by David Nutt
“Never mind.”
“We can score the cat food later,” Darb explains, his red face growing redder. “It ain’t going anywhere.”
The elderly cashier is halfway through the inventory before he looks up and greets them. Darb is bent down, muzzily searching the candy case in their aisle. He grabs a chocolate bar and slams it on the conveyor belt, jolting the rubber off its track. The cashier apologizes and rings for his supervisor. Darb tries to speak, but he is sobbing too hard, gut-punched by some swift and inexplicable grief.
The cashier tries to marshal the chubby skin of his face into something that resembles a smile. “Any coupons today?”
But Darb is weeping hysterically, humpbacked, janking his arms. Shaker digs around his pockets to find a tissue or hanky. But all he has on his person are two solder guns filched from the manor, plus his halitosis and a dire case of dry scalp.
The old man swipes them through with such urgency he fails to ring up a few jars of baby food. Shaker pays with cash that he also filched from the manor and includes an ample tip. Then he hurriedly shoves Darb and Darb’s overloaded baskets out the mechanical doors. Once they reach the parking lot, Shaker looks back and sees the cashier in animated conversation with the teenage manager. Shaker is trying to read their lips when he’s pegged in the snout with a packet of dairy creamer.
“I love you, cousin. More than I love these fucking snacks. You know that, right?”
Darb is squinting through the tears and slush, holding a handful of packets, winding up for another throw. This one Shaker dodges with a skillful pirouette. The next packet grazes Shaker’s cheek. Darb dumps the armload and goes for the baby food.
“The glass—” Shaker says.
The carrot-cream goulash explodes at Shaker’s feet. Shaker takes a big step to avoid the shatter, tripping over his bootlaces, and lands with a fartish smack.
Darb breaks a few more jars and asks, “Truce?” while leaning over Shaker with a bottle of salad dressing in each fist, several saliva bubbles bursting on his lips.
Shaker thinks it over.
“Nah,” he replies and gets to his feet. The fresh pavement is sticky with colorful pastes, spurts, abstract arcs, crumbed glass.
“Already had most of this stuff at the camp anyway,” Darb shrugs, cellophane crunching under his knockoff Italian loafers. “Really, I just wanted the quality time.”
He walks off into traffic without his groceries, leaving a trail of gummy footprints behind him and Shaker standing there, still nodding, wondering where all the pavers of the republic get parked at night.
*
Maybe it is the sunlit morning or the songbirds refusing to surrender their station in the trees, or the sight of Royce chewing his cold leftover manicotti with an air of benediction, but the dark mood lifts. Shaker stops by the bakery for two dozen bagels and a sampler cup of cream cheese. He also buys a round of iced coffees, which the counter girl wedges into a polystyrene tray that Shaker giddily carries out to the truck, palm-up, like a trained waiter. It is almost nine o’clock. The miniature metropolis of warehouses and storage sheds, aluminum rooftops and rusted facades, has filled with workers and cars. Shaker parks the truck on the grassy shoulder of the maintenance road and carries the boxed bagels and coffee tray to the shed where his former coworkers are divvying up their equipment and holstering tools in belts. Shaker sees the tarp that hugs the bulky shape of his old machine. He tries to bravely ignore the wistful thaw in his chest. Hob is on a foldable chair, fastening bike clips to his pant cuffs. Before Shaker can reach him, he’s blocked by an arm and almost spills breakfast.
“Back from the dead,” says Thin, his gaunt features thrust up in Shaker’s face. The man has lost teeth and hair, and his skull bone structure is more pronounced. His eyeballs, jittery and rodentesque, are shaking in the arctic caves of their sockets.
“Temporarily,” Shaker says.
“You found better work.”
“A benefactor. A patron saint. Probably temporary, too.”
“This winter was a long one.”
“Yes,” Shaker replies.
“At least you had a royal palace to hole up in.”
Even though he amounts to little more than a semi-verbal cadaver, Thin still manages to block the alley path. A few icy drips of coffee bead down Shaker’s wrist.
“We seen you in that neighborhood,” Thin hisses. “Don’t get fucking caught or you’ll ruin it for the rest of us. Land of the free and the freeloader and so on.”
