by David Nutt
“Are those mutton chops absolutely necessary?” she asks over her shoulder.
“Huh?”
“The things on your face. Your sideburns.”
“Right,” he replies, touching them with an exploratory thumb. “Those.”
He shakes off his undershirt and hands it to her. Rather than wipe her thighs, she snuggles the fabric to her face, whiffing deeply.
“Is that how it always was with her?”
“More or less,” Shaker says, bashful, still chugging breath. “Usually less.”
The woman flattens herself upon the couch’s contoured leather.
“I bet she doesn’t even know,” she says, dropping the item of clothing and reaching back to grab the muscle flab on his leg, squeezing and releasing this, too. “Now please don’t touch me ever again.”
*
Days after, while shoveling the snow that has drifted up the driveway in waves, like rolls of frozen surf, Shaker entertains the prospect of inviting Darb and his garish suit to come live at Agog Manor. He fantasizes about the cousins bunking beds, sharing dental floss, donning matching jammies, glomming onto each other like old times. One more husband for the woman to rehearse her precarious wifery upon. But Darb could already be gone, too, seated on another interstate bus bound for Tuscaloosa, Florida, Bowling Green. Shaker has his qualms. He only wants to keep at his work. The shoveling and salting duties occupy his body in a way that assuages as much as it exhausts. His attention is directed in troughs and vectors and distinct points. The Tullys soon arrive with fresh chains on their tires and a new task. A popular youth center has turned inferno. Shaker rides hump in silence, a respectful passenger, cautiously chewing the crusted chap off his lip.
There isn’t much youth center left. The rumpus mats and alphabet blocks and lending library are melted into the snow, splotchy colorful stains that look like poker chips scattered from afar. Shaker sweeps it all into a pile with his foot while the Brothers pick clean the only surviving artifacts. Hamster wheel. Hamster hammock. Hamster condominium with aboveground hamster pool. The hamsters and their swank habitats are going to outlast us all, Shaker thinks, and for the first time in weeks he feels halfway hopeful.
The men bucket the rainbow silt and drive to their landfill. The sky has started snowing again, loosely. The stray flakes feel moist upon Shaker’s forehead as he stands in the shadow of his monument, gazing upwards, realizing after several minutes’ consideration that the monument is intact, perfectly preserved in this long and dreary weather, but Mort’s gasmask is missing.
14.
Most days, Shaker finds the woman in the kitchen, where she has hauled along most of the garage. Broken guitars, shattered maracas, an old Fender Tweed ripped apart, mid-autopsy. All this equipment she has begun to clinically dismantle in knots and sections and curly strands. Shaker observes the massacre from the breakfast nook, a UN peacekeeper keeping uneasy watch over a war-trounced and blood-caked land, afraid of criticizing the local voodoo. Royce has been wheeled to the window with a look of utmost blissfulness. The recorded yodeling has paused. An electric accordion is disemboweled across the counter, and the woman loosens its mechanical guts from the steel box frame. She digs her free arm back into the amp. She’s been at this horror show for hours.
“This mean you’ve killed the bluegrass, too?” Shaker asks.
“You’d like that.”
“Royce agrees with me.”
“I have a process,” she says. “A whole theoretical scaffolding, and a scaffolding for that scaffolding. You’re too much a prude to try to understand it. Any of it.”
“I woke this morning to the sound of slave spirituals and sea shanties.”
Ohms, amperage, voltage, impedance, whatever she’s trying to undo, she drops it in a pile.
“Selfhood is the ultimate tyranny, the ultimate oppression. You need to break it apart to see the bigger patterns at play. Destruction, then doubt. Mystery, then pilgrimage. Eventually, that leads to rebirth. That’s the whole cycle, the chain.”
“You’re regressing,” Shaker says.
“She ventured forth into noise and abstraction and the avant-garde? I’m working my way backwards through the influences and rudiments, seeking the original source, the source of her. And that starts with the end of all this, this, this…material.”
Shaker hoists his beverage cooler.
“You’re taking Royce on a picnic,” she says.
“Just myself. He looks so happy there at the window, now that the Viking throat-singing has been eradicated.”
