The Family Fang: A Novel (9 page)

O
nce he had arrived in St. Louis, Buster wandered up and down the terminal for a few hours, walked into a diner, ordered another milkshake, and dabbed at his misaligned face with a moist towelette. “You don’t mind me asking?” said a woman in the booth next to his, pointing at his face. Buster was about to answer when he felt something twitch in his brain, the long-dormant synapses that were programmed to lie without provocation, to create something better than what had come before. “I was doing a daredevil show over in Kentucky,” he answered. “I rode a barrel over a waterfall but somebody had drilled some holes in it before the stunt and it began to sink before it even got close to the falls.” The woman shook her head and slid into his own booth, leaving her food untouched. “That’s awful,” she said. Buster nodded and then continued. “Fighting for air, I finally went over the edge of the falls and the barrel busted open on some rocks and I got battered around in the churning water. By the time they pulled me out, half a mile down the river, everyone assumed I was dead.”

“I’m Janie Cooper,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Lance Reckless,” he answered, trying not to smile, now knowing what his face looked like to other people.

“You say that someone drilled holes in the barrel?” she asked.

He took a long, dramatic sip from his milkshake. He had decided he would live on milkshakes from here on out. “Foul play,” he answered. “I’m sure of it. A daredevil’s life is full of danger, Janie, and not always for the reasons you’d suspect.”

She took out a pen and paper from her purse and wrote down her phone number. “Are you in St. Louis long?” she asked.

“Just for the day,” he answered.

“Well,” she said, placing the scrap of paper in his hand, “call me tonight if you end up sticking around.”

She walked back to her table and Buster took such a long sip of his milkshake that he felt his head begin to ache from the effort.

Not ten minutes later, Mr. and Mrs. Fang stumbled into the bus station’s diner. Mrs. Fang was wearing a sling around her plastered arm, her head awkwardly bandaged. Mr. Fang had two black eyes, his nostrils plugged with blood-crusted gauze, his body hobbled and bent. “Buster,” they cried in unison. “We asked around for an injured boy,” his father said, “and everyone pointed us to the diner.”

As he hugged his parents, Buster noticed Janie again turn away from her food, her arm draped over the booth, watching the proceedings. “Oh, my baby,” Mrs. Fang cried. “We thought we had lost you,” his father added. “What the hell is going on?” Buster said. For all his talents, he knew he was powerless against his parents. There were two of them. It was not a fair fight.

Janie stood and introduced herself to Mr. and Mrs. Fang. “Are you Lance’s parents?” she asked.

“Who?” the Fangs responded.

“Lance is my stage name,” he told Janie.

“Did you two go over a waterfall in a barrel too?” she asked.

His parents had never in their entire lives allowed a stranger to confuse them.

“We were attacked by a bear,” they said, as if they had not even heard Janie’s question.

“We were camping in the mountains in Michigan,” Mrs. Fang said, “just my husband and myself and our son here, Buster, when a grizzly bear came upon our camp and we were forced to fight him off in order to save our own lives.”

“Lance?” Janie said. “What is she talking about?”

“This was before the waterfall mishap,” he said weakly, but Janie was already paying for her meal, walking out of the restaurant.

“We lost her,” Mr. Fang said.

“What the hell is going on?” Buster said. “Why are you all bandaged up?”

“Oh, we thought, I guess, I don’t know, that we’d play along.”

“You’d play along with the fact that I almost died?”

“
Play along
is the wrong phrase. We wanted to add our own interpretation of the event.”

“You folks eating?” the waitress asked. Mr. and Mrs. Fang each ordered a milkshake.

“St. Louis,” Mr. Fang said. “Can’t say I’ve ever been here.”

“I always think of the Judy Garland movie,
Meet Me in St. Louis,
” Mrs. Fang said.

“Wonderful movie,” Mr. Fang replied.

“Little girl in the movie, can’t think of her name, goes around killing people on Halloween.”

“Jesus, Mom,” Buster said.

