Geek Love (14 page)

“Hold their hands.” I nudged Chick. Two hands spread out against the pillow and a fist landed with a smack and a squeak. “All the hands! All!” I snapped. Four arms splayed in the air away from the twisted bundle of pajamas. A leg swung back for a kick and then froze.

“Can you hold them?”

Chick nodded, looking at me. His eyes had crusts of sleep in them. Elly's face lifted out of a mass of black hair -- a red scratch across her forehead. She drew back on her long neck and shot forward, whooshing out a phtt of air as she spit into the tangled hair beneath her.

There was no hiding it from Al and Lil. The scratches and bruises were so visible that the twins couldn't do their act for four days. They were sick and sore. They lay in bed with their faces turned away from each other all that day. Al and Lil were very upset.

“You must never do that again! You must never fight with each other!” The old incantation poured in shocked desperation from the parental mugs. The twins refused to explain what it was about.

Chick was helping me drain sewage tanks that afternoon. We were both glum. We stood and watched the gauge on the pump that emptied our van's tank into the tanker truck. I kept thinking about what they'd looked like when Chick had opened the door. Like a thing that hated itself.

“They always bicker,” I said.

Chick nodded, watching the gauge dial. “But they were really trying to hurt each other.” Chick's head fell forward, his chin nearly touching his chest. The back of his neck was so thin and golden, and his tawny head was so big above his skinny shoulders. Seeing him hit my lungs like an ice pick through the ribs. He was pretty.

“I wonder what it was about?” I murmured.

Chick sighed. His head wobbled. “Iphy said his name in her sleep,” he said.

Lil made Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Chicken for dinner. She was rubbing lemon juice over her hands to get rid of the garlic smell while we all sat around the table waiting for the oven bell to sound.

The twins were excited about something, whispering to each other. Al was talking about an old road manager he'd run off the midway twenty years before. The guy had shown up again that day looking for a job.

“Vicious god, Lil! He looked eighty years old! He looked like the grave had spit him back up, disgusted!”

Lil tsked over her lemon-juice hands. Arty watched the twins. Chick and I leaned on Papa from opposite sides, leeching his warmth.

Lily was dishing out the chicken when Iphy finally spoke up.

“We have a new turn for our show!” Iphy glowed. It had to be tricky. Iphy always did the talking if a “No” was possible. It was hard for anybody to say “No” to Iphy.

“We do a standing vertical jump onto the piano top and spring off into a synchronized-swim dance number in the air. We fly out over the audience and back while the piano goes on playing the 'Corporal Bogwartz Overture'! Doesn't that sound great? We practiced this morning! We'll use pink floods and three pink spots to follow us over the crowd. Do let us, Papa! Chick can handle the whole thing so easily. He knows the music already. He learned it in two sessions! It takes exactly one and a half minutes and it'll be our finale. He can just run in during the last five minutes of each show, stand behind the screen, and be finished when we touch the stage for the bow! Please, Papa, Mama? Come and see it after dinner; you'll love it!”

Chick was hiding his face behind Al s arm. Arty's eyes stayed on Lil's big spoon, lifting out chicken and putting pieces on plates.

Al was laughing. “What a picture! Wouldn't that flatten 'em? Hey, Crystal Lil! How about these girls? Sharp?”

“Flying,” Lil murmured. “Mercy.”

Elly was pink with eagerness, her hopeful, fearful eyes fixed on Arty, who said nothing. He rocked slightly in his chair, seemingly interested only in the food that was accumulating on his plate with the help of Lil's spoon.

It never happened, of course. Arty quashed it. If the outside world tumbled to it, or even suspected it was not a trick, we'd drown in power plays for Chick. Stay with the straight path of what we were each gifted with ... Did we think Al hadn't done enough for us, that we had to monkey with his work? Iphy was disappointed but willing to understand. Elly never said anything about it.

We probably looked sweet, the twins and I, in our blue dresses under the shady apple trees, with big bowls in our laps, snapping green beans on a summer afternoon. But the apples on the tree were gnarled and scabby and the twins' glossy hair and my sunbonnet covered worm-gnawed brains.

“Arty wouldn't hurt anybody.” I was lying vigorously as I snapped away at the smooth-skinned beans. “You're the one, Elly. You're jealous of Arty when he's just trying to take care of family.”

“Oly, you know Chick would be floating in formaldehyde if it looked like he was going to steal any of Arty's thunder by being a big success.” Her hands ripped the beans to pieces, dropping the tips and strings into one bowl and the usable chunks into another. Iphy's hands did the same task lightly, delicately.

