Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  I crawled out of my cupboard and tiptoed into the toilet cubicle. Elly was grumbling. She must have given in. She’d given in on Arty’s birthday the year before and sulked the whole day. The pink joy from Iphy’s smiles had twisted me up. I looked in the mirror trying to see the fear on my face. It was in my liver and invisible.

  Arty would rather have Iphy cut his meat than me. The blinds squeaked open in the twins’ room. Their voices came out together. “A horse!” they said, and then a paired sigh, “Poor thing!”

  They left the van door open and, when I came out, they were standing on the bottom slat of the board fence peering through.

  “Many happy,” I said, and hugged their long beautiful legs. Then their hands were pulling me up by the arms and I grabbed at the top rail and peered over. Iphy said, “Hang on to her,” and Elly’s arm clamped under my hump.

  “He’s sick,” said Iphy, who thought all unfamiliar animals were male. “She’s old,” said Elly, who assumed that all living things were female until proven otherwise.

  The horse had been orange once but a grizzle of white had paled its coat. Its white muzzle drooped to the ground on a thin, tired neck. Its ears were loose and hanging. Its eyes were nearly closed. Bones jutted through spine, ribs, sharp cow flanks. The tail was so long that it dragged in the muck.

  “The feet!” said the twins. The horse was not sleeping. It moved half a step forward. First a rear hoof and then the opposite forehoof lifted slowly out of the black mud that covered them to the fetlocks. Then the horse stopped, lifting again that rear leg, holding it curled so the hoof was above the mud. The hoof was long and curved forward like a human shoe worn over on the outside. The legs were muddy to the knee and bowed oddly.

  The sun leaked up over the edge of the plain. The horse stood in shadow in its tiny pen. “Its feet are rotten,” muttered Elly. Iphy began to sniff in sympathy.

  I could feel the faint thunk in the fenceboards from the pumps far off in the middle of the tight maze of paddocks. The sun’s yellow knife slit the air, not yet reaching the ground or even the fences, but just touching the heads of the pumps as they rose and then losing them as they bobbed down into the shadow again. The feeble horse stood sunk into itself. Not an ear twitched. Not an eyelid flickered. An early-morning fly crawled over its hanging lips.

  “Happy birthday,” Arty said.

  Iphy sat next to Arty at breakfast. Al had gone to the sheriff’s office to get the verdict on our permit for Burkburnett. Lil hugged the twins every time she passed them and made elegant little melon salads for breakfast. Elly didn’t talk. Iphy mourned for the horse all through the meal.

  “I want my chair.” Arty was brisk, up to something. I dragged the chair outside and set it up in front of the door. He clambered into it from the top step and looked around. “Over by that horse.” And I pushed his chair through the dust to the fence. He leaned forward and peered through the slats. The horse hadn’t moved. Arty’s face rumpled in disgust. He sank back against the chair and looked at me speculatively. “Well. Go get the doctor. Bring her here.” I ran.

  The doctor’s big van was by itself at the end of the line with fifty yards between it and the last trailer. She never parked close to the others. Her blinds were open. The twined snakes painted on the van’s side held the intercom in their mouths. I pushed the button. The sun was up now, slanting warm and yellow over my hands. The intercom speaker hissed and then her voice came out calmly. “Yes.” I delivered the message. “One moment,” she said. The speaker hissed again and went silent. I climbed down off the step block to wait for her. I didn’t like to think of her door opening too close to me.

  The air was still and dry with a musty, thick taste. The only familiar smell was the faint tang of fuel from the van. We hadn’t opened up yet. We hadn’t put our mark on the air. I tried to see past the cluster of vans and trucks and trailers to home—to the place at the other end where our van sat, with Arty out front next to the near-dead horse in its pen. Everything was in the way. I pulled my cap down over my ears and jigged anxiously in the dust. I didn’t want to look in the other direction toward the dry slut town with its dark windows shaded against us. I bit my tongue when the door opened. The antiseptic smell slid out first. Then I saw her thick-wedged white shoes with the ankles leaping from them. “Lead the way, please,” she said. And she stepped down toward me. I scuttled.

