Geek Love (25 page)

Elly smiled. “At our prices we won't be dealing with a waiting line.”

“They'll be people,” Iphy explained, “who are truly interested in what we have to offer.”

Enter the Bag Man

Arty always had a great skin -- smooth and tight -- never a zit or a boil. Not so much as a wart. He claimed, and it was probably true, that it was all the hours he spent submerged in the heavily chlorinated water of the tank. “I don't even have itch mites,” he'd say. The time when Chick and the twins and I all had ringworm from mucking with a leopard cub that Horst had picked up cheap Arty didn't get it and he wouldn't let us touch him until we were clean again.

But there were times over the years when Arty's tank developed an odd, slimy moss that seemed immune to the chlorine. It would start in a tiny patch on the glass behind one of the pumps and spread. It also spread to Arty. I was the one who helped him with his shower after each show. I always soaped him and sponged him but he hated being tickled and he was particularly ticklish directly behind his balls, so that was a spot we often missed. When the galloping green caught on in the tank it caught Arty by the balls and in the shady space behind them. I had to use a scrub brush to get the stuff off him.

I hated to ask Chick for help. It infuriated Arty and made it seem that I wasn't worth anything at all since Chick could do everything better than anybody. But on this night Arty was roaring in the tub-shower and thrashing around threatening to bite me as I tried to scrub his privates. I was about ready to drop the brush and holler when Chick opened the door and stuck his head in. “Oly ... ” he started, but I jumped up and grabbed his hand and pulled him into the bathroom.

“Take the mildew out of Arty's crotch!” I snapped.

“There's a man outside that I don't like,” said Chick.

Arty wallowed irritably in the hot spray from the shower and rumbled at us. “Do this shit-squirting job and then worry about that!”

“It's on the back side of the balls, in the wrinkles, and behind his balls almost all the way to his asshole,” I said.

Chick looked at Arty. A thin trail of green smoke -- almost invisible -- rose from the tub and hovered above the floor.

“What should I do with it?” asked Chick.

“The toilet,” I said.

“No,” growled Arty. “It might stay in the works and creep up my ass again.”

“Well ... ” said Chick. The smoke condensed into a distinct pea-sized puff and wobbled in the air.

I chuckled. “Put it in Dr. Phyllis's underwear drawer.”

Chick looked at me. “Now, Oly ... ”

“Take it with you! Get rid of it! Throw it into the middle of the Pacific! I don't care!” Arty flicked the shower tap off with his flipper and lurched up, catching the rim of the tub with his chin. I hoisted him out and started to towel him dry.

Chick leaned back against the door and crossed his arms to look at us seriously. “The man outside wants to see you, Arty, but I don't think you should.”

Arty rotated his shoulders under the towel. He grunted.

“He writes notes,” said Chick. “He can't talk and he's lost his face.”

“Yah, yah,” sneered Arty.

“He stayed through both your shows and then went to talk to Horst. Horst says he asked about the twins and Oly and Mama and that he claims to have met you before.”

Arty looked to see that I had the bottle of oil and then punched the door open and rolled into his room with the towel wrapped around him. He was climbing onto his massage bench when he said, “Tell the guy to wait. Bring him in fifteen minutes and then get yourself into the security room and keep an eye on him. How big is he?”

“Big,” said Chick. “But slow.”

“Oly will stay with me,” said Arty, and he stretched and wriggled his flippers and waited for me to start oiling him.

Chick's face crumpled in sour worry from the chin up but he turned and went out with the compressed pill of mold floating behind him like a pup.

Arty was sitting in his big chair, dressed in dark wine velvet and sipping at the straw in his tonic water when Chick brought the man in. He was as tall as Al and very lean. He stopped just inside the door, his one eye fixed on Arty, and dipped his knees in what must have been a bow. His face was covered by a grey cloth that fell from inside his baseball cap and drooped into his open shirt collar. Only his right eye peered out at us. “Mr. Bogner,” said Arty.

I pushed up a chair for the big man and he moved toward it and folded into it slowly and with great care. I remembered a story about a miser who had a deep dent in the top of his head. The rain had filled it with water and there were goldfish in it. The miser moved very carefully and slept sitting up so as not to spill his private fish preserve.