Shaker adjusts Land of his hold on the tray, only growing heavier in his one arm.
Thin blows a breeze of coffin breath. “Some pals of ours had a party. Brown-and-cream-type castle. A real rager, man. Things got crazy in a sad, sad way. A Good Samaritan came along and cleaned that party mostly up. Unfortunately, we are left to wonder about his intentions and why he still left a lot of fucking evidence just sorta lying around. Evidence that sits there to this day ‘cause certain parties cannot exactly waltz back in there with fancy schmancy hazmats and a kooky whore who wears a wig.”
Shaker winces at the man’s egregious mouth decay. He isn’t sure if he should nod or not nod, so he makes a confused compromise and tries neither, both.
“Maybe that party is ready to get started again,” Thin smiles and steps aside, “now that our pal Shaky is on the neighborhood watch.”
Hob is seated on the flatbed, hooking a new mulch bag on the mower. His goatee has been pruned into a handlebar arch that makes his lips seem smaller, bedeviled. He finishes securing the bag and tilts his mirror sunglasses so that he can stare down the bridge of his knurly nose, Shaker in the crosshairs.
“Breakfast?” Shaker sidearms a bagel at Hob.
With a deft wrist flick, Hob swats the food to the ground. “Dude, you don’t even work here! I rehired your shabby ass, and you never showed up!”
“Been busy,” Shaker says. “Charity work.”
“So this is your idea of amends?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You are a fucking prick,” Hob says.
“Don’t you miss the banter?”
“I do not.”
“I’m not really big on the amends scene.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“I don’t really like bagels, either,” Shaker says, staring down at his stupid tray. He grabs another and lobs it at the wall of the tin shack, where it sticks in place, an unsightly furuncle, baked fresh and already rotting.
On the drive home, he sees her standing on the roadside of the industrial park. She’s dressed in a familiar skirt, scrimpy and immodest, a baggy cutoff tank top that exhibits a lot of midriff, her augmentations. Shaker, a little wracked, stops near the corner. At a distance, he watches her hop from truck to truck. The drivers all display the same vacant look, mechanical and bored, as she tucks the money away and ties up her lush piles of possibly fake hair.
Maybe she’s just selling them some greenhouse contraband, he tells himself, speeding away.
*
Shaker has to triple-check the address on the mailbox to confirm this is, in fact, the house. The mud plot that once held his half has been successfully reseeded and regrassed. The northeastern side of the structure, shorn by bulldozer, has been professionally repaired. There is no trace of damage or renovation on the home or its yard or the bordering street, at least not that Shaker can observe. It’s almost as if Shaker never lived there at all.
The only new detail is on the side yard. A young man is laid horizontal on an outdoor massage table, bench-pressing a rod hung with paint pails. The pails are full of phonebooks. The kid is counting his reps aloud while some feet away the Hooster girl reclines in an old deck chair, broodily scrolling through her phone, refusing to watch him. She looks miserable, half-frittered. The kid sits up, kisses his bicep, and guzzles an orange energy drink mixed in a vodka bottle. Shaker, parked in the truck across the street, tries to salute the shirtless lothario. The kid sees him and flicks a middle finger in response.
Shaker drives off before the Hooster girl has a chance to look up.
*
The rest of the day, he dangles twenty feet off the ground via homemade harness and pulley system, burnishing the monument’s haunches with fine-grit sandpaper. His arm has gone numb from so much incessant rubbing. Also, at this elevation, his nosebleeds return. The gore seems to be flooding from every artery, inlet, and nook. Twin knots of tissue are twisted from his nostrils. As they reach peak saturation, Shaker pulls them out of his face and wads them into the monument’s fissures, like jelly filling in a donut.
Later, he rappels down his rope and lands on the new base, a granite slab he permanently borrowed from a Revolutionary War memorial down the road. Shaker glances around. He has nothing left to sand, so he packs up the truck and unpacks it and repacks it. A distant pinhole of sunlight continues to illuminate him despite his sincerest pleas and gripes.
Over on a distant hill of trash, a tall stranger with a scalloped haircut is watching him.
