by David Nutt
“You wanna try anything on?” Hob asks.
“I’m sorry?” Shaker replies.
“You working?”
“I am not.”
“Fucking sunglasses,” Hob says.
“I like the mirror ones. They’d look good on you. Like a stuntman. A movie cop.”
Hob shakes his head, folds shut the beach novel in his lap, and gives Shaker a well-rehearsed stink face.
“It will be spring soon,” Shaker says.
“Fancy that.”
“Yes,” says Shaker, the restless transient, starting to smile. “I am fancying it from afar.”
“You bother me, brother.”
“Both of us.” The smile on Shaker’s face is wide enough to wrap around his head until the corners tie together, like strings on a cheap mask. “My phone number has changed. I have my own shower now. Just so you know. I read in the paper Ms. Blaudin died a happy old woman of ninety-four.”
“Heart failure,” says Hob.
“Very sad thing.”
“For most of us.”
“I might be in the market,” says Shaker, flashing a credit card that is not his, “to buy some sunglasses after all.”
*
Shaker cannot smile such benign idiotism at the woman in the kitchen who is taking apart a robust cabbage with a rectangular meat cleaver. Jettisoned food scraps are stuck to the back-splash tile. Her technique is mean and brusque. Shaker holds himself a generous distance away from her whacking arm. The longer he stares at the mutilated vegetable, the more it seems to assume the spoiled features of his own crinkled face. He gulps hard and locates the cutting board, dirtied, in the sink. Just in case he needs to shield himself against any wild swings.
“Such a beautiful head of hair,” she says.
“Mine?”
“That was the first thing I noticed about you. That lush mound. It was only later, much later, that I realized there were eyes-nose-mouth in that pale potato.”
Shaker resists the temptation to reach up and inspect said parts. Then he relents, and indeed the pieces are there. They are still not smiling.
“Sometimes I dream of scalping you,” she says. “Wearing that lush hairpiece on a nice rope around my neck. Along with the shark jaw.”
She smacks the knife downward, bits of greenery spewing everywhere. “Why don’t you wash some dishes?”
“Are those teeth marks?” Shaker mulling the countertop.
“It’s good to keep tabs on the people who adore you so much they may one day murder you.” She grins this while twirling her very large knife. Shaker steps up, steps back.
“You’re feeling unwell,” he says.
“Pardon me, sweetie?”
“I’ll say it again. Just put down the tomahawk.”
The woman sinks the knife into the green mound, ventilating the vegetable, and she shakes her free hands at him. Shaker picks up a dish and runs it under the faucet several times without applying any soap. He’s waiting for the moment to cling, shimmy, become moon-shaped.
“I must be missing something,” he says. “All the great blitzes of yesteryear that went straight up my nose. Damaged the ol’ radar dish.”
She snatches the saucer from him and appears ready to hurl it. “I’ve seen pictures! All the hours you’ve spent secretly gallivanting around that stupid dump with my husband!”
Shaker puckers his expression with such vehemence he can feel his capillaries crack. “Which Tully told you?” he asks.
“I needed to know why Royce comes home smelling like compost.”
“The smell’s not so awful.”
“You realize, of course, you’re making me revise all the wonderful principles I’ve always held about outsider art.”
Shaker blinks but not simultaneously. One eye, the other eye. An unnerving tic for unnerving times.
The woman sets down the dish and is now touching him on his forearm’s juncture, the thinnest, weakest, most Shaker-like part of him. “Play your role. Stay on script. You’re still one of my husbands.”
“Your impotent harem.”
“Yes,” she nods.
“Yes,” he nods, too.
“Shaker.”
“Yes.” He’s still nodding.
“The Shaker I know does not build mysterious things in scummy, ostracized places.” She takes her hands off him and wipes them and cups her breasts, molding a provisional cleavage of that pale-freckled flatness. “Remember this?”
“Don’t be nasty,” says Shaker.
“Sometimes I’m nasty,” she shrugs.
“Then be nastier, much nastier.”