  Dr. Phyllis should have had a nice voice. It was cool and high and always controlled. She never ran off into the ragged edges of sharp like Lil or Iphy. But it still wasn’t pleasant. It was monotonous as a sleepwalker. Her words came out cleanly, nipped off surgically with a slightly heavy breath where an r should be. She spoke Lil’s old tongue, the long, smooth one from the right side of the hill in Boston. Though, when Lil asked her, Dr. Phyllis said she’d never been there. That talk made Lil want her to stay. Lil thought it would be good to have a woman with the show who spoke that way—as though she and Lil might drink tea in the van and talk about home. But it never happened. I didn’t mind Lil liking her. Lil was silly about who she liked. But Arty was different.

  The dust puffed up behind me as I ran. I hoped it would settle on her white uniform. I wished she wasn’t wearing the mask so she would breathe my dust and cough. But she never came out without the mask over her nose and mouth. The white cap was always pulled down tight over her forehead and completely covered her hair. In between were the big thick spectacles. She was completely protected. She didn’t speak to me, and she kept up with me easily, walking fast.

  Chick was leaning on the arm of Arty’s chair as we came up. The two of them were watching something in the dust.

  I heard Arty say, “Push them together.” Chick’s head nodded and a small grey snake rose a foot into the air, suspended from its middle like a shoestring, and then dropped back into the dust.

  “They’re not paying attention,” said Arty.

  “Good morning,” said Dr. Phyllis in her high, perfect voice. The snake and a horned toad rose quickly and flew away together into the desert. Chick hid his head against Arty’s chest.

  “Doctor!” said Arty. “Take a look at this horse.”

  She walked stiffly past me, her hands folded in front of her crotch. “I am not,” she said calmly, “a veterinarian.”

  Arty jabbed his chin into Chick’s wheat-colored hair. “Scat!” he snapped. The child jumped away from the chair and turned to run. When he saw me, he reached out his soft hand and ran up to me.

  “Let’s go see what Mama’s putting in the birthday cake,” I said. He smiled and we climbed into the van.

  Chick sat on the counter, still except when his mouth opened to receive the gobbets of chocolate frosting that would occasionally lift from the bowl that Lil was dipping from. “Stop it, Chick,” Lil would murmur. And he would smile sweet chocolate at her, and the curl that dropped in front of her ear would stretch out in a soft caress over her cheek and then spring back. I crouched on the floor with my hump against the cupboard door and watched Arty and Dr. Phyllis through the open door.

  Her white skirt was stretched tight over her thick legs and square hips. She was pushing her hands deep into her front pockets and rocking on her wedge heels. She gazed through the fence at the decrepit horse. Arty leaned back in his chair and looked up at her, smiling. I couldn’t hear what they said.

  A brown blob danced in front of my nose. I opened my mouth. It dipped, circled in the air, and zipped onto my tongue. Frosting.

  “Thanks, Chicky,” I mumbled. My cap slid forward onto my nose and then back to its original position. Dr. Phyllis leaned an elbow on the top board of the fence and turned her mask and spectacles toward Arty. She propped a white-gloved hand on her hip and nodded. I licked the last of the frosting out of my teeth and let it trickle down my throat.

  “I wonder where the twins are,” said Lil. The cake was beautiful. Lil had cut it into the shape of two hearts that interlocked.

  I gave the word to Horst and he went right away. He took a
pair of musclemen along to help pull the little trailer. I sat on the step of the cat van, smelling the Bengals and waiting for Papa. There were a few cars moving on the distant street now. A barbershop had its door open and a curtain of red and white fly strips hung limp. The guards were drinking from big Thermoses at the end of the lot. It felt odd to be parked without the gates and the booths and the tops going up around me.

  After a while Dr. Phyllis marched by, followed by Horst and the two bullies pulling the covered trailer. She had them park it next to her big van. Then she went inside her van. Horst came to me slowly. He dropped heavily onto the step beside me. “Horse thieving now!” he said.

  “Papa will find its owner and pay for it.” The men were grunting and cussing inside the little trailer. The old horse would not get up.

  “I wouldn’t feed that critter to an alley cat. Grey meat and little of it.”

