Geek Love Part 9

"The one buck they've got, I'll get," said Arty. But it wasn't the money that excited him. It was that those who never would have come to the carnival came just for him.

Mama was dreamily pleased. "Arty's spreading his wings," she said, nodding to herself. But his wingspread took in more than the bleachers in his own tent. And all this time he was taking over more and more control of the carnival itself, and becoming more obvious in the orders he gave.

10.

Snake Dance-Immaculate

Iwas eleven years old that year. Chick turned six and the twins were approaching their fourteenth birthday. Arty was sixteen and in a hurry.

He got his own big van with a platform to connect it to the family van. No fuss about it. Papa just shrugged when Arty had him write out the check. The guards lugged the furniture from the dressing room behind Arty's stage, and I arranged it. Mama busied herself moving Chick into Arty's long-abandoned cubicle in the family van.

As Arty got stronger, Al and Lil wilted. Each week they seemed softer and browner at the edges. Lil was scatty and vague more often. You could catch her any hour of the day with her collection of pills and capsules shuttling in and out of the handbag she kept by her. She did her work but she got thinner and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s began to droop. Her clothes didn't hang on her in the old smooth way. Her makeup was a little blurry to begin with and tended to slip by lunchtime. Long before closing each night the mascara and rouge would slide into thick smudges. There was something missing in her eyes.

This was the year she decided she had taught the twins all that she was able, and hired the fancy piano man to teach them. Arty claimed that this was the cause of her frail weeping. The twins said it had started after Chick was born and had simply increased.

We didn't ask for Papa's opinion. Al was listless one minute and irritable the next. He'd go out to give orders in the morning and find that Arty had already pa.s.sed the word for the day. He'd nag and snap and stand over the crews while work was being done. He took to spending more time with Horst and to showing up half b.u.t.toned into his tailcoat and with his mustache unwaxed for his Ringmaster routines. Then Dr. Phyllis appeared.

Al had always fancied himself a healer. His hobby was reading medical journals. He collected first-aid kits and drugs. He was an enthusiastic amateur general pract.i.tioner, and as soon as we could afford it - years before Arturism was in swing - he bought a small second-hand trailer and set it up as a little infirmary. His fascination with human mechanics certainly came before and probably sparked his idea for manipulating our breeding, and he did have a knack for it. We thought of it as part of his Yankee spirit. He was enthralled by medicine but furious with doctors for hogging the glory just because they'd managed to get a piece of paper to hang on the wall.

With Al's hobby, the Fabulon had been nearly independent of medical folk. Horst was called in as a consultant on veterinary ch.o.r.es, but Al handled anything human himself. The flame eaters figured him for a genius because he cured the many blisters on their lips and inside their mouths. Over the years he set fractures, relocated joints, diagnosed and treated venereal diseases, and dosed infections from the kidneys to the tonsils.

It was Lil who soothed brows, changed sheets, and read aloud for the sick, but it was Al who did the flashy stuff. He lanced boils with a flair, gave vaccinations, irrigated ears, noses, and r.e.c.t.u.ms with equal zest, and made a grand production of extracting a sliver. He was a masterly st.i.tcher - "scarless wizardry," as he himself claimed. His career triumph happened the night an elderly lady collapsed in the front row at her first sight of Arty. Al recognized a heart attack, ripped her purple cotton dress down from the throat and clapped disposable electrodes to her chest within seconds of her tumble to the sawdust. He did it right there in front of Arty's tank with seven or eight hundred people in the bleachers watching. She jolted. Her eyegla.s.ses slid off. She voided her colon rather noisily, and was alive again, if not conscious.

It was the custom for the midway folk to appear on Monday mornings at Al's clinic if they had complaints. A lot of people said Al "should have been a doctor," and that his talent was wasted in the Fabulon. Al didn't see it that way. "I've got a captive practice of sixty souls," he'd say, increasing the numbers as the show's population grew to eighty, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and sixty.

Then Dr. Phyllis arrived. She drove into the lot one morning and parked thirty yards back from the cat wagon, which happened to be the last trailer in line that day.

She sat at the wheel and looked out through the windshield for a while. I saw her because I was stumping around the cat wagon rehearsing a lead-in talk. I kept on, pretending not to notice but taking in the shiny white van with a pair of tangled snakes climbing a staff painted next to the side door. I could barely see the vague pale figure behind the polarized windshield. We'd been on the lot for two days and were all set up, so the crews were taking it easy that morning, sitting on trailer steps talking and drinking coffee.

Horst was shaving beside his living van, using a portable razor while he looked into the rearview mirror on the driver's side. Everybody on the lot saw the van arrive but n.o.body reacted. For all we knew it was an act that Al had hired and not mentioned.

I was thinking she was a snake dancer because of the vipers on the van. I was morbidly fascinated by snakes. The van door opened, a pair of steps flopped out, and she appeared.

She was dressed in white - the uniform, the shoes, stockings, gloves, and of course the snug cap and the face mask. Only her gla.s.ses were neutral, clear, the eyes behind them blurred by their thickness.

She stepped smartly down and strode toward the nearest guard. It was Tim Jenkins, a big mahogany weightlifter who had retired from perpetual corporal status in the Marines and had been taken up by Al while his scalp was still visible under his military haircut. Tim was serious about guard duty and clicked his heels as the short, st.u.r.dy white figure approached him.

I'd stopped my pacing and was staring, boggle-eyed, at her. I knew it was a woman because of the broad hips and bulging prow. I was figuring her for a Hindu snake dancer - imagining flame shows with reptiles flickering over her gradually revealed flesh, slipping up her arms under the white sleeves, and so on.

