Geek Love (18 page)

Chick also spent time with Arty. Suddenly Arty's nasty attitude had switched to fond big-brotherhood. He let Chick do a lot of work for him -- the brand of charity Arty was most generous in dispensing. Arty also debriefed the kid every time he came away from Dr. Phyllis's van. Chick was Arty's mole in the doc's previously impregnable camp. This was clever, considering that none of the rest of us had even got through her door, but I figured it for dangerous.

“What if she decided to dissect him to see how he works?” I asked. “What if she decides to make a big reputation by writing papers about him for scientific journals?”

“Naah. She won't,” Arty assured me. “She wants to keep him to herself. She's teaching him to be a painkiller. She says that old horse would have kicked off right away if she'd dosed it with drugs to knock it out. She told Chick about the pain dingus in the horses brain, drew pictures, and had him fool around inside until he figured out how it worked. She says Chick put the horse to sleep, kept it unconscious, and sat on the pain dingus so the horse didn't have any shock reaction at all. She thinks Chick will help her be a great surgeon. She's not gonna advertise him. She knows she'd lose him if she did.” Arty paused and thought for a second. He gave me an odd, worried roll of his eyes. “She might decide to take over the planet or something, but I'm trying to keep a tight rein on that kind of stuff. I think it'll work.”

Arty was busy. It's amazing to me even now how much privacy he had in his own van, how much time he spent seeming to lounge around, and how much he got done by giving orders. He was working. His show was changing. He hired his own advance man -- a specialist named Peabody who popped in once a month for an hour and then drove out again in a perpetually gleaming sedan. Peabody wore bank-grey suits and an air of smug humility that clashed with the style of the racetrack types who did the job for Al. Every town we hit held a larger crowd waiting docilely for Arty. They weren't always poor. They weren't always old.

News cameras were common enough on the midway. We were often booked as a feature of some local crawdad festival or Miss Artificial Insemination pageant or whatever, that drew coverage for us. But the reporters also started doing more interviews with Arty in his tank.

Whatever he was telling them was what they wanted to hear. We were all running flat out to keep up with the crowds. Papa trucked in a portable chain-link fence to close off Arty's stage exit from the people who wanted to touch him and talk to him after his shows.

Arty got a golf cart to toot back and forth in. Papa's guard crew increased to fifty large men dressed in sky-blue uniforms with spangled Binewski badges and arm patches. They carried discreet, telescoping electro-shock sticks and stun-gas spray canisters.

Arty stopped coming to the family van for meals. Mama cooked his food and I carried it to him on trays.

The midway jingled with profits from Arty's crowd. The twins, the geeks, the swallowers, and every act in the variety tent bubbled daily with cheerful audiences, but they were really just waiting for Arty.

Arty was absorbed. Mama treated it as another one of his growth phases. “He's always been moody, sensitive,” she said.

Papa strode the line from early to late -- “working harder than I ever have!” -- jubilant at the gross and his own roaring of orders and arrangements. But he was fuzzy behind the eyes because he was no longer the actual King Cob of all the Corn. In his dire heart he felt the difference.

He wasn't working for himself anymore. He was working for Arty. Everything revolved around Arty, from our routes and sites to the syrup flavors in the soda fountains.

We were all nervy with an unspoken anticipation. We were accelerating toward something and we didn't know what.

Miss Lick’s Home Flicks

The library microfilm spews a stream of nuggets. An announcement of the birth of Mary Malley Lick, eight pounds, nine ounces, at Good Samaritan Hospital. The obituary of Eleanor Malley Lick, dead of cancer when her daughter was eight years old. Mary Lick, an uncomfortable fifteen-year-old in a baggy sweater, pictured as “A sophomore at Catlin Gabel School, who holds the Oregon State Women's Handgun Marksmanship championship for the second year in a row.” Thomas R. Lick cutting the ribbon for the new trophy and smoking room at the Sauvie Island Gun Club.

