Geek Love (36 page)

I took a tour of the Arturan camp early and watched the holes in the line close up. All the gaps left by the deserting schismatics -- tent spaces, parking spots-that called attention to their emptiness like missing teeth have been sponged away. Miz Z. simply walked the lines and told everyone to move over and fill them. One fight broke out when a novice backed his scrofulous Volkswagen into one of the Harley sidecars, leaving a discernible dent. The other Arturans quickly subdued the irritated Harley owners and the rest of the morning proceeded in untrammeled harmony with much delighted gossiping: “That Arturo! He's a pisser!”

“He showed 'em the road and told 'em they were welcome to it.”

“A relief, really. They were disruptive, arrogant. Definitely interfered with my P.I.P.”

“Them types wouldn't be happy anywhere.”

“They'll be causing trouble in some hallelujah bin next ... ”

Miz Z. came clapping her hands down the line around noon saying there would be a special Aqua Man service at 1 P.M. They all scurried for clean bandages, barking at the novices to get ready.

It was a short service with only the Admitted admitted. Arty came in to a tape of “The Ride of the Valkyries” and a roar of bubbles that subsided to reveal him floating in a hot-pink spotlight. He had a lot of gleam gunk on for the occasion and he made one of his more dynamic impressions. His talk was actually a chant-rhythmic: “She served us -- she served us all -- now we serve her,” while an honor guard of one-fingered novices rolled out a wheeled cot with what remained of Doc P. ensconced in white satin. Chick tagged along behind. When the cot stopped in front of Arty's tank and the white spot hit it, Chick stepped up and peeled back the top sheet.

The crowd of amputees took a minute to catch on to who it was lying trussed like a leg of lamb. No mask. No cap. Only the spectacles glinting over her closed eyes were familiar. A short mop of grey hair spread around her face. She was still completely out. Those glasses were as useful to her as shoes, right then, but Arty, the clever little snot, knew the folks would need something to pin her identity on. Arty waited while the murmurs started and spread. Finally somebody down front yelled, “Doc P.I” and the joint went up like an ammo dump.

When the roar died down, the spectral voice of Arturo, from the glowing tank above the cot, introduced Doc P.'s replacement.

“The Apprentice -- the Student -- the Assistant. Now come into his own with his first act, this, the ultimate service to his teacher!”

Chick was charming-flushed pink and gold-his child body bobbing in an embarrassed bow to the storm of applause. Funny how all the Arturans adore him. They're delighted that he's now the surgeon.

Catching His Shrieks in Cups of Gold

I'd expected Chick to fume endlessly about nipping Doc P. but he surprised me. In the act he was businesslike. Afterward he was gently nostalgic. He stood very close to her until the ambulance took her off. She was going to an Arturan rest home near Spokane. Chick also blossomed, as Mama would say, in his new fame as full-fledged surgeon. Arty claimed not to be surprised.

“That blush-and-shucks game of his was a dead giveaway. The kid always wanted an act of his own.”

An act he had. The Arturans treasured him. On his eleventh birthday he was in the surgery for fifteen hours straight. He had a talk with the nurse on the day he was named successor. That cool and efficient personage became his dog and priestess on the spot. She'd never cared for Doc P.'s bullying. The Arturans pestered him constantly. I'd laugh, seeing some patriarch in a wheelchair rolling madly to catch up with the barefoot towhead kid in the dusty coveralls, or the two hard-bitten motorcycle vets sitting on a trailer hitch so this scrawny runt of a kid could peer into their big spongy ears or lift up an eyelid to examine the exploded blood map underneath.

“Well,” Chick confessed, “I don't need to touch them or even look at them to tell what's wrong. But they like it, so I do it.”

They gave him no rest. Mama grumbled about his health and his lost childhood as she sewed baby clothes on her machine in the dining booth of the van.

