by David Nutt
“Does he get barbered often?”
“I know just how he wants it.”
“You should open your own boutique,” Shaker says, smooshing his face into Royce’s coiffure. “You have a knack.”
“My Rolls Royce, I call him.”
“His hair smells good enough to eat.”
“Oh, you should have seen him before the stroke.” She separates Shaker from the Royce cranium. Then she leans down and awards the cranium a full-lipped kiss. “He made all his money as an amusement park magnate. The Whirler, the Heavy Turnip, the Lavender Monster. He built them all. It was the blood pressure medication that sent the clot up his brain. I found him on the floor of our gazebo with his pants wetted and his birding binoculars around his ears. Then we ran into some problems with the IRS.”
“The Irish?”
She stilts herself on one leg, arms free and agitated.
“Yes, Mr. Shaker. It was the bloody Micks.”
“I think I’m with the Dutch,” Shaker replies meekly.
For this, he gets an annoyed eye-roll. The woman shifts her gaze to the hard oak floor. “It’s difficult for an independent artist like myself to shake out a living these days. With Royce out of commission, I didn’t have the best financial guidance. We had to blow out of California in a hurry. At least we have this house.”
“I don’t know if house is the word I’d—”
“Workwise, I’m in a dry spell until she puts out the next record. The release keeps getting delayed because her label is suing her for breach of contract. They say the new stuff is too experimental, too schizophrenic. She’s not sounding enough like herself.”
“I don’t follow the gossip anymore,” Shaker says.
“Once the album comes out, there will be an uptick in interest. There always is. The requests will start pouring in, I’ll have steady work for a while, and then the adoration will dry up. Drought, flood, drought, flood. That’s the cycle. It’s sorta Old Testament.”
“And Royce. What’s he waiting for?”
“A miracle,” she says quietly. “Any old miracle will do. For him, I’ll wait forever. Ours is a love of substantial tilt.”
Shaker sucks his bottom lip, tongue, lower teeth, the dopey expression that threatens to gormandize his entire face.
The woman tours him through the rest of the estate, from the empty fitness center to the empty sauna to a cavernous bedroom, also empty. Mostly empty. There is a plush king-size mattress on a frame so tall it almost rivals Shaker in height.
“We can set you up here in our auxiliary closet. It has a nice overlook of the neighbor’s partly excavated pool. Plus, a bathroom and shower of your very own. You don’t find that on most front lawns. Soap and shampoo, I’m afraid, are not included. Our stockpile is getting a little low.”
“Everything is empty,” Shaker says.
“We’ve sold off a lot of the embellishments, the incidentals.”
“Is that what I am? An incidental?”
Shaker starts to haphazardly finger-flick the dirt crumbs and grass clumps off his trousers. Soon he is delivering wholesale smacks to his lower body and chest. The woman puts her hand upon him, slowing the operation of his arm.
Something long dormant inside the Shaker core quietly begins to quake.
“I really recommend you make fast friends with that shower,” the woman says and walks out of the room.
*
When Shaker is fatigued from gazing at the dark crater of dirt in the neighbor’s lawn and he tires of pacing the room’s ivory rugs, he scales the high mattress and perches, legs dangling, on the ledge. Here is the view from the nosebleeds, and it is not so spectacular. Shaker has already showered four times. He’s unable to doze. He probably couldn’t eat any midday paste even if he was offered it. So he rappels off the bedside and searches the downstairs and backyard, where he finds the woman sunning herself inside a standalone greenhouse.
“I’m relocating to the basement,” Shaker tells her. “That’s more my kind of scene.”
“It’s mostly just retired appliances, broken furniture, and broken dreams down there. But suit yourself. I think there might be a foldup cot from Royce’s convalescence. Everything else has been pawned.”
“I didn’t know anyone lived in these houses,” he says.
“The neighbors are mostly nada,” she replies, lifting a hand and pointing blindly at the miscellaneous smudges of world beyond the paneled glass. “That one and that one and that one are foreclosures. The developer went bankrupt. And thank god for that. We got the place über-cheap.”
