Geek Love Part 13

After Carina, Miss Lick was tentative, cautious for a while.

"I stuck with thyroid treatments for the next three. I was nervous about a more drastic approach."

The disks flickered over a secretary, a high-school hurdles runner, a young prost.i.tute - and then their incredible incarnations. All three so fat they could barely move.

"Lulu, the ex-hooker, is my accountant. The secretary is my office manager." Miss Lick shoved her hands deep in her pockets and stared at the last image on the screen. A mound of dark flesh lies on a pillow. Thin hair straggling in greasy tangles suggests that it is a human head. Finally I see the tiny eyes gleaming out of dents in what must be a drooping heap of cheeks.

"This was Vita. She was seventeen when we started. I felt terrible ... It was a failure ... I misjudged. She couldn't take it. Tried to kill herself. Pills. She'd been an athlete and this was the wrong route for her. Absolutely the wrong technique. Acid would have been O.K., but not this. Made me realize I had to tailor the treatments. I've been working on bringing her back. Her body is close, now. But her head is ... And she was sharp." Miss Lick's clenched fists were still against her belly but all the rest of her shuddered.

"So she says, 'Just give me the money and watch my smoke. I don't need the operation.' And I told her, hey honey, that's what they all say and maybe you'd get the degree and the job but the first p.r.i.c.k who rubbed your nipples the right way you'd go down the chute with all the rest. Those forty-fours of yours are a matched pair of concrete boots and you either ditch them or stay on here loading bread trucks and wait for the janitor to get so anxious to bury his face in your fat sacks that he offers to marry you."

Miss Lick is flushed with the rect.i.tude of her argument. The blonde on the screen is a cantilevered mammary miracle in a red T-shirt and tight pants. She bounces majestically as she reaches for big metal trays of plastic-wrapped wheat bread. The disk skids.

"She's not as smart as I figured. All she's good for is a technician."

A thin-shouldered lab coat with a greasy ponytail turns toward us holding a pair of test tubes up to the light. A squinting examination of cloudy fluids.

"She spends all day a.n.a.lyzing horse p.i.s.s from the tracks. Big day if she finds a jump drug in a sample. But h.e.l.l. She's happy. Makes a good living."

The lab coat is flat. No chest at all.

"d.a.m.ned good surgeon. Made a mistake and landed in my pocket. He's lucky to be practicing and he knows it lasts just so long as I say so. I pay him well for my little jobs and I cover his a.s.s. He used to balk and squirm about it but he's been sewn up for years. He's got kids, a big house, a country club. Reliable character. Truth is, I think he gets a kick out of it.

I watch everything. Used to make me sick but I enjoy it now. An acquired taste but there's a lot of finesse involved."

She will not show me the sections of the disks that record the actual operations.

"I've got several projects going all the time. Prospects that I'm doing research on. Sometimes after I've decided a girl is right and make the approach, it takes a while for her to come around. I've had a few rejections. A few. I'm careful. Never a whisper about it though. Never any trouble. I just offer. No force at all. Nothing to complain about. Nothing illegal. Right now I'm interested in a kind of progressive procedure. Start out with a superficial thing - long hair, maybe - and use it as a kickoff. Bigger rewards dangled in front to keep them going ... Interesting. Still experimental, of course, not sure how it will work out in the long run." Miss Lick does not mention the Gla.s.s House and neither do I.

My new room is unfamiliar and chilly. I lie on the bed and try to learn the way to the bathroom door. A private bathroom here. It's a much lusher joint than my room in Lil's house. No hazy perambulations down the hall to the shared can in the middle of the night. But the other is home and I miss it. This more respectable front is what Miss Lick expects of Hopalong McGurk, and I hope it will keep her from connecting me with Miranda. I arrive early at the radio station every day to get my mail and prevent any accidents from the staff's trying to reach me at my old address.

For a while I told myself that all I needed to do was interfere with Miss Lick's finances. If she were poor, I thought, she wouldn't be able to go on with her projects. I looked around her corporate structure for ways to sabotage her pocketbook. Nothing. I'm not clever with business. Couldn't understand half of it. All I came up with was an idea about incendiary bombs in each of the factories. But they all work on twenty-four-hour shifts and they're too scattered across the country for me to do it all myself. She's got her capital snugged away in safe paper unconnected with the travel-grub business anyway.