The masked man balanced a pad of paper on his knee and looked at Arty. I stood close, fiddling with a spray can of Paralyzer. The lamp on the bureau went on and I took half a step back so Chick would have a clear view of the big guy through the mirror.

I flinched when he lurched forward and began scribbling on the pad. He ripped the sheet off and held it out to Arty. I took it and held it for Arty to read. The script was a fast block print, very legible. It said, “I'm glad to see you again. I shot at you in a parking lot ten years ago.” He was leaning forward, his one eye sweeping its gleam over us both eagerly. His baseball cap was dark blue and the bill was pulled down. The top of his veil was tucked under the left side of the cap so he looked like a game of peekaboo. The veil bulged at his neckline in a bag that seemed to swell and fall back with his noisy breathing. He was literally a Bag Man.

Arty was still and staring, no expression on his smooth, wide face, only his eyes weren't blinking and were wider open than usual. He was holding his breath. I couldn't read the Bag Man's eye. It moved and light came off it, but there was no flesh to crinkle around it and tell me what the eye meant. I got a grip on the Paralyzer and dug my heels into the carpet.

Arty let his breath out. Then he took some in. In a half-joking and familiar tone he said, “Now, why ever did you do that?”

The Bag Man blinked and bent over his knee, writing fast with his pen scratching and jumping in his big weathered knuckles. He ripped the sheet off and handed it to me and then kept on writing. The paper said, “Things were slipping on me -- oranges at first -- then everything. My wife and kids had no respect for me. I started going up to the woods with my old man's 30.06 on weekends but I never did any hunting. Just sat by the fire and cleaned the rifle and had a few beers.”

He didn't remember much of the trial, though he was quite clear on being booked. The photographer and the fingerprinting struck him as dull. He felt that he should struggle or shout, cry, anything to make the proceedings important. But he was too tired, and looking into the faces of the uniformed men going about their work made him anxious not to disturb or trouble them. “Who knows what their wives are like?” he thought. Sitting in the cell alone, he decided that he had done something that couldn't be put right. He lay quietly on his bunk and tried to think. On the second day a man came who claimed to be Emily's lawyer. Emily was filing divorce papers.

The trial was vague and boring. He remembered an old woman, very neatly dressed and sharp-voiced. She was sitting on the chair next to the judge's bench and she said, “ ... If you ask me I'd say it was a charitable instinct for mercy. I felt the same way. I'm not one who'd say it was a wrong thing to do.”

Vern was confused about the charges. They tried to convince him that what he had done was wrong and after a while he pretended to believe them. But he knew that he was being punished for his failure. After all, they had been lined up. Absolutely in line, and he -- the story of his life -- had missed.

He liked the State Hospital. He didn't mind the steel mesh on the windows. He had a room of his own and three sets of green pajamas. He swept his floor every morning, ate the food on the tray, and had a nap on his neatly made bed. When he woke up the tray and the broom were gone and his room was bare and tidy again. He slept a lot and managed to forget nearly everything.

After a year or so he started thinking again, though he didn't much want to. What he thought about was children. Teddy and Brenda had been six years old and five when he last saw them. First he remembered their voices saying “Dad.” He dreamed that his only real name was Dad and the other things that people called him were either aliases or insults. He remembered seeing a whistle on the shelf of a variety store and wondering if Teddy would like it, wondering if he should get one for Brenda too.

Then he dreamed that he was in the open door of a plane several thousand feet above the earth and he had to jump holding a baby in his arms. It was his baby. He jumped, pulled the rip cord on the parachute, and it didn't open. The emergency release didn't work. He was falling fast. The wind tore at him fiercely. He was gripping the baby as tightly as he could but the wind pried under his arms, strained at his muscles, and suddenly the baby was loose, falling beside him, just out of reach. He flailed and groped in the air, trying to reach it. The baby was falling just a little bit faster than he was. It was below him, falling away from him as he fell after it. The earth screamed up at him. He knew that the baby was going to hit first and he would see it, would know it for a whole fraction of a second before he was smashed into a pulp himself. The terrible millisecond of that grief burst in him and he woke shrieking. He couldn't get the dream out of his head. He prayed that he would have the dream again but that this time he would fall faster and be allowed to die first. The dream was not to be monkeyed with. It did not come again and it would not go away.

Emily did not answer his letters. He got a formal letter from a lawyer “reminding” him that the divorce had gone through and that he had been denied all communication with the children.

