Geek Love Part 26

Elly's face was frozen on Iphy's shoulder but her arms were coming back. Their dead flabbiness was turning to muscle again, and I could see it rolling thinly beneath the white skin, filling out the sleeves of her blouses.

"Elly? You've been exercising in secret, haven't you?" I'd ask, coming up close and staring into the unfocused eyes. She never reacted.

"Buzz off, Oly," Iphy would snap, and I'd wander away, speculating about Iphy too, and how much more like Elly she was now. Stronger. Meaner. She never cried anymore. Never sang. She cleaned. She fed Mumpo, lying down beside him because she couldn't lift him. She gave up on bottles and turned so he could reach Elly's breast when he had flattened her own. She urged him toward solid food and he gobbled that, too, spilling nothing, sucking it all in, then demanding t.i.t.

In Santa Rosa a Twins Fan Club came to the door. They were sixteen-year-old girls who had started dressing the "Twin Way" when they were twelve or so and were still wrapping two waists in one big skirt like potato-sack racers. They dyed each other's California hair to the blue-black gloss of the twins.

I went to the door. The pair in front tried to look past me into the trailer. "We just love them! Is it true they had a baby? We wanted to give them a present."

The bouquet came in, pa.s.sed from mock pair to mock pair and finally to me. I said Elly and Iphy were sleeping or maybe working. I took the green paper cone of flowers and thanked them and shut the door. Iphy watched through the curtains as the troop hobbled and giggled away, four pairs of twins with their arms around each other. Iphy absent-mindedly hugged Elly, who flopped from the squeezing.

"We used to have a lot of fans in this part of the country," said Iphy. She put the flowers in a big jug of water and they sat on the table for days.

It was easy for me and it could have been much harder for the twins. We had a small world, peculiarly unalarmed by nature. We had no worries about food or shelter, the opinions of the family, or the hardships of lone child rearing. There were Mama and Papa and Chick. There was an inexhaustible reservoir of obliging redheads.

Part of being pregnant is that you think about it so much that you're seldom bored. Terrified often enough, but rarely bored. There was some disappointment in my mind occasionally. I'd sit in the sun next to Grandpa's urn on the generator truck and drift into lip-sucking melancholy.

Life for me was not like the songs the redheads played. It wasn't the electric clutch I had seen ten million times in the midway - the toreador girls pumping flags until those bulging-crotched tractor drivers were strung as tight as banjo wire, glinting in the sun. It wasn't for me, the stammering hilarity of Papa and Lil, or even the helpless, dribbling l.u.s.t of the Bag Man rocked by the sight of the twins. I have certainly mourned for myself. I have wallowed in grief for the lonesome, deliberate seep of my love into the air like the smell of uneaten popcorn greening to rubbery, staleness. In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It's feeble to be an object. What's the point of being loved in return, I'd ask myself. To warm my spine in the dark? To change the face in my mirror every morning? It was none of Arty's business that I loved him. It was my secret ace, like a bluebird tattooed under pubic hair or a ruby tucked up my a.s.s.

Understand, daughter, that the only reason for your existing was as a tribute to your uncle-father. You were meant to love him. I planned to teach you how to serve him and adore him. You would be his monument and his fortress against mortality.

Forgive me. As soon as you arrived I realized that you were worth far more than that.

Lily collected Mumpo's castoffs and washed them and folded them into the drawers next to my cupboard. She moved the dish towels and the knives and forks and her plastic-bag collection and sewing sc.r.a.ps as well as Papa's junk tools. "These will be your little hope chest," she said.

Lily was delighted to have me swelling close to her, not cut off and strange as the twins had been. She would hug me distractedly in the kitchen or as we did the laundry together. "Now hope hard!" she'd whisper, squeezing me, with her watery blue eyes blinking in filmed pleasure. An odd, warm scent of her favorite spray warmed by sweat and a faint bite of rot had begun to drift around her. I would lean against her, watching her hands, her crumpled-paper skin rustling as she stroked my face. "You won't tell ... " she whispered once, "don't ever breathe it ... I don't like Mumpo ... I love him ... I'd tear my heart out for him ... but there's something about him I just can't like."

