Geek Love (33 page)

Arty has a revolution to contend with and where is he? Mooning over his lost love -- not Elly, but Iphigenia. He's subtle about it. He only inquires half a dozen times a day about her health and whereabouts. The binoculars set to swivel on the tripod in his window are, he claims, for keeping an eye on the flock. Never would he use them to watch the pale Iphy in her painful progress down the row toward the Chute with her swollen belly pulling her forward while she struggles to balance the flabby monster that sprouts from her waist. She sticks one arm straight out for balance and drags that unreliable leg on the other side.

General opinion about Arty varies, from those who see him as a profound humanitarian to those who view him as a ruthless reptile. I myself have held most of the opinions in this spectrum at one time or another. Watching Arty pine for Iphy, however, I come to see him as just a regular Joe -- jealous, bitter, possessive, competitive, in a constant frenzy to disguise his lack of self-esteem, drowning in deadly love, and utterly unable to prevent himself from gorging on the coals of hell in his search for revenge.

The estimable Zephir McGurk informs me, in his laconic way over checkers (a game at which his plodding methodical integrity reveals itself unassailable), that Arty had him design a bugging system that tapped the twins' van into a recording device in Arty's console. He can hear every word, every move.

I find this depressing. The idea of Arty sitting and listening to hour after hour of footsteps, pages turning, toilet flushing, comb running through hair. Elly's conversation has been reduced to the syllable mmmmmm and Iphy is not in the mood for song. Her piano is covered with dust (according to McGurk) and Arty is listening to her file her nails.

Doc P. is frustrated by the inefficiency of Arty's method. I mentioned Arty's theory of acclimatization and continually renewed commitment. “One respects,” I said, “Arturo's desire for complete understanding on the part of the Admitted. Each elevation being a voluntary step, a considered step, allows those with hesitations to back out at any time.”

But she started up on how many hours she'd spent already just taking off my four toes, and she would be hours in surgery on those remaining, and that would bring me only to the first level of elevation, while, if she were allowed to be efficient, she could take me “all the way there inside a single hour on the table.”

Her face became quite damp with her effusions, and her final outburst fogged her glasses. “Now he wants to add on lobotomy at the end! He's talking about sending for all the completions-bringing them back from the rest home a few at a time so I can do yet another job on them! I'm spending eight to ten hours every day in surgery. I'm getting an allergic reaction to my gloves -- unless it's the soap. My hands are scaling and my knuckles are swelling.”

I knew better than to suggest hiring another surgeon to help her.

She says Iphy is enjoying a fairly normal pregnancy but may be carrying twins. I asked about Chick, who looks terrible lately. She says he's depressed and she's dosing him with B complex, zinc, and jumping jacks. “Exercise is the ultimate panacea ... Oxidation of impurity and so on,” says she.

I talked to Chick in back of the cat wagon this morning. An old tire lay flat in the dust and he was bouncing on it, his bare feet planted on opposite sides, his hands on top of his head, his coveralls flying loose on his thin frame. The coverall straps lay on his bare shoulders, emphasizing the skinniness of a neck the size of my wrist. He was polite as always but thinking of something else. His face turned up to me had a starved, ancient look. He said he was “waiting for Iphy.” No, he didn't have to work today because Doc was having meetings and giving speeches. (This is the first word I heard of Doc's Surgical Strike.)

I wanted to question him about some of the “Chick stories” going around but Iphy sagged up, lugging the drooling Elly. Chick hopped off the tire, said “So long” and ran off to her. He threw an arm around her, tucked his shoulder under Elly's armpit to help support her dead weight. They strolled off, the three. Two? Or do we count the ballooning belly and call it four?

I saw Arty's squad marching down the camp so I went through the fence to catch up. The way he leans forward gives an illusion of speed as the chair hums and groans over the dry ruts and dead grass in the Arturan encampment. His solemn novices don't dare touch the chair unless he asks them to.

He stopped at the open door of a dusty sedan with white rags draped out of the windows to dry. Inside, on the back seat, lay an elevated male with his arms ending in white-wrapped bulges at the elbow and one leg ending at the knee. The plush upholstery of the car lifts a puff of dust every time the man shifts slightly in the seat.

