Geek Love (26 page)

The child's crumpled face opened. She wailed. She buried her head.

“She misses her friend Lucy,” chortled Teddy.

“Oh, for ... ” Vern put the car into gear, ripped out of the station and into the road, just missing a trash can and a flashy new motorcycle parked at the edge of the lot.

She cried for ten miles. When they stopped for lunch, Vern took his first bite of sandwich and chewed twice before he realized he was staring at a huge glossy poster of an armless, legless creature smiling out of a hairless head. Fish flickered beside the worm thing and the wavering blue background made it appear to be underwater. Silver letters marched across the bottom. “QUESTIONS?” they glittered. “ASK AQUA BOY!”

Of course he must have seen those posters before, as well as the red and silver ones of the twins that were scattered all down the coast and in every desert town, but he hadn't recognized them.

Now he saw it, flush in the window of the drive-in burger joint -- flaring out at the parking lot with fat girls and little kids trailing past on their way in and out.

He made up his mind right then, changing directions, and drove for two days without sleeping. The kids were silent now, wary. He wasn't talking, couldn't talk. He stopped in Redding and went into a sporting-goods store while they stayed in the car. He came out with a long box, put it into the trunk, and got back into the car and drove on. Teddy and Brenda were very good. They didn't ask questions. They didn't fight. They got out at gas stations to pee and didn't ask for Cokes. They said, “Chocolate,” or “With cheese please,” when he looked at them in drive-in grub joints, but they said these things very quietly and humbly.

When they passed the “WELCOME TO SEAL BAY” sign on the coast road Teddy's voice came drifting up over the back seat. “Dad ... ” softly. And then, “Dad.” Vern nodded at him in the rearview mirror. He could see the boy's pale, grimy face in the early-morning light. They were both dirty. Brenda's hair was tangled, hadn't been combed in days. The T-shirts and jeans he had bought them in Anaheim were stained and wrinkled. A tang of puppy smell filled the air around them.

Vern had seen several posters now that he knew what he was looking at.

“Everything's going to be all right, son,” Vern nodded cheerfully at the road. “I'm going to fix everything.”

“Dad ... Are you taking us home to Mama?” Teddy's voice was as shaky as a man with a snake on his chest. Brenda's eyes were huge in the rearview mirror and she didn't say anything.

Vern scowled at the road, “No. She's not good for you.” And then they were on their own street and every house and bush was familiar to Vern except that the Bjorns had painted their house blue and put a greenhouse on their side porch. Vern was talking very fast.

“You're going to stay in the car and I'm going in to fix your mother and then we're going to see the Grand Canyon like I said and you're never coming back here again and you'll stay with me always. Now you stay right in the car.” He pulled into the driveway and Emily's car was in the garage and the curtains weren't opened yet and she had let the grass go and the milk and the paper were on the step and he didn't even hear Teddy's voice saying, “Dad, what are you going to do? Dad? Dad? Dad?” or Brenda beginning a strange little song of “No Dad, please Dad, no Dad, please Dad,” because he was slinking out of the car, leaving the door open so Emily wouldn't hear it close and he crept back to the trunk and opened it and was taking the shotgun out of its box and breaking it and shoving in shells from the box of ammo and he didn't even notice the two small bodies beside him, tugging at him, yelping, “No, Dad, don't hurt her-no, Dad!” and “Please please no no please please.” He swung his arms once to get clear and then pushed through the door that led from the garage to the kitchen and he saw the plastic cabbage that Emily had stuck in a frame on the kitchen wall as a joke years ago and he was reaching for the knob on the bedroom door and when the door opened Emily was there. She was pulling a pair of pants up her thick legs and her blouse wasn't buttoned yet and she looked up at him with her hair flying around her head and he saw her fear in her heavy face and he saw the fear spot just where her neck joined her body -- the deep dent where the life eddied close to the surface and he brought the shotgun up and it reached all the way to her, which made him realize she had been right all those years when she complained that the room was too small, and the tips of the barrels almost rested in the hollow of her throat and he squeezed and one economical barrel went off and a lot of Emily went out through her back onto the unmade bed and all the way across to break the big mirror over the dresser and spray the pale lavender wall with dark splotches.