Mumpo was eating the twins. "Mama, he only s.h.i.ts once every three days and then not much. Is it O.K.?" Iphy fretted and Elly had frozen into an intelligent frown that hobbled perpetually against Iphy's shoulder. They grew frail and bony except for the four b.r.e.a.s.t.s that ballooned every three hours in time for Mumpo to wake. He bellowed before he even opened his eyes, roaring until the gap was crammed with raw t.i.t. Then he vacuumed the bag until it draped flat over the protruding ribs of his mothers, and bellowed for the next t.i.t until all four milk bags were drained and limp. He would sleep for three more hours before beginning again.

"Every baby is different," Mama would say diplomatically. But later, in the home van, she'd shake her head at me and crackle, "Greedy! Takes it in. Won't let it go. Keeps it!"

Mumpo grew, spreading around himself in looping, creased pools of pinkness that pulsated with his breathing.

Chick checked me over each morning before he ambled off to the Arturans for the day. He was ragged, growing out of his clothes. Mama was too distracted to notice. He missed Dr. Phyllis.

"It was easier when she was here," he explained. "I'm scared a lot now. Almost all the time."

He came in for meals with his hands bloated like a drowned corpses from the perpetual washing followed by the airtight gloves of surgery. He sank into a doze if he sat still for more than a few minutes. He worried about the ritual wrangling of Horst and Norval Sanderson.

"It's fair, isn't it?" he'd ask me. "That's the way Doc P. set it up. Horst gets the legs and arms and Mr. Sanderson gets fingers, toes, and hands and feet. It's because the little bones are bad for the cats. That makes sense, doesn't it? Why does Mr. Sanderson keep trying to cheat? I had to ask a novice to guard the thighs in the refrigerator truck the other day because Mr. Sanderson kept sneaking them away in garbage bags. Horst threatened to let Lilith, the Bengal, loose in Mr. Sanderson's trailer some night if he doesn't stop. Horst is drinking all the time now. He might do it. And Papa goes over there to drink with him. They sit inside with the checkerboard and argue and drink and forget whose turn it is to move." Chick talked to me more all the time because he had no one else. "Arty doesn't like the hometown surgeons getting in on the Arturans. He doesn't like the rest-home doctors setting up. But I do. I can't do it all. They can't all travel with us. Arty wants it all where he can see it but it's too big now. There are too many."

Arty got a new folder of clippings every morning. The office novices would comb papers and magazines from all over the country for any mention of Arturism and for anything that might affect Arty. He subscribed to a broadcast-monitoring outfit that provided video or sound tapes of any news item, comment, discussion, or joke that mentioned Arturism on television or the radio.

"Here's another imitator in California, the Reverend Raunch! That's three in one state!" he snarled as I brought in his breakfast tray. "And there's that brain-slice scam in Detroit, a takeoff on Doc P.'s trip. The silly c.o.c.ksuckers are getting hauled in front of a grand jury. a.s.s lickers will screw us all!"

Arty didn't need to worry about the tadpole compet.i.tion but he did. His tent was the biggest ever made on this continent, and it was always full, with a crowd as live as a hurricane wailing for him. But Arty sulked over every ten-cent Baptist, sneered at the plastic surgeons, turned green at ads for weight-loss clinics and alcoholism programs.

He'd gloat sometimes. "I have the best tools. I talk to Doc P.'s keeper every week, you know. And my little brother did a much tidier job on Doc P. than Doc P. ever did in her life. Smartest thing I ever did was tuck Chick in her pocket."

I didn't pay much attention. I was caught up in the amazing contents of my belly. Everything else was insignificant. As the time got close, though, I got scared. I wasn't afraid of dying. Chick wouldn't let me die. I wasn't afraid of the baby dying. Chick would make sure it stayed alive. Still, a sick grey fear sat in my chest, nameless. Chick kept offering to put me to sleep.

"Hey, it's good. Doc P. is happy. I'd like it myself. I'd put myself to sleep only there's n.o.body to do my job."

