The Slip: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lucas Schaefer lives with his family in Austin. The Slip is his first novel.

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1. Tomato Can

Tomato Can

LET ME TELL YOU something,” said David Dalice, twenty-seven years in Texas from “the baddest shanty in all of Haiti” and Director of Hospitality at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center. “To get to your woman’s heart, you get down between those legs, stick your tongue in deep deep deep, and get as close to that pulsing organ as you possibly can.”

David offered this lesson as he led his newest trainee on morning rounds. It was a standard part of the How to Please Your Woman seminar he’d been presenting to his teenage male underlings for decades. The year was 1998, the city Austin, the floor Assisted Living. The trainee was Nathaniel Rothstein, and this was his first day on the job.

The job, a volunteer position, was to assist David in making Shoal Creek—a “luxury eldercare community,” according to the brochure—feel like home to its residents. As Director of Hospitality, David was responsible for the happiness of all of them—from the still-with-it here on the first floor, to the losing-it on the second, to the lost-it on top—and walking these long halls was the bread-and-butter of his every day. He’d remind passersby of the 10 a.m. calisthenics class in the multipurpose room, poke his head into the games parlor to visit with the ladies playing bridge. (“Arthritis acting up? On a young thing like you? Madam, you don’t look a day over nineteen!”)

David had worked at Shoal Creek since immigrating to the Texas capital back when he was twenty. Now forty-seven, he’d become, over the years, a star in this place, and he strode the floral-carpeted corridors with the low-key bonhomie of a man sure of his position.

“And hello to Dr. Abruzzi!” David said as a stout and whiskered woman walkered past. Dr. Gloria Abruzzi was David’s favorite resident: a retired psychologist whose sharp tongue belied her increasingly foggy memory.

“A most beautiful purple on that shirt,” David told her now.

“Matches my varicose veins,” said Dr. Abruzzi, winking at David, then grimacing as she passed his newest charge.

Nathaniel Rothstein raised a hand, then stuffed it back into the pocket of his oversized Patriots hoodie. He was the sort of pudgy, sullen sluggard who slunk into Shoal Creek each June from the torpid swamp that was the high school volunteer pool: baby face smattered in freckles, with a puff of coarse brown hair and a blank expression that suggested he might be filled with a simmering rage, or else nothing at all.

Since arriving at Shoal Creek at sunup, the boy had been almost silent, lagging a few paces behind David like an adolescent Igor, nodding slightly whenever advice was offered, but otherwise uninterested to the point of near invisibility. Few of the residents seemed to notice him.

Only during David’s sexual digressions did Nathaniel show signs of life, glancing up from his grubby Vans to examine his new mentor. David was soft and strong, like a snowman in scrubs. He wore a thin mustache, parted in the center, and often sported the sort of authoritative grin that would’ve gone well with a crown and scepter. Each time he caught Nathaniel looking at him, he looked back, and the speed with which Nathaniel then turned away made David Dalice feel powerful as the sun.

“Comrade, I’m signing you up for community service,” the boy’s uncle, Bob Alexander, had told David three weeks prior. This was at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, where David’s Saturday morning workouts had evolved, in middle age, from exercise with a side of gossip to the other way around. Bob was among his favorite conversationalists, a fifty-eight-year-old history professor and David’s most consistent source of weed.

Bob had explained the situation as they collapsed into two worn barber’s chairs along Old-Timers’ Row after their workout. He needed to find a volunteer gig for his sixteen-year-old nephew, who’d be spending the summer with the Alexanders as a favor to Bob’s younger sister “back east.” Days before, Nathaniel—“a schlemiel of the first order”—had gotten into a fight with “some lemon” at school. “Big deal, right? High school stuff. Except…” Here Bob leaned into David. “My guy snaps. Breaks the other kid’s jaw! Police and everything.”

“Your sister didn’t think, ‘Man, this boy can defend himself’?”

“My sister’s tired,” said Bob. “Single mother, raising some gloomy kid? And now he’s suspended for the rest of the year? She wanted them to toss him into juvie for a couple days! Scare him straight. I said, ‘Linda, he’s a white kid from Newton, Massachusetts…’?”

David let out a guttural laugh. “If I was a white boy from that rich place, you know the first thing I’d do?”

“If you were smart, rob a bank.” Bob pulled a dime bag from the pocket of his tiny tennis shorts, tossed it David’s way. “I told her, ‘Linda, they’ll do it all right, but only after they find your body!’?”

David had assured Bob Alexander they’d be fine. He’d worked at Shoal Creek close to three decades, and for many of those years had taken under his wing a summer volunteer. Usually these were wayward high school boys who the other department heads didn’t want to deal with: the crater-faced grandsons of wealthy donors, the burger-breathed spawn of longtime trustees.

Indeed, David had learned long ago that among the various do-gooders who populated the place, he derived the most pleasure from the ones who did the least good. The rosy gerontology majors who speed-walked onto the scene straight from College Station? It was never any fun with those competent souls, their small, tasteful gold crucifixes and toothy grins making David feel each of his forty-seven years. Stoners, slackers, cultural Wiccans: these were his people.

David snapped his neck, indicating Nathaniel should follow. He usually saved his most lurid commentary for the locked Special Care Unit—best to keep it clean around the sentient—but this was not a man who countered silence with more of the same.

“Tell me this,” said David, in a voice so low only the boy could hear. “When was the last time you think I ate some pussy?”

Nathaniel winced in disgust. “How should I know?”

David let a heavy silence fall between them. In these situations, David knew, patience was key, and it didn’t take long for the boy to surrender.

“Last week?” said Nathaniel.

David let out a high-pitched Oh! “You think that low of me? Last week? Last night I ate the finest, wettest pussy on all of Highway 290.” Then, at normal volume: “And a good morning to you, Mrs. King!”

At the service elevator, David pressed the up arrow, then gave the boy a friendly elbow. “She called herself Juanita Boggs.” The elevator dinged. “Juanita Boggs of Elgin, Texas.”

“Cool,” said Nathaniel, trying to sound indifferent.

“And how about you?” David asked, after they were both inside. They stared straight ahead as the doors closed in front of them. “When did this young stallion last lick the sweetness?”

Eight hours later, David pulled...