“You think my work is silly. Silly and sad and relentlessly pathetic.”
“Some ancient cultures believe that accordion is an aphrodisiac,” Shaker says, edging up beside her.
“Oh yeah? Well, I heard the best singers in the world are castratos. Where’s my knife?”
She lifts the steel box into the crook of her arm and taps its keys. The chord is fumbled and ugly, but Shaker can hear it. A wheezing, medieval sound.
Shaker trudges off toward the garage, nervously adjusting the crotch of his pants.
*
Triple-stack pb&j sandwich, pecan cookies with brown sugar glaze, coffee in thermos, two cans of cat food. The cooler is packed. Shaker has even brought along a portable space heater from the basement, plus a hundred feet of extension cord, in case his cousin is living in a teepee or ice-fishing shack. But Darb isn’t outside his old apartment as Shaker had assumed. No recreational campers or indigenous refugees in tents, no displaced bachelors hibernating on the yard. The yard is empty. Shaker heads for Darb’s disaster site and doesn’t find a tent or shack, either, only the thing. Shaker isn’t sure what else to call it. He thinks of it only as the thing, a manifest presence, the same way a sunblind beachgoer looks across the Atlantic Ocean and muddily announces: France.
The structure sits just beyond the house’s blackened foundation, a semi-sphere shape twenty feet across and only partway built, nude frame. The exoskeleton of an igloo? Bio-dome greenhouse? Latticed mushroom cap? Shaker can’t tell if the thing is a shelter or obstruction or standalone art piece. Is his cousin sleeping in that?
Shaker nears the structure with a slow-footed gait, his hands in his pockets and a fake smile seared into his face. Darb is still wearing the daffodil suit. His head is hidden inside a welder’s mask, and he’s taking a blowtorch to the structure’s crisscrossed beams and gaps, all jointed into mass. The thing needs reinforcing, Shaker knows. There are snowdrifts to contend with, vain gravities, heavy weathers. He stands beside Darb, nodding his head rotely, his tongue a strained scrap of muscle folded neat inside his mouth.
“Work in progress,” Darb says and snuffs the torch. “The base was a bitch-and-a-half, but that is what happens when you forsake blueprints and go at a vision freehand.”
“Looks like a…a…” Shaker is low on the ground, peering upward, trying to find a revelatory angle. He stands and scratches his head.
“Geodesic dome,” explains Darb.
“Okay,” Shaker says. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Just what it seems like.”
“Aluminized Swiss cheese?”
“Yeah, that’s a funny comparison.”
“There is a distinct odor.”
“I learned about them from Mort. Details are still a mite sketchy, but the dome’s the real dream. Had to make it a sensible scale, of course.”
“It’s the metalwork,” Shaker says, sniffing. “The material.”
“Cat food tins. I melt them and weld them. My recyclables.”
He indicates the abundance of trash bags heaped in a pyramid beside the backup propane tank, the tape measure and yardstick, a wrench collection outspread in the snow. Shaker recognizes the wrenches as his own but doesn’t mention it.
“You can never have too many monuments, I guess.”
“He was my boy,” Darb replies stiffly.
He resets his jaw, dentures aligned, and resumes the blowtorch. “Still deciding the bes
t way to present it for public viewing. If it needs some kind of backdrop or maybe a spotlight or type of gala. A geodesic dome, people usually go gaga for the spectacle.”
Shaker doesn’t mention the missing mask, either. He doesn’t offer a sandwich nibble, or nip of lukewarm coffee, or the heat packets he brought in bulk. Instead, he clears his throat and gets a good, strong voice going. “Ya know what? I should probably head home. My auto-harp needs a vasectomy.”