When my labor started Mama gave me tea and Chick put me into one of the Arturan wheelchairs and took me to his surgery. It was late in the afternoon. The Ferris wheel lights were bright against the dusk and I could smell popcorn and hear the talkers hollering, "Show the little lady what you're made of!"

It didn't hurt. I sat up against pillows and slept for a minute at a time between squeezes. There was no pain but it was exhausting work. I remember looking at Chick and Mama and trying to tell them why it was called "labor."

I remember seeing Miranda's head for the first time between my legs.

She looked so silly, like a red turtle's head stretching on its spindly neck and turning, blinking, wobbling, I nearly laughed. And I remember Chicks smile as he reached for her. She slid out onto the white cloth he held for her, and he lifted her dripping, squirming little carca.s.s and put it on my collapsing belly. "I like this!" he said. This was his second delivery, of course, and he told me later that Miranda was easy compared to Mumpo, that he'd worked much harder to suppress the twins' pain.

Mama and I examined her amazing body and found only that ridiculous tail. My heart died. Arty would despise her. But Mama told me to go on hoping. "Go ahead and love her," Mama said. I've wondered since whether those were Mama's last sane words, the final sizzle of her synapses.

Then the real fear began. With the baby outside me and vulnerable, I suddenly saw the world as hostile and dangerous. Anything, including my own ignorance, could hurt her, kill her, s.n.a.t.c.h her from me. I wanted to cram her back inside where she'd be safe. I was too weak to protect her. I needed the family. Arty had to care about her. Iphy had to help me. Papa had to be sober and brave, and Mama had to lay off the pills and be wise. But there was really only Chick, and I was terrified whenever he was out of sight. I scared him with my clinging but I couldn't trust the baby to anyone else.

She had Arty's face and I named her Miranda because Miranda's father loved her.

Arty did not love my baby. He never asked to see her. When I finally went to see him - took him his breakfast a few days after she was born - I left her with Chick. I was testing the water and I found it cold.

"How kind of you to call," Arty sneered. "Good of you to take the time. I suppose you won't be working anymore. Gone into retirement like Iphy."

I felt my lungs ice over. I couldn't snap back at him. I went back and hid in the cupboard, holding Miranda, careful not to press her bottom the wrong way for fear her tail would be twisted or pinched.

I always slept curled around her in my cupboard. It made Mama nervous but there was no room for me to turn over so I thought there was no danger that I'd crush or smother her. I didn't dare put her in a box or drawer separate from me.

"He doesn't hate her," Chick said. "How could he?" Chick was holding Miranda in the sink as I bathed her. His arm looped behind her flat little back so she wouldn't topple over and crack her perfect skull. I was afraid to trust myself bathing her. Her five-month-old fingers grabbed at his moving lips and he kissed them, making slurpy noises. "Mama and the redheads say you should be getting better now, Oly. Not so afraid."

My arms disappeared below the elbows, covered by the warm grey water in the sink. Across the lot, Leona the Lizard Girl was floating, still and silent, in the green murk of her jar. Miranda could chortle and hurl a spoonful of pablum at the wall but she would be as helpless as Leona against Arty. I wanted Chick to believe me, to be as frightened and watchful as I was.

"Baby's no threat to him." Chick spoke as though he were answering my thoughts. A bubble of light swelled in me. He was right. That puny tail of hers was no threat to the Aqua Man.

"Besides," Chick protested, "he keeps after me to bring Elly back. He says it would be good if she could help with Mumpo. I've been working on it but it's tricky in there. In her head."

My bubble fantasy sank into a chilly puddle. So that's why Chick was so sure of Arty's benevolence. "Guilty," I said.

Chick nodded agreeably, his shiny head bobbing on his scrawny neck above Miranda's unfathomable curls. "He feels bad."

I sponged her puffing cheeks and she opened her gums and clamped down on the sponge, squeezing it happily. "I thought she was coming back."

