Geek Love (17 page)

“Save a big piece for Horst,” Iphy ordered, “and one for the redhead who helped us. What was her name?”

“Red.”

“All the redheads are 'Red,' scummy! They have regular names, y'know!”

Arty had soothed and entertained his (newly discovered) little pal during the storm by letting Chick read aloud to him from Arty's ancient greeting-card collection. When the wind shifted and Arty's van considered tipping over, Chick prevented it.

Chick did not have a story. Chick did not eat his cake. His plate sat on his lap as he stared around at each of the fascinating taletellers in turn. He wasn't enjoying himself but he didn't say anything. Only after we'd kissed Mama and Papa goodnight and were drifting off toward our beds, Chick caught up with us in the narrow place beside the twins' door, looking up at them sadly.

“What is it, sweets?” asked Iphy.

“I knew where you were. I should have brought you out, huh?” His eyes were growing in his face like the size of the question. Elly smoothed a hand across his hair.

“No, Chicky, you did just right.”

“If I had got you out like Mama wanted, you would all have been home like me and Arty. Mama wouldn't have got a broken rib. You wouldn't have got scared.”

I let go of his hand and punched him softly on the arm. “Don't feel guilty about me, I had a great time!” and I sagged off to my warm cupboard, leaving the twins to console him or not.

I was standing on Arty's dresser polishing the big mirrored one-way window to the security booth. He was lolling on his new velvet divan leafing through a torn magazine retrieved from the pile in the redheads' trailer.

“If I were an old-money gent with a career in the family vault,” Arty proposed, “and heavy but discreet political influence, how would I dress?”

I looked back over my hump to see if he was pulling my leg. He had his nose in the magazine so I answered, “Quietly.”

“But what's quiet for a man with my build?”

“I don't know.” I climbed down and wiped my footprints off the dresser top. “A tweed T-shirt? Gabardine bikini trunks? Charcoal silk socks?”

“Socks.” He stretched his bare hip flippers, flexing each of the elongated digits separately. He hated socks. “But I suppose they'd be warm.” He kept turning pages. “Oh, Toady. Why were the twins hiding in the latrine?”

So that was it. I dropped my cleaning rag and hopped onto the divan, grabbing his lower flippers.

“I'll tell you if you'll tell me about Chick and Doc P.”

“It's no big deal. She doctors that horse for me, I let her study Chick.”

“Study how?”

“Talk to him. Ask questions. Observe. What about the twins?”

“They started bleeding that morning. It got Elly spooked.”

“Bleeding?”

“Their first time. Do you think I'll bleed too?”

He yawned. “I'm going to do some work now. You'd better go.”

Chicks legs and sneakers were sticking out, toes down, from under the family van. “Whatcha doing, Chick?”

“Looking at ants.”

I flopped onto my belly and wormed in beside him, careful not to crack my hump against the van's undercarriage. A school of small ants swarmed on a damp lump in the dirt.

“That looks like cake.”

“It's my piece of the birthday cake. They like it.”

“You were over at Doc P.'s again this morning, weren't you? What's she like?”

His hot pink face flashed at me, smiling. “She's going to make Frosty the horse well. And she's going to let me help her. She's going to show me how to stop things from hurting. Arty says it's good. But today I just moved her garbage out.”

The twins and I were wiping the jars in the Chute with dust cloths and spray cleaner. I rubbed the big jar hard and peered through at Leona the Lizard Girl floating calmly inside. “Is Mama sick?” I asked.

“She has to sleep,” said Elly. “Papa gave her an extra shot so she could sleep. It's good for her ribs.”

They were cleaning both sides of Apple's jar. Iphy kept one hand spread across their wide, flat stomach.

“Does it hurt, Iphy?” I asked.

Elly snorted. “She keeps thinking about it.”

“Let Oly do the Tray, Elly. I'll throw up if we have to do the Tray.”

“You won't puke. Close your eyes while I do it.”

“You think about the bleeding, too,” Iphy protested.

“Yeah, but I'm not going, 'Ooh, what's that? Does it hurt?' every time something rolls over in our belly. I'm thinking what it means for us.”

I was working on Maple's jar by then, spraying and wiping. “What does it mean?”