*
The microphone is hung from the chandelier, a second one slotted between stair rails, the third and fourth angled across the foyer tile, and another in the drooping begonia petals. The woman hunkers over the tape machine, her finger raised to her lips, shushing Shaker, who stands mid-foyer in a condition of near-pious confusion. She closes her eyes and bobs her head in absolute silence. She checks her watch. She holds high her arm, as if conducting a symphony’s concluding note, and then she clicks off the tape machine and pries the padded headphones from her ears. They are sweat-suctioned to the sides of her head.
“You’re really going at this silence thing in a heavy way.”
She doesn’t speak, just stands there squishing the headphones together like a moist concertina. The actual concertina is wedged under a stack of rack-mounted preamps, propping them up.
“Steak tonight?” Shaker hefts the grocery sack.
“I’m fasting.”
“Royce?”
“Only if you purée it.”
“I can handle that.”
“Wonderful.”
“There’s a strange man standing on the lawn,” Shaker says. He points out the foyer window to the tall, mop-headed gentleman in flannel shirt and denim pants, spoked upright on the fake sod. “He’s been trailing me all week.”
“That’s Spall,” she says, barely looking.
“An old flame?”
“Of course.”
“Why is he following me?”
“Well, it makes sense in a way.” Her face retains its blanched beauty, sweet and elliptical, with all the expressiveness of a vacuum cleaner dressed in an Amish frock. “He’s my Shaker.”
“I thought I was your Shaker.”
“That’s a laugh.”
“Royce?”
“Royce is my Royce. The one and only. But you Shakers are pretty much ubiquitous.”
Shaker nods. “He seems a nut job.”
“He’d have to be.”
She shakes off the drapery of cords and equipment and presses her face so close to the pane, she practically merges with her opaque reflection. When she turns back around, she indulges him with a sympathetic pout. “Don’t be sore.”
He kicks a foot through the snaked cables, the sprawly space. “I’m starting to miss the banjo yodels, that’s all.”
“The world begins in silence, the world ends in silence. There is symmetry, a natural shape. Full circle. As a concept, it works for me. But the acoustics in here really fucking blow. I mean, seriously? This silence absolutely sucks.”
“What kind of name is Spall anyway?” Shaker asks, already up the stairs and through the hall and motionless under the shower nozzle, a thousand cold noodles of rain.
16.
Spall is razing a dark footpath around the backyard, white shirt stained mustard, greasy bangs weighing in his face. The ground under his boots has cracked apart like hard cookie. Shaker occupies the greenhouse, which enables him to surveil in all directions. The woman is visible in the manor window with her microphone upraised. For days, she has been busy interrogating the cobwebs that have begun to thicken in baroque snowflake designs in all their overlit corners. She’s shunning song, shunning speech. Royce has been wheeled to the dinner table to rest among the other diminished vegetation. Even he seems a bit pestered by the petty zealotries that are coopting their daily lives and annexing their house.
Shaker bends his attention back to Spall. The pacer is staying in his circuit. He pauses, realigns his feet, reverses course. Shaker is reminded of the homeless men who still mill around the monument at irregular intervals. As an awkward adolescent, Shaker never had the people skills to join the social clubs, the teams, the allegiances. He never had the people. Now he has his own cabal of wayward marauders, a whole tribe, plus the one straggler. The responsibility may be too much. Shaker is tracing the man’s movements with the business end of an antique Winchester replica he found under a pile of anthropology textbooks in a closet upstairs. Sighting down the barrel, he feels all the blood in his body coagulating in his trigger finger. Malignant cells. Unrepentant plasmas. All the small libels of the soul.
An hour later, they try dinner. They try to try it. Royce will not accept the paste that the woman has mashed mortar-and-pestle style in a Stone Age crock. His facial stubble has reached whisker proportions, so Shaker leans across the table to give the man a quick trim with his butter knife, and nobody stops him. Disappointed, he rescinds the offer. Dinner decorum persists. The woman is a day and a half into a hunger strike of her own. The only fluid she is willing to ingest without force or intravenous assistance is sugar water, which Shaker didn’t even realize was a legitimate beverage. Her stomach grouses so loudly throughout the meal, he says it deserves its own placemat and bib. Then he goes back to glaring at his plate of underdone sirloin as if it was hacked from his own hip. They have exhausted their supply of canned yams and canned tuna and canned spam, and yet nobody finds this a topic worthy of regard. They’re trying to eat dinner, and it is only ten o’clock in the morning.
