by David Nutt
“I didn’t need it,” Shaker says, indicating the crowbar. “Your window was unlocked.”
“Silent alarm.”
“Okay,” Shaker nods.
“I already called the cops, told them not to bother. Just a confused fawn wandering in lost from the forest. So I shot it. They applauded my initiative and stellar marksmanship. I knew you’d do something foolish eventually.”
Shaker requests the Howitzer move to the center of the room. The Howitzer sighs and reluctantly rises. He stands there on the rug examining the pink wicks of his fingernails as Shaker leaps from his rocking chair and slams into the Howitzer’s chest. The unsuccessful tackle more and more resembles a desperate hug the longer Shaker stays latched around the Howitzer’s middle, as if still clinging to the slender notion of vengeance itself.
“You got any beer in this cabana?” Shaker asks, face nuzzled in the Howitzer’s stomach.
“Smells like you’ve already hit your quota. How about something from the tap?”
“Only if it’s a thousand goddamn degrees.”
“Easy, chief,” the Howitzer says. He detaches himself from Shaker and returns with a glass of water. Shaker sits and accepts the drink with a vulgar gesture he immediately regrets. The Howitzer remains standing, a geometry of skis and poles racked over his head. They very nearly resemble antlers.
Shaker takes a prolonged sip and says, “Because I can’t get any sleep in my own fucking Winnebago.”
“That’s probably the point.”
Shaker studies the sweaty glass, unsure if the sweat is his or the tap water’s.
“I know that,” he says. “I know that’s the point.”
“You’re not the only one suffering here. Waking up at odd hours, stumbling around your place in the dark, finding new and inventive ways to unravel you. That crappy little duplex depresses me, chief.”
“I always liked it.”
“That depresses me, too,” the Howitzer says.
Shaker holds the wet glass to his forehead, rolling his attention from one Howitzer foot to the other. Big, pulpy bricks. The man must need special sneakers. He must shop in special stores. Shaker imagines the Howitzer as an awkward teenager, sulking out of all the usual franchise chains at the only local mall, mocked by slobbish salespeople, his monstrous feet sore in too-small shoes.
“Is that nail polish?”
The Howitzer gently lifts Shaker’s head away from his stumpy toes and aligns it at eye level. “Shaker,” he says.
“One day I’d really like to learn the bolero,” Shaker says through clenched molars. “Just let me bolero.”
“Don’t you ever wonder why the shitstorm started?”
Shaker can’t nod with his head in the Howitzer’s hand, so he blinks once, twice, once, a Morse code of facial tic. But even then, he’s still not sure his answer.
“I do a special kind of freelance work for people,” says the Howitzer. “People who don’t like you. If my bank account is any indicator, their numbers are legion.”
Shaker twists his mouth, a confused funnel.
“I thought I was a people person,” Shaker says.
The Howitzer smiles tiredly and takes the glass from Shaker. “You can stop blinking now.”
“Viva,” Shaker replies and pretends to lift an imaginary glass. The pantomime feels heavier than the real thing.
“As much as I’d like to stay up for the slumber party, I need sleep,” the Howitzer says. “Gotta get up early tomorrow morning to disconnect the heat at your house.”
Shaker nods slowly. “I’m sure I have some errands, too.”
He rises and steadies and is aiming for the door when he begins patting his pants, his shirt pocket.
“Think I lost my house key,” he mumbles. “Must’ve bounced from my pocket when I shimmied off the shed.”
“You think I have a spare,” says the Howitzer.
Shaker shrugs. “You’re getting in somehow.”
The Howitzer reaches around Shaker and opens the door, then stands with his arms folded, refusing to budge that great, meaty mound of a head. He gives a rugged smirk and slides a key off his neon lanyard’s ring.
“Gracias,” Shaker says, pocketing the duplicate.
“No problem,” the Howitzer tells him. “But I’m gonna need that back tomorrow morning.”