Iphy s eyes were closed as Elly examined the Tray's jar for fingermarks and smears. “What if we can have a baby? Don't you ever think about what's going to happen when we grow up?”

Iphy shook her head, eyes closed. “Nothing will change.”

“What will change?” I was suddenly scared. Elly was impatient with both of us.

“Stupid! What do you suppose is going to happen when Mama and Papa die?”

Iphy's eyes popped open. “They're not going to die!”

“Arty will take care of us,” I said, dusting the “BORN OF NORMAL PARENTS” sign. “He'll be the boss.” But I was thinking I'd marry Arty and sleep with my arms around him in a big bed and do everything for him.

“Right!” Elly sneered. “We can depend on Arty!”

Iphy tried to be reassuring. “I'm going to marry Arty and we'll take care of everybody ... ”

Elly's spray bottle hit the floor as her right hand closed into a white fist and sailed in a short, tight hook to Iphy's mouth, where it smacked, spreading Iphy's lips and snapping her oval head back on her long-stem neck. Iphy tried to stuff her dust cloth into Elly's mouth and block another punch at the same time. They fell, squealing and thrashing, biting and pulling hair. I stood staring through the green lenses of my huge new sunglasses at the convulsing tangle of twins on the floor. I probably could have stopped them, but I didn't feel like it. I turned and shuffled out of the green-lit jar room and down the narrow corridor, leaving the twins to their mutual assault.

We were still in Burkburnett when Dr. Phyllis did the job on Frosty with Chick to help and Papa joining in for the messy bits. They did it late one night in a smallish tent that reeked of antiseptic. The tent was so brightly lit inside that, from the outside, it glowed like a damaged moon heaving with shadows.

I sat fifty feet away on the hood of the humming generator truck and watched their silhouettes. Chick, a tiny motionless lump at one end of a long dark heap, and the squat, bulging form of Dr. P., standing for long periods in one place with only her head and shoulders moving. Al was busy, the large Papa shadow bending, stooping, rushing from one end of the glow to the other, seeming to pace nervously.

They made the big table from a pair of sawhorses and a steel door from one of the vans. The scarcely breathing heap in the middle was the ancient horse.

While Mama and the twins slept, while all the camp fell dark and the midway lights cooled in their sockets and the night guards shifted and spit and sighed at their scattered posts, I watched, leaning on Grandpas urn, feeling its cold bite working through my hump to my lungs.

A light filtered through the window of Arty's van but no movement showed on the glass.

It took a long time. The black sky should have ached with cold but there was no wind. The stillness was almost warm, almost comfortable. No frogs, no crickets, no birds sounded. I nodded off and woke with cramped shoulders and a sprung neck.

The rotten edge of the sky was moldering into arsenic green when the light in the tent went out. The grey fabric was suddenly dull and three shoddy figures crept out through the flap and trailed away.

I could hear Papa talking in low tones. As they passed me, Chick reached up to grab Papa's hand, the small boy figure drooping sleepily over stumbling legs.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land. Horst theorized that we'd all live longer for “wintering in these scalped zones.” The redheads moaned that it just seemed longer. As the days and miles went on they stopped moaning and leaned toward long silences. Their faces took on the flat, wind-tracked look of prairie. “The grave looks good by bedtime,” they said, but the complaints lacked their usual spice and crackle.

We'd holed up near Medicine Mound and were taking fearful advantage of the truckers and riggers and a crowd that had come down 250 miles from the Indian Nation in customized maroon buses with fiddle and accordion bands playing next to the toilets and ice chests full of beer every five seats. The Indians stopped off to stretch their legs and their eyeballs at our facilities on their way to the annual stockholders' meeting of some oil company.

Horst himself was reminiscing about the Texas town called Dime Box and the glories of Old Dime Box, which seemed isolated in his eyes to the broad, strong hips of one Roxanne Tuxbury (pronounced Tewbury) who ran a motorcycle-repair shop there and was undismayed by the indelible stench of cat in a man's chest hair.

Papa was handing out doses of his most rancid tonic before breakfast. “The winter sun is kind of green and doesn't have the Go juice. That's why you get so sleepy.” Horst was leaning on the door waiting for his secret spoonful of vile black Binewski's Beneficent Balm.

“Just don't let Dr. Phyllis know,” Papa muttered with every pour from his big bottle of Triple B.