Shaker takes a long, chaste breath and leaves the kitchen as the knife gets going again. In the garage, he suits up, sidestepping the crush of instruments and frayed mic cables on the floor. He observes his funhouse reflection in the SUV’s black paint: a squat, elasticized moonman henpecking his various freedoms and shackles. Shaker gets into the truck and guns it around the culde-sac and main neighborhood road, too depressed to admire all the glorious rubber melt he has left streaked across his blighted half of the hemisphere.
A monotone of gray winter clouds. Sunlight laminates the seams. There isn’t enough brightness to require sunglasses, but Shaker thinks wearing them would improve his mood. Unfortunately, the forty pair he purchased from Hob are sitting in a shoebox under his cot, and his facemask is only vaguely tinted. Shaker tries the radio and tunes in an opera. A male baritone is plundering his diaphragm for a note so low it rattles the vehicle. Shaker steers with his knee, trying to slice the stereo’s EQ. He can’t stomach this much orchestra in the morning. So he roves the dial, only half-listening. He’s more interested in the unusual smell that has followed him from the garage. Shaker clicks off the radio and winces through the sudden windshield glare. Gold everywhere. Cat food, he thinks. The car smells like cat food.
“Driver,” intones a familiar voice from the backseat. “Mind the speed limit, please.”
Shaker struggles to spin round, expecting to see Royce handsomely buckled in his suede chinos and refurbished with speech. But it’s not Royce. Nor is it Thin or Hob or the Howitzer, nor a homeless man in gray monk robes. He’s wearing a ridiculous yellow lounge-lizard suit and a too-short crew cut that almost matches Shaker’s own, an athletic duffel on his lap. Shaker has slowed the SUV to a mild carom. He’s trying to nod hello.
“Jailbird flies free,” Darb says and reaches forward to straighten Shaker’s head towards the road.
“Am I pale?” Shaker asks their glassed reflections. “I feel pale.”
“Sorry if I made you brown the pants of your snowsuit. That would be a shame. Suppose I got a knack for this sneaky stuff. Maybe I could be a private investigator. Keep law and order intact. Wouldn’t that be a reversal?”
There’s no more movement in Shaker’s head. He says nothing. Darb leans forward and whispers into Shaker’s ear, “I said wouldn’t it?”
“Guess so,” replies Shaker.
Satisfied, Darb leans back and continues. “It’d be long hours. Sit in a car. Watch out the window. Pee with your equipment in a pickle jar. This arid weather just parches me, man. But you guys got lots of climate control inside that greenhouse, yeah? The twenty-car garage and so on. Interesting how the tables do turn. Swively tables, I guess. Roulette wheel tables.”
“Darb—”
Darb looks off, a whittled silhouette in the backseat. “Don’t wanna know the details. I have no yen for gossip. Or polygamy. I respect the integrity of other folks’ homesteads, unlike some people who I am tempted to slap in the back of the head.”
“Just blasted limestone up there,” Shaker says.
“Shitsky,” Darb grumbles, racking his duffel’s zipper. “Maybe a noogie or two at the next traffic signal would suffice.”
Shaker ignores the road and peers past his own ashen reflection in the rearview mirror. Rather than pale, his cousin appears reddened, wind-lashed, abraded.
“Glad you’re out,” Shaker says.
“Out?”
“Prison.”
“Oh, that. Had an overcrowding situation. They unleashed me the weekend before Turkey Day. I spent my holiday on a Greyhound aimed for Tuscaloosa, but I gave up somewheres in Kentucky. That woman.” He trails off. “Kentucky is the pits.”
“That was two months ago.”
“You got yourself a calendar? That’s good. Learn your presidential birthdays.”
“My point—”
“A man need not explain his every furlough.”
“I’ll grant you that one.”
“How fucking kind. Charity from a snowflake.”
The anxious zippering ceases. Darb has removed a tin of cat food, peeled its aluminum seal, and begun to snack. “I seen the ugly crater where you used to have a house,” he says while chewing.
“Bulldozed.”
“Least they did a smooth job. When life hands you wrecking balls, etceteras. I mean, just look at you playing nursemaid to a hooker and her beautiful gimp. I am big with awe.”
“Interpretive dancer,” Shaker corrects him. “Of sorts.”
Darb shrugs and licks the rim of his tin. “You found a way to navigate your confused affairs, good for you and your affairs. Me? I am maintaining. There is a straight road, and I intend to cling. Speaking of roads, you’re about to run us off this one.”
