The Great American Suction

by David Nutt

  “Take it all,” he says as soon as someone picks up. “The glass in the windows, the silver fillings in my teeth. It’s all yours. Everything.”

  Shaker hears only heavy breath, the scratching of facial hair. What Shaker imagines to be a sinister goatee.

  “It’s okay,” Shaker continues. “That futon was giving me rashes. I didn’t really fit on it. I forgive you, whoever you are.”

  The scratching halts. A slow hiss of silence.

  “You haven’t atoned for your sins,” the voice says.

  “I didn’t know I had any.”

  “That’s not our problem.”

  “So how do I atone?”

  “You can’t.”

  Shaker pauses. “I still forgive you, guy.”

  “So you think this is how you whup us?” the voice asks. “Turn the other cheek? Give us the Gandhi? Shame us?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You fucker,” the man says and hangs up.

  Shaker is still holding the phone to his head like a conch shell he has unburied at the beach, unable to decide if the bogus ocean sounds warrant a spot on the bookshelf or not. There is no more bookshelf, Shaker reminds himself, and he relays the phone to the Hooster girl, who has watched the entire exchange while keeping one eye on a portable TV. The dark room strobes with each fresh image. She unmutes the volume and regards Shaker as if he has an ugly clot of vegetable lodged between his incisors.

  “You are a mess,” the girl tells him.

  “Thank you.”

  “Mama thinks you’d be an item if you got a real wardrobe and didn’t sustain all those mongrels with milk like an old spinster. And by ‘wardrobe’ I don’t think she means that dumpy outfit you were wearing a few days ago.”

  “Listen,” Shaker says, clinging on her windowsill. “Can you—”

  “I ain’t lending my bike for you to break again.”

  “It’s not the bike I want to borrow.”

  “Then what?”

  Shaker reaches through the window and rubs an uneven splotch of acne cream across the rest of the girl’s nose.

  “How do you feel about trench warfare?”

  *

  Shaker is wearing his part of the bargain, an oversized seersucker thing the girl selected from the thrift-shop rack: three pieces, pinstriped, an ascot knotted at the neck. Shaker feels like he is dressed for a high school musical set during the dark days of Prohibition. He avoids the dandyish sight of himself in the restaurant mirror and continues to scrutinize the dinner menu even after their ravioli has arrived. The Hooster woman will not stop rubbing the ribbed fabric on Shaker’s arm. He looks for the waiter to order more ice water, buckets of it, tankers, and he accidentally catches the Hooster woman’s eye.

  “I hear everything on the other side of our living room wall,” she says. “Does that upset you?”

  “We could have had lasagna,” he mutters.

  “You are a lonely man.”

  “Cod fish. Chicken parm.”

  “And you’re afraid of lonely women. You’re terrified of us. You think we’re going to come charging over the hilltop in a big posse with pitchforks and prenuptial agreements.”

  “Uh oh,” he says, sniffing his spoon and looking up. “Does this ravioli have eggplant in it? I can’t be anywhere near eggplant.”

  “I can hear your drunk weeping at night, those sad songs you try to sing. Even your bathroom noises. It’s disgusting. God knows what you hear of us.”

  “A lot of vacuuming,” Shaker says.

  “We don’t own a vacuum.”

  “I know,” he nods. “That’s what horrifies me.”

  The Hooster woman leans across the table and whispers, “I used to be afraid like you. You know what I realized? The unbeatable slow machine that chews up your life? That machine is scared, too. So I made a little investment to even things up. Would you like to see my cannon?”

  She’s holding Shaker at the wrist now. Both wrists.

  “God no,” he says.

  “You’re gun-shy.”

  “I don’t own a vacuum, either.”

  The Hooster woman releases Shaker’s arms and fixes her posture, straight and serious, and looks around the room. She points a fake fingernail tip at the sternest, most behemoth-scale man at the restaurant bar.

  “That ox,” she says. “Could you fight him?”

  “Why would I fight him?”

  “To defend my honor.”

  “Your honor is fine, just fine.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I’d rather not,” Shaker says.

  The Hooster woman smiles hard and starched, the way Shaker imagines cosmopolitan ladies regard each other in line at the lingerie store. She swallows a few spoonfuls of her ravioli, wipes her mouth, raises an arm, and motions for the muscled man.

