The vacuum cleaner wasn’t working. Back after three weeks on the road, Harlan wanted to clean out the van, get rid of the stray potato chips and gas station receipts and pea gravel tracked in from motel parking lots. He wanted to give the van a real going-over. But when he ran the nozzle across the upholstery, nothing happened. The vacuum cleaner roared the way vacuum cleaners are supposed to roar, but all the suck was gone out of it. Harlan turned off the machine and, popping it open, saw that the bag was full. He went inside where he found Lisa pulling things from the medicine cabinet and dumping them into the sink.
“You seen the toothpaste?” she asked.
Harlan shrugged. “Maybe we left it in the last motel.”
“That’d be the third tube this trip.”
Harlan didn’t understand how Lisa could get so worked up about a tube of toothpaste. It was astonishing how she could be so philosophical when they hit a deer in some prairie backwater and were stuck there for three nights waiting for the body shop to fix the van. But lose a tube of toothpaste and the world might end. Probably it had to do with control. A tube of toothpaste is something we can control. A deer leaping onto the road is more like an act of God. Even Lisa could see that Harlan didn’t have time to brake, so after the initial shock, she got out of the car and, staring at the bloody carcass and the mashed-in grill, said: C’est la vie. But the first time Harlan forgot to pack the toothpaste, she made it sound like a sign of the coming apocalypse.
“You seen the vacuum bags?”
“What for?”
“I wanna do some gardening.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“Why do you think I’m asking for the vacuum bags?”
“What I meant was: I put in a fresh bag when we left on the trip.”
“Well it’s full.”
“You mean the kids actually used the thing while we were gone?”
“Looks like.”
“Should be a box of them. Linen closet. Top shelf.”
Harlan found the box, but it was empty. That was so like the kids, especially the twins: use something up then put back the empty box without telling anybody it needs replacing. They did this all the time with the breakfast cereal and the Kleenex, and the milk. The milk was the worst. At least once a week, Harlan poured himself a bowl of cereal only to find that one of the kids had put an empty carton of milk back in the fridge. Harlan returned to the garage and tossed the empty box of vacuum bags into the recycling bin.
Harlan didn’t feel like driving to the store. He’d had enough of driving these past weeks. Instead, he drew a stool to the garbage can, put on the mask he used for sanding drywall and finishing the floors and all the other DIY home reno projects that raised a cloud of dust, and he emptied the vacuum bag into the can. The bag’s opening was the width of two fingers. Harlan stuck in his left index finger and his middle finger—the finger Lisa was always after him not to flip as he drove—and used them like tweezers to pull out tufts of dog hair and dirt and bits of food, all of it a dull grey. He wondered if this wasn’t some kind of parable: how all the wild colours of our modern life mix together to produce something bland and colourless. He pulled out pennies, a cork, the tabs from beer cans, a triple-A battery, half a dog biscuit, pine needles, a frayed shoelace, a couple of Jenn’s makeup remover wipes. Digging deeper into the bag, Harlan felt something big and hard, something too big to pull through the opening.
Withdrawing his fingers, he shook the bag over the garbage can until the object fell out. He squinted into the cloud of dust rising from the garbage can. From where he sat, he couldn’t say what it was. It looked the size and shape of a stubby carrot, only not the colour of a carrot. It was mostly black and grimy. Harlan drew the object from the bottom of the can and took it around to the other side of the van where he kept a light above his work bench. Taking off his mask, he turned the object over and over in the light.
It was a human finger. The black was the black of dried blood. The finger couldn’t have been in the bag long because it wasn’t rotten yet. Maybe a day. The whorls of the fingerprint were still intact. It had been severed almost at the knuckle, and by a sharp tool. There was nothing ragged about it like you’d expect if it had been yanked off or bitten by a dog. Harlan got a plastic baggie from the kitchen, and sealing the finger, he stowed it in the freezer compartment of his beer fridge. Then, opening the fridge, he got a can of beer and sat himself behind the garage for a think.
No need to panic. No need to call to the police. It might have been an accident. There might be an easy explanation why someone in his household had vacuumed up a human finger. Maybe he shouldn’t tell Lisa, at least not yet. She had a tendency to overreact. What if one of the kids had done it. Harlan didn’t know much about the law but he was certain that chopping off someone’s finger was a serious business. None of his kids had ever been in trouble with the law and he wasn’t sure Lisa could stand it if any of them went to jail. The twins were sixteen and so they would be treated as young offenders. No serious consequences. But Jenn was nineteen, an adult, at least in the eyes of the law. Then again, Harlan had a hard time believing Jenn could have chopped off someone’s finger. That was more the sort of thing you’d expect from the twins.
