Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  Arty made me take him to his stage and unbuckle his straps and leave him alone. He wouldn’t talk at all.

  I was furious when I came out and saw the twins strolling off to rehearse with their sheet music. I stalked up to Elly and gave her my fiercest glare. “You tried to kill him.”

  Iphy reached toward me, as if to give me a hug, “Oly, she didn’t tickle me or anything. She just let go.” Elly dragged her on, and snapped back at me, “You’re just Arty’s dog! He’d kill us all and you’d stand there holding his towel.” They sailed on.

  Papa took some of Mama’s pills and slept that day and through the night that followed. The show closed at 9 P.M. and the camp shut down by 10. Even with my cupboard door shut I could hear the rattle and gasp of Papa snoring. It seemed pitiful. I couldn’t stand hearing it.

  I crawled out in my flannel nightgown and went barefoot through the door and down the hard clay ruts past the dim grey vans and trailers. There were lights on in the redheads’ windows but I wanted Arty.

  The guard at the back steps of his stage truck nodded as I went in. It was warm and humid in the dark. The heated water tank kept the backstage tropical.

  Arty hollered, “Yes,” when I knocked. He was lying on the bed with the maroon satin bedspread, reading. I crawled up beside him.

  “Who do you think it was,” I asked, “the guys who stuck up Papa?”

  Arty squinted at me for a second. I was asking but I didn’t want to know. Maybe he decided to teach me a lesson.

  “Remember last summer’s geek?” He pretended to be looking at his book.

  “The yellow-haired boy from Dartmouth?”

  “George. They were his fraternity brothers at college.”

  I nodded. Arty tipped his head so he could scratch his nose with a flipper.

  “The guy Chick moved. Was he hurt bad?”

  Arty shook his head slightly. “Fractured skull. He’ll be all right. What bothers me is that they got Papa’s kick. That means they got paid twice.”

  My head did a slow interior waltz and swooped back to the same word. Twice. So it was Arty who stole the money from the safe, or arranged it. Where would he get explosives? Or learn to use them? I stared at him as he lay against the maroon pillow. He had changed without my noticing. He was thicker. His neck was heavily muscled and set solidly into his heavy chest. Beneath the thin, sleeveless shirt his muscle was as defined as ever but larger, bulkier. Even the wrist joints of his flippers seemed strong. Where the three long toes of his hip fins bent to clutch the bedspread, I saw a curling fuzz of hair clouding the top of each knuckle. I stared. It was the only hair I had ever seen on his glass-clean body. I knew than that he’d gone outside and away from me. For the past few months I’d scarcely seen him. All the hours of every day he had been on his own—not just escaping the irritations of Chick and the twins and their rival stardom, but befriending the geek, talking to people I didn’t know, talking talk I hadn’t heard, making phone calls without me to dial for him.

  I complained, “Taking the money was against the family. Scaring Papa was against the family.”

  His eyes stayed closed but his head rolled impatiently on the pillow, “Not in the long run.”

  I couldn’t understand that. The angry, weak sounds of Papa’s story, the way those tinhorn brats had stampeded him, Papa the Brawl Buster, Al the Boss, the Ringmaster, Papa the Handsomest Man. I felt robbed. My champion was revealed as a scam and I was embarrassed at all the years I’d let myself feel that Papa was any protection at all. It was Arty’s fault.

  I opened my mouth to blame Arty, to yell. But there was something odd about him. He was curling slowly onto his side, tighter and smaller. His face was stony except for a puckering twitch beside the long, pale ovals of his closed eyes. A tear squeezed out from under one lid and disappeared immediately into the creasing flesh. It was years since I’d seen Arty cry, not since he abandoned tantrums and went over to the cool, hard image he admired. But it might not have been a tear. His eyes opened and stared past me.

  “Elly,” he said. “I’d kill her but the cunt would take Iphy with her out of spite. And Chick! Can’t anybody but me see what he is? What he’ll do to us? He’ll end up smashing this whole family like an egg if we’re not careful.” His eyes swiveled at me in a queer begging gesture.