“Maybe there’s some buried bounty in the other homes. Diamonds, silver, prissy show dogs and cigarette girls dipped in gold. Random loot.”
“I think the drughead-junky-anarchist-squatters already plundered the good stuff.”
She turns onto her stomach and aims a fingernail at a cream and brown Tudor-type monstrosity across the mud field. “Exhibit A.”
“Looks nice enough. Like a piece of marble cake.”
“Let’s just say that we always lock our doors now. And our windows. And our lovely marijuana greenhouse.”
“I thought that was herb I smelled.”
“Our Tully friends have quite the green thumb for the stuff.”
“You’re on board with Tullys.”
“They are fellow favor-traders.”
“What’s your favor?”
She gives him a sly grin.
“Tan lines,” he nods.
“Don’t be so gullible. I do bootlegs. Just to support me and Royce while I get my impersonation act off the ground. It’s not the usual concert recordings and studio outtakes that always get pirated. We have our own special niche. Rehearsals, backstage chatter, bland conversations at the catering table, copyright hearings. I have some moles embedded in the entourage. There is a real economic opportunity in capturing the creative spaces that exist outside the art. The margins. The performance of nonperformance. Otherworldly residues, banal juices. Gossipy eavesdropped stuff.”
“Are you recording me right now?” Shaker asks.
“Would that be a problem?” Another sly grin.
But Shaker is preoccupied, standing on toe tip at the greenhouse entrance and eyeballing the drug-squatter mansion. He cranes forward, licks his thumb and elevates it, divining wind direction, gale size, mushroom cloud circumference.
“What are you doing?”
“Estimating the blast radius,” Shaker says and pockets his fist.
*
Even after the inferno, his cousin’s property doesn’t look much different. Same patchy grass and dead garden, dirt in piles, oaks so scrawny with skin disease they resemble cheap community theater scenery. Some fresh blackness rings the periphery and middle—mapping the reach of fiery debris, toxic fallout—but it’s similar, too similar. Perhaps Shaker is hardened to the spectacle of apocalypse at home and yard. Maybe, in some cynical nook of his mind, he anticipated it all along. He lingers upwind from the disaster scene, feeling unbuoyed, a chronic prick in his throat. Then he remembers the paint mask on a string around his neck. He fits it to his face. The throat prickle is still there. Shaker discards the mask entirely and tries to breathe with only one lung. The left one. His favorite.
It is the third day of on-site cleanup, and the Tullys are down to the dark dregs. Shaker can only watch through squinched eyelids as the Brothers poach the rough ground with tongs and sandwich bags, pinching at things. The dominant wreckage has been towed. The bed of their truck brims with black baggies. Shaker is marking time on the sidelines with a plastic beach pail for any surviving alloys that might fetch a few bucks on the scrap resale market. He has not found any keepsakes. He hasn’t even looked. Instead, he fantasizes about mainlining truth serum into each of his pores, defeating his liver with castor oil and a funnel, combusting under a million watts of American sunshine.
A Tully in his rubber hazmat gestures for the bucket. Shaker hops over a tire rut left by an emergency vehicle and exten
ds the receptacle. A brass bolt grazes the plastic rim and lands with a satisfying ping. Shaker blushes with accomplishment. He holds himself aloft like an aristocratic statue in a public park. Then he lowers his beach bucket and dropkicks it across the property. The contents fly everywhere. On hands and knees he crawls the terrain, picking up the same scraps all over again.
*
In the truck, en route to the Tullys’ private landfill, Shaker rides hump between the Brothers. The bucket is awkwardly wedged in his arms and jingling. The hazmat heads are off. Each Tully is ruddily cheeked, hair roostered up with sweat. They are taking turns at a can of diet soda Shaker conveys between them with his free hand. Driver Tully is the more muscular one. He has several terribly botched tribal tattoos sneaking up his neck and a chin dimple so prominent it could accommodate a golf ball. Navigator Tully is the weirder wit, the smirker, the schemer, Shaker’s secret amigo. At least that’s Shaker’s benevolent assessment. The mufflerless truck fumes wafting in through the air vent might be making him a bit schmaltzy.