That was when he remembered the freaks in the parking lot. Their strange twisted forms danced viciously in his head. They were cruel and jeered at him.

He decided that Teddy and Brenda were going to become freaks like that if Emily was allowed to raise them.

About that time Vern's mother visited him and he was required to spend every morning and afternoon in the day room with the other patients. His mother made him think of the old lady at the trial. She never talked about why he was there. She talked about her farm, the dairy that Vern's dad had built up and left to her when he died. She said she could sure use a man around the place. The hired hands were shiftless sneaks. She said Emily never let her see the children.

Vern hated the day room. He wanted to be alone again. Then he decided that he wanted to leave the hospital altogether. He started paying attention to the doctors and nurses.

He was released from the hospital three years and six months after he had entered it. His mother met him in the lobby and walked out with him. She led him to a big car and they got in. She drove him home to the farm where he had grown up. Mrs. Bogner took Vern on a tour of the farm and introduced him to the hands. It was spring and the garden needed a lot of work. While his mother fried chicken, Vern sat at the kitchen table and sketched a plan for the vegetable plot on a scrap of notebook paper.

That was Thursday. The following day was a payday for the hands.

Mrs. Bogner stuck to the old ways and paid her men and her bills with cash. Just after midnight Vern got out of bed, put on the tan work clothes his mother had bought for him, packed a brown paper bag with more clothes and shaving gear, and eased out of his room. He slipped past the old lady's door and down the stairs. Vern's father had always kept the cash box in a drawer beneath the flour bin in the kitchen. The key had always hung on a small nail in the door of the hall closet. Vern's mother hadn't changed anything.

He was parked outside the grade school at 8:30 on Friday morning. His mother's car was newish and respectable. Vern pretended to read a newspaper and smiled to himself as he watched the kids straggle into school. A little before nine he began to worry that they might have gone in another door. For a moment he wondered if they might have changed so much that he wouldn't recognize them. Then he saw them. They were together but arguing about something. Teddy gave Brenda a push and she stamped her foot and yelled at him. Vern rolled down his window. His whole body was suddenly flooded with sweat. His voice shook and came out too soft. They didn't hear him. Brenda tried to stomp on Teddys sneakered foot and grab a book from him. Teddy laughed and held the book up out of reach. Vern found his old voice. He disliked their bickering. He always had.

“Teddy! Brenda!” The pair, caught in their quarrel, looked guiltily toward him. He was calm again. He knew them well, after all.

“Dad?” said Teddy. And Brenda, confused and not remembering, looked at her brother and said, “Dad?”

Disneyland was fine. They drove straight through two days, put up in a motel across the street from the enormous amusement park, and then spent three days from breakfast until bedtime glutting themselves on the wonder of it.

Vern was calm and happy. The kids were in a daze of ecstasy. They collapsed at night too tired to watch the television in their motel room. After they were asleep Vern would turn the set on, keeping the volume very low. Crouched close to the set he would watch the late news, listening carefully for mention of himself or the children. There was nothing. He knew the police would be looking whether the news mentioned it or not. He sat up late watching the kids sleep.

When they climbed into the car on the day after they had finished with the amusement park they obviously expected to be taken home.

Brenda was bouncing a toy crocodile on a stick. “Mama will like this. I'm going to give it to her.” Teddy announced that he would give Mom the photo of himself in the race car. Vern had sidestepped their questions like a bullfighter for days. Now he took a slow breath and said he thought they ought to take a look at the Grand Canyon before they headed back. Maybe ride some horses down the trails.

They kept talking about their mother. Brenda started to worry about school. Her class had planned a roller-skating trip and she suddenly realized that she had missed it. She came out of a gas station toilet crying pitifully. Vern was convinced that she'd been frightened by a molester and he roared through the door marked WOMEN to find nothing but a little room with cracked plaster, a damp, bitter smell, and a trail of sodden tissue paper on the floor. When he got back to the car Brenda was sobbing in the back seat with Teddy sneering at her and the station attendant, a plump teenager with a red oil rag hanging out of his hip pocket, was staring suspiciously at all of them. Vern handed him money and slammed his way into the driver's seat. He flicked the engine on and whipped around in the seat to stare at Brenda. “Why are you crying? What happened?”