The whole house seems to be tilting a little too much into the murk.
So Shaker is not entirely surprised when he finds Spall standing aloofly in the middle of the house in rubber sandals and a sari of familiar bath towels, head stuffed in a shower cap. Twice more, Shaker catches the lanky man loafing up the stairs with several slices of bread on a plate and a bottle of ketchup. Spall is walking about in cotton socks barbarically torn at the tip, his brown, pronged toenails curling out, like starved tree roots.
“My mongrels have followed me here,” Shaker announces, although the foyer is empty and his voice is not confident.
At least the lurker has an appetite in addition to fastidious table manners. Spall helps saw Royce’s slab of honey-glaze chicken into edible morsels, holding the cutlery with a dainty grip, exaggerated posture. Evidently, he has been rehearsing. Two seats over, Shaker has forgone utensils altogether and licks the glaze off his plate until the surface sparkles.
He is thinking about maybe giving his Pilates another shot.
*
Although it is not his idea, Shaker fetches the stack of blankets and pest spray and binoculars from his various hidey-holes around the manor, and all four of them venture across the yard. There is a massaging quality to the evening, a radiant balm. Their motley beach party settles on the far side of the greenhouse. The woman sits with her chin resting on Royce’s knees, absently stroking his emaciated doll legs as everyone looks upward, stargazing in silence. The moon looms above like an act of substantial oratory itself. At some point, the woman starts to hum, breaks off, starts again. Her melody is simple, monotonous. What first reminds Shaker of the clandestine language of religious cults and the lunatic faithful keeps devolving. Private murmur, baby babble. Royce blinks in mild ecstasy as she rubs his knee harder and harder. The woman starts to kiss his thigh, and the hum hardens in anger. Shaker touches his own throat and realizes the tetchy noise is his. All the years and miles a
nd oceans of glue fumes he thought were lost inside him—hoovered up his sinus cavity, sealed tight—seem to be streaming out his pores in one sudden, horrific flush. His clothing is soaked through, and he can’t stop wringing his vocal cords. Shaker politely excuses himself and goes to the garage. There he sits in the pressurized airlock of the SUV’s backseat and screams his brainless brains out.
*
The view is difficult in the dark. Shaker senses the altitude more than he sees it as he perches atop his monument, legs swaying. Thirty-six feet of glued junk teeters underneath him like a stack of dirty dishes or an amusement park ride. He tries to stay steady, tries to focus on the spread of gray landfill below and afar when, out of the darkness, something pops him in the face. It is soft, barely solid. Then another comes whistling past his ear. A third item catches Shaker in the cheek and drops into his lap. A pinecone. Someone is chucking pinecones at him. This person’s arm, Shaker realizes, is quite marvelous. Shaker reaches around the monument’s rim and pries off a chunk of slag, waits for another pinecone, and hurls the slag in that direction. Then he pries another piece and hurls this, too. A fusillade commences. Pinecone and junk are shunted back and forth in lazy trajectories that Shaker has trouble tracking at this late hour. He catches a few more in the face and swallows the insult with a neutral attitude. And the tower that Shaker sits atop, rocking on its narrow crux? Even after the fusillade concludes and Shaker tiredly shimmies down to flat ground and slumps off to bed? The monument holds its height in all this new altitude and dark.
*
“Who can trust the dude?” the woman whispers. “We didn’t invite him to live with us. He tromped in without a word or any belongings, just those hick boots and churlish demeanor, and made himself at home. What a creeper! He doesn’t try to communicate. No civic etiquette. Sometimes I think he does it on purpose. Almost like a performance. I know you understand. There’s a hundred different types of silence, thousands maybe, and he has weaponized his. That arrogant indolence. You can be sure there’s some scary, insecure self-loathing underneath it all. Who knows where he goes at night? What awfulness he causes? And those toenails! His sideburns are not nearly as nice as yours. I mean, look at him! Just look at him!”
