The Great American Suction

by David Nutt

  “Nervous?”

  “You won’t shoot me.”

  “No,” Shaker says. “I won’t.”

  And he presses the barrel into his own thigh, the swell of meat there, the muscle and knot, and he fires a round pure as sunshine itself. The pain squeezes through his flesh and femur and maybe the floorboards, too. For a brief moment, Shaker thinks he can hear the bullet rebound off the asphalt with a melodious ping. The truck cab fills with thunder and smoke.

  “My gawd!” Darb howls as the pickup swerves. Blood has sprayed everywhere. Everything’s ringing. Shaker emits the most candid babble, but Darb’s the one who shouts, “Think you blew off the muffler, son!”

  “Should we go back for it?” Shaker asks, woozy and shutting his eyes against the pain. The pain is all he is.

  “That was balls, man! Balls!”

  Darb regains his breath in increments. He has stopped pounding the steering wheel, and he’s swiveling his head with less frequency.

  “Leg looks foul,” he says. “You know any doctors who stitch but don’t snitch?”

  Shaker can only grumble. The roadside is still streaking, but he’s not coherent enough to absorb it.

  Darb cracks his neck, tense against the wheel, the rearview mirror filling with his jaw. “Emergency room?” he asks.

  Shaker’s whole body is on fire, several variations, whites and reds and golds and neons, each one holier than the last.

  “Parasailing,” he replies.

  *

  The emergency room is more hallway than room, with three plastic chairs in buoyant preschool shades, a grimy communal water cooler, a nurse’s station overlit with fluorescence. There are no magazines or TV. No mangled men or mauled women with handkerchief slings or homemade splints or children moaning with ruptured organs. No insurance scammers or unsuccessful suicides. The corridor is empty and the desk is unstaffed. Shaker isn’t nodding in and out of consciousness so much as noodling around it. He can sense Darb, grumped and restless, in the chair beside him. Darb crosses his legs. His foot wags. Shaker registers the fabric-chafing noises, but Darb’s movement and the chafe noises remain disconnected. The reason exceeds Shaker’s purview. Most things do. Shaker keeps his head against the wall and tries not to regard the new wound glaring up at him like an evil, abscessed eye.

  Darb gives him an elbow nudge. The woman in white, suddenly appeared at the desk, is staring at Shaker with intense boredom. Shaker clears the saliva and panic from his throat, feeling for the correct octave. Unable to string together a cohesive sentence, he simply points at his cousin and croaks, “Him did it.”

  “Sir?”

  “Shot me. The thighbone. Ring the fuzz.”

  The nurse shifts her boredom to Darb, no longer tap dancing in his chair. He’s peering into the dark triangle of his crossed legs, the riven sole of his disintegrating loafer, Mort’s gasmask on his knee. Instead of addressing the nurse or Shaker, he consults his clenched fist. The gasmask watches him, impassive, alert.

  “Kinda looks like my handiwork, sure,” Darb says, flexing the fist into articulation. All it needs is a sock puppet. As the woman dials the authorities, Darb pushes a thumb up into his mouth to straighten his dentures. Finally, he looks at his cousin, too furious to speak. His dentures give one last clack. The sound is so firm, so conclusive, that Shaker fills with a mysterious relief. Maybe this is the only mercy left. Here and gone before it can be touched or autopsied or memorialized or even acknowledged at all.

  Shaker sits up and says, “Probably a few more minutes before the cops get here.”

  “Sure,” Darb replies with a bogus yawn.

  Shaker moves his eyes towards the door. “Greyhound waits for no man,” he adds.

  Darb nods indifferently. Shaker throws another obvious glance at the doorway. Darb meets his gaze and nods again, then again and again in gradual acceleration. Shaker tries to smile, but the most he can do is wince with his posterior teeth. But Darb understands. He gives his dentures one more clack, wipes the hand on his jeans, reaches over, and sticks an index finger into the freshly steaming hole in Shaker’s leg.

  “Goddamn!” Shaker shouts, writhing, frantic.

  The nurse looks up from her clipboard, her boredom declining into low-wattage abhorrence. Shaker cannot see much room anymore. He has the leg-on-fire pulled up to his chest. And Darb. Darb extends the blood-slick finger and the steady hand to which it is attached, examining it like a messy dipstick.

  “Just making sure the nerves are all there,” he says.

  And Shaker, euphoric with pain, promptly passes out.

  18.

