitent slobber—but the dryness still clings his throat. He kicks in a few rocks, takes out his wallet, and tosses it in the hole.

  “Genius!” Darb bellows. “Leave some evidence! You wanna throw in a pair of your white undies with your name scribbled on the waistband, too?”

  “They’ll ID me by my dental work.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m saying if you want me in a different hole, make sure you knock out my teeth.”

  Darb’s face undergoes an incredible cycle of contortions, broad, tight, elastic, before returning to its original confusion.

  “You upset me with that kind of talk,” Darb says. “I ain’t stone-hearted, and I ain’t a killer. The redeemer does the dirty work. All of us are just antennas for the divine.”

  “Shaker,” he adds. “Hey, Shakes? You want a hand pushing in all that dirt?”

  But Shaker is too busy ramming the mound of ash and churned stuff back to its source. Darb sighs again and takes up the second shovel, scooping furiously at the trash, the sinews in his neck large and red with throb. He’s racing Shaker, but Shaker is oblivious, shoveling steadily, the dirt lobbed in orderly arcs. When the hole is no more and the coarse ground is patched together to match the rest of the topography, the men throw their shovels into the pickup. And Shaker, shivering in his sweat, stomach sick, limbs filthy: He points to his monument, moonlit and pale in the distance.

  “Help me push it over,” he says.

  “You serious?”

  “It’ll only take a minute.”

  Darb chews the interior of his cheek so strenuously his whole face furrows. The distortion signals a sour and waggling thought.

  “Let it stand,” Darb says. “The boy probably would’ve liked it, in his own slow way. He liked pointless things.”

  Shaker can see the sutures in his cousin’s face splitting, the whole red rock breaking apart.

  “That secret committee of folks that fucked with your furniture and plumbing and plowed down your house? Man, I’m on that committee,” Darb says. “Problem is, there’s so many members it takes forever to make a decision about anything. We’re talking years and years of gabbing and quorums and bureaucracy shit. The whole town, pretty much. Tullys introduced me to them, and they introduced me to the shadiness across the border. Pennsyl-tucky mafia. Ain’t no joke. I was trying to promote the blowfish, you know? Build the brand and all? Had to really spin it hard ‘cause that shit sounds sorta bonkers and too much of it makes you chew your tongue off at the root. Maybe I sorta oversold the operation. Mafia bastards must have torched my fucking house before the ink on the contract was even dry. That’s my guess. The whole thing was probably a sham, a setup. They were just weeding out the competition. So I did some weeding of my own. Had to start somewhere.” Darb nodding at the dirt. “Still not sure how bad I’m supposed to feel about all this. But I really did try to relish it.”

  His mouth is open, his nose and eyes wet.

  “Maybe it’s true,” he adds, “I was not the most stringent of daddies.”

  Darb shakes the gasmask off his forehead and cradles it carefully in the crook of his elbow, like an infant or booby-trapped parcel, on his walk back to the truck.

  *

  Shaker’s one solemn act with a firearm came years ago, when he purchased a pistol to assassinate a family of squirrels that had invaded the attic of the farmhouse he and his singer-girlfriend were renting in the woodlands, near a scenic Superfund site. The constant scamperings and scratchings resonated throughout the house all night, every night. Traps, poisoned acorns, tainted cheese. Every ploy failed to incapacitate the vermin. So Shaker bought a pistol his cousin had recommended a little too loudly, a long-snouted, silver-plated thing, which he needed both hands to hold and some assistance to aim. Shaker blasted so many divots and clefts in the attic roof the rain flooded through, collapsing the insulation into the wood, and the wood into the plaster, all those layers sandwiched and buckling. Soon the entire house was infested with rain rot. Conditions grew uninhabitable for squirrel and human alike. Shaker and his girlfriend spontaneously eloped after she used the same gun to shoot him at point-blank range o
ne night, and for six months they moved among a series of rental trailers and motel rooms until she realized her true error and moved on without him. Shaker pawned the gun for a better brand of radio. The squirrels were replaced by roaming dogs that have likewise fled to some faraway locale. But Shaker remains, grouchily leaned in the passenger seat while Darb drives in silence, the roadside streaking in drips and squiggles.

  “I’m fine with not speaking,” Darb says. “Silence doesn’t rankle me like it does some.”

  “Then shut up.”

  “Make me, mountebank.”

  “Fancy talk.”

  “Got it from a book. I’m a reader, you know.”

  “What a brain loaf,” Shaker says as the pickup bounces a pothole. Darb’s revolver rests on the dashboard. The turbulence slides it a little closer to Shaker’s side.

  Darb is staring with enormous focus on the road. “That’s the one thing that baffles me with this whole cryogenic freeze business. Why do the scientists save only your head? That’s the most useless part of the pig.”

  “Depends on the pig,” Shaker says, glimpsing his own reflection in the windshield, his doltish lips, lumpy eyelids, flattened face. The relief of the survivor and the stupidly living everywhere upon him. It is a look of minor existence, and it’s not a look he savors.

  “You’re a killer,” Shaker mutters at the reflection. “It’s not enough to bear the dark. You have to bear the pallor, the sunlight.”

  “Say what?” Darb asks.

  “Sunlight,” Shaker says.

  “You ain’t looking so hot.”

  “I feel fine, absolutely fine. I need to go on some kind of epic vision quest, and you need more time in prison.”

  “Whoa now—”

  “Here,” Shaker says. “Let me help.”

  Shaker snatches the pistol from the dashboard and cracks it open. Four bullets remain. He folds it shut, brandishing the weapon just out of his cousin’s reach.

  “Watch where you point that hair dryer,” Darb says.