Then, in the pool one day, I saw her watching the children. Pretty schoolkids training for the club team. They were like otters, playing around the stodgy lap swimmers. I was leaning on the steps at the shallow end, resting. Miss Lick came to the wall and stood up instead of doing her usual flip and push-off. She glared at the girls, her eyes burned red with chlorine and hatred. Long legs flashed, smooth, angular faces laughed at each other. Miss Lick's head jutted forward from her big shoulders. Her jaw gripped at an odd angle and began to twitch.

My stomach tried to crawl into my mouth. If she couldn't buy them into disfigurement she'd find another way, and in that minute I realized it was lucky she did have money. I'm resigned since then. I like her. She doesn't usually scare me. But I know what I have to do.

I am driving the golf cart and Miss Lick walks alongside. We are somewhere past the fourth green.

"It's a tax write-off. My girls go down as handicapped. No trouble establishing fake accident reports. Private nursing. I'm a bona fide charitable organization with rehabilitation as my main goal. It's the truth too."

I am glad that Miss Lick has made a big campaign out of her hobby. It gives me more substantial justification.

If Miranda were the only one she'd ever approached I'd do it anyway - but I would have doubted the propriety of dousing anyone's lights permanently for the sake of Miranda's ridiculous little tail. I'm the only one who sets any real store by that tail. Anybody else would call it great luck to get paid for having the nuisance removed.

Sometimes when we've been drinking I can't help smiling at Miss Lick while I picture myself drilling her through the eye with her pop's target pistol. The irony of my killing her righteously for doing what she considers righteous - and she, remember, never killed anyone - is hilarious to me. I must watch my drinking. I like it too much.

I read nothing but murders lately. Six solid weeks of mystery stories on my program. The puzzles intrigue me - and the methods. Surely the simplest way is the best.

I am terrified of trying and failing. The idea of her looking at me, that great hopelessly rumpled ma.s.s of flesh seeing me as a betrayer - knowing that I am responsible - that I deliberately led her on and am now hurting her. That image comes to me horribly in my sleep. I can't bear for her to live on knowing that I would try to do that to her. She'd become a real monster-and my creation. No, it has to be absolutely sure, and quick. Very quick.

Meanwhile the cheap editions of murder pile higher and higher in this temporary room. I must be leaving a mile-wide trail. Hiding my intentions from her will be enough - but it will be obvious to anyone nosing around after the fact. Still, I am not as afraid of being caught as I imagined I would be. I'm only afraid of Miss Lick's knowing. And I'm afraid of failing.

Knowing Miss Lick has made me think about Arty again. Wanting to do it didn't make him evil. Getting away with it is what turned him into a monster.

Of course I will have to apply this rule to myself eventually. And I'm glad I've discovered whiskey.

I can't spend much time at Lil's house for now. I go in every Thursday night to deal with the garbage and to arrange my notes with the other papers in the trunk for Miranda. I tell myself that it matters, and that the relics of my life will miss me. Sometimes I believe it.

13.

Flesh-Electric on Wheels

The guy was obviously sixty but he looked like he'd never stopped training for some tight and lonesome sport, rock climbing maybe, or breaking his own long-distance record for walking on his hands. He sat on the step of Arty's van with his sleeves rolled nearly above his elbows and a pair of suspenders holding up his shin-length work pants. His shoes were high b.u.t.ton-and-lace combos that must have been forty years old and made from hand-lasted baby rhino. They had an odd grey l.u.s.ter about half a century deep in elbow oil. Nice shoes, and he had them planted firmly under him and his elbows dug into his knees and his forearms angled up to a peak where his hands clasped. The muscles cut so solidly away from each other that my first thought was of old wood and roof beams.

He had the good sense not to get up when I walked over to him. He nodded and took off his cap as though he meant to air his brown scalp rather than honor me. "My name is McGurk ... Zephir McGurk, and I'd like to visit with Arturo ... your brother, I think."

I started my standard routine. "Arturo undergoes great strain during his demonstrations and requires rest ... "

McGurk flicked his window-cool eyes at me, quirked one corner of his mouth and reached down beside him for an elaborate leather-bound case with bra.s.s clamps. "I think I've got something the Aqua Kid would very much like to see. I'm an electrician and an inventor, miss ... And I've been thinking about your brother for a solid year - ever since the show came through here last March. You let me see him. You won't regret it. And neither will he."