  One of the young men jumped out and stood at the tailgate to pull. With his hands wrapped in the dung-fouled tail he crouched and crab-walked backward. The pale, gaunt flanks hove into view. The flabby hooves and rear legs fell out onto the ground. The blond man inside the trailer was pushing from the other end. The horse rolled out and lay on the ground. Its head flopped down on the end of the long neck and lay still. The white flapping nostrils flared and drooped. The blond man hopped out of the trailer with a rope hackamore and fitted it onto the limp head. He clipped a rope to the chin ring and ran it to the axle of Dr. Phyllis’s van.

  The guards were moving slightly, standing up, putting their Thermoses behind their stools. A big man crossed the street and walked across the rutted stubble of the lot. Papa. The two guards walked halfway to the vans with him and then went back to their posts. Papa came on. He looked angry.

  Burkburnett had forbidden our opening on Sunday. We’d have to wait until the following day. Al was pissed off. He was cursing the cowardly advance man who had done a bunk the first time he ran into a snag. “Missing Friday and Saturday in Wichita Falls—and having to open on the slowest day of the week in a town that couldn’t buy a week’s worth of toilet paper for the crew!”

  I told Papa what Arty wanted. Al groused but then went off to look for the owner of the horse.

  At lunchtime, Lil realized she hadn’t seen the twins since breakfast. She flew into a panic and went jittering around on her high red heels with her hands clutching her own shoulders. She teetered from guard post to guard post questioning the big blank-faced men. “Ain’t seen ’em, ma’am. Couldn’t miss ’em if they’d come this way.” And they’d switch their chaws and wobble their eyes anxiously as she skittered away, hoping that the little freaks hadn’t slipped by them while they were swapping lies about hot nights in Baton Rouge.

  Papa was somewhere talking to a man about a horse and I trailed after Mama piping, “Maybe so,” and “Ah, they’re all right!” and “Maybe they’re buried in the meat yard, shall I get some shovels?” in my most reassuring way as she burbled through her Mom’s-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight. Lil had got to the finger-twisting stage and all the red-haired girls turned out to look. We opened all the empty boxcars on the rail siding and examined all the padlocks on the big sliding doors to the packing plant and were on our way back through the camp line, stopping at every van, trailer, and truck camper. The whole show was on hold because Papa hadn’t given the set-up order yet, and Arty was occupied with something else.

  Mama decided the twins were having a nap in their own room and we were on our way to look when I noticed the sky. It was a vague milky sheet. Far off at the dull edge of the plain, a blood-red line lay between the earth and the sky. As I watched, the red thickened to a bar and then a band, climbing the sky.

  Arty and Chick were next to Dr. P.’s van at the end of the line. Dr. P. herself, arms cocked to plant her white gloves on her white hips, stood in front of Arty’s chair nodding her mummy-wrapped head. Chick looked like he was hiding behind Arty’s chair.

  The wind was picking up. It riffled Chick’s hair and pushed Dr. P.’s skirt flat against her legs. Off to the side the old horse lifted its head on a curved and quivering neck, scrabbling at the earth with its mushy front hooves, trying to get grip enough to heave itself upright.

  Horst trotted by me with the two guys who had moved the horse. I started to run. I could see Dr. P. opening her van door and waving for Chick to go in. Chick looked at her but both his hands were fastened to the arm of Arty’s chair. Arty’s chin was jerking toward the door and the doctor. Arty was telling Chick to go with her.

  “We’re gonna shove that maggoty goat back into the little trailer!” Horst yelled at me as I passed him. It was too far to Dr. Phyllis’s van and I was too slow. Her door closed on Chick and he was inside, alone with her. Arty had the bulb control in his teeth and was wheeling merrily toward me when I grabbed his chair arms.

  “What’d you do that for?” I puffed. “What’s she gonna do to Chick? Don’t leave him with her!”

  “Push me home! He’s all right. Come on! Double it! Run!”

  I grabbed the chair handles automatically and slogged toward his van, still craning my neck to look back at the blank closed side of Dr. P.’s white van. Horst and his helpers were torturing the decrepit brute back into the trailer. I stopped pushing. “Arty, what is she doing to Chick?”

  His smooth-skinned head bobbed at the side of the chair. “Milk and cookies. Teaching him to play checkers. Move it! I have to piss so bad I can taste it.”