*
The problem is Shaker did better work than he thought. The monument’s summit is several layers of drywall long-screwed into a masonry of enamel and aluminum and pyrite and plank, all cauterized like a wound and buttressed with surplus wire. He has to hack apart the stack with a canoe oar. With pliers, he peels away the chicken wire and employs a saber saw to decapitate the monument peak, which he tarps and sets aside for future use like the top tier of a wedding cake. Then he begins his usual build, keenly aware he previously scavenged the best articles. And so Shaker finds himself groveling around subzero February with shovel and hammer, prying loose sloughed polymer wherever he can find it. He thinks of childhood stories that involved buried riches and the rollicking escapades of lone men on desert islands, eccentric pensioners and beachcombers with metal detectors, all castaways of some sort. Shaker is not sure where he fits in the lineage, if he has some alternate pedigree, or maybe no pedigree at all. He continues until dusk and somehow manages to add sixteen inches to the spine. Because any additional height also requires additional width, Shaker starts pulling off more and more chicken wire, slow and then recklessly, causing fifteen and a half erect feet of alloyed trash to come toppling down on him, pinning his limbs to a small parcel of petrified landfill for the next thirty-six hours.
*
When the Tullys stumble across him, Shaker has turned an unsavory blue color and is subsisting on a single rationed cookie that his teeth are too numb to chew. He’s basically just sucking the glaze for sustenance. Trapped under six hundred pounds of crumbled monument, his blood circulation continues unabated thanks to the disposable heat packets that line his parka. Shaker has only to repeatedly punch himself in the chest to activate their warmth. The cold-induced dementia has added several coats of permafrost to his brain, a brain that can now only communicate with itself in crude burps and jumbled lullabies. The space heater never made it out of the car. The heat packets are burning him severely. Shaker’s self-pugilism may have fractured a rib.
The Tullys approach the accident scene with their arms full of sacked dross they came to deploy. They arch over Shaker, scanning him for any last twinklings of life.
“I think I see France,” Shaker tells them before lapsing into a calm and restful coma.
*
Shaker wakes in bed under an avalanche of steaming towels. A Tully sits on each side of him, and a woman who resembles his ex-wife is warming his toe knuckles with a curling iron. Her handsome stroke-victim husband sits in a wheelchair at the window, making soft swishing sounds with his lips. Royce seems to be on the brink of imparting some vital intelligence that Shaker is not yet ready to hear. Shaker tries to sit up, but the hot towels scald him. The notches in his spine are fused together, one stolid slab. He relaxes under the weight of all this mollycoddled recovery and remarks to the Tully on his left, “My cauliflower is burning.”
“Oh god,” the woman moans. “I don’t think I can handle another vegetable at the breakfast table.”
“Breakfast,” Shaker says. “Sounds lovely.”
“Stay still.”
“An act of sabotage,” he tells them. “I saw it in a vision. Somebody loosened the rivets on my stump. My stack.”
“I understand that he has always been a little drug-damaged,” she says. “But will the idiot live?”
The Tullys stare at Shaker, then nod at each other and nod at the woman, who returns the nod and presses the curling iron against the tender undersides of Shaker’s feet. The room fills with the smell of barbecued flesh. Shaker yelps and she unplugs the torture device.
“That’s better,” she says and walks out.
Shaker is adapting nicely to the hot towels that wrap his throat, his torso, his arms. The Tullys, for their part, stare past the roasting cocoon to the small parts of landfill slag that Shaker hugged all the way into this bed.
“Bury me with it,” says Shaker.
The Tullys sigh and depart the room. Shaker is alone with Royce, and Royce is snoring beatifically in his chair.
Springtime is almost upon them.
*
But it’s another month before the warmness returns to the corn-belt latitudes. By that point, Shaker is prepared. The chargrilled patches on his feet have healed. He’s plucked his overgrown eyebrows, expunged the lint from his navel, and filed his canine fangs down to inoffensive nubs.
“The good news is I got my old machine back,” he tells her. “Part-time. Afternoons only. Once again, I am riding the Waring blender. I should still be available to take Royce to his tap dance lessons.”
Shaker can’t read the woman’s reaction. She has a pair of swim goggles stretched around the top half of her face and a red-checker bandanna curtaining the rest. The kitchen has been transformed by a moody chiaroscuro of dark smoke and skewed lighting, her experimental destruction having expanded to include all the plumbing and cabinetry and electric in the walls. She stands amid the puddled water and broken pipes, scrutinizing the tendril of torn cable in her hand, shaking her head dismissively. Shaker steps forward and tries to repeat his sentence, realizing too late that her ears are plugged, too. She hasn’t been listening to him at all.