*
Still, even more mysteriously, Shaker cannot continue inside. He loiters under a sputter of starlight on the yard, feeling tedious, unawake. There is sitcom chatter on the Hooster half, television voices, and the canned laughter seems aimed directly at the character Shaker has been duped into playing. An insomniac is running a vacuum somewhere. Someone is sending a casserole through a paper shredder. Shaker has slipped off his shoes and is rubbing his toes in the crisp sod. His windows are dark, all dark. He can almost imagine his indoor self framed and illuminated against those black squares, a restless animal in exhibit, oblivious to any audience. But he can’t quite see the look of stunned witlessness on his usual face.
“You locked your idiot self out?”
The Hooster girl is at her window, TV gibbering behind her. Shaker holds up the copied key. “I’m admiring the view.”
“And?”
“Needs more crop circles. Maybe a tiki torch or two.”
“I thought you were that guy,” the girl says. “The fix-it guy with the weird hours.”
“I’m him tonight. How’s your water? Your heat?”
“Normal. Unlike you.”
“He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“He helped me fix up the bike you broke.”
“I didn’t break it,” Shaker says.
“It’s not meant to be rode on by drunk, old, idiot jerks. He got me a new chain and unbent the banana seat and even put on pink reflectors for free.”
“He’s a good specimen.”
The Hooster girl nods.
“Am I?” Shaker asks.
“Are you what?”
“A good specimen.”
Shaker shifts uneasily, fumbles a shoe.
“You alright out there?” the girl asks.
Shaker kneads his jaw until he hears the tired bone click.
7.
Truckless today, Shaker tramps to the grocery store on foot. He doesn’t have enough funds to purchase anything, but he enjoys wandering the glossy, checkered aisles of modern commerce on his day off, aloof and hungry, maybe shoplifting a vittle or two. All his days are days off now. Shaker is en route on the roadside, not leaning far into traffic, when he is almost guillotined by a passing car’s side mirror. The car swerves belatedly and pulls onto the shoulder to wait for him. Shaker recognizes the vehicle—its duct-taped fender dangling like a ragged hangnail—from the puffer party. In daylight, he gets a better look. The exterior is glamorized with ritzy window tint and chrome hubs and gaudy trim that fail to offset the vehicle’s general dilapidation. The woman clerk climbs out the passenger door. She smiles blandly at Shaker, then points inside the car. Shaker feigns a flinty indifference, dips his head, and peers inside.
His cousin is staring back at him from the driver’s seat. Someone has prepared Darb in a handsome sweater vest and color-coordinated chinos. All the lifesick wrinkles seem to have been steam-pressed from his narrow, untroubled face.
“Long time, no parlez-vous,” Darb says brightly. “Want a ride? You are a rough goddamn sight, cousin. A rough sight.”
*
Shaker’s leggy frame is accordioned in the backseat, his gaze shifting from Darb’s head to the woman’s head to Darb’s head again. He can’t catch much of their faces in the rearview mirror, but he can hear Darb’s plastic dentures clacking with every bounce and jolt of the car. The whole vehicle interior smells like cinnamon napalm and canned tuna. The woman sits silently with a Tupperware full of puffers hugged in her lap.
“Making deliveries?” Shaker asks.
“The wonders of oceanography.” Darb gives the woman’s trove a courtly pat. He follows Shaker’s gaze and
says, “You remember Lorelei?”
“I do not.”
“It’s a funny story,” Darb says, noisily chewing his dentures, and then he stops talking altogether.
Shaker tries to reach around to shake Lorelei’s hand but has trouble negotiating the seat angle. He reaches his other arm around, flopping both at her. The overall impression, he fears, is that he is threatening to Heimlich the poor woman. She brushes his knuckles and whispers hello. Shaker withdraws the arms without additional comment or intrusion.
They drive the rest of the route in silence. The car curves off the road and down a hidden driveway to a southwestern ranch home, low and long, with stucco coating and terracotta roof tiles. Lorelei is abruptly gone into the garage. Shaker and Darb remain in the hatchback with the engine cut, listening to the vehicle’s ruptured head gasket settle and dribble and steam.
“What do you think, man?” Darb asks. “Surprised?”
“You’re her chauffeur. Her butler.”
“Try again.”
“Drug gopher?”
Darb sighs and twists around, his seatbelt wrapping him at the neck.