  “You’re jealous,” I sneered. “You want to be the only star!”

  He threw himself back on the pillow. On any other face his expression would have said despair and resignation. “Yeah, you too, I know. He’s cute. Almost like a norm. And he’s innocent. As innocent as an earthquake.

  “Papa gave all those solemn orders of secrecy when he was born but it’s Papa who brags and puts Chick on jobs outside where people can see him moving things. There’s nobody on the lot that doesn’t know! They come on in Pittsburgh, quit in Tallahassee, and tell all their friends and the lady next to them on the bus. How long, Oly? How long before the Feds are tucking us all behind barbed wire in the interests of national security?” He’s leaning over, glaring at me, shouting.

  “Oh, Arty.” It came out soft from my throat. Tired. “You’re just making excuses.”

  Now he grew angry, rigidly upright, balanced on his hip flippers and quivering. “Hey! Did you ever think maybe I deserve what I get? Hey? Elly is nothing. She couldn’t get a job in a B-bar playing that plinka-plinka crap. All she’s got is Iphy. Papa gave it to them on a platter.

  “Me? You know what they do with people like me? Brick walls, six-bed wards, two diapers a day and a visit from a mothball Santa at Christmas! I’ve got nothing. The twins are true freaks. Chick is a miracle. Me? I’m just an industrial accident! But I made it into something—me! I have to work and think to do it. And don’t forget, I was the first keeper. I’m the oldest, the son, the Binewski! This whole show is mine, the whole family. Papa was the oldest and he got the show and Grandpa’s ashes. Before me the whole place was falling apart. I’m the one who got us back on the road. When Papa goes it’ll be me.

  “The twins don’t care if I draw a bigger crowd than they do. They don’t have to play or dance or sing. They could sit on a bench and wave and they’d still get crowds. They can afford to be easygoing. Nobody’s going to upstage them. And Chick! Of course he’s amazing. That’s my curse. I’m a freak but not much of a freak. I’m like you, fucked up without being special. There’s nothing unique about me except my brains and the crowd can’t see that.

  “You know what I hate? Iphy should have been mine. She should have been hooked onto me. Papa fucked up there. We don’t need Elly. If I had been twins with Iphy we would have had something. We could have done something. But my time’s coming.”

  The flame energy of his anger and disgust flickered. He eased back onto the pillow and a peculiar childface replaced his sneer. He was afraid. His shoulder fins reached toward each other but could never touch, never meet. Falling short, they lay like a failed prayer across his chest.

  He lay there staring at nothing, tired out by the draining of his own venom. I crawled up behind him and snuggled close, my belly to his back. This was my reward for endurance. He would never ask for my arms around him but times like this he would allow me to warm him, to warm myself against him. I nuzzled into the back of his neck, breathing carefully so as not to irritate him. I felt his fin stroking my arm. When he spoke again I could feel the low vibration of his voice all over my body. “You know, Oly, I’m surprised. I didn’t think Papa would be so easy to beat. Not this soon. It’s kind of scary.”

  9

  How We Fed the Cats

  Al, the handsomest man, looks bewildered and groggy over his first cup of coffee. His mustache is sprung and wild to match his sleep-jagged eyebrows as he peers around the table at us, asking, “What’s this I hear about high jinks on the Mouse Rack with the wheelchair? Eh, dreamlets?”

  We all grin dutifully and Elly does her “Oh, Papa!” routine to disarm him while Mama blearily hands around filled breakfast plates, and drags her kimono sleeves
through the butter every time she reaches across the table.

  I cut Arty’s meat slowly while my chest fills with a yearning that would like to spill out through my eyes and nose. It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

  Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, “Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we’ll make it right.” The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child’s need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

  Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

  We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear’s worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

  The shadow stayed in Chick’s eyes, and a dimness, a kind of fog, settled on him. I think he never quite got over having hurt the frat goon. Chick was crazy like that. Something in his chemistry mixed up with the way the family trained him. He got twisted so that he was more afraid of hurting someone else than of being hurt himself, more scared of killing than of dying. In the numb, dumb way that he knew things, Chick understood Papa’s disappointment and felt guilty for it.