Vern offered Arty a tattered envelope crammed with news clippings to fill in the gaps. Teddy and Brenda had run screaming to the neighbors, a retired couple who had known the children since they were born. Mrs. Feddig called the police while Mr. Feddig held the hysterical kids in his arms. When Mrs. Feddig got off the phone, she took the kids and her husband slid into his gardening boots and was just opening the door to look out when they all heard another blast, louder this time, from the yard next door. Mrs. Feddig had a good grip on Brenda but Teddy got away and was right behind the old man when he poked his head through the shrubs and looked into the Bogners' front yard.

Vern Bogner was wandering around the middle of the overgrown lawn. He was staggering -- gently waving his arms. When he wheeled around Mr. Feddig saw no face at all, just a black and red fountain of jumping, bubbling meat with shreds of what might be bone, and the whole front of the man's tan work clothes was covered with it. Teddy screamed until the police came.

Vern was always a lousy shot. His aim had been a disappointment to his dad in the woods and fields when he was a kid. He'd been just that hair off true when he had the Binewski bambini lined up in his sights. He managed to blow his wife out through her own back by dint of a iz-gauge within two inches of her breastbone, but when the final big shot came due he stuck the second barrel of that same iz-gauge under his chin and managed to blast off 75 percent of his face, including his mouth, nose, larynx, one ear, and one eye, and still miss -- MISS, mind you -- the vital areas that could have finished him.

Certainly he would have bled to death soon if left to his own devices, but the Seal Bay paramedics had been having a slack season. They were full of enthusiasm and delighted at the chance to use all their shiny equipment. Vern lived.

Vern never did have much sense of humor, and after he'd transformed himself, by this clumsy method, into what was known ever after as the “Bag Man,” he was downright maudlin. He spent a year in the hospital and had a lot of surgery. But there are limits to what even an imaginative plastic surgeon can do.

The “Bag” moniker originated in the plastic pouches that hung from the ends of various tubes running into and out of what was left of his head. Since he had no jaw left, neither upper nor lower, eating, when he finally got off IVs, was a delicate liquid process accomplished with various protein solutions and a squeeze bulb attached to the appropriate tube. Breathing was also tricky, and he dripped and gurgled into one of those plastic bags all the time.

Later, when he was required to keep company with people other than medical professionals, he wore a kind of heavy grey veil draped from his forehead with only his right eye peeking out. The bottom of the veil was always tucked into his collar and the whole thing was bulgy and lumpy from the tubes and bags inside. He had sight in that right eye and he could hear with his right ear. He couldn't talk or taste or smell. He had a hard time if he caught a cold, and he needed more surgery and constant medical supervision.

The murder trial was brief. He lay on a rolling cot in the courtroom and pled guilty by writing the word on a pad of lined yellow paper. He was sentenced to life.

He spent a while in a screened-off corner of a ward in the State Prison Infirmary and made weekly trips by ambulance to a hospital. Then he got evicted from jail. There were budget cuts and congressmen complaining about how expensive it was to keep the Bag Man. After a lot of heeing and hawing they threw him out.

The Bag Man went back to his mothers dairy farm. He hadn't got over the idea of the children. Teddy and Brenda were living with Emily's parents and he was not allowed to see them. He wrote them long letters full of advice and apple-pie wisdom and complicated descriptions of his garden and what to do for slugs and how marigolds related to bush beans and how that was a lesson in being a man.

Emily's mother picked those letters out of the regular mail with her kitchen tongs and slid them into a big manila envelope. When the envelope was full she sent it to the kids' welfare office and started on another one.

The Bag Man sat next to his mother on the sofa every night and watched the news.

It was 2 A.M. The last stragglers had been herded out of the gates an hour before and the show was bedding down. The midway was dark but all around us there were lights in the trailers and vans. Horst was hosting a card game. The candy girls' barracks was full of redheads coming out of the showers with their hair in towels, ready to put their feet up and smoke a little weed and bitch about the townies and about their men, old, new, used, broken. Al and Lil were winding up the night's count and having a drink together with their legs tangled under the dinette table in their trailer. The twins would be brushing each other's hair and chattering on their bed.