“When does he climb trees? When does he sneak candy from the booths? Where are his friends to coax him into teasing the cats or giving Horst a hotfoot? They'll drive him into the ground. They'll suck him out of his natural growth. Look at his wrists and elbows! He's knobby!”

Arty was pleased in a guarded way. He kept an eye on Chick in case delusions of grandeur should beset him, but privately Arty was convinced that with Chick as “The Knife” he was safe from revolutions. “He's a loyal little insect,” Arty would grin. But Arty was intent on keeping the Arturan act solid. He toured the camp every day, supervised the office work, did his shows three times a week, conducted interviews, sent out advance men, advised Papa about the midway, and stayed away from Mama and Iphy.

Papa expected to assume Doc P.'s supervision of the twins' pregnancy but Arty slid Chick into the job. Papa sulked and spent more time drinking and playing checkers with Horst.

Iphy didn't bother to look up from her book when we came in. Chick sat on the floor and wiggled his toes in the carpet. I went my rounds with the dust cloth and made the bed and sorted the twins' laundry. Iphy read all the time. She liked mysteries. Every week's mailbag brought her a new lot of paperbacks. She took her daily walks and did her exercises grudgingly, wanting to get back to the book of the moment.

I came out of the bedroom with the laundry basket and looked at Chick. He hopped up and waved goodbye to Iphy as he opened the door for me.

“You're getting so used to doing things with your hands!” I said as we went down the ramp. He chirped, “Elly is coming back some.” I felt myself swerving an inch above the ground, giddy and happy.

“Put me down!” My feet touched and my stomach dropped into place. “Are you sure?”

“Iphy knows but she's scared Arty will find out. Don't tell, Oly. Promise?”

“Are you doing it?”

We were near the laundry truck by then and Chick stopped and looked at me, startled. His hair was hanging down around his ears, I noticed. Mama would be wrapping him in a towel soon, making him sit on a stool in front of the van, and stepping around him with scissors as she prattled and he squirmed.

“Are you doing it?” I repeated. He blinked and shook his head.

“I never thought of it. Do you think I could?”

“How do I know? I thought you could do anything.” I was impatient with him. It was one thing to be eleven years old when you were memorizing geography, but this was supposed to be the region of his gift, the terrain of his purpose.

“Well, I mainly take things apart. I can take anything apart,” he said. An amazed wideness settled on his eyes as he stared blankly at the door of the laundry truck.

Watching his possibilities dawn on Chick, I decided to ask the question that I'd been carrying for weeks. Ever since I'd realized how limited my own possibilities were.

“Chicky, listen. Remember how you used to pick pockets? Well, you know the sperm in Arty's balls?” I had his attention at least. “Could you move that sperm -- the wiggly little things -- could you move them into me and get 'em into the egg thing in me so I could have a baby like Iphy?”

That, Miranda, was how I came to ask. Chick was hesitant, scared at first. He was afraid of botching the job. He insisted on trying it out on the cats first.

The next week he managed to impregnate an elderly and irritable tigress whom Horst had never successfully mated. She had such a nasty attitude that she sliced up any male who propositioned her. Chick accomplished the miracle of Lilith, the tigress, early one morning while sitting on an overturned bucket in front of the cat wagon. I paced and fidgeted, ready to warn him if any of the Arturans should come along to distract him. He took what seemed like a long time. His hands clenched in a knot at his knees, his face flushed and beaded with sweat.

The male, at one end of the row of cages, slept through the process. Lilith, who had been named after Mama, paced and coughed and glared and switched her tail at the other end.

There was nothing to see. I was getting bored when he finally let out a long, cautious breath and looked at me. He rubbed his eyes with his fists. “Wow,” he said, “I think it worked.”

I went hopping and celebrating around, patting him on the shoulders and rumpling his hair. I was as happy as if it were my own stunt he'd just pulled.

Chick agreed to be ready to do it whenever my time came around if he could be sure of having both Arty and me still and in the same room, preferably for some time.

“Maybe I could do it without seeing you both, but something might go wrong. It's tricky.”