Shaker swerves. The vehicle resumes a safe channel in the single lane. Darb snickers in the backseat, reaches an arm up, and clamps it ruggedly on Shaker’s shoulder.
“Us bozos,” he says and squeezes.
But he doesn’t ask the questions Shaker expects him to ask, not about the hazmat or the secluded landfill or the monument itself: rigged upright and unharmed, very complete, on account of Shaker perfecting the garbage-to-chicken-wire ratio. Also, all that Super Glue. Shaker’s daily habit is to circle the monument like a disoriented animal, obsessively searching out cracks and crumbles and deficiencies in posture, pasting things. But today, he stands with Darb at the clearing’s cusp, peering instead at his cousin. Darb and his red face are motionless. He’s not even looking at the monument, Shaker realizes, not the whole length at least. Only the top, the crowning piece, the item de résistance. Mort’s gasmask. Shaker has wondered for weeks if the mask was too sentimental, a dubious taste. But Darb doesn’t object. He doesn’t say anything. Instead, he wraps an arm around Shaker and taps his tongue on the ridge of his dentures. The sound inside him is clean, abrupt.
“That’s classic,” Darb says and climbs back in the car.
*
They are soberly carousing the streets on a breeze-flattened Monday evening. Darb has declined even an innocent prune-and-piss juice at the Beagle, insisting he wants to hold to his current teetotaler streak. Four months and thirteen days. He won’t enter bars or stroll the beer aisle at the grocery mart or make sarcastic jabs about the sleek liquor advertisements pasted outside the local preschool. He says he passes up the fake wine in church, and the word church surprises Shaker. It sounds so fraught, so brittle in his cousin’s mouth. Darb’s mind is uncluttered, and Shaker has no argument here. So they drive. Sternly at first, but soon the old giddiness creeps in. Shaker honks the car horn at unsuspecting pedestrians. Each man has his window low and an arm out, finning the night air. Darb’s seat is reclined to such an angle his kneecaps are level with his baldness. Shaker notes the Italian loafers on his cousin’s feet. Imitations probably. The leisure suit makes Darb look like a giant, festering banana. Darb catches Shaker’s expression and matches its vexation.
“That’s a whole lot of yellow to drape on one man,” Shaker says.
“Ain’t it? I was standing at a bus depot in Pennsyltucky with my bag and my new haircut, looking at the departures board. And I really zeroed in on that word. Departures. It scared me to shit. Kinda obvious why. Then I turned around and saw a shoeshine gentleman in this outrageous suit, and I gave him all my money. Two hundred total. Now here I am, looking like a big, gay daffodil. It opens me up wide, the way my addictions used to. I am nude, an open target, ready before God. I dunno. That makes me feel more scrupulously loved.”
“Both of us,” Shaker says, “look like we’re dressed for trick-or-treating.”
Darb shifts against the upholstery in a fetal crouch and howls. The laughter is ribald, convulsive. The joke, Shaker thinks, was not so funny. It wasn’t even a joke. The laughter disintegrates, and Darb uprights his seat with a long sigh. “They don’t let you laugh like that on Trailways.”
“I thought you took Greyhound.”
“Pull over,” he says.
“Here?”
“Pull over!” Darb shouts.
It’s the shadier backend of Main Road. Porn shacks and tackle shops where the franchises have all failed. An ice cream truck, box-shaped and officiously white, is steel-booted alongside a fire hydrant, a wad of traffic citations tucked in the wiper blade. Marooned, it looks. The Frosty Brain Freeze and Sundae Bloody Sundae decals have been slandered with gangland graffiti. An outbreak of ivy rises up the grille. Darb gets out and walks between the two trucks, a pained blankness on his face. Something inside him is roiling. He looks to Shaker for an answer. Shaker shrugs.
Darb can’t return his attention to the ice cream truck. He’s squirming in his suit, plagued by some kind of unbearable itch, and that’s how Shaker sees them. Across each wrist a recent, deliberate pink slash. Suicide souvenirs. Shaker looks up, looks away. Darb is still addressing him with the red bulb of his head, his features rabbled together. He stops grappling with himself. He sighs and buttons his coat. The scarred wrists slink back up his tacky sleeves.
