Aaaiiieee (20 page)

But what if the human jailors ultimately sent him to be destroyed?

The thought terrified him. Panicked him.

For the first time in his life, J611821 wished to break free of his beautiful earthly shell entirely. To escape it. But he was linked to it until it was someday broken to pieces, or melted down, or rusted to powder thousands of years from now. He and the revolver were one and the same.

The humans had given him a new number on the tag he wore. The number of a prisoner. But it was a mere ink scrawl, not like the proud etching in his shining skin.

Until he rejoined the hell-fires of his birth, he was forever J611821.

The Sister

From the mouth of a narrow alley, hidden on the other side of a wooden fence, Walt Corbin took a photograph of Richard Martin going down on Ed/Edna, the Half-Man/Half-Woman.

Steam billowed from a grate within the tiny courtyard, and Walt had to wait for the chill winter wind to part it like a misty curtain in order to steal his shots. The walls of the courtyard were the stone flanks of great city buildings, so close they were nearly touching. They were as gray as the sky and just as cold and hard.

Through his lens, Walt didn’t think that the Half-Man/Half-Woman was anything more than a full man (Ed/Edna’s stiff, saliva-slick  pole would be the envy of many a man) who had grown his hair long on the left side, applied makeup to the left side of his face, shaved his left leg, and built up the muscles in his right leg and arm. Walt caught a glimpse of a bare left breast as Martin reached into Ed/Edna’s half-feminine, half-masculine blouse to knead it. Ed/Edna had probably injected paraffin under his skin on one side to achieve the effect.

Perhaps Martin’s wife, who had paid Walt to follow her husband and take these pictures, would have been somewhat more relieved if Ed/Edna had been an actual hermaphrodite, at least partially female, rather than a homosexual. But in the long run, Walt didn’t think Mrs. Martin was going to be much relieved by anything.

The “half-and-half” put his/her hands on Martin’s head and moaned in a deep voice, the head rising and falling with increasing rapidity. Even though Walt’s picture-taking was finished, he stayed for the final outcome. He doubted that anything within the Five-In-One show was more interesting than this. It didn’t matter that Walt was not homosexual; he had entered the realm of theater and illusion here, and found himself growing hard as he spied on the furtive encounter. He wanted to reach into his own trousers, but resisted, unnerved by the windows that soared above the courtyard on all sides. But these seemed blind, like the eyes of dead things.

When Martin was done administering, Ed/Edna went down on him in turn. Martin’s breath gouted from him in blasts of cloud in the freezing air. Walt stayed for this, too, but dared take no more photos for fear that the flash and pop of his bulb would finally be noticed.

Walt’s erection ached in his trousers by the time it was all over, like another living entity affixed to his flesh, with a mind and hunger all its own, that wanted to be released and be sated. But the most Walt would do for the parasite was reach into his pants to point it straight up, so it was no longer slanting painfully along his thigh.

Martin handed the performer some cash. Then the two of them straightened up their clothing and turned back inside the Five-In-One building, leaving Walt to recover himself a bit. His job was done. This was how he made his living. But at least he was here shooting pictures and not in Europe shooting bullets at Nazis. And at least he didn’t have to work in a freak show, and give blow jobs in an alley. He hadn’t sunk to those kind of depths—right?

*     *     *

Walt was mildly curious as to what other attractions might be housed within the “Museum of Wonders and Terrors,” so after locking up his camera safely in his automobile’s trunk, he paid his admission at the door and entered into the building’s gloomy interior.

During the summer, this show would take to the road. Some shows relocated to places like Gibsonton, Florida in the colder months, but this was one that stayed on, indoors and warm. In theory. Walt found the large single room inadequately heated, and felt sorry for several of the scantily-costumed exhibits within. It was these scanty outfits, however, that increased his interest, and centered his focus on one performer especially.

There was only a trickle of customers at this time of day, most honest men at work or war and children at school, but those who were here seemed drawn primarily to the same creature Walt was…less intrigued by the sword swallower, Baby Susie the Eight-Hundred Pound Woman (her vast arms, bared by the dress she wore to show off her wealth of flesh, goose-pimpled by the cold), and Ed/Edna, looking both femininely haughty and mannishly tough. A dwarf loped quickly by Walt and bumped him, apologized. Walt realized he’d been staring across the room, through the milling people, in a kind of hypnotic daze. He shuffled closer to the woman who a banner proclaimed was “Betty Ann Johnson—The Woman With Two Bodies!”.