It happened one night in Arty's front room with Norval Sanderson there. Arty and Sanderson were talking their endless talk, Arty drawn up to his desk in the wheelchair and Sanderson stretched out in a soft chair with his legs ending in the loose sandals he wore to accommodate the bandages on his feet.

Chick was lolling on his belly on the carpet, pretending to read a big picture magazine about foreign lands. I was curled in the corner on a built-in bench, listening.

My pulse filled my head as though the heart had punched its way up my throat and was stuck beating between my ears. I couldn't take my eyes off Arty. He was in his wrangling mood. He loved to talk to Sanderson. He seemed to relax and enjoy the winding stalk of argument. Sanderson, the camouflaged hunter, pretended a casual indifference but secretly struggled to catch Arty unawares, skewer him on his own words.

Arty chuckled delightedly, “Such a sadist! You go unarmed because you're sure you can make me turn my own weapons on myself! You don't want to dirty your delicate paws with my blood! You want me to rip out my own guts so you can tsk and sigh and write prize-winning features on the tragic flaw. The self-destructive vortex at the core of greatness! You do see greatness in me. Admit it!”

Sanderson, with his head tipped in cartoon contemplation, would tap his lip slowly with his thumb and question, always question: “Is elephant gas great? Is it great in the pain that it causes the elephant? Or in the relief it affords when expressed? Or perhaps it is only great if it is ignited on farting and the resulting explosion is used to power a turbine? Is an elephant fart great in and of itself? Or only in its effect?”

“Ah! So now we're down to fart jokes! But you'll notice that I am sitting here with all I was born with, Norval, my lad, while you are being whittled away. How do you account for this?”

On and on they went, having such a good time. I loved Arty when he really laughed, and Sanderson made him roar. I watched, knowing this was my moment as Arty tipped back his smooth skull and rippled his belly in waves of pleasure that bounced out through his wide mouth and creased his grey eyes shut in the wild dance of his whole twitching, rocking body to the tune of the glitter inside his skull.

I sat very still. Chick had assured me that the thing in me was ripe and waiting.

There was Chick, on his belly with his bare feet kicking slowly in the air. His water-white hair hung in his eyes as he turned the pages slowly, revealing the mysteries of Tibet and the banner wall of the palace in Lhasa. His head turned slightly, one eye peeking at me. I grinned near convulsions. Do it. Do it now, while he's laughing, I thought. And Chick nodded slightly, turning back to his book as Arty said, “Consider how protected our lives are. Never seen a movie, never set foot in a school.”

“But there's no reason for not seeing movies and whatnot,” protested Sanderson. “The redheads have a portable set. It's sheer cantankerousness and barbarism,” he drawled.

“Early training!” barked Arty. “Hatching habits!”

“Poor feller, try this ... ” and Sanderson pulled a flat steel bottle out of his tweed pocket and poured a golden dollop into the drained lemonade glass on Arty's desk. Sanderson pulled a long swig from the bottle, capped it, and sighed, “Am-fucking-brosia!” while Arty cautiously nipped at his straw and made wry mouths at the taste.

“If that's your idea of pleasure, it's no wonder you need religion.”

Chick was flapping his magazine closed, pulling in his knees, getting to his feet with a stretch and a yawn, twisting to look at me. I stared anxiously at him. He winked.

“G'night,” he said to the room.

“You'll start on Miz Z. in the morning? I promised her,” said Arty.

Chick nodded and slid over next to the chair, looping an arm around Arty's neck, pulling his face close. Chick planted a kiss on Arty's bare, flat cheek and then went to the door and out. As he closed the door after him, my cap slid down toward my nose and then back up to its proper place again.

That was it. I didn't feel anything. But I believed it. And I didn't want to leave. I wanted to go on watching Arty at play, knowing he would talk for hours longer, until Sanderson's flask was empty and the black sky turned green and fleshy in the first seep of dawn. But I also needed to crawl back into my cupboard and feel miraculous. So I went home.