"It's slow," he nodded. "It was starting anyway. But I'm trying, a little bit every time. You should go over more. They're lonely, the twins. It helps if things are busy, exciting around them. Elly notices more."

"I help Iphy with the cleaning."

"You don't like Mumpo. You think he's bad, but he's not. Take Miranda to play with him."

"He doesn't play. He just lies there and eats."

Chick's golden face fell into a shadow of hurt. "He's a wonderful baby. He's different from Miranda." His face drooped down to rub against her damp hair. "But he's wonderful."

I reached for a towel. "Lets get her out now."

She rose, dripping, straight up from the water and swooped into my arms, crowing.

"She likes to fly." I smiled up at Chick, ashamed of insulting his other child.

"I have to go to surgery now." He wouldn't look at me. His face was flushed.

"We'll come with you." I started dressing her quickly.

"No, Oly. Don't. It's hard for me to concentrate when I have to take care of you. I have hard things to do." I watched him through the window as he walked away. The ragged straps of his coveralls rode his bare bony shoulders as though n.o.body loved him.

Miranda was just learning to walk. She traveled from Papa's big chair to the built-in sofa bench where Chick slept at night. Then she fell, face first, and split her lip. I was crying. She was bleeding and screaming. That was when Arty decided to come calling. It was the first time he had ever seen Miranda.

It is true that I'd been useless to him since she was born. She changed me. When I did work I was afraid to be close to him because I had something to lose.

After he wheeled out in disgust, I ran, with the baby still bleeding in my arms, and burst through the door of the surgery. The nurse grabbed my shoulders and hustled me into the waiting tent. Chick was severing a thigh. A critical procedure. She gave me a swab for Miranda's lip and went back to the surgery.

He came out in his green scrubs and I flung myself on him. He was thirteen years old. I was nineteen. Miranda was one. He looked at her and she stopped crying. Her lip stopped bleeding. She reached up to him and he lifted her. She sighed and let her head fall onto his shoulder.

"He called her a norm," I stormed. "He says he'll feed her to Mumpo! He wouldn't even look at her tail! Iphy will laugh all crazy and Mama will pop a pill and Al will swig on his bottle and n.o.body, n.o.body can help me but you!"

His child face rumpled in puzzlement. "I don't understand," he said.

At once a coolness swept over me. A woods-pond stillness filled me. "No!" I shrieked. "No! Don't!" But it was too late and the anger and pain were small and hard in me, not gone, but distant.

"Now explain, please," Chick pleaded. And we walked calmly out through the tent flap and strolled up the gra.s.s behind the midway booths, and Miranda fell asleep in Chick's arms on the way.

I believe Chick tried. When he came out of Arty's van he looked a thousand years old. He was the one who had to tell me.

Dear daughter, I won't try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Arty was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

He saw no use for you and you interfered with his use of me. I sent you away to please him, to prove my dedication to him, and to prevent him from killing you.

The Arturan Administrative Office arranged everything. They located the convent school. They deposited a lump sum of money in a trust fund to be doled out to the nuns.

My job was to take you to that cross-cursed old woman - who, don't forget, had given up children for her G.o.d-love long before you or even I came along. I had to take you to her and come back without you.

My job was to come back directly, with nothing leaking from beneath my dark gla.s.ses, to give Arty his rubdown and then paint him for the next show, nodding cheerfully all the while, never showing anything but attentive care for his muscular wonderfulness. Because he could have killed you. He could have cut off the money that schooled and fed you. He could have erased you so entirely that I never would have had those letters and report cards and photos, or your crayon pictures, or the chance to spy on you, and to love you secretly when everything else was gone.

Arty could have done worse, but he chose not to.

25.

All Fall Down

Hopalong McGurk smiles with pearly dentures because my perfect Binewski teeth went down the spout with everything else. Yet the day we lost it all was nothing special. Miranda had been gone a year or so. Late in the morning I was in Arty's dressing room as usual, coating him with grease as the tent filled and the ropy voice of the crowd came through the wall, thickening the air. Arty lay on his belly on the ma.s.sage table while I painted him. He watched me in the big wall mirror.