  I threw myself forward, plodding, watching my feet stir the dust into the wheel ruts and noticing that the odd, thin light from the sky threw no shadows at all.

  Mama was frantic. Papa was trying to tell her about the fat, bristly tick of a man who owned the horse and had tried to convince Al it was blood stock and would be a three-year-old in prime fettle as soon as it got some oats in its belly. Mama was whipping over every surface in the van looking for a note. A ransom note from the kidnappers or a farewell note from the runaway twins. “I left a note in my mother’s sugar canister when I ran away,” she muttered. Papa followed her, rambling on about the “used cayuse peddler” and finally noticed something amiss. Mama turned to him with clenched fists and a flaming face.

  “Help me find them!”

  “What the …??” Papa snatched at her wrist, turning her arm over, checking the number of injection tracks. I saw them toppling into anger.

  “Papa, the twins are missing.”

  “Ah, the flabby-gashed mother of god!” howled Papa as he sailed out the door trailing Mama. The wind slung the door wide with a flat whack and rushed into the van. I pushed the door closed behind me and took the two steps to Arty’s van. I turned the knob without knocking and slid inside. Silence. Carpet. The clean, rich room dim except for a yellow pool of lamplight where Arty lay calmly on a wine velvet divan with a book. He watched me wrestle his door closed.

  “Do you know where they are?”

  He shook his head. “But you can soak some towels and pack the windows and door frame for me. Help keep the dust out.” His eyes fell back to his book.

  I wet towels in the tub, wrung them out, and punched them into the window frames. Through each window I could see the crew moving the vans and trailers, turning them end-on to the coming wind. There was movement in the windows of some of the other trailers as other hands tucked wet rags or papers against the cracks.

  “Shall I go get Chick?”

  Arty looked at the clock. “He’ll be coming here in a few minutes. He’ll make it before the dust comes down.”

  “There he is.” I could see him through the window, holding hands with a red-haired girl as he ran to keep up with her long legs. They were ducking their heads, hunching into the wind, the red-haired girl with her free hand holding her high-rise hair, which blew up and back around her groping fingers.

  “Did you ever wonder,” Arty asked, in his coolly speculative tone, “why he doesn’t fly? He should be able to.”
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br />   I yanked the door open as the pair hustled up the steps.

  “Oly dear!” said the red-haired girl. “Crystal Lil wants you, honey! Chick found the twins. Come on.” I was staring at Chick, looking for bruises, psychic scars, electrodes planted behind his ears. Nothing. He was caught up in the excitement of the wind.

  “Leave him with me!” Arty yelled from the divan. Chick’s eyes sprang eagerly past me, his face opening, pleased. He trotted in as I pulled the door shut.

  The redhead grabbed my hand. Hurrying. The wind pushing so I felt my weight lifting away from me. The sky was a deep rust above us and the shouts of the crew around us were shredded to yelping bits that flipped past like no language at all. “Where?” I bellowed.

  I thought she said, “The Schultzes!”

  We blew past the generator truck, the refrigerator truck. I saw Horst shoving a wad of wet paper into the ventilator slot of the cat wagon and then the sand hit us. The red-haired girl screamed a short, high whistle interrupted by coughing, hers and mine. It was needles from behind, a million ant bites blistering the back of my neck, burning through my clothes. In front it was worse. A hot cloud of granulated suffocation filling nose, mouth, and eyes with dry powder that stuck to any moisture. It liked the roof of the mouth, the caves behind the nose, and especially the throat.

  The refrigerator truck toppled onto its side behind us. We ran and the wind tried to make us fly.

  The ten-toilet men-and-women Schultz was broadside to the wind. The same heaving gust that flattened the redhead and me toppled the Schultz off its trailer. On my belly in the dirt with my face buried in my arms, I felt the crash more than I heard it. Then a hand was pulling me up, and slipping my blouse up to cover my nose and mouth. The redhead rushed me along, her own blouse snugged to her face with the other hand. The fine dust sifted through the cloth but I could breathe a little. The wind ripped up my back, raking my hump, clawing at my bare head. My cap had blown away with my sunglasses. There was no sound—the blank roar of the wind-borne sand was seamless.