Geek Love (21 page)

The girl I'd tackled was a stranger, not part of the show. I heard and saw Arty's door open and blurred figures moving into the light several times before I recognized that it was always a different girl.

I crawled into my blankets smiling, slept well for the first time in days, woke as cheery as a pinhead, went joking and grinning around all day. Arty wasn't having a love affair. He was just “fucking around,” as the redheads called it. What had been a blowtorch blackening my brain with sick, helpless jealousy was now just useful information. A love affair would have shut me out. This gave me an opening. I could tease Arty in private. Keeping mum to everybody else would be evidence of my discretion and encourage him to have confidence in me. If a trickle of puke still riled my throat at the thought of Arty with the long-limbed norms, it was at least tolerable. I needed all the ammo I could get.

Zephir McGurk was a do-it-yourself electrician from the same independent school of thought that spawned Papa's medical hobby. McGurk made do. He read journals and magazines and catalogues from supply houses to feed his ingenuity, but he was an innovator. Even if a thing had been invented and perfected thirty years before, McGurk was inclined to build his own rather than buy the gimmick from somebody else. McGurk was valuable. His pay was minimal cash and what Arty called the “overflow” of curious females.

He slept in the back of the old but well-kept safari car. He did his work in the utility trailer that housed the power tools and spare parts. He set up a compact and efficient workshop. If he wasn't in the workshop he was asleep or in Arty's show tent. He never socialized in the midway or dropped in on any other act. Zephir was a focused man. Arty was his apple. Arty was the work he'd been given to do.

“It would be good to have some way to spell out my messages in grits,” Arty might say.

“Maybe,” McGurk would say slowly, his head already tumbling Possibilities.

Arty went to visit him in the workshop. This flattered McGurk deeply. Arty was in an energetic mood he'd have me strap him into one of his treads and would lead the way to the workshop with me trailing. He'd go up the step and climb up on the workbench and talk companionably with McGurk.

Other times he'd stay in his chair and sit outside the door with McGurk perched on the step to talk. McGurk had stowed his prosthetic legs in a trunk. He'd gone over to fancy strap-on pads on his thigh stumps. He wore blue or brown leather for his workaday stumps, but he got a pair made of iridescent green satin, embroidered with silver vines, for wearing in the control booth at the top of the bleachers where he worked the sound-and-light board for Arty's show.

It was McGurk who invented Arty's speaking tube -- a plastic form that fitted over Arty's nose and mouth. When Arty tongued the button inside, a rush of air expelled the water from the face mask so Arty could breathe and talk into the mask at the same time. The thing stuck up against the front plate of the tank on a long gooseneck that linked it to a gaudy (but phony) console in the bottom of the tank. It actually hooked into the sound system. Arty talking under water was an astonishing improvement over propping his chin on the top of the tank to rap into the microphone. The crowd loved it.

When McGurk built the burton receiver that hid in Arty's ear and let him hear the sound system, the crowd, and messages from McGurk in the control booth, Arty offered the electrician his own van and a good raise. McGurk shook his tidy head and politely turned it all down. “I've got my routine set,” he said. He went on sleeping in his station wagon.

McGurk cooked for himself. He was a fussy vegetarian. He was roasting carrots in an oven in the workshop the day he came up with what we later called “The Singing Buttock.” He was peering through the oven window at the sliced carrots in a dish. “What if,” he asked, “every board in the bleachers was wired for sound?”

Arty was lolling on top of the workbench looking at a sheet of McGurk's doodles for a new colored-light plan. He rolled back his head and squinted at McGurk's broad shoulders. McGurk with his back to you was an imposing specimen even with his shirt on. The oven pinged and he took the dish out with a mitt.

“Why?” Arty wanted to know. McGurk dropped the mitt beside the carrots and leaned his big brown elbows on the workbench. He had his private knife and fork wheeling through the carrots and whipping quick chunks of steaming root into his mouth. He always ate standing up. Three bites went through methodical milling and swallowing before he finally let his eyes drift up to Arty.