Then there are articles about all the Lick enterprises. There are fifty-one plants nationwide and a flagship factory tucked into a bend in the Willamette just north of the Fremont Bridge. The product is Lickety Split dinners-portable food for airlines and for institutions, from rest homes to schools, jails to asylums. Nineteen full menus with special Kiddie, Diabetic, Kosher, and NMR (No Mastication Required) lines. Everything from three to six courses in plastic trays with an indentation for each item. A subsidiary arm leases microwave ovens to clients for “on-the-spot warming.”

An item about the failure of a labor strike at the Portland plant mentions that Lick Enterprises employed close to eight thousand workers coast to coast and not one of them belonged to a union. Thomas R. fired all the strikers in Portland and hired fresh help unpolluted by notions of collective bargaining.

A mug shot pictures prim young Mary, with her spanking new degree in Business from the state university, recently named Portland plant manager at the age of twenty-four. The caption explains that despite her age she was “by no means a novice, having worked in the plant for seven years in various departments ranging from bookkeeping to sanitation.”

In the old man's obituary -- cancer -- seven years later, Mary is listed as Executive Vice President and sole heir to Lick Enterprises.

The last item is a tentative mention in the also-ran list trailing the four hundred richest individuals in the nation. The dry line beside her name explains that, since all Lick assets are privately held, only estimates of her net worth are available.

I take the copies back to my room and read everything again. There is no mention of relatives, friends, or lovers, no names or faces recur near Mary Lick. Every photo shows her isolated even in a group. Her expression is never quite in sync with the cheer or solemnity of those around her. She is alone.

Just before midnight I go downstairs and listen to Lil breathing. Then I go upstairs and knock on Miranda's door. There is no answer.

After the morning shift at KBNK I hole up in an empty office at the station and spend the afternoon on the phone. I enjoy it. I can never be inconspicuous in person. A hunchback is not agile enough for efficient skulking. But my voice can take me anywhere. I can be a manicured silk receptionist, a bureaucrat of impenetrable authority, or an old college chum named Beth. I can be a pollster doing a survey of management techniques or a reporter for the daily paper doing a feature on how employees view their bosses. Anonymous, of course -- no real names used and all businesses disguised.

A dozen phone calls into the day I am thinking grimly about my luck. Mary Lick could have played chess or poker or pool. She might have been intrigued by dim, cozy porno shops with black booths for a spy to hide in. It would have been a snap to get close to her if she were a horticulture type or a dog breeder. But no. Miss Lick is physical. Her secretary exclaims, “She just couldn't get from one day to the next without her two-mile swim in the evening.”

In my family Arty swam and nobody else did. I never learned. Trudging home it occurs to me that things could be worse. Lick could just as easily have gone in for jet boat races, jumping horses, or sky diving. I can learn to swim.

Miranda's windows are glowing yellow as I come up the street. I go straight upstairs to her door and knock. She laughs and takes me in and shoos out a handsome man named Kevin so she can draw me. I sit naked for hours watching her. She draws and makes tea and draws and talks. We don't mention her tail.

The Athletic Club is only a few blocks from the apartment building where Miss Lick owns and occupies the top floor. The club is in the same style as the apartment building, a massive brick-and-glass temple to the joys of insulation. The word is that Miss Lick's father was instrumental in having the club opened to female membership.

“Of course we have been integrated for more than thirty years,” the information girl told me over the phone. I asked to have the club brochures mailed to me. The pamphlets were glossy productions with color photos of the Oak Trophy Lounge (full-service bar), the saunas, dining room, weight rooms, handball and tennis courts, and the Thomas R. Lick memorial swimming pool. I invested in the six-week introductory membership and spent four afternoons loitering in the five-story parking lot across the street to watch Miss Lick's black sedan enter the brick gateway at 5:30 every evening.