“No, really. She says she’s going to murder somebody and when the man answers the doorbell to hand out treats, she hits him in the face with a handful of flour. It’s so insane. I wanted so badly for you kids to do that one year, but I thought it might be too obvious.”

“The whole movie should have been about that deranged girl,” Mr. Fang said.

“I’m the most horrible,” Buster’s parents shouted, “I’m the most horrible,” apparently quoting from the movie. They looked like patients in an insane asylum who had found romance.

The waitress came by and slammed down their check. “You people need to calm down,” she said. “And pay your bill over there.”

“We’ll take good care of you, Buster,” Mrs. Fang said.

“I need good care to be taken of me,” Buster answered.

“Who better than us?” Mr. Fang asked, and the family walked out of the diner without paying.

the day of the locust, 1989

artists: caleb and camille fang

“S
ometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” Annie said. She paused, considered what she had just said, and then repeated herself. She said it again, and again, and again, until the line felt like a foreign language, until the words were not words but sounds and the sentence was not a sentence but a song.

“Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” she said, emphasizing the words
some
and
think
and
tummy
in the sentence, nodding her head in time with the cadence.

“Sometimes I think my
heart
is in my tummy,” she said.

“Sometimes
I
think my heart is in my tummy,” she said.

“Sometimes I think
my
heart is in
my
tummy,” she said.

“Sometimes . . . I think my heart is in my tummy,” she said.

“Sometimes I think my heart . . . is in my tummy,” she said.

“Sometimes I think . . . my heart . . . is in my tummy,” she said.

“Somet—” and then a plastic cup hit her in the ear. She turned to see Buster standing in the doorway to her room.

“You say that line one more time,” he said, “and I’m going to set the house on fire.”

“I’m rehearsing,” Annie said.

“You sound like a parrot,” Buster said, frowning.

“I’m rehearsing,” she yelled, and she threw the plastic cup back at Buster, who skulked back into his room, slamming the door shut.

“Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” Annie said quietly, whispered to herself like a coded message. Her heart, in her chest, beat furiously with excitement.

A
nnie was to play Nellie Weaver in a low-budget film called
Knives Out,
which was about a traveling salesman, Donald Ray, who goes on a cross-country, yearlong trip selling steak knives to get out from under the debt brought on by his gambling. She was the main character’s mentally challenged daughter. She was to have a single line in the movie.

There had been an open call in Nashville and Annie had begged her parents to take her. The Fangs had been skeptical. “Oh, honey,” Mrs. Fang said, “an actress? That’s one step away from a dancer.” Mr. Fang then said, “Which is one step away from a model.”

“I just want to try,” Annie said.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Fang continued. “What happens if this movie becomes a success and you start getting recognized by everyone when we create our happenings? We’ll lose the anonymity necessary to enact these events.”

This sounded like heaven to Annie. She would become Annie Fang, child star, instead of Child A, artistic prop. People would recognize her in the middle of a Fang event and they would ask for her autograph; her parents, not wanting to attract attention, would simply have to wait until all requests for photos and handshakes had been fulfilled. She could, effectively, ruin everything for her parents.

“Please?” Annie asked.

After a few days, Mr. and Mrs. Fang relented. In quiet discussions at night, they hashed out the various ways that they might disrupt the proceedings, to put their own stamp on the movie, if Annie was selected. “Okay,” they finally told her. “You can be an actor if you want to.”

For her audition, she performed a scene from
All About Eve,
her favorite movie, and as she brought the unlit cigarette, stolen from a woman’s purse in the lobby, to her lips, she said, “Slow curtain. The end,” and took a long drag. The director began to clap, smiling broadly, looking from side to side at the other people at the casting table. “That was wild,” he told her, shaking her hand, “just wild as hell.” When she walked into the lobby, her parents asked her how it went. “Fasten your seat belts,” Annie said, the cigarette dangling from her lips, “it’s going to be a bumpy night.” The Fangs had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