“Sound is physical. I've been watching Miss Oly ... ” He nodded to where I perched on his work stool. “Her ticket talking got me thinking. Sound is a vibration. It carries through matter. When you hear, it's not just with your ears. A sound actually affects every cell of your body, making it vibrate and pass that vibration to all your other cells. That's why they say a sound is 'piercing' or a scream 'goes right through you.' It does. It actually does.” He stopped with his fork in midair and looked at Arty. Arty was watching him, waiting. Arty didn't say anything. McGurk sighed and took a piece of carrot from the fork and chewed it. I watched it go down his thick-muscled gullet.

“I was thinking,” McGurk said, finally, “that you use your voice real well. I was thinking, what if your voice wasn't just coming at 'em from the air but was vibrating up from the soles of their feet and through their asses up their spines. I was thinking what it would be like if they felt what you had to say because the boards they were standing and sitting on were wired to carry that vibration of your voice.”

Arty's eyes were almost bulging, looking at McGurk. His face was frozen for a long instant and then it folded into a smile and then broke at the mouth and Arty's whole body shook toward his mouth, laughing.

“I love it!” he howled. “I love it!”

The bleachers are empty and singing around me. Arty is chanting in the boards. I sit on the fifth tier and stare straight at the tank, at Arty, his mouth and nose in the black cup of the speaking tube. Wires are taped to my wrists and to the insides of my knees and to my hump, next to the spine. They lead up to the control booth, where Zephir McGurk is measuring my physical responses to the sound that he has wired to feed through every board in the bleachers.

Arty's body floats straight out from the speaking tube, glinting mysteriously in the bright green water.

“Peace,” says Arty, and the speakers above the tank lift his voice to the canvas peak of the tent roof. The bottoms of my feet say “Peace,” and the padded bones of my pelvis whisper “Peace” to my bowels. A shiver passes upward into my stomach, and my spine feels “Peace” like fear curling upward to my skull with my shoulder blades flinching around it.

“As I am!” shouts Arty, and my heart nearly stops with the shock of the sound in my body.

Arty pulls away from the face cup and wriggles toward the surface.

McGurk is hopping down the steps from the control booth. He is beside me now. Only slightly taller than me on his stumps, he is watching the wires as he rips the tape off my skin.

Arty's head appears on the rim of the tank, grinning at us. His face is pale and doesn't look as though it's connected to his body, which is golden, with slowly flexing flippers gleaming through the glass.

“That seemed a lot better!” chirps Arty. “That flat zone makes it even more effective!”

“Yes.” McGurk holds the ends of all the wires together in one hand like the leashes to a pack of dogs. He examines the sheet of readout graph in his hand. “Yes. With just the upper and lower registers you can make them dance to whatever tune you like.”

The Pen Pal

It was Earlville, on the Gulf of Mexico. One hundred windless, muggy degrees. Mosquitoes drowned in your neck creases. The only industry in town was the federal penitentiary. The midway was jammed and the show tents bulged with sweating, stinking, bad-tempered drawls. It got dark but it didn't cool off.

The fat woman surfaced at Arty's last, hottest show for the day. She was young but her colorless hair was scraggled up into tight separate curls with so much scalp between them that she looked old and balding. She was crying as she stood up on the fifth tier of the bleachers and pushed her clasped hands out toward the tank where Arty was deep in his pitch.

“You, darling,” said Arty, and the feel of “darling” rose up through her puffy ankles and through every buttock in the bleachers. The crowd sighed. The fat woman sobbed.

“You feel ugly, don't you, sweetheart?” and “ugly” and “sweetheart” thrummed the crowd, and they all gasped and she wasn't the only one nodding.

“You've tried everything, haven't you?” said the bright floating spirit in the tank. “Everything,” murmured the bones of the people.