He swivels side to side, trying to address both Tullys.
“So you guys remainder. Distribute bootlegs. You monopolize all the good winter work. Also, a little greenhouse agriculture. Half your tools have the town seal. Judging from the miles on the odometer, I’d say maybe some type of interstate traffic is involved. Here’s an idea. The militia thing is a front.” Shaker nods at each Brother. “Which one is the big, pink brain running the operation?”
The muscle shrugs. The smirker is no longer smirking.
“You guys are good,” Shaker says.
The Tully landfill is five square, squalid acres of singe and blemish with a children’s nursery bordering one side and a graveyard the other. Shaker appreciates the symmetry. It lends an aura of life-spanning equilibrium the trash ruins do not deserve. As for the ruins themselves, Shaker is able to identify certain forms in the amalgamated slag, structures. A pipe stove, a Laz-E-Boy, swing sets, the crumpled tin roof of a detonated chicken shack. Shaker stands behind the truck and helps the Tullys dock the edge of the rubble. Once in position, the gate is unlatched, the shovels dispersed, and the three men begin the long drudge of scooping and flinging, flinging and scooping, pausing only to pocket the occasional bauble. This is how Shaker, near-blind under a borrowed pair of swim goggles and a rag around his mouth, finds Mortimer’s gasmask. He lifts it by the straps, holds it up to his face. Peering into the empty eyeholes, he can’t see anything of the boy. Only the reflection of a strange man, shifty and indistinct, waffling around on a lonely island of trash. Shaker grips the mask tighter. He is tempted to launch into a pseudo-Shakespearian monologue about guile, regret, blood oath and valor, and the tiny bronze drain at the center of the universe through which all living meat is eventually sucked.
He jiggles loose the silt and ash.
“Goddamn me,” he whispers.
A few seagulls skim the landfill. Nothing settles. Shaker stashes the gasmask on the truck’s dashboard and returns to his shovel.
The dregs don’t get any darker than this, he thinks.
*
It’s almost midnight when Shaker returns to Agog Manor and immediately aims for the upstairs bathroom so he can shower the dead smell off him. The water pressure is below par, inconsistent. He spends half an hour shivering under the trickle. Then he steps free of the stall and regards the towel rack. The towels are the lavish, swollen variety found in popular hotels and minimum-security prisons. Shaker is shy about involving himself in other people’s laundry, so he tries to make a nude run for the basement. Hands cupped to groin, a trail of damp footprints behind him, he gets about three feet down the hall before he sees the master suite door is ajar. Shaker can’t resist the lurid urge. He peers inside. The empty wheelchair is parked in the corner, and Royce is laid in bed. Someone has dressed him in safari pajamas. A herd of stuffed antelope and bovine surround his withered legs. Even so, Shaker senses a nobility about the man, an endurance and pride. He looks ready to star in his own series of gourmet coffee commercials.
Somewhere downstairs, a languid ballad is being played. Shaker follows the music to the garage and finds the woman sitting on a stool. She’s staring helplessly at a ukulele on the workbench, her hands empty, while the soundtrack emerges from an old reel-to-reel unit. Noticing Shaker making puddles in the doorway, she clicks a foot pedal to halt the machine and shoots him a plaintive scowl.
“I think your gondola needs tuning,” Shaker tells her.
“Long ago, I had this idea to make note-for-note re-creations of her entire repertoire. Every song, every album, every outtake. Even her bootleg conversations. Surely, there’d be a niche market for that, too. I could even make up a few lost albums, write them from scratch, and really add to the legacy. But I can’t sing, can’t play. I freeze up in front of microphones. I can’t fake a single lick.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“But everyone knew you were a fraud. That was the charm. Your aloofness. That’s what made it successful kitsch.”
“My dog liked it,” Shaker says.
“Even her rotten new stuff. Blenders, drum machines, car alarms. I can’t get any of it right.”
“She grew up in a suburban manor almost as posh as this, you know,” Shaker says.
“So?”
“First, she copied the rustic trailer-park crap. Then she got bored and started copying the spazzy avant noise crap. She didn’t invent anything. It’s all vaudeville. An act.”