  Shaker is hobbling around Agog Manor on his crutch, numbly colliding the furniture, smashed sheetrock and dead appliances still strewn in the halls. The painkillers have wrapped him in an angelic gauze. Somewhere under the real dressing on his leg, the thread and pinwork are not exactly done neat. Shaker couldn’t be happier. The woman watches his slapstick from a middle distance, a hand on her pelvis, smiling her vague smile at Shaker. She prepares his tomato-and-barbiturate soup each morning and twice a day ministers his bandages while Shaker sags in a mailorder hammock salvaged from the basement and suspended from pegs and hooks in the den ceiling. On occasion, she even sings for him. She stands beside the hammock in a girly one-piece romper that is striped red-white-blue, hair pulled off her face by rubber band, although several rogue curlicues disturb her pasty forehead like misplaced punctuation marks. Shyly, she sings a capella, gazing unbroken at him and only him. It’s a solitary performance. Her voice is tarnished and reedy, not musical at all. But it has a scrappy charisma, an integrity. The lyrics are a mash note of TV ads, political stump speeches, encyclopedia entries, radio rants, childish gibberish; a recycled misappropriation that implicates, yet exalts, mass culture’s endless loop. The Whirling Universal Repeat. Shaker is in rabid love with every purloined word. He rises on his crutch and leans intently forward. He’s ready to crank open his silly maw and finally croon along.

  And then, once again, the woman is gone. No goodbye sticky note, no great pageantry or grudge sex or farewell kiss. Just gone. Royce has disappeared as well, although for reasons Shaker cannot explain their SUV is still parked in the garage. Shaker finds Royce’s whole wardrobe steamed clean and regally folded in the closet upstairs, so he borrows a few favorites. Soon he’s parading around the manor in every stripe and stitch the stroked man owned. Some nights, he takes his sleep without mattress or blanket, sprawled on the floor in twill and corduroy and khaki, like a well-dressed tramp. He feels like he’s working on a new purview altogether. He sleeps unsoundly but wakes, strangely, with strong enthusiasms. He just isn’t sure for what.

  This is how they find him, flat on the sun-warmed foyer tile, hazed from a dream he can’t quite reconvene. Shaker opens his eyes and discovers the older woman and older man. They are tanned and dressed in tropical pastels, astride several intimidating trunks of plaid-print luggage, hovering over Shaker’s half-woken face.

  “Gerald,” the woman says. “This homeless man is drooling all over your corduroys. My god, I think he tried to remodel our kitchen. So much savage damage!”

  Shaker awards the elderly couple an amiable look, a trustworthy look. The look of a man who contains sturdy moral textiles, astute psychological tackle, with no hint of the charlatan about him at all. When he opens his mouth to speak, though, he finds his voice has vanished.

  Shaker is unable to utter a single, lucid, lifesaving word.

  Acknowledgments

  Great thanks and fierce gratitude are due:

  Giancarlo DiTrapano.

  Sam Lipsyte.

  Dana Spiotta, Arthur Flowers, George Saunders, Christopher Kennedy, Christine Schutt, Gary Lutz, and all at the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program, particularly my fearless cohort—Rachel Abelson, Mildred Barya, Chanelle Benz, Martin De Leon, Rebecca Fishow.

  Gene Kwak, and Ryan Ridge and Ashley Farmer for excerpting early portions of this novel via NOÖ Journal and Juked, respec
tively.

  Jacob White and JT Tompkins for first reads.

  Steve Gattine for the final gander.

  Joe Kepic, Brendan Kuntz, Tom Yagielski, Kevin Dossinger, Haley Dossinger, Chris Romeis, Pat Lonergan, Travis Forte, and José Beduya for the soundtrack and the tinnitus.

  Jason Nutt and Randolph Wright for early and generous and possibly misplaced encouragement.

  My parents—Charles and Deborah Nutt—for their affectionate bewilderment and unstinting support.

  And Gina for, well, everything.

  David Nutt was born in 1977. He is a former newspaper reporter and copy editor, speechwriter, substitute teacher, executive assistant, administrative assistant, electrician’s assistant, office gopher, dishwasher, grocery stocker, part-time burger flipper, begrudging paperboy, and sometime musician. His fiction has appeared in The American Reader, Electric Literature’s Okey-Panky, Green Mountains Review, Hobart, Juked, New York Tyrant, NOÖ Journal, Open City, and Washington Square Review. He attended the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, where he met his wife, the poet Gina Keicher. They live in Ithaca, New York, with their dog and two cats.