I pushed on doggedly through my beans. “Arty still thinks Chick can be useful.”

“Sure,” Elly sniffed. “As a workhorse and a slave. Chick can save us a lot of money. It takes ten men five hours to put up the tops that Chick can put up in one hour by himself. And Chick's pay is a pat on the head.”

Iphy sighed, “You should be kinder.”

Elly muttered at her own fingers, “I'm just taking care of you and me. That's all I'm thinking about. He hates us. He's selfish.”

“Not selfish! Scared! He's scared all the time, Elly! You know it!” Iphy's hand lifted in fright, demonstrating Arty's terror. I shrugged off goose bumps, thinking, I'm scared too. Because I know Arty. I know him better than either of you do.

“Let him be a preacher. Let him have all those creeps sucking around him. They'll puff him up. But he'd better leave us alone, and Chick too. And you can tell him that, Oly. There, take all these beans to Mama!”

“Be nice, Elly,” I pleaded. “Just be nice.”

“I'll be nice,” she muttered dangerously. “You'd both let him cut your throats before you'd complain!”

Without any of the family taking much notice, Arty became a church. It happened as gradually as the thickening of his neck or the changing of his voice. From time to time one of us would remember that things hadn't always been that way. It wasn't that Arty got a church, or created a religion, or even found one. In some peculiar way Arty had always been a church just as an egg is a chicken and an acorn is an oak.

Elly claimed that it was malice on Arty's part. “He has always had a nasty attitude toward the norms. Iphy and I like them except for the hecklers and drunks. They're good to us. Papa tends the crowds like a flock of geese. They're a lot of work and a bit of a nuisance but he loves them because they're his bread and butter. Mama and Chick -- and you too, Oly -- you three don't even know the crowds are there. You don't have to work them. But Arty hates them. He'd wipe them all out if he could, as easy as torching an ant hill.”

“Truth” was Elly's favorite set of brass knuckles, but she didn't necessarily know the whole elephant. If what she said about Arty was “true,” it still wasn't the whole truth.

Arty said, “We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise. Even a rats-ass dwarf jester got credit for terrible canniness disguised in his foolery. Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. The norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us as cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanctity.”

The first time I remember him talking like that was one very rare night when he had an ear infection and couldn't do his act. I stayed with him while the rest of the family worked. He sat on the built-in couch in the family van surrounded by the popcorn he'd spilled, the kernels getting smashed into the upholstery as he bounced around talking and dipping his face into his bowl of popcorn and nipping at hot chocolate through his straw. I laughed because he had butter smeared around his eyes as he pumped this piffle at me.

I was crushed when Arty ousted me from the Oracle. Originally, I had been the one who sorted through the question cards and actually went on stage to press the face of the chosen card against the side of the tank while Arty hovered, bubbling on the other side, to read it and then shot to the surface to give the answer. Then Arty decided he wanted a redhead to do it. He had them parade in a giggling line outside their dorm wearing shorts and bras so he could choose the best figure. He said the crowd would have more respect for him if he was waited on by a good-looking redhead. “They'll wonder if I'm balling her, decide that I am, and think I must be a hell of a guy if this gorgeous gash puts out for me even though I'm so fucked up. If it's Oly waiting on me, they figure it's just birds of a feather.”

I still took care of him after each show, but for a long time I sulked and ignored the act.

The Aqua Boy changed again. For a while, he answered only generic questions distilled from the scrawled bewilderments and griefs that piled up on the three-by-five cards. Then he stopped answering at all and just told them what he wanted them to hear. Testifying, he called it.

What Arty wanted the crowds to hear was that they were all hormone-driven insects and probably deserved to be miserable but that he, the Aqua Boy, could really feel for them because he was in much better shape. That's what it sounded like to me, but the customers must have been hearing something different because they gobbled it up and seemed to enjoy feeling sorry for themselves. You might figure a mood like that would be bad for the carnival business but it worked the opposite way. The crowd streaming out from Arty's act would plunge deeper into the midway than all the rest, as though cantankerously determined to treat themselves to the joys of junk food and simp twisters to make up for the misery that had just been revealed to them.

Arty thought about the process a lot. Sometimes he'd tell me things, only me, and only because I worshiped him and didn't matter.