Harlan left his can of beer half empty on the patio and went inside. He poked his head into Jenn’s room and found her cross-legged on her bed and yakking on the phone with her boyfriend. Harlan waved. Jenn waved back, all the fingers of her left hand present and accounted for. He squinted at the right hand, noting how comfortably she held the phone with all five digits. Jenn pressed her palm to the phone and asked what he wanted.
“Nothing. Just checking in.”
“Okay, and Jenn rolled her eyes.”
Harlan found the boys in the basement playing video games. He watched how they held the controllers and he counted twenty digits in all.
“I need to talk to you boys.”
When Chas asked what, Wes took advantage of the momentary lapse in attention to blow up Chas’s jeep.
“Boys, just pause it for a minute.” Harlan and Lisa had been back not even half a day and, already, the kids were behaving as if their parents had never been gone. “I want you to tell me straight up: did you two have a party here last night?”
The boys looked at each other, then relaxed their shoulders and admitted that, yeah, they’d had a bit of a party, but only a few friends, nothing wild.
“And Jenn? Was she in on it?”
“It was her, you know,”
“idea.”
“Boys, anything happen at this party of yours? An accident, say? Or a fight? Anybody get hurt?”
The boys looked at each other and shook their heads.
“And if I asked Jenn, she wouldn’t know anything either?’
“I guess not,”
“seeing as we were all together.”
“Boys, I’d like you to come out to the garage with me.”
The three men crept through the house like commandos, looking left and right down each hallway to be sure Lisa didn’t see them. Harlan led the boys to the beer fridge in the garage, and as they stood like worshippers before a shrine, he took the baggie out of the freezer compartment. They gathered beneath the light of the work bench. The dog curled onto the concrete floor by the beer fridge and licked herself in indelicate places. Harlan opened the baggie and, using a pair of barbecue tongs, removed the finger and held it up for inspection. He looked like a surgeon with oversized instruments.
The boys gawked at the finger, saying things like whoa and is that what I think it is?
“I found it in the vacuum cleaner.”
The boys shrugged.
“The bag was empty before your mom and I went away. Which means the finger got sucked up while we were gone.”
No change in their expression.
“So you two have no idea how it got there?”
They shook their heads.
Harlan remembered the beer he’d left behind the garage. It was warmer than he liked, but still drinkable. Beer in one hand, tongs in the other, Harlan contemplated the finger where he’d lain it on the old wooden miter box. He had no idea how to read the boys. Sometimes they looked at one another and he knew they were up to their eyeballs in some kind of conspiracy. But he saw none of that now. He wanted to believe their ignorance was genuine. After another gulp of beer, he sent the boys back to their video games with a promise never to tell their mother what they had seen. When they were back to blowing each other up in hi-def Dolby 7.1 surround sound, Harlan went inside to get their sister. Give Jenn a chance to examine the finger. See if it stirred any recollections from the party the night before. As they stepped into the garage, Harlan told her he was about to show her something nasty and she was not to tell anybody.
“Whatever, Dad.”
Harlan stepped to the work bench, but the finger was gone. Underneath the bench, the dog lay chomping at something. “Queenie!” Harlan grabbed the dog at the back of the jaw and forced open its mouth, but it was too dark underneath the bench. By the time he had dragged the dog into the light, whatever she’d been chomping on had disappeared.
“Damn. She just ate the evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“A finger. A human finger. It was in the vacuum cleaner.”
Jenn gave no indication she knew what her father was talking about. He sent her back to her telephone with the same promise he’d extracted from the boys: don’t tell your mother.
Tossing the empty baggie into the garbage bin, Harlan took a second beer from the fridge and returned to his chair behind the garage. He needed to think about things. Thank God for beer. What is it they say? In vino veritas? In wine, truth? Harlan wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he found a kind of truth in beer. If he drank enough beer, it smoothed over the ragged edges. It solved life’s mysteries, not by giving answers, but by making them cease to matter. Harlan had no idea how a human finger had ended up in his vacuum cleaner. Harlan swallowed another mouthful of beer. To be truthful, it didn’t seem all that important.