The case wasn't hiding a bomb or a gun. I was sure of that just looking at the guy. I unlocked the door and took him in. McGurk stood beside the table and examined the fingernails of both his hands in a discreet way. I went to Arty's door and knocked.

Though he insisted on the charade of attempted privacy, Arty liked having people clamoring to see him. He swung up onto his red velvet throne and held his face up for me to wipe his nose.

"Stay in the security room," he said.

I opened the door for McGurk and introduced him as I slid out. In the security room I checked the gun and took off the safety while I slowly opened the ventilator beneath the one-way gla.s.s. McGurk was sitting in the armchair. He was looking coolly at Arty's lower body. After a few seconds McGurks eyes jumped up to Arty's.

"Have your t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es descended?"

Arty was used to impertinent questions. "Why do you ask?"

"How can you sit upright without hurting yourself?"

"I have well-developed b.u.t.tocks and I wear a rigid cup."

McGurk nodded and put the case on his lap. He used a small key to unlock it.

"I've been thinking about your life and I've designed something that may do you some good."

"That's kind of you."

"Not exactly. I just couldn't sleep until I came up with a solution." The case spread open on his knees and revealed an old-fashioned record player with a chrome bar elbowing out from a spot near the center of the turntable. A soft thick tube drooped from the end of the chrome. McGurk looked at the bed and got up. He set the thing on the bed near the wall and stretched the shining bar toward the center of the bed. The tube drooped toward the maroon satin spread.

"The switch cable is pressure operated." He pulled a rubber ball away from the side and a chrome-wrapped coil followed it, whirring against the case.

"You can hold it in your teeth and have complete control, one click turns it on." He pressed and a faint hum pulsed into the room. "You insert your p.e.n.i.s in the tube here ... ," his fingers lifted the flaccid bag until a deep pink mouth showed, "and a second click adjusts the clamps to a firm grip." The tube jumped and the mouth took on an 0 form.

Arty began to chuckle. "Clever. But are you sure you didn't design this for yourself?"

McGurks head swung around to look at Arty. A crease of irritation flickered between his eyes. "You're what? eighteen or nineteen years old?" he said. "I kept thinking what things would be like for you." He thumbed a pressure switch in the rubber ball. The turntable began to spin and the chrome arm pulled and thrust, pushed and retreated smoothly, with the bag at the end inflated and Arty stared at the pumping chrome arm and its full tip. McGurk leaned forward and pushed his thumb deep into the mouth. The bag sucked and jumped around the thumb as he watched it. "You get thirty-three, forty-five, or seventy-eight RPMs on this suction tube."

Arty licked his lips, sniffed carefully to make sure his nose wasn't running. "Have you tried it out?" he asked.

McGurk pulled his reddened thumb out of the bag and pressed the control switch. The chrome arm stopped moving.

My tall stool was cutting off blood to my legs and I squirmed and craned my neck. Arty was turned away from me, watching McGurk, who slumped down and sat on the bed. "I'll show you the lubrication and drainage system, but ... " He hiked at his trousers until both knees were bare, white and hairless. The shoes came up his shins and turned into grey socks. "But I guess you want my credentials," McGurk said. He reached up his right pant leg. There was a snap and the shoe toppled over with the plastic shin and knee sticking out of it. A dim gleam came from the dark fold of the empty trouser leg. He slid his hand up the other trouser leg and both legs lay on the floor with steel shining out of the hollow tops of the knees. He pulled his pant legs up his thighs and showed the steel caps on the stumps. There were a groove, a few grip protrusions, and a number of electrical contact points protruding from each unit. He looked up, calmly waiting.

Arty pursed his wide lips and rolled them speculatively. "s.h.i.t," he said. Then he sent a long arc of saliva at the nearest shoe. It hit the laces and trickled down across the holes. McGurk went on looking at him but there was a deep crease between his eyes.

"You figured it wrong. The whole thing," said Arty. He rocked slightly, chuckling. "You've got yourself a little old disability there, so you took pleasure in feeling sorry for me. Well. You figured wrong."