“I think I'm getting a notion of how to do this. O.K., a carnival works because people pay to feel amazed and scared. They can nibble around a midway getting amazed here and scared there, or both. And do you know what else? Hope. Hope they'll win a prize, break the jackpot, meet a girl, hit a bull's-eye in front of their buddies. In a carnival you call it luck or chance, but it's the same as hope. Now hope is a good feeling that needs risk to work. How good it is depends on how big the risk is if what you hope doesn't happen. You hope your old auntie croaks and leaves you a carload of shekels, but she might leave them to her cat. You might not hit the target or win the stuffed dog, you might lose your money and look like a fool. You don't get the surge without the risk. Well. Religion works the same way. The only difference is that it's more amazing than even Chick or the twins. And it's a whole lot scarier than the Roll-a-plane or the Screamer, or any simp twister. This scare stuff laps over into the hope department too. The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous. Bad! Well, I'm working on it. I've got the amazing part down. And the scary bits are a snap. But I've got to come up with a hope.”

Arty had the advance men make up special flyers to hit certain churches. “Refuge!” they blared. “Arturo, the Aqua Boy!” and then a list of our dates and sites. Though Arty never mentioned anything resembling a god, or an outside will, or life after death, church groups started showing up. In the grim blasted regions where the soil had failed or the factories were shut down, whole congregations would drift through the gates, ignoring the lights and sights of the midway, and find their way to Arty's tent. They paid their price and sat numbly in clumps on the bleachers waiting as long as it took for his show to begin. When it was over, they would leave the grounds together, ignoring everything.

“Too poor to play,” Papa said.

“The one buck they've got, I'll get,” said Arty. But it wasn't the money that excited him. It was that those who never would have come to the carnival came just for him.

Mama was dreamily pleased. “Arty's spreading his wings,” she said, nodding to herself. But his wingspread took in more than the bleachers in his own tent. And all this time he was taking over more and more control of the carnival itself, and becoming more obvious in the orders he gave.

Snake Dance--Immaculate

Iwas eleven years old that year. Chick turned six and the twins were approaching their fourteenth birthday. Arty was sixteen and in a hurry.

He got his own big van with a platform to connect it to the family van. No fuss about it. Papa just shrugged when Arty had him write out the check. The guards lugged the furniture from the dressing room behind Arty's stage, and I arranged it. Mama busied herself moving Chick into Arty's long-abandoned cubicle in the family van.

As Arty got stronger, Al and Lil wilted. Each week they seemed softer and browner at the edges. Lil was scatty and vague more often. You could catch her any hour of the day with her collection of pills and capsules shuttling in and out of the handbag she kept by her. She did her work but she got thinner and her breasts began to droop. Her clothes didn't hang on her in the old smooth way. Her makeup was a little blurry to begin with and tended to slip by lunchtime. Long before closing each night the mascara and rouge would slide into thick smudges. There was something missing in her eyes.

This was the year she decided she had taught the twins all that she was able, and hired the fancy piano man to teach them. Arty claimed that this was the cause of her frail weeping. The twins said it had started after Chick was born and had simply increased.

We didn't ask for Papa's opinion. Al was listless one minute and irritable the next. He'd go out to give orders in the morning and find that Arty had already passed the word for the day. He'd nag and snap and stand over the crews while work was being done. He took to spending more time with Horst and to showing up half buttoned into his tailcoat and with his mustache unwaxed for his Ringmaster routines. Then Dr. Phyllis appeared.

Al had always fancied himself a healer. His hobby was reading medical journals. He collected first-aid kits and drugs. He was an enthusiastic amateur general practitioner, and as soon as we could afford it -- years before Arturism was in swing -- he bought a small second-hand trailer and set it up as a little infirmary. His fascination with human mechanics certainly came before and probably sparked his idea for manipulating our breeding, and he did have a knack for it. We thought of it as part of his Yankee spirit. He was enthralled by medicine but furious with doctors for hogging the glory just because they'd managed to get a piece of paper to hang on the wall.

With Al's hobby, the Fabulon had been nearly independent of medical folk. Horst was called in as a consultant on veterinary chores, but Al handled anything human himself. The flame eaters figured him for a genius because he cured the many blisters on their lips and inside their mouths. Over the years he set fractures, relocated joints, diagnosed and treated venereal diseases, and dosed infections from the kidneys to the tonsils.

It was Lil who soothed brows, changed sheets, and read aloud for the sick, but it was Al who did the flashy stuff. He lanced boils with a flair, gave vaccinations, irrigated ears, noses, and rectums with equal zest, and made a grand production of extracting a sliver. He was a masterly stitcher -- “scarless wizardry,” as he himself claimed. His career triumph happened the night an elderly lady collapsed in the front row at her first sight of Arty. Al recognized a heart attack, ripped her purple cotton dress down from the throat and clapped disposable electrodes to her chest within seconds of her tumble to the sawdust. He did it right there in front of Arty's tank with seven or eight hundred people in the bleachers watching. She jolted. Her eyeglasses slid off. She voided her colon rather noisily, and was alive again, if not conscious.