  Papa took to having depressed spells during which he was inclined to sit alone in odd spots with a bottle. High on a two-day binge, he ordered posters for a “World’s Strongest Child” act, but he shelved the idea during the hangover. Sometimes Horst, or the twins or I, would make a suggestion to try to cheer him up.

  “What about sports?” I’d ask. “What if a pole vaulter got just a tiny boost from Chick at the right moment and you happened to have a bet on the guy? What if a ball got a little nudge toward a goal line?”

  But Papa would shake his head and pat my hump. “Oly, my dove, your grandpa told me long ago, and I should have remembered. He used to say, ‘If you don’t mess with the monkey, the monkey won’t mess with you.’ ”

  Al and Horst were going off on business for the day. Al told Chick to feed the cats and Chick, as usual, bit his tongue, turned pale, and nodded without saying anything.

  Chick bit his tongue more than any kid I ever heard of. Sometimes Al had to use fire-eater’s salve on the inside of Chick’s mouth.

  After Al left, Chick slid up to me at the sink where I was doing the breakfast dishes. “Come with me, Oly, please?” The dishes flew out of the sink in a silent, clatterless flock. They dipped through the rinse water and dried in the air as they jumped, ten at a time, to their places in the cupboard. I laughed and wiped my hands. Arty was holed up with a book and the twins were practicing piano with Lily.

  “Sure,” I said, “but how come? You’ve fed them lots of times.”

  His soft face rumpled lightly in worry. “I know. But I don’t like it.” His eyebrows went up in a peak of resignation. “I like the cats. It’s the meat. I don’t like moving it. Just come along, O.K.?”

  Horst always parked the cat van near the refrigerator truck where the meat was kept. When he fed the cats himself, Horst would toss a quarter of beef out onto the ground, jump down after it, slam the truck door, wrestle the beef around by its lone leg and whack chunks off it with a huge cleaver. Horst fed the cats through the cage doors, but nobody else on the lot felt comfortable doing that. Horst liked telling stories about how unpredictable cats are. I always suspected him of doing it deliberately to keep people from messing with them. If that was his reason it certainly worked.

  The sides of the cat van were hinged at the top and could be cranked up like awnings, shading the cages. There was steel mesh outside the bars, and the walls separating the paired Bengals and lions and leopards were inch-thick plates of steel. Al tried to get Horst to put clear plate plastic up instead of bars and the steel screen but Horst said it would ruin the effect. “People think big cats should be behind bars. And the screen gives them the feeling that they could get their fingers clawed off if they stuck them through. Besides, the cat smell is important too, and if I put plastic up I’d have to air-condition the whole rig.”

  When Chick fed the cats he dropped the meat through the ventilator slots in the roof. We stood outside the refrigerator truck and watched the big bolt lift and the door swing open. Chick reached over and took my hand. “Is this O.K.? I want to hold your hand while I’m moving the meat.” He was looking pinched. “Sure,” I said. A beef quarter floated off its hook inside the truck and wobbled out. It flopped onto the big chopping block. The cleaver came out of its slot in the truck’s tool rack. Chick worked fast. The blade flashed upward five times quickly and six chunks of meat sailed through the air with exposed fat gleaming. The cats were coughing and spitting as the trapdoors over the ventilator slots lifted simultaneously. The chunks dropped through with a single thunk to the floor. Another quarter jumped out on the block and the door shut while the cleaver was rising and falling. Chick was squeezing my hand gently. The cleaver dipped its square tip into the cutting block and stayed there while the chunks lifted, circled like cumbersome crows, and headed slowly for the flaps in the roof.

  “You could do it without the cleaver, Chick,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I’d feel the meat more. Can you feel it?”