“Roxanne Tuxbury always rides a kick-start cycle,” explained Horst, “and the thighs on that woman are as long and strong as her laugh, which you can pretty much pick up in Arkansas if the wind is right. She wears a little leather halter three hundred and sixty-five days of every year.”

Papa jammed a big spoonful of Triple B under Horst's mustache and bent his famous Binewski eyebrows. “Too bad Dime Box isn't on our agenda this year. Maybe you ought to take a little van and hop down there for a week. Catch up with us after you've vented your glands or blown your gasket with Roxanne.”

Horst swallowed hard to keep the Triple B down and glared at Al. “Leave the cats? If you had the sense to winter decently in Florida it'd give a man a chance to ... ”

The bells started suddenly. Chick and Arty, who'd disappeared early that morning, came rolling up fast and shouting, “Elly! Iphy! Come out here!”

The twins, bug-eyed and wincing, crawled out of the dinette where we'd been finishing arithmetic lessons and waiting for breakfast. Mama forgot her biscuits and I trailed along. Papa and Horst laughed as we all trooped down along the hard clay track toward Dr. P.'s. Arty had a tape player in his wheelchair playing the taped bells loud. The show folk poked their heads out and strolled along, redheads and roustabouts. The flat grey of the day crept up our backs as we came to the shabby covered trailer parked near Dr. P.'s gleaming white mobile clinic.

Arty's chair stopped and Iphy's hand was caught tight in Arty's shoulder fin as Chick stepped forward. There was a rustle and bump from inside the trailer, and then the frost-coated, candy-orange horse stuck his head out the door and came prancing down the ramp to the ground with his mane braided in blue ribbons and his eyes rolling nervously as he arched his thin neck and crow-hopped in the dust. We all inhaled as we saw the long form of the horse, the Dachshorse, the chopped and channeled Basset Horse perched on starry stockings and realized that all four of the mush-boned feet were gone. The horse had been cut off just below the knees and was dancing his sprightly senile horse dance on stocking-covered, rubber-padded half-leg stumps.

“Ain't that something?!” Papa shouted. The redheads “wowed” softly and clapped, and Horst whistled a knife blast through his teeth that flattened the old horses ears. Arty grinned and bowed in his chair, and Chick watched the old horse steadily. Dr. P. did not appear at all.

We all went close to look and pat the sweating, scared horse, and to examine the sock-covered stumps and admire how his tail was tied up in blue ribbon so it wouldn't drag in the dust. Chick stayed close, holding the halter rope. The twins stroked the quivering coat of the stunned old beast and glanced at each other as Arty told them that, though it was late, this was his birthday present to them.

“Thank you, Arty,” they chorused. Papa was praising Dr. P. and Mama set off running for the home van with a cry of “Biscuits!” and the group shifted and scattered.

Chick let the halter rope slide through his hands and the horse reached for a surviving clump of grey-green near the trailer wheel and bumped his jaw on the ground because he wasn't used to being so low down. Or that's what I thought. Arty leaned back in his chair and looked worriedly at Iphy. “Are you glad?”

Elly watched the horse stepping gingerly on his shortened limbs, his huge body balanced precariously. Iphy took a breath and patted Arty's shoulder. “But is he okay, Arty? Doesn't he hurt?”

Chick interrupted quickly, “No, he doesn't hurt at all.” And I, leaning on Arty's chair arm, wondered if Chick was doing it all, holding the horse up and making him dance. Elly's face turned toward us and she was old. She had sunk into some dark place behind her eyes, and whatever she was looking at wasn't me or Arty.

“So this is what it's going to be like,” she said. Her voice was as dry as the sand that stretched to the sad edge of the sky.

The twins stayed as far away from Frosty the horse as they could, despite Arty's nagging them to “visit their pet.” Chick took care of the horse. He would probably have croaked when he first woke up and noticed that his feet were gone if it hadn't been for Chicks literal support. Whether Chick had actually kept the brute's heart pumping against his will I don't know. Every morning Chick spent a few minutes jollying the horse into facing another day.

I can't be sure how much information or help Chick got from Dr. P. What is sure is that the tyke spent time with the doctor every day and he wasn't always taking out her elaborate garbage. All he would say when I grilled him was, “She's showing me how to stop things from hurting.”