I stand in the middle of the deserted locker room, a ditty bag in one hand and a combination lock in the other, staring at myself in the mirror that covers the door. I look old. I have always looked old. The hump is not a youthful thing and the nakedness of my scalp and my hairless eyelids and brow ridges creak of something ancient. I have stuffed my wig into the ditty bag already, waiting for her. “Always remember,” my father used to say, “how much leverage you've got on the norms just in your physical presence.” I examine my wide mouth and pink eyes, and the slope of cheekbones into the tiny leg that serves me for a jaw and wonder if it will work this time when I need it to. After all, Miss Lick is not a norm and for all I know she is immune to the usual tricks.

She comes through the door and it starts -- her double-take stare reassures me instantly. She is not immune. There is the standard civilized greeting, ignoring the obvious.

“Perhaps you can tell me which lockers are ... ”

I hesitate and she drops her purse on a bench and nods at a row of cabinets against the wall, “All those without locks.”

I shuffle, apologetic, catching a sidelong glimpse of my awkward figure moving toward the lockers, my heart bulging wild in my mouth with fear that I've overplayed it.

Her seriousness surprises me -- the slow weight of her -- the lack of cruelty imprinted on her big wary face. Bubbling won't work on her. I set myself to go straight-faced and slow-voiced to gauge words carefully and understate everything.

She skins out of her tweeds and into the big blue tank suit. Her thick arms and shoulders roll with padded power. Her hands are short and thick, the nails clipped straight across at the tips of the fingers.

“New member,” she says.

“Yes, I joined for the sake of the pool,” I say, looking at the hooks in the locker as I sling my clothes onto them. “My doctor wants me to learn to swim.” I can feel her eyes on my hump -- on the rolls of my neck climbing up to my bald pate.

“Arthritis?” comes her voice.

“It goes with the turf,” I say lightly.

“So I hear,” she says, and I keep my back turned long enough for her to get a good look at me.

Fourth day at the pool.

“Clever contraption,” says Miss Lick, as she snaps the elastic band of my swimsuit that crosses above my hump. Her voice is soft and low, at odds with her bigness and her brusque movement. The showerhead suddenly decides on cold and the water hits my hump and my neck and my whole naked head with a bright chill.

“Special tailoring?” asks Miss Lick. “Expensive?” I smile up at her. She is vigorously massaging her own arms in the spray from the next nozzle.

“Well, it's orthopedic,” I say, bobbing out of the cold water to stand dripping on the tiles.

“Ah!” says Miss Lick. “Right.” She pounds her big solid belly with both fists. She flicks her short hair briskly, and her massive jaw wobbles a run of water down onto her chest. I am pulling the rubber cap down over my scalp, feeling it crumple my forehead into rolls over my nose. It pinches.

Miss Lick slides an identical swim cap onto her head, puffing, going red at the edges where her face bulges out of the cap like a ruptured condom.

“Check your feet!” whispers Miss Lick cheerily, and I crouch against the tile bench and dutifully spread my toes and run my fingers between them. Miss Lick is slamming the fire door open and propping it with a rubber wedge. Out she bounces into the shallow footbath that fills the passage between the shower-room door and the pool door. Miss Lick spends several minutes in this high-chlorine footbath before and after her swim. She is concerned about athlete's foot and other fungoid growths.

Miss Lick has kindly offered to give me swimming lessons to counteract the arthritis that is sinking into all my joints. Miss Lick says that all hunchbacks and dwarfs should swim.

I stand knee-deep in the footbath with my nose on a level with Miss Lick's bouncing buttocks, as she jogs vigorously in place in the warm nose-searing chlorine solution. She is looking through the small screened window in the door to the pool.

“Christ! She's there already!” I splash back a step, startled because Miss Lick's side of our conversation has been pretty spartan up to now. This burst of emotion throws me. Then I recognize it. Success. Miss Lick's jaw shoves forward belligerently and her big hands reach back and grasp her buttocks and begin to knead them nervously through the blue tank suit.

“That old nanny goat haunts me.” She looks back with a wry grin at my inquiring face. “She swims so bloody-arsed slow! And she never stops. She's always in my lane and I'm forever running over her! I tried coming in on my lunch hour. There she was. I tried running in before I got to work in the morning and she was here. She's here every goddamned hour of the day. And look at her! She swims like the dead!” Miss Lick stares out the diamond-shaped window and grabs hard at her butt. I pull my tinted goggles down over my pink eyes and close out some of the sting of the chlorine. Her profile blurs in the green lenses and her muttering goes on.