Arty nodded in at the shadowed face. “Do you have what you need?”

The stump man wriggled, surprised, craning his neck, “Arturo, sir?” His eyes showed their whites in the dimness.

Arty's scalp was bright in the sunlight. “Are you well treated? Do you need anything?”

“Well, that boy that's s'posed to help me ... not meaning to whine but he's always gone. Yesterday, I couldn't help it, I wet myself, and by the time he showed up, damned if I didn't have diaper rash.”

Arty chuckled, nodding. “Sounds like you need a replacement. What's that boy's name?”

“Jason. But he's a good boy. Just young.”

Arty swiveled in his chair and eyed his entourage. A dozen backs straightened and a dozen faces tried to look bright and eager.

“Who'll serve this elevated man?” Arty asked. The hands shot up -- all five fingers spread to show their service status.

“Miss Elizabeth,” Arty nodded. The woman stepped forward, her white dress bunching over her thickening body. Her hair bunned on top of her head. Thirty-five. Something burnt out of her soft face.

“As you hope to be served?” Arty asked.

“In my turn,” breathed the fingerful, toeful Miss E.

“When that Jason boy shows, send him to me.”

Miss E. detached herself from the group, climbed into the front seat of the sedan, and started sorting through a paper bag full of clothes for clean and dirty.

The elevated man, flat on the back seat, waved his stump arms and strained his neck in the shade of his washed bandages hanging on the windows. “As you are!” shouted the elevated man. Arty nodded and his chair turned and moved on.

Doing his rounds, he calls this. It's a recent development, probably triggered by the Doc and her agitating. I followed him from tent to van to pickup trucks with mosquito nets and sleeping bags in back.

He scolded, sympathized, made peace, moved people from one job to another, from one campsite to a more peaceful spot. He talked to the cooks in the big mess tent to make sure a vegetarian menu was available for those who wanted it. He sent runners from his platoon of disciples to give orders or deliver messages. He spent a good three hours rolling around among the chinless ninnies, the whiners, the leeches, the simps, and the good people in his congregation. He ended up back at his own trailer looking very tired and young. I shoved his chair up the ramp to the deck and opened his door for him.

“So you have a strike on your hands,” I said. He smiled going in and I followed him. He rolled straight to the desk and started pushing through papers. “I've got one rebel on my flippers,” he grinned, “but I always knew she'd turn one day. I'm not all that put out.”

“She's got you over a barrel if she won't cut anymore.”

Arty looked at me with a flat smile. “I'm not such a fool as that. I've had her training her own replacement for years.”

The sun pounded down and the dust drifted up, and after a while Mama's thin scat voice was far off. Iphy called to me: “I need to sit down.”

She was hanging on to a thick, drooping stalk of vine when I got to her. I took the bucket and tucked myself under Elly. The lolling blank face rocked against my head as Iphy slowly turned. We made our way out of the brambles.

“On the grass would be fine,” Iphy said. But I steered her around past Horst to the narrow shade beside the van. She sank down and pulled Elly's head over to lie on her shoulder.

“I'll just rest a little. Standing up in the sun ... ”

Horst was wide awake, blinking and tapping his stick in the dust, pretending he'd never been asleep. I went back to find Mama.

Iphy braided Elly's hair so she wouldn't drool on it. Iphy with hands like angel wings, combing and polishing the long gleaming strands while Elly lay against her. Elly's head drooping forward on the too long, too thin neck, her face blinking emptily at the sofa cushions.

Iphy would wind the long braids into coiled black shells and pin them over Elly's ears and then do her own. Then Iphy would turn the blank, soggy face toward her and sponge it carefully, brushing the eyebrows smooth and propping the lower jaw closed with one hand so that, for an instant, it looked like Elly. Until Iphy let go and the face fell down again.

Horst drove us to the meadow and parked the small van in the dust-white grass. Mama helped Iphy out and I handed around the plastic pails.

“You twins always have flying fingers,” Mama was chattering. “Flying fingers, but Oly and I will do our part as best we're able.”