  “Hey, ox!” she shouts.

  When Shaker recovers from the blackout, he is in the backseat of the woman’s automobile, his ascot vanished, his seersucker awry. The Hooster woman is nestled against him with a pearl-handled revolver in her lap.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she says.

  Shaker taps the raw lump on his cheek. That is either blood or ravioli sauce slathered all over him and the gun.

  “Did you pistol-smack me?” he asks.

  “Somebody had to shoehorn some manhood into you. Mr. Ox was much too nice. Do you think the gun is loaded? The machine doesn’t sleep.”

  Shaker cannot nod without aggravating his migraine, no matter how much he agrees with her. He groans a humble affirmation. He feels around the seat for a takeout carton or doggy bag. The Hooster woman sits up, kisses his injury, then licks the gun barrel and touches it to the doughy spot on his person where he maybe still has a liver or spleen.

  “Bang bang,” she whispers.

  *

  The next morning, Shaker wakes to a sprained face, vaguely regretful the woman is not humped on him in his borrowed sleeping bag, hair snarled wild, cooing gun puns. He slouches around the duplex until noon, and then he makes the long foot-trek to Tullys for their truck. The Brothers are so inured to this scene they don’t bother to stir from their tree post in the side yard. Tully One waves hello with his rifle snout while Brother Two goes for the notepad, adding a checkmark to the continuing tally. Neither Tully mentions the tires Shaker slashed, the rearview mirror he busted. Shaker is running out of surfaces to paint. Soon the entire house will be a runny seafoam green, and they’ll be asking him to sand off the color and start anew. Maybe a loud chartreuse. Eggplant purple. Black-eye black.

  “She broke me in alright,” Shaker later tells the Hooster girl, who nods grimly at his new shiner. “Probably needs x-rays.”

  “Does this halter make me look slutty?”

  She thrusts the fuchsia top through the window and into Shaker’s face. Instinctively, he flinches.

  “It’s fine,” he says. “Perfectly respectable.”

  “Then I don’t want it on me.”

  He can hear her rummaging in congested bureaus, kicking aside wire hangers, burrowing into boxes. Shuteyed again, he reaches in an arm and drags out the alarm clock by its cord.

  “It’s almost five.”

  “So?” she asks.

  “Best to catch him before suppertime, when his appetite is starting to crest.”

  “Whoever heard about a goddamn date to Burger World?”

  “He likes his fast food.”

  “And you’ll wait in the car?”

  Shaker shakes his head. “I’ll hang back at the house. Play with his fish.”

  “Sounds like a real hot time,” she sighs.

  “Deal’s a deal,” Shaker says, ducking at the sound of her mother’s voice in heated communion with a talk radio program in the next room. When he rises again, the girl is standing in knee-high socks and bicycle shorts and a t-shirt fringed with large rips.

  “It looks like somebody tossed you to the lions.”

  “Don’t I know it,” the girl replies.

 
They drive with the windows unrolled, a tide of air moving through the truck. The stereo is off, but the girl is perusing the collection of bootlegs—all Shaker’s ex-wife—that reappeared in the backseat. The girl hums a half-forgotten song. Her pitch is unsteady, a brief warble concluding her high notes. Shaker himself is tone deaf, music deaf. He could not establish a stable rhythm with a metronome wired to his cochlea. The girl’s fluted sounds make him uneasy.

  “You mind not doing that?” he asks.

  “I’m that bad? My voice?”

  “Nah. Maybe. I dunno.”

  “You’re the gruesome one.”

  Shaker nods, tapping at the wheel with erratic canter. “I just want to be the type who brings his own galoshes.”

  “You smell like unshowered rutabaga, too.”

  The truck is halfway to Darb’s when the girl begins to scoot in her seat, heels knocking, anxiously winding her fingers in shirt fringe.

  “Nervous?” he asks.

  “See that gas station?” she says. The building is abandoned, decrepit. “I’m gonna pee myself if we don’t stop.”