The woman drops the ukulele in a bin filled with assorted percussionry: tambourines, maracas, egg shakers, Hare Krishna finger cymbals. “Of course you’d say that. I can see why she shot you in the chest.”
“The chest-shooting thing was blown way out of proportion.”
“You’re bitter.”
Shaker shrugs, his nudeness hid partially behind the doorjamb.
“Better acoustics inside the house,” he tells her. “The high ceilings. The eighteen square miles of carpeting.”
“But the American garage is a classic trope. It feels more authentically me.”
She follows Shaker’s gaze to the gargantuan SUV, black and glossed and ominously tinted behind her.
“One day, Royce and I are gonna drive down to Argentina. That’s where the real pure sound is made now, deep in the rainforest where white parasites like us can’t reach. Those people are untainted. They still yield to the image, the spectacle, the tropes. I don’t think you would understand that kind of devotion.”
Shaker shrugs again and again.
“Your name is too stupid to say with a straight face. Authority Shaker. My god. How do you manage?”
“I thought I was doing okay,” he mumbles.
“And the nudist act?” she asks. “You’re too good for our towels?”
“I want to lock them in a museum somewhere.”
“Speak to me the way you spoke to her. The same language, the same voice.”
“Isn’t this already me?” Shaker asks.
“I don’t see a scar on your chest.”
“Maybe it never happened.”
“What a stupid-looking chest. I bet you shave it. Do you shave it? You probably shave it.”
The woman chews an indigo fingernail gone pale at the tip. “I will not backslide into your bed.”
“Aren’t all the beds here your bed?” Shaker asks.
She stops snacking on her nails and arranges her fingers into a pistol shape that she points at his hairless breastbone.
“Bull’s-eye,” she says.
*
The basement is a soundless, windowless vault, but Shaker can tell it’s still nighttime on the other side of the dirt and the concrete. He can’t sleep, can’t not sleep. He slips back into his overbleached pants and stinky garbage shirt and wanders the manor like a bored prowler in sock feet. All the shadowy square footage spooks him more than his current bout of insomnia, yet he commits himself to remaining indoors and getting a fix on the situation. He barks himself all o
ver the rich couple’s insubordinate furniture. He returns downstairs. Minutes later, he’s hoofing across the backyard in mud-soaked socks, a stolen maraca in his rear pocket.
Shaker meanders the suburban purgatory of half-finished properties and bare plots. He weaves among abandoned construction equipment, kicking aside the trash left by trespassers: energy drink containers and used condoms, pill vials, ripped underwear. The first house is stark and new, never occupied. The second is a foreclosure with childhood rumpus equipment and a push-mower grazing in the backyard. Shaker pauses at the mower, touches a finger to its cold engine, and awaits an emotional jolt that does not arrive. The next house is a skeletal frame. Shaker stands in what might be the living room area, totally exposed, with an anemic moon looming overhead and his trousers dropped, trying to unleash a hot, smoky piss on the hardwood. Unable to summon any flow at all, he stays rooted in his spot, tool in hand, aiming into the emptiness for what feels like hours.
On his return to the manor, he veers at the gates of the brown and cream Tudor. Only dull light in the windows, no sound, no junky squatters visible. Shaker presses against a side window that has been stripped of curtain and venetian slats. From this angle, he surveys assorted lawn chairs in the kitchen, a patio table with tropical umbrella, an inflatable pool stocked with dead fish. He moves to the next window and is startled by a face staring back: eyes large, hair amok, blubbery mouth. His own insomnia-crazed reflection. He peers past this gristliness into a room lit by television static. Positioned in a beach chair, the only audience for the TV screen’s relentless snow, sits the Minnesotan. His body is pale and attentively upright, utterly distinguished except for the paper sign that is pinned to his sternum: Hello! I’m Stinking Dead! Please Bury Me in the Minnesota I Probably Am Not Even From. The note is secured to his lifeless chest with a spiny puffer fish, like a war medal.
And that’s all Shaker needs to see of the brown and cream Tudor.