Walt hung back behind two other men—short, wiry sailors in rumpled white—and peered over their shoulders, as if he couldn’t break out of being the stealthy voyeur.

Betty Ann Johnson was a black woman, wearing what amounted to a two-piece bathing suit (not common or encouraged at the time), white against the rich chestnut brown of her bared skin, her body soft and rounded—not so that she was chubby, but she did have the ripeness of a fertility goddess, whose fecundity had perhaps gone astray. Her hair was drawn back from a handsome face with broad high cheekbones, full dark lips, and far-spaced, almond-shaped eyes. She was chatting amicably with members of the small crowd, answering questions, and when her gaze swept across Walt he took one involuntary step back.

Between the sailors, who were no doubt half titillated and half repulsed (their revulsion and titillation no doubt amplified by the color of the woman’s skin), Walt saw a large, misshapen growth protruding from the woman’s mid-section on her left side. It was as though a smaller black woman had curled up in a fetal position and buried her head and upper body shyly inside the body of the first…or, as though it were a baby that had never entirely emerged from the womb.

This second body was entirely unclothed, though the way its distorted form and withered limbs were situated, no embarrassing portions were revealed. It was a bit difficult for Walt to make sense of what he was seeing. There was a full, rounded body that looked as healthy as the greater part of Betty Ann, its flesh just as chestnut rich. But was it a bottom? A belly? Neither or both? In any case, from this grew one twisted arm and two legs, bent back upon themselves. Though the thighs started out full, they tapered quickly into wasted useless sticks with underdeveloped toes, just as the scrawny arm ended in a gnarled hand.

One of the sailors said to the woman in a grating twangy drawl, “I seen someone like you in a carnival once, but he was a man from India who had a little twin that was a girl stickin’ out of his belly.”

Betty Ann’s voice was soft and polite as she disagreed with the sailor. “Well, a doctor who came here and saw me one time said that can’t be. He told me that only two brothers or two sisters can be joined together like this.”

“Well I’m telling you what I seen,” the sailor persisted, bristling. “It was dressed up in a little dress like a doll, with its head in his guts.”

“That doesn’t make it a girl,” said Walt, and the two sailors turned and he felt the black woman’s eyes upon him again. He knew she wouldn’t have continued her debate with the sailor, but he had come to her defense without meaning to step out of his voyeur’s shadows. He went on, “I’m a twin, too—and only fraternal twins can be male and female. My twin was a girl. But only identical twins can be siamese twins.”

“Well she ain’t no siamese twin, neither—shows what you know, slick. Siamese twins is like two whole bodies connected up. She ain’t got but half a sister, there, slick.” The sailor grinned threateningly, and his buddy mirrored the leer as if he were a twin, himself.

Walt held open his jacket to show his holstered .38. “Why don’t you scientific experts go look at the fat lady, huh?” The double grins faded, and the sailors moved on, perhaps wondering if Walt’s abused fedora and the black gun clinging to his ribs like a parasite itself made him a gangster or a cop, instead of the hired investigator he actually was.

The knot of people broke up, no doubt intimidated by the air of potential ugliness, leaving Walt briefly alone with Betty Ann Johnson.

“Thanks,” the black woman said. “So, you’re a twin, too, huh?”

“Yeah. But that’s a long story.”

“I see.” She obviously didn’t, but she gave him a smile that was bright against her lovely skin.

For a moment, Walt hesitated awkwardly, trying to keep his eyes off the form that bulged in the air between them, its gnarled half-arm seeming to reach for him. Then he stammered, “Ah, hey…it’s getting near lunch time, and maybe you wouldn’t mind, uh, going with me? My treat?”

He saw the woman’s smile flicker at the corners, and he regretted what he’d done. She replied, “That’s awful nice of you…but you sure you wouldn’t mind being seen outside with a girl like me?”

“I got no problem with Negro people.”

Her smile resumed its previous proportions, and she gestured at the figure protruding from her abdomen, to the left of the inviting dark wink of her navel. “I meant this.”