“Pills, shots, hypnosis, diets, exercise. Everything. Because you want to be beautiful?”

Arty was building it up now, winding them tight.

“Because you think if you were beautiful, you would be happy?” He had the timing pat. Arty was a master of tone and timing. I leaned on the last steel strut of the bleachers in the aisle and smiled, though I'd seen him do it all my life.

“Because people would love you if you were beautiful? And if people loved you, you would be happy? Is it people loving you that makes you happy?”

Now the pitch drops a full octave into the groin groan. I can feel it even in the support poles. The asses on the seat boards must be halfway to orgasm.

“Or is it people not loving you that makes you unhappy? If they don't love you it's because there's something wrong with you. If they love you then it must mean you're all right. You poor baby. Poor, poor baby.”

The place was full of poor babies. They all sighed with tender sympathy for themselves. The fat woman's nose ran. She opened her mouth and cried, “Hoooh! Hoooh! Hoooh!”

Now Arty was gentle and low as a train a mile off in the night. “You just want to know that you're all right. You just want to feel all right.”

And now he dives into the sneer. Arty's sneer could flay a rhino. “That's all you need other people's love for!”

The crowd is shocked into stillness. Arty grabs their throats while they're down and starts pumping the tempo.

"So, let's get the truth here! You don't want to stop eating! You love to eat! You don't want to be thin! You don't want to be beautiful! You don't want people to love you! All you really want is to know that you're all right! That's what can give you peace!

"If I had arms and legs and hair like everybody else, do you think I'd be happy? NO! I would not! Because then I'd worry did somebody love me! I'd have to look outside myself to find out what to think of myself!

"And you! You aren't ever going to look like a fashion queen! Does that mean you have to be miserable all your life? Does it?

“Can you be happy with the movies and the ads and the clothes in the stores and the doctors and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You can't. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them ... Now, girl, I want you to look at me and tell me, what do you want?”

Arty expected her to stay tongue-tied and blubbering so he could say the next line. That's the way it always worked. But this fat woman was so used to blubbering that it didn't slow her down. She opened her mouth wide and, though I've never really stopped hating her for it, I have to admit she was just saying what all the rest of the damp, wheezing crowd was thinking. She screamed, “I want to be like you are!”

Arty stopped dead still. His flippers froze and he began to sink slowly with his face pressed into the speaking mask and his eyes close to the glass staring out. There was sobbing in the crowd. Soft voices murmured, “Yes, yes.” Arty was silent for far too long. Had he had a stroke? Was it a cramp? I started forward, ready to run around behind the tank and up the ladder. Then his voice came.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, that's what you want.” And I could hear his breath go in, Arty's breath. Arty could control a mike and he never breathed so you could hear it.

“And that's what I want for you.”

He didn't go on with his usual talk. He said that he'd have to think how to give this gift to her. He said they should all come back the next day -- though he knew few of them would -- because he would have something to say to them.

McGurk didn't know what to do with the lights. He was flickering a rainbow that made Arty almost invisible in the water. Finally Arty himself hit the switch that blacked out the tank.

The crowd started to trickle away as I ran to the back of the tank. Arty was already out on his platform and rolling in his towel.

“Arty, what's wrong?” I whispered as I scrambled up the ladder.

“Not a thing,” he said. His face popped out of the towel and he grinned hugely, excited.

“Let's get over to the shower quick. I want to see Doc P. right away.”

The woman who wanted to be like Arty came back the next day. The crew had just finished sweeping down the bleachers in Arty's tent and were raking the sawdust. The first show had gone as usual and it was an hour until the last show began.

I was next door in the ticket booth of the twins' tent snagging the take out of the till drawer into a bag, and punching in totals. A finger tapped the SOLD OUT sign in the barrel window in front of me.

“All sold out!” I hollered, and locked the cash bag.

“There's a dame in Arty's tent!” It was the crew foreman, shrugging at me. I took the cash bag and went with him.