It was the custom for the midway folk to appear on Monday mornings at Al's clinic if they had complaints. A lot of people said Al “should have been a doctor,” and that his talent was wasted in the Fabulon. Al didn't see it that way. “I've got a captive practice of sixty souls,” he'd say, increasing the numbers as the show's population grew to eighty, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and sixty.

Then Dr. Phyllis arrived. She drove into the lot one morning and parked thirty yards back from the cat wagon, which happened to be the last trailer in line that day.

She sat at the wheel and looked out through the windshield for a while. I saw her because I was stumping around the cat wagon rehearsing a lead-in talk. I kept on, pretending not to notice but taking in the shiny white van with a pair of tangled snakes climbing a staff painted next to the side door. I could barely see the vague pale figure behind the polarized windshield. We'd been on the lot for two days and were all set up, so the crews were taking it easy that morning, sitting on trailer steps talking and drinking coffee.

Horst was shaving beside his living van, using a portable razor while he looked into the rearview mirror on the driver's side. Everybody on the lot saw the van arrive but nobody reacted. For all we knew it was an act that Al had hired and not mentioned.

I was thinking she was a snake dancer because of the vipers on the van. I was morbidly fascinated by snakes. The van door opened, a pair of steps flopped out, and she appeared.

She was dressed in white -- the uniform, the shoes, stockings, gloves, and of course the snug cap and the face mask. Only her glasses were neutral, clear, the eyes behind them blurred by their thickness.

She stepped smartly down and strode toward the nearest guard. It was Tim Jenkins, a big mahogany weightlifter who had retired from perpetual corporal status in the Marines and had been taken up by Al while his scalp was still visible under his military haircut. Tim was serious about guard duty and clicked his heels as the short, sturdy white figure approached him.

I'd stopped my pacing and was staring, boggle-eyed, at her. I knew it was a woman because of the broad hips and bulging prow. I was figuring her for a Hindu snake dancer -- imagining flame shows with reptiles flickering over her gradually revealed flesh, slipping up her arms under the white sleeves, and so on.

I couldn't hear what she said but Tim nodded and looked at Horst. Horst had been watching everything in his mirror. He flipped his razor through the driver's window onto the seat of his van and strolled over. Tim was making introductions and Horst nodded and stuck out a hand. The figure in white pointedly jammed her gloved hands into the pockets of her white jacket. Horst let his hand drop and settled back a hair on his heels. Horst strolled away with the lady in white, toward the two Binewski vans. I trailed at a distance.

It was a bright, warm morning in Arkansas, I think, or maybe Georgia. The dust was brick red on my shoes as I leaned on the generator truck and looked down, pretending to mind my own affairs. I could have kicked myself for picking that fender to lean on when I realized that the fractured thrum of the generator would keep me from hearing any conversation. The white lady was waiting outside Arty's van. She was carrying a thin vinyl briefcase, white. She stood quite still with no nervous movements. Chick's small face peered from the window of the family van.

Arty came out in his chair. His forehead folded down over his eyes with questions. He doesn't know her, I thought. He didn't send for her. He nodded and said something. She spoke, her hands on the white case. Arty guided his chair down the ramp, and she fell in beside him, going slowly away from the vans, talking. She tucked the case under her arm and jammed her hands in her pockets again.

The case didn't stay where she put it but slid out behind her and floated toward the open door of the family van at an altitude of four feet or so. She whipped around and despite the mask I could tell she was glaring at the flying briefcase. Arty looked over his shoulder, stopped, opened his mouth, and shouted at the van. The case stopped just before it entered the door, turned in midair and zipped back to the white lady at twice the speed it had left her. She reached out a gloved hand, snatched it, and stuck it back under her arm. Arty was talking to her. She nodded. They turned away and, with him rolling and her walking, they paraded up and down and around the lot, talking for a long time.

“I think she's creepy,” said Electra. Iphigenia bobbed her head gravely in agreement and popped a slice of apple into her mouth. Arty ignored them both.

“How is she going to be paid? Percentage? Salary? Only when somebody's sick? Or only as long as everybody is well?” Al slid his eyes nervously, trying to be businesslike. Arty was forced to abandon his soup and his pretense of oblivion. He stared around the table at us and then turned to Papa.

“Don't worry about her money. I'll take care of it. She's got a lot to offer us. She's a stroke of luck for this show. She's not a school hack, at least. She's good at what she does.”

Papa looked guiltily into his soup bowl.

Lily smiled dreamily. “It will be nice having an educated lady around.”