  “Land ho,” Shaker replies and slows the truck into the pebbled lot. Two rusted pumps, a snack shack that has been shuttered, an ice machine in manacles. Shaker conducts a speedy reconnaissance and stands guard between the truck and the girl as she disappears around the shack’s corner. Road traffic is sporadic. Shaker waits with his head at a gallant tilt, chin high, arms crossed, arms uncrossed. He’s not really sure what to do with his arms. A car passes, another. Shaker waves. He gets a few smiles in response, a few unpleasant gestures. He waves again and again, working his arm in exaggerated arcs, like a political novice campaigning for a municipal post that has not been adequately described to him. Once the routine turns stale, he walks back to the truck, where the Hooster girl is sitting and watching him, big-eyed, baffled. Shaker waves at one last station wagon as it goes streaking by.

  “Mama wasn’t lying. You are an odd egg.”

  “And my gum lines are receding,” he nods.

  The girl fires up the cassette player, and Shaker allows it. The unmistakable voice of his ex-wife ambushes him in stereophonic sound. The recording is rough, muddy, a series of subdued declarations taking place in an oakechoed room. Some kind of legal deposition. Shaker dials down the volume but lets the tape spool through the stereo while the girl resumes humming in her slatternly getup, and they drive.

  It’s almost six. Suppertime soon. They are approaching the last bend of road. Something charred and tangy enters their nostrils. Shaker and the girl smell the inferno before they see it. Darb’s house. It has been replaced by a holocaust of orange flame.

  “Is that?” she asks. “Is it?”

  The disaster area is tended by fire trucks and ambulances and a corps of plainclothes policemen and lifeguards in neon rain-slickers who holler into their walkie-talkies and conduct traffic farther down the road. Shaker settles the truck into a rocky ditch but cannot climb out. Instead, he watches the scene slivered in the rearview mirror, the girl beside him wan, silent. He sees a fireman dislodge himself from his helmet and proceed to drench hair and head in the full force of a pressurized hose. Other workers prod the ground with pickaxes and tamp debris. There is an authentic Dalmatian dog inside the fire truck, slobbering the glass in expressionistic swirls. A male cop, grease-smeared, yawning, massages the shoulders of a female EMT. And the smoke. The dark smoke rises, infinite in measure, pulled and pulled and pulled from the inferno, remaking the sky in a not-unbeautiful slate.

  “Stay here,” Shaker croaks and tugs his arm free, unaware the girl has been squeezing his hand. To his surprise, nobody stops him. He does an awkward limbo under the caution tape and approaches an ambulance, steeling himself for the horror, any horror, shrouded or toe-tagged or unsheeted or slabbed. Lorelei sits on a stretcher, pristine in her leotard spandex, an oxygen mask clamped against her mouth. Beside her, an EMT is in distracted consultation with a clipboard. The young man peppers her with curt questions and nods and nods and unstraps the inflatable band from her bicep. Shaker can’t hear much. He’s too numb for sound. The smell is a putrid garbage rot, the kind of thing that makes retching feel like pure, dry relief. Then Shaker is knocked away by a pair of workers transporting a collapsible table, which they erect at the caution-tape cordon and adorn with disposable cups, a coffee carafe, plates of pastries. The Dalmatian is barking for its dinner now. A rescue worker slots his ax in a melted lump of stucco and heads for the truck, crooning with puppy yammer, unable to allay the animal. Shaker pushes through the mass of men who have flocked around the coffee table. He finds Darb sitting on the fender of a police cruiser, a blanket on one leg, his son’s gasmask clutched in his hands.

  “This was all I could get,” Darb says, strangling the rubber mask, his own face smeared with cinder, damp grief. “The rest of him was melted to the workbench.”

  There are third-degree burns up his arms and wrists, flesh in blister, his tropical-theme shirt nightmarishly singed, the little that’s left of it. His socks are blackened to his feet. It’s here Shaker notices the team of EMTs in a semi-circle around the car and Darb. The EMTs are overloaded with splints and gauzes and compresses, a neck brace that seems on loan from another catastrophe entirely. They’re waiting for Shaker’s cousin to submit to treatment. Darb, unable to meet Shaker’s gaze, regards them all with bitter contempt. Shaker doesn’t try to formulate any kind of speech, let alone condolence. He simply wriggles off his seersucker vest, eases forward, and tenderly smacks the smolder from Darb’s charred half-shirt. When he steps back, the EMTs move in. Darb looks at Shaker now, unblinkingly, an agonized stare. Shaker wants to say something, any dumb something. But his attention shifts as one of the EMTs produces a scorched piece of tubing he has rescued from the wreckage. There are rigorous nods, condescending sniffs. The man smirks at Darb and grumbles the words “drug-cook flambé.”