She hasn’t been wearing much clothing, either, not while she conducts this domestic mayhem, no makeup or jewelry or psychedelic skin paint. Just an ordinary nude body balkanized by uneven tan lines and cellulite dents. Shaker wants to avoid leering, although he respectfully notes she has continued to groom her pubic region into delightful topiary patterns. Once he’s recovered the sensation in his nerves, he undertakes an adolescent odyssey of rampant self-abuse in all the unused and undemolished rooms of the manor. In this way, he steels his resolve and continues to concentrate on his own ludicrous project. He has secretly mailed the town planning board about zoning and height variances but received no response.
Springtime brings the usual up-tick in combustions. The Tullys are making daily deposits at the landfill, bringing so much exploded wreckage that Shaker benefits from all sorts of novel finds. He upgrades wire brands, epoxies, a more aerodynamic selection of trash. He finds a few more arrowheads and involves them in the construction. A rim of refuse now borders the flat range, blockading it from the natural elements. Shaker is slowly starting to understand the location suffers from rotten drainage, so he rigs a sump-pump around the monument’s base that ultimately malfunctions and nourishes a bloated moat. He fashions a canopy of patio parasols above an antique wicker chair to keep Royce cool and dry in case the gray gentleman is ever again smuggled back to the site. Here Shaker sometimes sits with an Instamatic camera, documenting the monument’s new expansion. Twenty-five feet tall. He thinks he can reach forty. The photographs he stashes under his cot at home, like some shameful clump of sticky porno pages. He tells the woman he’s thinking of growing a beard to go with all the new hair on his palms.
*
They continue to come humping over the hills, a dozen homeless men in their rag tatters and trash sack ponchos, heads hooded, only the grayness of their gray hands and gray chins and gray chin stubble protruding. From Shaker’s high angle, it almost appears they have risen intact from the garbage acreage itself. Nearer and nearer, they sway as they walk, a martial formation that somehow moves across the rough terrain without the tentative stepping and clumsy footholds that signal even a seasoned rubbish-strider like Shaker. He pauses his chainsaw, which he had been using to symmetrize the northwest corner after he accidentally took off too much on the opposite side. He dismounts the ladder and waits for them to clear the garbage barrier, the hom
eless men swaying and walking and swaying, a circle around his circle. Shaker is almost hypnotized by the procession. He shoulders the chainsaw with a rope sling and uses a deformed pool ladle to pole-vault himself over the moat, overshoots his mark, and crashes into a pair of men at the end of their train. The men go down, rise immediately, and continue their slow trek. Shaker has difficulty getting to his feet, burdened as he is with the chainsaw on his shoulder and a second and third chainsaw tied to each leg.
“Beautiful day!” he shouts after them. “I took my dog for a walk this morning! Sunshine out the goddamn wazoo!”
The rain continues to come down on him in razors and clots.
*
The bones of the manor seem to be shifting around in congress with the clamor. Up in the third-floor attic, Shaker is idly harvesting pieces of insulation fluff from the walls, a superior brand of firing-range earmuffs clamped on his head. But he can still feel the breakage downstairs, which has achieved a kind of steady tribal rhythm. THUMP, thump, thump, thump, THUMP, thump, thump, thump. The woman has abandoned medieval nostalgia for the Paleolithic period. These must be the primal stirrings of early earth, Shaker thinks, a music forged in mountain caverns and desolate plains, drummed on tanned skins, splintered skulls. Although that does not explain the wailing smoke alarm. Royce is dressed in Shaker’s hazmat, his head turbaned with a towel, shins and wrists strapped to his wheelchair so the vibrations do not spill him. Shaker makes sure the fastenings are still secure, and then he wends his way downstairs, carefully avoiding the ruck of fallen sheetrock and broken plaster and twisted pipe, a cat’s cradle of black cables disgorged from a ceiling tile.
She is sitting inside a circle of candles with her legs folded, a sledgehammer in her lap. A pagan meditation of sorts. The walls around her are punctured with dozens and dozens of holes.