McGurk was twisting on the bed, reaching his powerful forearms down for the artificial legs. He straightened and jammed the steel ends onto his stumps with a clang. The gun was sweating in my hands.

"You figured ... " Arty was watching carefully now; his eyes swung once to the mirror above his bureau that hid me and the gun on the other side, " ... figured we had a common set of interests. Guess you have a hard time with the ladies. Well, I don't. I've got women mooning around begging to take up my slack."

McGurk was folding the chrome arm back over the turntable, feeding the control cable back into its hole, carefully closing the case, not paying any attention to Arty. Arty sucked his lower lip in between his teeth and popped it out again. He waved his right flipper vaguely. "You know you're taking the wrong road on those stumps. You're like a man with a beautiful voice taking a vow of silence. You're working hard to pretend they aren't there and you meet a girl in a bar and don't tell her about those knees until you get to take your pants off. You ought to tan your thighs and walk on them. Wear silver sequin pads and dance on a lit stage where they can see you. All those soft girlies come knocking on your door borrowing sugar in the dead of night and sliming for you. You could have that. Not as much as I get but plenty ... You're just going along with what they want you to do. They want those things hidden away, disguised, forgotten, because they know how much power those stumps could have."

McGurk was looking now, listening. I could see his eyes sliding on the console, the velvets, the soft, deep carpet. I put the gun on safety and stuck it back on its shelf. I flicked the switch as I went out so the lamp on the bureau in Arty's room would go out and he would know I wasn't covering him. I got a contract and took it to Arty. McGurk was smoking quietly and staring at the walls. Arty was saying, " ... a sensible man doesn't have to have the top of his head blown off to know the truth when he sees it."

McGurk signed on as an electrician. He shook hands with me because he couldn't with Arty. Then he went out to sell everything he owned, say goodbye to the two teenage sons who lived with his ex-wife, and furnish his station wagon for temporary living so he could follow the show.

When the blighted stump horse died, our Chick "took on something terrible," as Mama said. I came out of the Chute that morning with my nose burnt from the smell of gla.s.s cleaner, and heard "woo-wooing" of a wet, breathy variety that seemed familiar. They were up on the generator hood by Grandpas urn. Chick was sprawled out flat with his face buried in his hands and Elly and Iphy patted him gently while they looked off in opposite directions at the sky.

I crawled up to help pat Chick. The twins said he'd found Frosty stiff and flat in his trailer. Talking to the fuzzy blond back of Chicks head and the wet pink fist hiding his face, I said, "Shooty-pooty, Chick, it isn't your fault. He was old and it was his time and you took such good care of him these past few months. He was probably happier than he'd ever been in his whole life." But the Chick choked and Elly sniffed and said they'd already told him that but he loved the horse and had to cry. I took offense at her snotty ways and told her Chick loved everything and he was going to be a mess if he cried like that every time a geranium conked out in the redheads' flowerpots or something. But Iphy was dreaming sorrowfully at the low grey sky and Elly was not to be baited. She just sighed, "Probably," and went on patting Chick.

I slid down and went off to practice a funeral oration for Frosty. It wasn't too bad, though it was never delivered. Doc P. dissected the horse for educational reasons and then had the roustabouts haul the remains to an incinerator.

Late. The camp dark. Two hours after closing. The family was sleeping and I sat in the kitchen sink looking out through the moon mist at the dark without my gla.s.ses. A sc.r.a.ping sound from outside. A step. It was behind me on the other side of the van. I slid to the floor, tiptoed to the door in bare feet, peeped silently through. My breath froze - a movement near Arty's door. A tall figure moving there.

a.s.sa.s.sin! I thought. In the instant it took me to get through the door I dreamed a long dream of Arty's grat.i.tude at my courageous self-sacrifice in saving him. I saw myself wrapped in white, propped on pillows. Arty enters, white-faced and shaken ... That was about as far as I'd got by the time I locked my arms around the thighs of the dark shape in Arty's doorway and clamped my teeth into a bulge of b.u.t.tock. The thigh flailed wildly and started to scream as I growled. Fingernails whacked and clawed at my head and sc.r.a.ped at my arms. Breathless shrieks pumped out of the murderers throat and vibrated through my teeth in adrenal heroics that lit my skull's interior with an epileptic torch.