  And then Darb is restored to his feet and has the man’s throat between his hands. The EMTs pile on, six or seven of them, each restraining a different Darb limb, doubling-up on his flailing arms. He’s cracking jaws and headbutting blindly, one hand still pressing down on the smirker’s neck. Then the cops enter the rumble, a few swaggering firemen. The EMT emerges from the brawl kneading his own throat. He sits on a bumper and pops an antacid pill, fitting himself into the unused neck brace.

  Shaker and the girl stay until Darb is handcuffed and escorted off the premises in an unmarked vehicle, and it is already the next morning. Lorelei’s ambulance left hours ago. The ruins are sending up smoke signals en masse, a swizzle of gray-black messages that all say the same dark thing. The cop cruisers scatter in different directions. The firemen depart with their slumbering Dalmation, and Shaker and the Hooster girl stand beside the empty buffet table, the snacks eaten, the carafe drained. Only the gasmask, found on the ground and tossed against the bagel spread as an afterthought, remains.

  Then they go.

  *

  The sun peeks over the hillside. They are driving home at a fraction of the speed limit. Shaker knows that if the girl attended school on a regular basis, she would be readying for the bus at this hour. She’d be gobbling breakfast with her hair in an electric straightener, her homework unfinished, or sassing her mother, or telling her mother she loved her, or reminding herself at least she had a mother to love. Or maybe she’d just sit there, staring down and softly cursing her oily skin and angular hips. The girl is dozing in the passenger seat instead, curled into herself for warmth, the seersucker shading her face. Shaker steers but doesn’t see the road. All is weightless and light. He is coherent enough to understand there are gradations to shock, cloverleaf ramps, loading docks, staging areas. But none of that interests him. The road is gone. The wheel fills his grip. He wants to navigate the truck to the nearest rest stop and rescue a litter of emaciated puppies from a flash flood or forest blaze. He wants to hold high the leaky roof of heaven and provide shelter to all the premature widows and abandoned orph
ans who do not have enough ceiling in their lives. He wants to do any number of pointless, impossible things.

  They arrive home to half a house. Shaker’s side has vanished. Just the shared wall and its ugly lime paint are standing. Each of his rooms has been thoroughly bulldozed, the debris and dirt carted off, plumbing pipes and electrical wiring sucked back into the soil, and neatly. The remaining hardwood floor is blackened with an earthmover’s tread, naked to the elements. Shaker feels like all the near and far cataclysms in his life are aligning, end to end, a spooky eclipse. And maybe he feels some reassurance in this.

  The Hooster girl is awake and coolly gazing out the windshield, also unimpressed.

  “You said they could take it all,” she says.

  “I did.”

  “House sorta looks bigger now in a weird way.”

  “You’re right,” Shaker says, filling with a terrible awe. “It does.”

  “If Mama asks—”

  “I’ll explain.”

  “Don’t,” she says. “Just tell her I ran off like usual and it took you all night to find me. I’ll only be grounded a week.”

  “But—”

  “I gotta go wash my hair,” she says. “It’s the only thing I can smell.”

  She leans up and pecks Shaker on the cheek and wears his coat pulled around her waist as she carefully swings her skinny legs out the truck and across the bare tract. Most of the property is now patio. Shaker gets out of the truck as well, taking a few short strides and promptly lying down in the churned earth. There is no tingle in his reconstructed knee; the pins and rods are quiet. His head is hollow, immaculate. Shaker imagines picking up one of those starved puppies he has rescued and snuggling it against his crusted mouth and vacant forehead, then squeezing the small animal as its adorable eyes go big and dreadful and the squirming dog explodes like a jelly donut. Then he imagines exploding another and another and another and another until the entire world has been reduced to Shaker, his bloody hands, and an empty cardboard box.

  Thus at long last, exhausted by all that imaginary puppy slaughter, Shaker can shut his eyes, and it suddenly seems like an alright idea to have a loud, ferocious crying jag right there on his peaceful yard.