“Just a truck,” Darb says, as if stopping had been Shaker’s idea all along.
Returned to their vehicle and carousing slower now, neither man speaks. The aimless patrol continues without incident. Darb asks to be dropped at his old apartment, and Shaker complies. He doesn’t think to inquire whether his cousin is living there or not.
*
The woman is on the sofa in garters and nylons, leg slung over the arm ledge with crumpled dollars crammed into her dark pleats, as the hi-fi plays at a discreet volume. One of Shaker’s ex-wife’s feather boas lies athwart the coffee table. The ottoman holds a tiara. All the furniture, in fact, seems to be frozen in rival states of stupefaction, Shaker included. She scissors her legs wide and provides him an ample view. The most retort he can manage involves tensing his lips into a shrewd aperture, too small to speak. He’s pretty sure the crumpled dollars are board game currency. The boa looks feral. Meanwhile, the stereo on the other side of the room isn’t playing actual music, just soft tides of static. Shaker takes a step and his hazmat makes the most stupid-sounding crinkle. He tries to pause his breathing, attempt a tepid hello, but the woman snaps a garter. Shaker’s internal machinery collapses in a pile of hooks and nails and crusted glue.
“Busy night?” she asks.
“Not until now.”
“I wiggled across several miles of dirty stage, volcanic rubble, picnic tables, ocean floor. A few dozen men put their eyes inside me where their grubby fingers and gold bullion cannot reach. I starve myself without end or goal. I try to look my best. These are the dream songs of the sexually ineffectual.”
“You want to fuck me by not fucking me.”
“Not you. Everyone. Everything. The mass is always more manageable than the poor, single, lonely soul at the other end of the telescope.”
“I had a visitor today.”
“I saw,” she says. “I was only a few steps behind you with my cabbage aimed. I wanted to launch it at your head, cannonball style.”
“That’s sort of beautiful,” Shaker whispers.
“Should I break out the blow darts?”
“He’s harmless.”
“I’m not,” she spits.
“You’re bored with the fiefdom.”
“Come here and say that to my angry little—”
“Vagina,” Shaker blurts. “Vagina, vagina, vagina.”
&
nbsp; He reaches out and steadies himself on a lava lamp that is providing most of the mood lighting for the current inquisition.
“You don’t like my vamping. You don’t like my death threats. What does a girl have to do to get a little mastery of the situation? And don’t say penis hickeys.”
Shaker lets go the lamp, looking at her, lightheaded and cross-eyed.
“Do something,” he says.
“Me or you?”
“Either. Both. Garters optional.”
“You survived so long without me.”
“Stop.”
“You pretended I didn’t exist after I left.”
“Don’t.”
“Tell me how much you missed me. How needy you became, how jaded, how dismal. Itemize all the wonderful ways I destroyed your life, and then sit back and relax and let me lick the gloom out of you like Oreo filling.”
Shaker mumbles something barely audible, something unlike any English he’s ever heard or tried to speak. Perhaps he’s turned feral, too. And not only him. The woman is curled into a small nylon ball, writhing around under the lace and dangling hasps, as she rubs herself with a lackadaisical hand.
A distant voice, muffled in couch cushion, asks: “Is this real enough for you?”
But Shaker can’t answer because he is already lunging against the sofa bolster where her ass is arched. After wrestling off the hazmat and stretching aside the panty silk, he inaugurates the lovemaking act with a bravado that seems utterly external to him. His face fills with stunned absorption, his vision blearily trained on the back of her downturned head. The room seems to pivot around them, as if on castors. She’s rocking along to a languorous tempo that Shaker can’t exactly locate. Every object and surface is glinting up at him warily. Shaker, the lucky stud, manages two and a half chivalrous thrusts before he clenches, stammers, coughs an apology, and prematurely leaks what feels like a gallon’s worth of his genetic soup down her backside. She moans and pushes her cold bottom against him, her flesh goose-pimpled, rose-blotched. Without realizing it, Shaker has already detached. He palms his face, sweeps back his greasy bangs, and glances helplessly around the room, hoping to regain armature, any armature. Mostly, he tries not to feel so glum about the milky dribble that has gathered in the grooves of the couch’s crimped upholstery.