"Thick in the creases, please. I want to shine."

I pushed the rolled flesh at the back of his neck and slathered a handful of grease over the smooth skin. He put his forehead against the bench and arched to pull the rolls out flat. I smoothed and rubbed and the sheen came up onto the back of his skull and crept toward his ears.

"Do you want the tips on your flippers?"

"I like it. The whole crowd breathes in when I go like this ... " He spread his flippers and winked into the mirror.

I slid a hand under his chest and heaved. His back muscles rolled in cut slabs, every k.n.o.b of his incredible spine visible as he bunched to help me. When he was balanced upright on his rear fins, I worked on his forehead and pulled the grease down onto his long eyelids and the flat cheekbones.

"I want a straight stroke of the white under each brow, down the nose, and under my lower lip. Not too blatant for the folks up close to the tank."

I opened the jar of deli-white and spread his right fore-flipper. The pale glitter was already dry between his web creases. I painted brushfuls of soft gleam onto the fine fan of bones that were almost a hand sprouting from his shoulder. He flexed and spread and the light danced on the webbed flap.

The flippers on Arty's hips were graceful. Nearly flat, twisting at their short joints like swans' necks, smooth and powerful and extending with asymmetrical purpose. The little toelike thing that never had grime beneath its square nail could grip or scratch or turn a page. He twitched as I stroked on white, sending ripples through his whole body.

"Good. Go ahead and grease it now," he said.

The undercoat caught the light in a subtle prism. When it was set, the final greasing had a sheen of its own and kept the white on even through the hour under water with Arty squirming his wildest. The white tipping and streaking were new touches. Arty examined himself in the mirror and his wide mouth wriggled from corner to corner.

"My, my. Won't they just lick my j.i.z.z today?"

The sky above Molalla was aching blue but I walked from Arty's tent to our van in the same air I'd sucked all my life. It was a Binewski blend of lube grease, dust, popcorn, and hot sugar. We made that air and we carried it with us. The Fabulon's light was the same in Arkansas as in Idaho - the patented electric dance step of the Binewskis. We made it. Like the mucoid nubbin that spins a sh.e.l.l called "oyster," we Binewskis wove a midway shelter called "carnival."

It was noon and the crowds were building. Arty was in his tank holding elevation services for the Admitted in the big tent. Sanderson was hawking maggots in his elegant kudzu grammar. The redheads threw daring looks from every ticket booth and candy stand. Two dozen simp twisters did their best to shake, shock, and dizzy the change out of all the local pockets. I strolled down the midway, ready for lunch. I thought Crystal Lil was brewing Scotch broth for all her children.

But then I saw Lily in front of the twins' van. She opened her long face and yelled, "Chick!" just as Chick pelted past me, elbows and knees pumping toward her. His white hair lashed behind him and I began to run. "It's Elly!" howled Lil.

The bedroom door was open. The pink bed was filled with thrashing. One bare leg bent, beating its hard heel into the limp thigh of its mate. A long arm arced out of the snarling hair and flesh and whipped downward, clenching scissors.

"No!" said Chick, but the glinting fist landed and the heel went on kicking its other leg. "No!" Chick pounced on the bed and two frail arms jerked up out of the long black hair. The furious leg straightened and fell down on the sheets. Iphy's red-smeared face tipped up between the raised arms and she lay quietly down beside Elly. The bubble pumping red from Elly's breast flattened and then ceased. The two shining eyes of the scissor handles sat straight up in the shadowed socket of Elly's left eye.

"No." Chick reached for Elly while Lily, on her knees beside the bed, moaned, "Baaaby."

"Elly?" said Chick.

I could see the thing on the floor in front of Lil, the b.l.o.o.d.y diapered heap of Mumpo.

"I can't find her!" The creak of fright in Chick's voice. A long thin tone whined from Lily's open mouth.

"I killed her," said Iphy calmly. She looked up at the ceiling from between arms stuck to the sheets by Chick's mind.

"I can't fix her!" Chick was crying.

"She killed my little boy." Iphy's voice was flat as Kansas.