“We found each other a month ago. Total accident. I was at the pet store to stock up on my munchies, my snacks. Brought a few dozen cat food tins to the register, and there she was. Hadn’t seen each other in years, man. The two of us had a romantic thing in one of our rehabs. Back then, I was doing all that shoe polish. She was snorting pixie sticks. Cousin, we had our nasal cavities so badly augered we couldn’t even smell smell. Got busy a few times. Apparently, life got a lot busier nine months after I checked out.”
“Oh no.”
“I’m a daddy!” Darb yelps, throwing a few rabbit punches at the air. “And a damn fine one, too! The boy is maybe a little retarded in some social office, but these days that’s how true genius is rolled. That kind of oddity wins the big prizes. And maybe that’s a little of me, also. You should see us together. It’s a ghastly performance, but I’m trying.”
Shaker can almost smell the singe and smoke of a dozen blown fuses somewhere in his own head. He catches his baffled glare in the window. Blinks disinterestedly at it.
“Don’t you think I’d be a good daddy, Shakes? My old man suffered black moods so corrupt he ran off before I ever met him. I can’t do a worse job than that. This is a whole new level of adult responsibility, and I’m stepping up. The hounds have been called indoors to account.”
“Puffer fish,” Shaker says.
“Blowfish, actually.”
“What’s the difference?”
“We’re rebranding,” Darb tells him. “People hear the word puffer and find it sorta distasteful. Not sure why. Blowfish has a lascivious connotation, too, but it plays well with our target demos. Me and Lorelei handle the entrepreneurial stuff. Arrangements. Facilitation.”
“Oceanography,” Shaker nods.
Darb smiles crookedly and says, “It’s legit, man. Nothing too illegal, at least nothing serious. A little book-cooking at the store is all. These blowfish are outrageous. They got this hidden toxin, you see, and if you take it in just the right dose it stuns the shit out of you, makes you trippy, sublime. You watch the nature channel shows? Dolphins get high off the little buggers and then bob on the ocean surface for hours, laughing at their own reflections, all loopy and whatnot. And everyone knows how whiz-clever dolphins are. The only trick is humans can’t take too much or it’ll numb you into a coma, maybe kill you. The risks of skipping carelessly through the golden gates of Shangri-La, I guess. Also, you gotta be careful the blowfish don’t blow up.”
“When you say blow up—”
“Like, uh, explode. Basically, we got a full-on distillery happening here. Extractions and expanders and all sorts of filters and crap. We’re pioneers! Just as long as PETA doesn’t catch wind, a dude like me could live like a middle-class citizen for once, provide for his loved ones, and so on. I’m trying to accrue a life here, compadre.”
“We are not so many miles from the Yarn Barn,” Shaker says. “Are we?”
Darb meets him with a steely stare, the cords in his neck round and tense. Shaker mumbles an apology and Darb chuckles, slides his head out of its seatbelt noose, and slaps Shaker’s leg.
“Wanna go inside? Eat some supper? See the freak show?”
The front yard is girded by lank trees on all sides. A basketball hoop leans off its post in the driveway. In the backyard, Shaker glimpses the beginnings of a trampoline, half a hammock, a badminton net obscured by unfinished fence.
“My projects,” Darb says. “Idle hands, etceteras.”
When he’s finished flapping his arms, he leads Shaker around the garage. Shaker pauses at a window and peers in. The space is painted various shades of salmon and lit by floor lamps and incense candles. Lorelei sits on a yoga mat among a battery of mothballed aerobics machinery, her thin body bent into a kind of human bowl, vaguely sculptural. All her parts appear to be vibrating at once. Shaker steps away from the window and turns his attention to the basketball net, the trees, the yard.
“Is this what happiness smells like?” he asks.
“I can’t whiff jack-shit anymore.” Darb shrugs and taps his nostrils. “The consequence of a life done at full tilt.”
“The kid play ball?”
“Wha?” Darb asks.
“Basketball.” Shaker points.
“Uh, sure. I mean, you know. It’s there.”
“It is there,” Shaker agrees.