T
wo weeks before she was to leave for Little Rock, Arkansas, the film’s location, to shoot her scenes, the Fangs sat in the waiting room of the JCPenney portrait studio to have their annual Christmas photo taken. Annie had been in character for the past month, eating with a bib on, struggling to tie her shoes, a dumb smile always on her face, the broad strokes of retardation that she hoped would add authenticity to her performance. She held a magazine upside-down, her nose running, while the rest of her family put on their fangs. “Honestly, Annie,” Mrs. Fang said, her tongue probing the points of her new teeth, “there’s something to be said for subtlety.” Annie almost broke character, the idea of her parents, wearing custom-made veneers to look like werewolves, calling for subtle gestures. Her mother cupped Annie’s face with her right hand and slipped the fangs into Annie’s mouth. “Don’t lose them,” Mrs. Fang said. “They’re expensive as hell.”

The fangs had been purchased from a cut-rate dentist open to interesting trades in exchange for services rendered. They had given him an antique quilt from the Civil War, which had been in Mr. Fang’s family for years, and had received, after their molding and fitting, four sets of fangs, snap-fit dentures that would go over their actual teeth and could be reused for years. “Merry Christmas to all,” Mr. Fang said, smiling, his canines long and pointed.

Their faces serious and somber, the Fangs walked into the studio and arranged themselves according to the instructions of the photographer, a heavily made-up woman, bug-eyed and nervous. For five minutes, the woman pointed and simply said, “There, there, there.” Annie pretended not to understand what the woman wanted, staring dumbly at the unmanned camera. “Go sit beside your mommy,” the photographer said. “She’s mentally handicapped,” Mrs. Fang said, covering her mouth with her hand. “Oh,” the woman replied and then said, louder and clearly enunciated, “Go sit beside your mommy.” Annie sat down and looked into the camera, ready for her close-up.

“One, two, three, cheese,” the woman said and the Fangs, teeth bared, shouted, “Cheese!” The woman made a soft, squeaking sound like a too-tight shoe, but was otherwise unfazed by the appearance of the fangs. “Okay, Dad, I think you blinked,” she said, and then once again framed the family in the viewfinder of the camera.

The fake teeth were starting to ache a little, and they kept running their tongues along the veneers in between shots. “Can we take these off?” Buster asked once the photographer had finished the session, but Mr. and Mrs. Fang had already returned their fangs to the plastic storage container. “Once we get the photos and send them out to people for the holidays, it’ll get a better reaction,” Mr. Fang said but he was obviously shaken by the lack of shock from the photographer. “She was too busy doing her job,” Mrs. Fang said, rubbing the tension out of her husband’s shoulders. “It’s like asking a brain surgeon to notice the magic trick you are doing while he’s in the middle of an operation.”

Buster said, “We need some fake blood.” Mr. Fang said, “Maybe. That’s not a bad idea.” Mrs. Fang said, “And a stuffed deer that we can pretend to be eating.” Mr. Fang said, “That could be arranged.” Annie said, “Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy.” No one else said a word.

T
hree days later, Annie received a phone call from the director’s assistant. “I have some bad news,” the man said. Annie, suddenly, as if struck by lightning, stopped acting retarded. “What is it?” she asked. Had filming shut down? Had they run out of money?

“We’re cutting your line,” the man said.

It was as if a doctor had told Annie that her leg could not be saved and would have to be amputated. Actually, for Annie, it was worse. She’d rather be missing a leg and have a speaking role in a feature film than the alternative.

“Why?” Annie asked. “Do you think I can’t do it?”

“That’s not it, Annie,” the man said.

“Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” Annie said.

“That’s perfect, Annie, but Marshall just felt that the main character would be more tortured if he never got to talk to his daughter during his sales trip than if he got to talk to her once.”

“I disagree,” Annie said.

“Well, Marshall and the screenwriter discussed this and they’ve made their decision.”

“What do they want?” Mrs. Fang asked Annie, who covered the mouthpiece of the phone and screamed, “Get out of here.” Mrs. Fang, stunned, turned and walked out of the living room.