She was sitting up on the fifth tier, where she'd sat before, but now she was the only one. The heat in the tent was heavy and dead. She had a shopping bag beside her and she looked ready to collapse. Her face was dark red. Her eyes were blood-spatter over yellow. She had a little face set into a big pillow of a head, and her arms and legs stuck out of a dress that would have been loose on a linebacker but looked like cheap upholstery on her. She was just sitting, staring at the unlit tank, listening to the gurgle of the pump that aerated and filtered the water.

I climbed up toward her. She looked at me, got a ripple of fear on her face, and grabbed at her shopping bag.

“Hi,” I said. She clutched her bag and nodded, warily. She expected to be chased. I expected to chase her. “I work with this show, can I help you?” I stood still at the end of the tier and didn't go any closer. She flapped her jaws and then came out with a tiny shrill voice.

“I'm just waiting for the Aqua Man. I'm going to pay but there wasn't anybody to sell tickets. I'll pay when the ticket booth opens.”

Her eyes ran over me cautiously. I was wearing one of the blue sailor dresses that Lil made for me. The blue matched the lenses of my sunglasses. I wasn't wearing a cap so the woman's eyes spent a lot of time on my bare skull.

“I'll sell you a ticket right now so you won't have to worry about it,” I offered, helpfully. I had a roll of tickets in my pocket, and I needed to make sure she wasn't going to pull an automatic out of her shopping bag and perforate Arty. She fumbled out money.

“You were here yesterday, weren't you?” I asked.

“He spoke to me,” she said, counting out coins. “He said to come back. He would help me.”

I sat down next to her and watched the heat rash on the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees and in the folds of her chins as she talked. She had got herself into a terrible jam, she said, and it had made her realize ... She was from Warren, Ohio, and her mother was a schoolteacher but had died last year. She took a photo album out of the shopping bag and showed me a picture of a fat old woman.

“What kind of a jam are you in?” I pushed. If she had strangled her old mother I was going to have her escorted to the gate, heat rash and all. “It's a man,” she said coyly. I couldn't help looking at her with suspicion. She bubbled into tears right away. I looked at the photo album in her lap. She had drawn pink daisies on the cover. I figured she was the type who would doodle LOVE in big, loopy letters and dot her is with hearts. Her name was Alma Witherspoon. She was twenty-two riding hard on fifty-five. It seems she was a pen pal. She'd always been a pen pal. Seems she'd got the address of a twenty-to-life bank blaster a year or so before. He was up the road in the Earlville Federal Pen. She'd sent him a photo of one of the cheerleaders in her high school. After her mother died she moved down here so she could send him fresh cakes and cookies.

“We're in love,” she said. It sounded like LOVE. “He wants to marry me!” she moaned. “And the warden has agreed! But I thought we'd do it by telephone and now the warden says I have to go out there and do it in his office and Gregory will see how I really look!” So she needed to see the Aqua Man. She didn't know anybody in this town. She had no relatives left to turn to. Her heat rash looked contagious. I gave her a show ticket and got away from her. “You just wait here for the show. Nobody will bother you.”

I took the cash bag to the safe and went over to help Arty get ready. I told him about Alma Witherspoon while I greased him. He lay on the massage bench and nodded. His eyes were eager. He had a funny half smile the whole time.

“She's probably been spinning whoppers to her pen pals for years about being beautiful and popular.”

“No relatives? No friends?” he asked.

“So she says.”

“Good,” grinned Arty. He stretched and rolled his back under my kneading fingers.

I was doing my talk in front of the twins' tent, “Siamese beauties linked in harmonious perpetuity ... ” I always had a great time with “perpetuity” -- it was a word you could play like a flute, rolling it up a full octave and whistling “Dixie” on that last syllable. The crowd was pretty good and most of them were already inside; the last twenty were shuffling in line for tickets.