This, Miranda, is how you were conceived. Don't ever doubt that it was an act of love. Your father was as happy then as he was capable of being. Your uncle Chick, the dove, was delighted to do it, to be able to do it. And I was a seventeen-year-old dwarf, pink-cheeked, rosy-humped, scarlet-eyed. I was beside myself with glory. Understand, child, that my idea of you was as a gift to your father, a living love for Arturo. And that's not bad, Miranda, considered as a motive for your existence.

Eleven days later the twins gave birth to Mumpo. It was a long labor, twenty-six hours, and a difficult delivery. Chick did a lot but Mama and Papa helped. I wasn't allowed in the van. I sat with Arty all night and most of the day. He was sick with fear. I was sick myself. The Arturans were buzzing on the intercom constantly. I took messages and shunted them off. Miz Z. in her proud bandage (one little toe's worth) appeared at the door twice with a sheaf of papers, but I shooed her away. Arty wouldn't eat. He insisted on playing checkers, hour after hour, game after game. He beat me fifty times and he would have gone on forever except that I accidentally won a game and he threw the board off the desk in a fury. He rolled off to his bedroom and locked himself in.

When Papa finally came to the door with the news, Arty wheeled out of his room to hear. A boy. Twenty-six pounds, five ounces. The mothers were doing fine.

Papa looked young again, leaning in the doorway to shout the news; his mustache bristled with power and pride, which, he used to say, “are the same except that pride leaves the lights on and power can do it in the dark.”

“Twenty-six pounds?”

“Thought it was twins, did you?” He chortled. “Fat little! A natural! Twenty handsome inches long and twenty-six of the babiest pounds! What do you think, uncle? Cheeks like, a politician! Ten chins right out of the oven! That Iphy! Took one look and says, 'Mumpo.' His name, see? Lily went to lay him on Iphy's breast and she like to die! Couldn't breathe, he's so heavy. Got to tell Horst; he's been sucking the bottle for two days worrying!” Then a sudden change, a confidentiality, a secret wondering, near whisper as he put one foot inside to keep it among us. “That Chick, Great Christo, he's good. I would have popped it with a knife myself after so long. I was scared to death with the kid so big. Not Chick. He pumped in air somehow, don't ask me. That baby breathing easy for hours and still inside. That Chick, sweet lollyballs of the prophet!” And he was gone, thumping down the ramp, hailing people in the line, hollering, “A boy ... Fine ... All fine ... A boy! Yes! By the bouncing melons of Mary! I'm a grandpa!”

Arty sat petrified in his chair, staring through the open door. Miz Z. appeared, heading for us, a clipboard in hand.

“Scare her off,” said Arty. He looked deflated and a little damp. “Then go get the baby, will you?”

“What for?” I felt a fist of fear in my gut.

“I just want to see him!” He spun his chair away with a last look at my face. He disappeared into his room. I had hurt him. I tried to feel the little thing in my own belly. Nothing. But it was there. I'd make it up to him.

Mumpo changed peoples names. Suddenly Iphy was Little Mama to all the redheads and wheelmen, booth rats and artistes. Lily and Al were Gramma and Grampa. Even uncle and auntie jokes made the rounds along with Papa's licorice-marinated stogies and the bottomless keg on tap in Horst's van. But Mumpo himself lay like a big sagging pumpkin in the blankets. He was a bottomless craving and he was cunning. Arty saw it immediately. Iphy knew. I knew. Lily and Al refused to notice. Chick knew and didn't care. Chick loved the big glob.

That first day I poked my head through the twins' bedroom door and saw everything covered with white sheets and smelling of disinfectant. Lily hunched over the baby where he lay, naked and huge in soft, unmoving mounds on a wheeled metal table, as she sponged him, cooing. Chick was watching Iphy. He sat on the edge of the big bed and held her hand and Elly's pale useless hand, the arms overlapping so he could hold them both.