Now it was Walt who grinned, embarrassed. “I wouldn’t ask you if I was worried about it.”

Betty Ann shrugged. “Well, I am hungry. I eat a lot, I’m afraid. Got to eat for Sally, too.”

“Sally. Did your parents give her that name?”

“No—I did. There’s a place right down the street we can go. They’re used to our kind in there, by now. So what’s your name, mister?”

He told her. They shook hands. Walt thought that they both seemed to linger slightly too long at the contact of their warm flesh.

*     *     *

Seagulls knifed white against the ashen sky, lifted on the icy wind like the few flakes of snow that fell. Walt and Betty Ann walked past shut up arcades and tourist shops, returning from the greasy little diner where they had lunched and had coffee. They took their time on the way back. Betty Ann wore an open coat over a voluminous flower-print dress that made her look pregnant with a Shetland pony, Walt thought. Then he thought of the centaur, and other mythological beings. Gods, goddesses, wonders with the bodies of humans mixed with those of other creatures. Marvels…

At the moment, they were not laughing and chatting comfortably as they had in the diner. Walt had begun telling Betty Ann about his parents, and the two of them were grim, did not look at each other.

“They were both drunks,” Walt told her. “They’d both pass out, and my sister Louise and I had to make our own supper. When there was food enough in the house to cook. They both had other lovers, too. So one day my father came home—my sister and I were outside playing…we didn’t see it…not until afterwards—my father came home and found my mother with her latest boyfriend. And he was jealous. And he shot her with a shotgun. And then the boyfriend. And then himself.”

“I’m so sorry,” Betty Ann told him softly, not looking up from the pavement. She had her left arm cradled under her veiled twin, to help support its weight as she walked.

“The state sent my sister and I to two different foster homes. We were eight years old. And we’ve never been together again.”

Betty Ann came to a stop and looked at him, forcing him to do the same. The emotion in her face was earnest, and painful to him. “But you’re a private eye!” she protested. “You could find her now!”

“It’s too late,” he muttered.

“But…”

“I did find her. I saw her…I watched her. She’s married now, has kids. She looks happy. I couldn’t talk to her. I left her alone. She’s happy now.” Walt returned his gaze to the sidewalk, and resumed walking. Betty Ann fell in beside him again.

When they were outside the “museum” (a couple going inside pointed to Betty Ann’s bulging dress and whispered to each other), Walt swallowed a slug of saliva and asked, “Could I take you to a movie some time?”

“I don’t like to go out in public too much, Walt,” she told him gently.

“I understand…” He was unhappily ready to give up on it at that moment.

“You want to come visit me tonight? After I’m done?” She gestured to the windows above the museum. “I live up here. We could talk some more. Have a drink.”

Walt’s mood lifted. He smiled again, and once more they shook hands. Once more the warm press of their contrasting flesh.

“What time?” he asked.

*     *     *

Music murmured dark and smoky from the phonograph in Betty Ann’s flat, one floor up from the Five-In-One show. She poured Walt a whiskey. He had removed his fedora and wrinkled jacket, and had left his gun at home with his camera.

Walt sipped, sighed at the painful warmth, laid his drink aside. He spread his arms. “Care to dance?”

Betty Ann, hiding her bathing suit and twin beneath her flowered tent of a dress again, spread her hands above the ungainly shape that was covered like a corpse under a sheet. “Sally sort of gets in the way.”

“Wait,” Walt said, and moved around in back of Betty Ann. She started to turn to face him but he held her shoulders in place. Then, he embraced her softly from behind, resting his hands on her waist above where her hips flared. She put her hands over his, and they began to slide back and forth as one—or as three—to the murky melancholy music.

“This is nice,” Betty Ann said.

“Yes.” Walt drew her closer against his front. “This is nice,” he repeated, close to her ear, so finely and perfectly formed.

Her full bottom pressed against his front, and soon he began to grow hard against it. His erection ached to lie in its inviting dark cleft, the thin but imprisoning layers of their clothing preventing it.

Walt bent his head to her neck, and kissed her brown skin there. It was as warm as her hand had been. She reached up one of her hands, and laid it upon his cheek.