“This may seem horrible but I've actually considered trapping her in the deep end and holding her under. There have been days when I wouldn't have hesitated if I thought I could get away with it.”

She looks anxiously back at me, her eyes bulging through the fat pads of her cheeks. I nod my head at her pale green face. The light moves on the surface of the footbath and streaks jump in shades of green across her face. “Oh, I can understand that,” I say, and I grin, nodding.

Miss Lick is doing her third lap of what she refers to as “butterfly” stroke. She will do seven more “butterfly” laps before she reverts to “breast” stroke. She does each lap in one minute, which means that the pool will be swamped with three-foot waves and a pounding roar for seven more minutes. Breast stroke is quiet even for Miss Lick. The very old woman who does her mile-and-a-half each day in this pool is clinging to the tile gutter at the side. She will hang there, waiting, until the butterfly is finished. The other swimmers, the young ones, who can evidently breathe under water, continue with their laps. Miss Lick's enormous shoulders have her whole torso free of the water before she splashes back. Her buttocks show briefly like a barrel going over Niagara. I can loll here on the steps at the shallow end, only my legs in the bath-warm water, and watch.

I've taken her on her own hook and I have to be careful. She thinks she's adopted me, that she's doing me a kindness, that she's displaying the magisterial stature of her goodness by spending time with me. I have to watch my ass. She is hideously lonely.

The whiskey looks like transparent wood in my glass. I hold it carefully between my eyes and the firelight so the movement of the red flame casts a grain into the brown liquid. The whiskey that I have already drunk sits warmly in my gut and mouth and penetrates the fog in my skull. The corner of my eye registers Miss Lick's heavy wool socks pointing at the fire over her footstool. I am waiting for my palms to dry, breathing slowly until the clammy seep of my nerves sinks back from the surface of my skin. The whiskey is amazing to me. I wonder why I never realized that I would like it. I wonder why I never tried it before. Liking it so much is dangerous now, and so I hold it and look through it, drinking very slowly.

Miss Lick has the bottle on a tray beside her chair and is being generous with herself here in the fire dark. She cuts the wood herself, takes an ax up to the family parkland in spring and drags a chainsaw into the woods on weekends to clean up the deadfalls from the winter. One whole storage cubicle in the basement of the tasteful brick apartment building is devoted to split cords seasoning in the dry dark with a deep resin odor. She goes down in the elevator with a canvas sling over her shoulder and brings up one night's worth at a time. She kneels on the flat granite paving stone in the hearth and nicks off tidy triangular kindling with a hatchet that looks at home in her hand, ticking the slim sticks off a sixteen-inch chunk that rotates quietly under her other hand.

The chairs are dark, supple leather, as big as rhinos. The drapes are a dark plaid in heavy wool. A plaster bust of Minerva, painted glossy black, sits on the mantel beneath a rack of shotguns.

“I used to go for birds with my old man,” she says.

She talks slowly. Dry barks of laughter punctuate the sad parts to show that she is not sentimental and is not looking for sympathy. She has just described her father, her house in the woods outside of town, her employees, the old but reliable machinery that poops out 3 ounces of gravy, 1.8 ounces of niblet corn, 3 ounces of turkey breast, 3.2 ounces of apple cobbler, each in its proper compartment of the plastic trays. She is considering a massive retooling.

“I'll get more ice,” I say, with the bucket in my hand, shuffling to the kitchen as she pads heavily toward the brown-tiled bathroom. The kitchen is blank. Clean and empty. A torn bag containing two dark chocolate cookies lies abandoned on one white counter. The refrigerator door yaws outward from its emptiness. Nothing but a half bottle of ketchup in the door shelves. The mouth of the bottle is caked with scab, and in the freezer section are solid stacks of frozen dinners in plastic trays-unlabeled.