  He was taller than I was and he looked down at me with such a serious intensity that I felt a small quiver of fear. “Feel what?”

  He frowned. Words never came all that easily to him. “Well, how … dead … the meat is.”

  I stuck my tongue out at the corner of my mouth and squinted at him through my sunglasses. Anybody else in the family except Lily would be pulling something if they talked like that, trying to spook me so they could laugh at me later. Chick was so straight he was simple. He could never really understand the joke when the rest of us were telling whopping lies.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t feel anything.” He pursed his mouth and I heard the meat land inside the cages and the snarling of the cats. Chick looked so sad I knew I’d failed him. “I’m sorry, Chick.”

  He swung an arm over my shoulders and leaned his face down against my head. “It’s okay. I just thought you might feel it if I held your hand.”

  “Shit,” said a clear voice behind us. We wheeled together as though we were the twins. It was one of the red-haired girls. She shrugged her round shoulders at us through her peacock shirt and laughed nervously. “I just never get over how you do that, Chick,” and she waved gaily and teetered away on her tall heels.

  We watched her go, Chick’s arm still around my shoulders, my arm around his waist. For one instant my eye escaped and I could see us as we must have looked to the redhead. Two small figures, one bent and distorted, shielded by cap and glasses, and this slim, golden boy-child, several inches taller, holding the dwarf close while chunks of meat sailed over them in the air. I hugged Chick. His peach cheek rubbed my forehead and nose. I wondered how he did move things and, while that wondering was creeping into my skull, I realized that I had never wondered about it before. Had any of us really wondered? Even Al and Lil? Or had we all been so caught up in the necessity of training him and protecting him and protecting ourselves from him and figuring ways i
t would be safe to use him and finding out exactly what he could or couldn’t do that we never got around to wondering?

  “Chick,” I said to his fine yellow hair, “how do you move stuff?”

  His head came up slowly from my shoulder and he looked surprised. Then his face focused. I was thinking how ridiculous never to have asked him. He started to blush. He let go of me and passed his hands over his ears as though he knew I was making fun of him. “Oh, you know,” he said. The cleaver levered itself out of the chopping block, flew to the sterilizer hose hanging from the refrigerator truck, and danced in the white gush from the nozzle. The hose stopped and the cleaver leaped toward the truck door, which opened just enough to let it in. Then the door closed and I knew the cleaver would be settling into its slot. Chick was bright pink now.

  “No, I don’t know, Chick. Tell me.”

  A small rock by the truck wheel began to spin in place. It flipped over, still spinning, then hopped onto its side and began to roll in a tight circle. The equivalent, probably, of another kid scuffing his shoes or twiddling his own ear in embarrassment. He was my little brother, of course, so I got impatient. “I’ll pinch you, Chick! Tell me how you move stuff!” The rock lay down quietly.

  “Well, I don’t really. It moves itself. I just let it.” He looked at me anxiously while I chewed on that and found it unsatisfying.

  I shook my head. “Don’t get it.”

  “Look,” he turned me toward the cats. The side of the van lifted and the prop poles slid into place so I could see the cats in the shade. They were all eating, standing over the meat, wrenching it, or lying with chunks between their paws, fondling it.

  “You know the water tank at the back?” said Chick. As I watched, the small taps over the troughs in each cage opened slightly and trickles of water flowed. One of the Bengals leaped at its tap and began batting the stream with its paw. “Water always wants to move but it can’t unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction.” The tap that the Bengal was playing with suddenly opened wide and a gush of water splatted into the big whiskers. The cat jerked back and then lunged forward, pressing his whole face into the heavy spray, twitching his ears ecstatically. “If you give it a big hole,” said Chick, “a lot comes out. If you give it a pinprick you get a slow leak.” He was struggling to make me understand. I watched the tiger play and felt a thickness between my ears. “I’m just the plumbing that lets it flow through. I can give it a big path or a small one, and I can make it go in any direction.” His anxious eyes needed me to understand. “But the wanting to move is in the thing itself.” We started off toward the big tent.