Horst leaned against the bumper with a stick in case we saw a snake, but he was soon asleep in the sun like one of his cats.

Mama stood against the dust-covered blackberry banks, reaching high into the rasping tangles of the thorns and humming. Iphy's fingers were not flying. With the arm supporting Elly she held the bucket against their swollen belly and reached out with her other hand, dutifully nipping off the warm, dark berries and ignoring the ragged red lines scratched on her arms and their legs by the thorns. She was careful with Elly, holding her away from the bush, staggering awkwardly, catching their bare ankles in the vines, working slowly. I plodded along, picking and getting scraped.

Later, at the sink in our van, Mama rinsed the blue stain and the odd spiders, caterpillars, and stems from the bucket.

“Not what we usually start with, but we can go again tomorrow. And this will set up nicely in about six, eight jars.”

The berries were beginning to simmer in the big pot on the back burner. Mama pushed her dark wooden spoon into the foaming berries and circled the wall of the pot slowly.

I leaned my hot arms on the table and said, “Iphy better not go tomorrow. She got tired today.” I was smelling the berries and Mama's sweat, and watching the flex of the blue veins behind her knees.

“Does them good. The twins always loved picking berries, even more than eating them. Though Elly likes her jam.”

“Elly doesn't like anything anymore.”

The knees stiffened and I looked up. The spoon was motionless. Mama stared at the pot.

“Mama, Elly isn't there anymore. Iphy's changed. Everything's changed. This whole berry business, cooking big meals that nobody comes for, birthday cakes for Arty. It's dumb, Mama. Stop pretending. There isn't any family anymore, Mama.”

Then she cracked me with the big spoon. It smacked wet and hard across my ear, and the purple-black juice sprayed across the table. She stared at me, terrified, her mouth and eyes gaping with fear. I stared gaping at her. I broke and ran.

I went to the generator truck and climbed up to sit by Grandpa. That's the only time Mama ever hit me and I knew I deserved it. I also knew that Mama was too far gone to understand why I deserved it. She'd swung that spoon in a tigerish reflex at blasphemy. But I believed that Arty had turned his back on us, that the twins were broken, that the Chick was lost, that Papa was weak and scared, that Mama was spinning fog, and that I was an adolescent crone sitting in the ruins, watching the beams crumble, and warming myself in the smoke from the funeral pyre. That was how I felt, and I wanted company. I hated Mama for refusing to see enough to be miserable with me. Maybe, too, enough of my child heart was still with me to think that if she would only open her eyes she could fix it all back up like a busted toy.

A redhead went tripping by, red heels stabbing the dust. She looked at me. Her mouth opened to say something, but then she looked away and minced on.

I decided I would go down to where the swallowers were parked and talk to the Human Pin-Cushion. I'd been watching him for weeks. I was nursing this fantasy that maybe he would like to run away with me and join up with some other show, some simp-twister, spook-house show that wintered in Florida and took life easy. I could talk them in for the Pin Kid and do his cooking and his costumes, and run the light-and-sound board for his act. A young Pin-Cushion, just striking out on his own, could do worse than have me for a partner. And, if I worked hard, he'd let me sleep with my arms and legs wrapped around him all night. The Pin Kid seemed to like me too. He laughed at my jokes and actually came looking for me once when I was rubbing Arty down.

You'd think dwarfs and midgets would have drifted through the Fabulon all my life. It was actually, though accidentally, very rare for me to see anyone like me. We'd had the usual monkey girls and alligator guys and an endless migrating herd of fat folks and giants.

Mama often said that fat folks went out of style because every tenth ass on the street now was wider than the one in the tent. Folks could see it free on any block. Giants were also out of work owing, according to Mama, to basketball and the drugs they fed to babies to make them tall enough to play the game.

“It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.” Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal.

It so happened that the Pin Kid who had joined up with our current pack of swallowers was a hunchback. He had regular arms and legs and a great torch of red hair. He was fragile as a glass swan, fine-skinned with freckles, brown eyes, and a clear, honest face. His name was Vinnie Sweeney. He was only twenty years old and he'd been working for years with other acts, trying to save enough money to get his own tent and trailer.