The light over the door flashed on and shouts closed over me. In relief at being rescued before I broke, though wondering if I would make such a sympathetic figure to Arty if I wasn't in traction, I released my aching grip. Cloth pulled out of my teeth as big arms lifted and held me against a warm chest and a deep voice cracked, "Jeez, Miss Oly!"

A piccolo hysteria behind me in the doorway. Then Arty's sympathetic voice, "Are you O.K. ? Come in here and let me look." My heart turned to steaming oatmeal as I wriggled around to see his dear worried face and the corpse of the terrorist I had foiled.

Arty wasn't talking to me. He was in his chair just inside the door, leaning anxiously to examine a jagged rip in the black satin rump of a tall young norm woman whose sobbing face was hidden by a straight fall of blond hair.

"Killer!" I bellowed, struggling to break out of the blue-sleeved arms of the guard who held me. "She was breaking into your place, Arty!"

The big chest against my fists rumbled, "Jeez, Miss Oly!" and Arty's chilly white face snapped an impatient look toward me. His wide lips stretched back over his angry teeth as he whipped out, "A guest. An invited guest simply ringing my doorbell!" Then, gesturing the tall, slim girl inside, he backed his chair away from the door.

The guard, in embarra.s.sment at my rigid body in his arms, was jabbering, "Sorry, Arty, I brought the lady to your ramp, like always, and I'd just got to the other end of the van when the ruckus started."

"Take Oly back to her door, Joe. Goodnight." The door slammed shut.

"Jeez, Miss Oly," said my guard. He turned, opened the door to the family van, put me down just inside, and closed the door on my ice-struck face. I crawled into my cupboard and tried to swallow my tongue or hold my breath long enough to die. I hoped they might give me a half-pint urn and bolt me onto the hood of the generator truck behind Grandpa.

Chick would come to rest his cheek on my cool metal when he was sad. Mama would polish me every morning before she went to the Chute and blink away tears remembering my sweet smile. Then it occurred to me that they might put me in the Chute in the biggest jar of all and I'd float naked in formaldehyde and the twins would bicker over who had to shine my jar. I gave up on dying and went over to blubbering into my blanket instead - imagining razor-slash scenarios of what Arty was doing with the norm girl and what an a.s.shole I was. I went on blubbering until I slept.

I kept the norm girl at Arty's door to myself. Arty wouldn't talk about it. He liked secrets. Without a good reason, Arty wouldn't admit that he ate or slept. Information was a marketable commodity to Arty. The guard may have gossiped but he would try to keep Papa from hearing about it. Private arrangements with Mr. Arty didn't get to Al if a man wanted to keep his job.

I hung on to it - my embarra.s.sment at being an idiot and my shame at being a patsy. Idiot for jumping a guest while in the throes of melodramatic fancy, patsy for being pulped by pain at Arty's involvement with a girl, and a norm at that.

I crept out of my cupboard and peeped through the slats of the louvered window in our door. I couldn't see much, but several nights of quivering in my flannel nightie in the dark proved it wasn't an isolated incident.

The girl I'd tackled was a stranger, not part of the show. I heard and saw Arty's door open and blurred figures moving into the light several times before I recognized that it was always a different girl.

I crawled into my blankets smiling, slept well for the first time in days, woke as cheery as a pinhead, went joking and grinning around all day. Arty wasn't having a love affair. He was just "f.u.c.king around," as the redheads called it. What had been a blowtorch blackening my brain with sick, helpless jealousy was now just useful information. A love affair would have shut me out. This gave me an opening. I could tease Arty in private. Keeping mum to everybody else would be evidence of my discretion and encourage him to have confidence in me. If a trickle of puke still riled my throat at the thought of Arty with the long-limbed norms, it was at least tolerable. I needed all the ammo I could get.

Zephir McGurk was a do-it-yourself electrician from the same independent school of thought that sp.a.w.ned Papa's medical hobby. McGurk made do. He read journals and magazines and catalogues from supply houses to feed his ingenuity, but he was an innovator. Even if a thing had been invented and perfected thirty years before, McGurk was inclined to build his own rather than buy the gimmick from somebody else. McGurk was valuable. His pay was minimal cash and what Arty called the "overflow" of curious females.