After a pause, Darb sighs. “The tour continues.”
The house is scantly furnished. Pastel walls, tapestries in mellow hues, no tables or chairs, no TV. Shaker feels as if he’s strolling an abandoned medical ward or some modernist museum in the Californian mold. He carefully steps over a bead rug on the kitchen floor that has been dressed with finger bowls and chopsticks. In the rec room is the house’s only sofa, which Darb regards from the doorway with a sly grin. The room is otherwise empty, and the couch addresses a blank wall. Shaker inspects its leather cushions. He can make out the pronounced dimples of his cousin’s rump bone, interred there, a lonely fossil.
“This place is almost as barren as mine,” Shaker says, not light on daze.
“It’s that austere look. That’s the true style. Sheerness, utility. Lorelei’s got this Buddha-type philosophy she’s introducing me to, along with the granola therapy diets. Can’t say I buy it all, but it keeps her feng-shui quotient from freaking the fuck out.”
“Guess the rehab calmed her.”
Darb conducts a violent semaphore with his hands.
“Hush that shit, man! We don’t talk about those days. Especially not near the boy. What happens in Tuscaloosa stays in Tuscaloosa.”
“Alabama?”
“Lorelei grew up there. She has shared stories. Gory stuff. Makes Vegas sound like the Vatican.”
“Is she gonna eat supper with us?”
“Lorelei?”
“Who else?” Shaker says.
Darb fidgets in the doorway, grabbing fistfuls of chino, his bottom jaw—the real one—distended into an incongruous pout.
“Wanna see the trampoline?” he asks.
After admiring the view of the half-built trampoline frame and ailing bonsai garden and other partially cobbled projects, all refracted by the opaque glass that enfolds the kitchen like a greenhouse, Shaker and Darb hover at the bedroom threshold. The room is all white, a static cube, with scattered candles on the ground and a narrow cot that only sleeps one.
“Tight quarters,” says Shaker.
“You mean the bed?”
“More like a cot.”
“Sorta. Sorta like a cot.”
“Doesn’t even look like you’d fit.”
Darb uses one hand to hold his head, the other to point down the hall at the rec room couch.
“You sleep on that thing out there?” Shaker asks.
“We’re staving off carnal relations until the marriage is official. Keeping things pure, robustly hearted. It’s kind
a sweet when you think about it.”
“So you do a lot of…”
Shaker gesticulates a vigorous two-handed masturbation.
“Like I said, I keep busy. My projects. Check it out.”
The intercom system is a clunky, generic box wedged in a rough hole in the hallway wall. A silver speaker, a lone red button, pubic curls of wire erupting. Shaker studies the fickle appliance. “That’s a whole lot of fire hazard for one dinky box.”
“Tons of fringe benefits at that pet store,” Darb says. “When the old technology conks out, it’s up for grabs. Lorelei snatched this beauty from the animal grooming snobs. I installed it myself. Nice, eh?”
Darb thumbs the buzzer.
“Mort? Mortimer?” He unclicks the button, thinks a moment, clicks it again. “Liberteen?”
Darb shifts around on his feet, neck cords rising, pinkness smearing his forehead. A long pause. Then he rears back and hollers at the door, “I am no longer declaring myself with this stupid box!”
The intercom crackles and a helium voice replies, “I’m down here.”
“I know you’re down there, damn it! Come upstairs! Enjoy some supper with your progenitor and his kin. We can eat the last of that seaweed sushi platter. Meet us out back on the launch pad.”
“Liberteen?” Shaker asks his cousin.
Darb gives an impatient tap with his foot. “Let’s go look at the trampoline again.”
The backyard is strewn with faded oak carcasses. The slim margin of grass that surrounds Darb’s numerous efforts of unfinished husbandry has been leeched of its color. The cousins stand amid this pared landscape, sifting their words with titantic care.
“I’m not gonna ask about a paternity test,” says Shaker.
“Good,” replies Darb. “One day we’ll see how much like me he grows up to be.”
“We can only hope he holds onto more of his hair.”
“I got my hair!”
“It’s doing that rimming thing.”
“Least I got a house. A whole one.”