Al patted her hand. Arty was concentrating on his soup again, crossing his eyes to sight down his straw. Chick sat beside Lil in the back of the dining booth, smiling and watching the peas lift, individually, from his soup, jerk slightly until the drip of broth fell back into the bowl, and then swoop down to rest in a military row on his plate. Chick never did like peas. I caught Iphy's eye. She raised her brows and pursed her mouth. Elly wrinkled her nose at me. We girls agreed, silently, that even if we had bubonic plague, the lady in white wasn't going to lay a finger on us.

Dr. Phyllis cowed Al. After that first day he never questioned her presence, or her credentials. He wouldn't even try to ask where she'd come from or what she'd been doing before she joined us. He dithered and protested that she was a “lady” and a good medic, and “By the blistered nipples of the Virgin,” he didn't need to know any more than that. The twins and I shook our heads at how little fight he put up when his private passion was usurped. I nagged him to ask questions because, if he didn't come up with some information, Arty would make me try. It seemed that despite his long conversation with her Arty didn't know much more about her than the rest of us did.

I was putting Arty onto the little elevator platform that ran up the outside of the family van one morning when he cocked a wink at me and said, “I guess you'll have to get old Doc P. to let you look through her microscope.”

I put a foot on the platform beside him, grabbed the lever, and we went slowly up.

It was a sunny morning. Warm. I don't know where we were -- a small valley. All around the camp were deep pastures cut by streams with rough hills beyond. The highway sliced through and ran toward a small town, whose chimneys we could see above the trees. There were songbirds racketing in the scrub oaks on the slopes. The honk of a pheasant drifted up from the long grass. Arty wriggled off the elevator onto the roof. He liked to sunbathe up there when he could. Al had put a low rail around the top of the van so Arty wouldn't fall off, at the same time he installed the elevator.

Arty stuck his toe into the elastic of his trunks and worked them down until they sagged off him. He rolled over and arched his back, tilting his belly to the sun, stretching lushly.

“Yep,” he said, “Little Oly had better do her stuff on Doc P.”

“Here's your fly swatter.” I put it beside him with the handle close to his head, where he could reach it. Arty was, as he claimed, “fly Mecca,” and he hated them.

“Don't ignore me, Oly,” he murmured as I rubbed suntan oil on his chest.

“I won't do it. I don't like her.”

“Oly, you like her. You like her a lot. She's a fascinating, intelligent woman and you can learn from her.”

“Right,” I said, capping the bottle.

“Give her an ear to pour into. Nobody does that better than you.” He turned his head to watch me step onto the elevator.

“Don't piss on anybody from up here,” I said. “Papa got really mad last time.” I lowered myself, looking away from him, looking at the brown creek that eased through the grass behind the van.

Three hours later I was hauling Dr. P.'s garbage to the camp dumpster and cursing her and Arty and myself in a thin blue vapor of rage that hissed through my nose with every breath. She had accepted my offer of help coldly and stood over me while I pumped the hydraulic leveler for her van. She gave me rigid orders about clipping the weeds and grass all around her van and then made me go over the whole area with a rake for litter. Then she introduced me to the garbage. She had very strict ideas about garbage. Each full bag in the can beside her van had to be slipped inside another bag and wrapped in a particular oblong shape and tied with string in a proper square knot. Three of these small parcels went into one large bag, which was then wrapped and tied with the same knot. Then the large parcel could be carried to the camp collection.

She considered it proper that I, or someone more efficient, should be dispatched by Arty to do her chores. She wasn't at all grateful.

When I got back to her van the door was closed again. I hadn't yet managed to get inside. I pushed the door buzzer. Her voice scratched out of the speaker, “Yes.”

“I'm finished with the garbage, ma'am.”

“That's all for today, then. Have a bath and pay special attention to cleaning under your nails. Report back tomorrow morning.”

A month and several towns later I still hadn't set foot in her van. I'd filled her fuel and water tanks, emptied her septic system, gift-wrapped her garbage every day, and in each new site I'd leveled her van, policed her area for litter, and generally kissed her cold and pendulous buttocks for nothing.

In the meantime she had taken over Al's precious infirmary trailer.

The sick call was cut in half. Al kept up his Monday-morning exams of the family but they were conducted in our dining booth. He didn't have the old zest for it. He went on tapping and listening and demanding news of our bowel movements. He still lifted our eyelids and peered into our throats and ears and scowled at our nails and rubbed blue gunk on our teeth and, for those of us with hair, checked for lice and ticks, but he didn't have his old glow of joy in doing it. He was sneaking behind her back.