He slept in the back of the old but well-kept safari car. He did his work in the utility trailer that housed the power tools and spare parts. He set up a compact and efficient workshop. If he wasn't in the workshop he was asleep or in Arty's show tent. He never socialized in the midway or dropped in on any other act. Zephir was a focused man. Arty was his apple. Arty was the work he'd been given to do.

"It would be good to have some way to spell out my messages in grits," Arty might say.

"Maybe," McGurk would say slowly, his head already tumbling Possibilities.

Arty went to visit him in the workshop. This flattered McGurk deeply. Arty was in an energetic mood he'd have me strap him into one of his treads and would lead the way to the workshop with me trailing. He'd go up the step and climb up on the workbench and talk companionably with McGurk.

Other times he'd stay in his chair and sit outside the door with McGurk perched on the step to talk. McGurk had stowed his prosthetic legs in a trunk. He'd gone over to fancy strap-on pads on his thigh stumps. He wore blue or brown leather for his workaday stumps, but he got a pair made of iridescent green satin, embroidered with silver vines, for wearing in the control booth at the top of the bleachers where he worked the sound-and-light board for Arty's show.

It was McGurk who invented Arty's speaking tube - a plastic form that fitted over Arty's nose and mouth. When Arty tongued the b.u.t.ton inside, a rush of air expelled the water from the face mask so Arty could breathe and talk into the mask at the same time. The thing stuck up against the front plate of the tank on a long gooseneck that linked it to a gaudy (but phony) console in the bottom of the tank. It actually hooked into the sound system. Arty talking under water was an astonishing improvement over propping his chin on the top of the tank to rap into the microphone. The crowd loved it.

When McGurk built the burton receiver that hid in Arty's ear and let him hear the sound system, the crowd, and messages from McGurk in the control booth, Arty offered the electrician his own van and a good raise. McGurk shook his tidy head and politely turned it all down. "I've got my routine set," he said. He went on sleeping in his station wagon.

McGurk cooked for himself. He was a fussy vegetarian. He was roasting carrots in an oven in the workshop the day he came up with what we later called "The Singing b.u.t.tock." He was peering through the oven window at the sliced carrots in a dish. "What if," he asked, "every board in the bleachers was wired for sound?"

Arty was lolling on top of the workbench looking at a sheet of McGurk's doodles for a new colored-light plan. He rolled back his head and squinted at McGurk's broad shoulders. McGurk with his back to you was an imposing specimen even with his shirt on. The oven pinged and he took the dish out with a mitt.

"Why?" Arty wanted to know. McGurk dropped the mitt beside the carrots and leaned his big brown elbows on the workbench. He had his private knife and fork wheeling through the carrots and whipping quick chunks of steaming root into his mouth. He always ate standing up. Three bites went through methodical milling and swallowing before he finally let his eyes drift up to Arty.

"Sound is physical. I've been watching Miss Oly ... " He nodded to where I perched on his work stool. "Her ticket talking got me thinking. Sound is a vibration. It carries through matter. When you hear, it's not just with your ears. A sound actually affects every cell of your body, making it vibrate and pa.s.s that vibration to all your other cells. That's why they say a sound is 'piercing' or a scream 'goes right through you.' It does. It actually does." He stopped with his fork in midair and looked at Arty. Arty was watching him, waiting. Arty didn't say anything. McGurk sighed and took a piece of carrot from the fork and chewed it. I watched it go down his thick-muscled gullet.

"I was thinking," McGurk said, finally, "that you use your voice real well. I was thinking, what if your voice wasn't just coming at 'em from the air but was vibrating up from the soles of their feet and through their a.s.ses up their spines. I was thinking what it would be like if they felt what you had to say because the boards they were standing and sitting on were wired to carry that vibration of your voice."

Arty's eyes were almost bulging, looking at McGurk. His face was frozen for a long instant and then it folded into a smile and then broke at the mouth and Arty's whole body shook toward his mouth, laughing.

"I love it!" he howled. "I love it!"

The bleachers are empty and singing around me. Arty is chanting in the boards. I sit on the fifth tier and stare straight at the tank, at Arty, his mouth and nose in the black cup of the speaking tube. Wires are taped to my wrists and to the insides of my knees and to my hump, next to the spine. They lead up to the control booth, where Zephir McGurk is measuring my physical responses to the sound that he has wired to feed through every board in the bleachers.