“So I don’t get to be in the movie?” Annie said.

“No, Annie, you’re still in the movie, but you just don’t have any lines. You’ll be in the scenes where Donald Ray calls his family, and you’ll be in the movie when it comes out.”

“I’ll be an extra,” Annie said and began to cry.

“Oh, sweetheart, please don’t cry,” the man said, sounding as if he might cry as well. “Can I talk to your mom or dad?”

“They’re dead,” Annie said.

“What?” the man asked.

“They’re busy,” Annie said. “They don’t want to talk to you.”

“Annie,” the man said, his voice finally regaining its composure. “I know you’re mad but if you want to be an actress, you need to learn how to deal with disappointment. You’ve got a long career ahead of you; I’d hate to see you quit just because of this.”

Annie, no stranger to disappointment, felt the hope break down inside her body and disperse without any lingering effects. “I know,” she said and then hung up the phone.

“What did they want?” Mr. Fang asked when Annie returned to the dinner table. Annie speared a piece of broccoli and chewed it slowly, then took a long sip of water.

“Movie stuff,” Annie said. “No big deal.”

Mrs. Fang said, “Well, it sounded like a big deal when you yelled at me.”

“It’s nothing,” Annie said.

“Annie Fang, Oscar-winning actress,” Mr. Fang said.

“Don’t say that,” Annie said.

Buster, his plate empty, pushed away from the table and said, “Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy.”

Annie threw her glass at him. It missed his head by inches and shattered against the wall, and Annie ran out of the kitchen, locking herself in her bedroom. That night, she watched a video of Bette Davis in
Of Human Bondage
. In the scene where Davis berates the clubfooted medical student who loves her, Annie paused the movie and then stared into the mirror and screamed, “You cad! You dirty swine! I never cared for you—not once.” She continued the monologue, slowly backing away from the mirror, getting smaller, retreating from view, and then she suddenly rushed toward her own reflection, screaming, “And after you kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth. WIPE MY MOUTH!”

The other Fangs, listening to punk rock in the living room, simply turned up the volume and pretended not to notice.

S
ix months later,
Knives Out
received a limited, almost nonexistent release. The few reviews it garnered offered mild praise; there were no mentions of Annie’s performance. Nevertheless, when the Fangs found a theater in Atlanta that was showing the movie, Annie could not contain her excitement. “You’re going to be so proud of me,” Annie told her parents.

She had not allowed Mr. or Mrs. Fang to accompany her during the filming of her scenes. They had stayed behind in the motel and, once the few scenes had been shot, each only a single take to save film for more important scenes, she answered their questions with shrugs and one-word answers. The Fangs had assumed she had lost interest in acting and did not press her. However, her vibrating happiness in the car, on their way to the only theater showing the film within a three-hundred-mile radius, the Fangs wondered how much they were going to have to lie to make their daughter believe the movie was any good.

They bought popcorn and candy and sodas and settled into their seats in the sparsely populated theater. Once the lights died down and the film began to snap into coherence, the theme song for the movie played over the speakers. A twangy voice sang,

What I’m selling, you ain’t buying.

My debts are multiplying.

Got my knives out, stainless steel.

I’ll find a way to make a deal.

“Oh, dear Lord,” Mr. Fang said and Mrs. Fang pinched the hell out of his arm.

The movie proceeded with little to recommend it, a man with a trunk full of steak knives, his gambling debts weighing on him, driving down long, unwinding highways.

An hour into the movie, Buster had successfully fit thirty-nine Raisinettes in his mouth. He pointed to his distended cheeks but Annie would not look over at him. She continued to stare at the screen, smiling, her knees bouncing. Buster shrugged and, one by one, spit the raisins back into the box. Donald Ray sliced his hand open with a knife during a demonstration in a drunk woman’s house and the splash of blood kept the Fangs from nodding off. The movie was so low-budget, Mr. Fang wondered if the actor who played Donald Ray had actually cut open his hand for the scene. He felt his estimation of the actor rise considerably.