That's when I saw Alma Witherspoon go by with two of the redheads who helped out in Arty's tent. The tall women beside her made Alma look even wider. She rolled along with her shopping bags and her purse and her photo album all folded sweatily into different rash-angry creases of her dreary body.

Alma couldn't have made a penny as a pro. She didn't weigh as much as a single leg of “Eleven Hundred Pound Jocko!” or “Pedrita the Plump!” but she wasn't healthy. Jocko and Pedrita were the proudest people who'd ever worked for the show, according to Papa. Alma Witherspoon had the pride of a squashed possum.

“ ... Twin musicians! Twin miracles!” I rolled on, watching the redheads gently guide the wobbly Alma up the ramp to the shower van parked behind the Games of Chance. She put her foot on the top and heaved lopsidedly upward as the door opened. I could see the startled jerk of Alma's wispy head as she saw the staunch white-clad figure in the doorway. Dr. Phyllis nodded, her white mask flashing glare into her thick glasses. Her white glove lifted, beckoning. Alma Witherspoon stepped into the shower.

“There is no shock. There is no danger of infection. Young Fortunato's techniques eliminate that entirely.”

Dr. Phyllis watched Arty as she talked; her eyes swiveled behind her pool-deep lenses, probing for an argument that would change his mind.

Arty was looking through the glass window at the sterile infirmary where Alma Witherspoon lay sleeping, with Chick perched beside her on a three-legged stool. Chick was wrapped in one of Dr. P.'s white coats with the sleeves rolled up. His glowing face was bent toward the pillow. His eyes grazed lovingly over the sodden grey folds of Alma's cheeks and chins.

“Did you look at that chart I gave you? The healing rate on that spiral fracture was triple the normal expectancy for a patient that age ... Arturo? Are you able to comprehend what I am conveying?” Dr. P.'s thin, perfect diction entered the ear in a surgical manner. Arty, who had been absorbed in his view of the lumpy sheets and the doughy mound on the pillow, turned to her calmly.

“Doc, I know you can cut her down all at once. I know it would be more efficient. But I want her to have a lot of chances to change her mind.” He turned back to look through the window again. He relaxed against the back of the wheelchair. His face was easy as he looked at the creature asleep in the next room. His mouth looked soft. There was a sleepy pleasure about him, almost peaceful, almost warm. There was, oddly, a look of Chick on Arty's face. Arty was happy. He was deeply happy and it was, in some way I didn't grasp, all because of moldy Alma Witherspoon having had all her toes cut off and then, when she'd recovered from that, having begged for the privilege of having her feet and legs nipped away as well.

Dr. P. and Chick kept Alma in the infirmary. Arty went frequently to park his chair in the observation room at one end and sit staring through the glass at her bandaged body lying on the second bed from the end.

Once a week, on Sunday mornings, Arty would flick on the intercom and watch Alma's face through the glass as his voice pumped at her from the speakers. She was always overjoyed to hear him. She called him “Aqua Man” and said she was fine and when could she have more of herself taken away? “I can't tell you what it means to me each time they clean a little more away, even a little toe. Once it's gone I feel what a weight of rot it was for me. Oh, Aqua Man, you are so kind to me. I thank the stars in heaven for leading me to you ... ” and so on like that. She'd blubber away, a pen pal to the core. Her message was always How soon would they take her feet off? When would they take her hands? Could she, by a special dispensation from His Wateriness, skip the feet and have Doc P. just take off her whole legs one at a time? They were such a burden to her and she was in such a hurry to be like HIM.

Arty didn't talk about it but I could see it meant a lot to him. The whole thing had me fuddled. Why should this Alma make him happy? He'd never been that way about any of his visiting night girls -- at least not by the time I brought in his breakfast the next morning. He was working harder than ever, reading more, vomiting nervously before each show -- “To clear my head,” he claimed. He schemed and planned with McGurk for hours every morning, playing with lights and sound. But I'd never seen him smile the smiles he smiled in those days, great soft openings of his face with no biting edges at the eyes.