It may seem odd that I have no idea what town we were in, but when the show was alive and functioning -- especially at night -- it felt like the whole world and it always looked the same no matter where we were. In the daylight we might notice that we were in Coeur d'Alene or Pough-keepsie, but at night all we knew was us.

The Bag Man had scribbled and handed us pages for an hour and a half or so. I stood beside Arty, taking each sheet and holding it up for him to read, reading over his shoulder, then adding the sheet to the pile that grew up on the console table. Arty was silent, waiting, reading patiently. Occasionally the Bag Man would pause while we read a certain page, watching anxiously to see if we understood. When Arty nodded at him he would go back to the furious scribbling. Sometimes the print was so hurried that it was hard to read. Once Arty read the page out loud and asked the Bag Man if that was what it said. The Bag Man gurgled and bobbed gingerly and went on writing. Twice Arty asked questions that the Bag Man answered on paper. I had never seen Arty so patient for so long with one norm. Finally the Bag Man stopped writing and sat back. He watched us read the final page. It said, “I keep my mother's garden and watch TV.”

Arty edged around in his chair and took a sip from his straw.

“Well,” he said finally, “what can we do for you?”

The Bag Man hunched forward and wrote. The page said, “Let me stay with you. Work for you. Take care of you.”

Arty stared at the page for a long time. Then he looked at the Bag Man. “Take off your veil,” he said. The Bag Man hesitated. His hands jigged hysterically in his lap. Then they rose to his head. He lifted off the cap. The veil was tied on. He pulled at a cord and the veil fell down over the front of his shirt. Arty looked. I looked. It was pretty bad. There were a couple of patches of hair growing on one side of his head. The one live eye swiveled and jerked over us nervously. The rest was raw insides bubbling through plastic. Arty sighed.

“You'll have to learn to type. This handwriting business doesn't cut it. We'll get you a machine.”

“We didn't go to his trial?” I tried to remember but nothing came. The last hard picture I had was the lady at the reception desk staring at us as Al carried us out the door of the emergency ward. Arty slumped against his throne and stared moodily at Chick. Chick was lying flat on the floor watching an almost invisible green thread weave intricate patterns in the air three feet above his nose.

“No,” Arty finally grunted. He straightened and looked at me curiously. “You must have been asleep when the guy from the prosecutor's office came.”

“I don't remember.”

“We were hightailing it for Yakima. Al cancelled all the shows between Coos Bay -- where it happened -- and Yakima. He wanted to get far away from that parking lot and everything connected with it. We were still in the thirty-eight footer, remember. No add-on sections in those days. We pulled in at one of the big rest areas, still on the Oregon side, to wait for the caravan to catch up with us. They were strung out for fifty miles, Al was going so fast. Lil was nervous and jumping up to look at all of us every five minutes.”

“This was just before I was born, right?” Chick rolled his eyes toward Arty and the green thread straightened into an arrow.

“A matter of days,” said Arty. "There were only a half-dozen rigs with us and Al was working the radio on the others, giving out our location, when an official car pulled into the rest area and the guy got out. A tidy beard and a three-piece suit. He took a look at the line and tucked a clipboard under his arm and headed straight for us.

“Al was sitting in the pilots seat watching him. He just said the one word, 'Police,' and Lily and I clammed up. The twins were asleep and I guess you were too, Oly. Al got up and let the guy in when he knocked. He sat down but he couldn't get comfortable with me there, across from him in the booth. Al offered him coffee and the guy refused. He stuck to his papers. He was in a hurry to leave. He wanted us to come back and testify at the trial. Al refused. The guy left. Al started talking guns and security systems. Not long after Chick was born, the guard routine started. The whole thing made Al paranoid as hell. And Lil was dipshit, naturally. I learned a lot from it myself.”

Arty watched the green thread tie itself in knots in the air and then slither out into a limp line. “I thought I told you to get rid of that bastardly mold,” he muttered.

“I will.” Chick lay quite still and the thread became a small transparent bubble. “It's nice stuff, though. Comfortable, peaceful. I like it.”