I couldn't hear what she said but Tim nodded and looked at Horst. Horst had been watching everything in his mirror. He flipped his razor through the driver's window onto the seat of his van and strolled over. Tim was making introductions and Horst nodded and stuck out a hand. The figure in white pointedly jammed her gloved hands into the pockets of her white jacket. Horst let his hand drop and settled back a hair on his heels. Horst strolled away with the lady in white, toward the two Binewski vans. I trailed at a distance.

It was a bright, warm morning in Arkansas, I think, or maybe Georgia. The dust was brick red on my shoes as I leaned on the generator truck and looked down, pretending to mind my own affairs. I could have kicked myself for picking that fender to lean on when I realized that the fractured thrum of the generator would keep me from hearing any conversation. The white lady was waiting outside Arty's van. She was carrying a thin vinyl briefcase, white. She stood quite still with no nervous movements. Chick's small face peered from the window of the family van.

Arty came out in his chair. His forehead folded down over his eyes with questions. He doesn't know her, I thought. He didn't send for her. He nodded and said something. She spoke, her hands on the white case. Arty guided his chair down the ramp, and she fell in beside him, going slowly away from the vans, talking. She tucked the case under her arm and jammed her hands in her pockets again.

The case didn't stay where she put it but slid out behind her and floated toward the open door of the family van at an alt.i.tude of four feet or so. She whipped around and despite the mask I could tell she was glaring at the flying briefcase. Arty looked over his shoulder, stopped, opened his mouth, and shouted at the van. The case stopped just before it entered the door, turned in midair and zipped back to the white lady at twice the speed it had left her. She reached out a gloved hand, s.n.a.t.c.hed it, and stuck it back under her arm. Arty was talking to her. She nodded. They turned away and, with him rolling and her walking, they paraded up and down and around the lot, talking for a long time.

"I think she's creepy," said Electra. Iphigenia bobbed her head gravely in agreement and popped a slice of apple into her mouth. Arty ignored them both.

"How is she going to be paid? Percentage? Salary? Only when somebody's sick? Or only as long as everybody is well?" Al slid his eyes nervously, trying to be businesslike. Arty was forced to abandon his soup and his pretense of oblivion. He stared around the table at us and then turned to Papa.

"Don't worry about her money. I'll take care of it. She's got a lot to offer us. She's a stroke of luck for this show. She's not a school hack, at least. She's good at what she does."

Papa looked guiltily into his soup bowl.

Lily smiled dreamily. "It will be nice having an educated lady around."

Al patted her hand. Arty was concentrating on his soup again, crossing his eyes to sight down his straw. Chick sat beside Lil in the back of the dining booth, smiling and watching the peas lift, individually, from his soup, jerk slightly until the drip of broth fell back into the bowl, and then swoop down to rest in a military row on his plate. Chick never did like peas. I caught Iphy's eye. She raised her brows and pursed her mouth. Elly wrinkled her nose at me. We girls agreed, silently, that even if we had bubonic plague, the lady in white wasn't going to lay a finger on us.

Dr. Phyllis cowed Al. After that first day he never questioned her presence, or her credentials. He wouldn't even try to ask where she'd come from or what she'd been doing before she joined us. He dithered and protested that she was a "lady" and a good medic, and "By the blistered nipples of the Virgin," he didn't need to know any more than that. The twins and I shook our heads at how little fight he put up when his private pa.s.sion was usurped. I nagged him to ask questions because, if he didn't come up with some information, Arty would make me try. It seemed that despite his long conversation with her Arty didn't know much more about her than the rest of us did.

I was putting Arty onto the little elevator platform that ran up the outside of the family van one morning when he c.o.c.ked a wink at me and said, "I guess you'll have to get old Doc P. to let you look through her microscope."

I put a foot on the platform beside him, grabbed the lever, and we went slowly up.

It was a sunny morning. Warm. I don't know where we were - a small valley. All around the camp were deep pastures cut by streams with rough hills beyond. The highway sliced through and ran toward a small town, whose chimneys we could see above the trees. There were songbirds racketing in the scrub oaks on the slopes. The honk of a pheasant drifted up from the long gra.s.s. Arty wriggled off the elevator onto the roof. He liked to sunbathe up there when he could. Al had put a low rail around the top of the van so Arty wouldn't fall off, at the same time he installed the elevator.

Arty stuck his toe into the elastic of his trunks and worked them down until they sagged off him. He rolled over and arched his back, tilting his belly to the sun, stretching lushly.

"Yep," he said, "Little Oly had better do her stuff on Doc P."

"Here's your fly swatter." I put it beside him with the handle close to his head, where he could reach it. Arty was, as he claimed, "fly Mecca," and he hated them.

"Don't ignore me, Oly," he murmured as I rubbed suntan oil on his chest.

"I won't do it. I don't like her."

"Oly, you like her. You like her a lot. She's a fascinating, intelligent woman and you can learn from her."

"Right," I said, capping the bottle.

"Give her an ear to pour into. n.o.body does that better than you." He turned his head to watch me step onto the elevator.

"Don't p.i.s.s on anybody from up here," I said. "Papa got really mad last time." I lowered myself, looking away from him, looking at the brown creek that eased through the gra.s.s behind the van.

Three hours later I was hauling Dr. P.'s garbage to the camp dumpster and cursing her and Arty and myself in a thin blue vapor of rage that hissed through my nose with every breath. She had accepted my offer of help coldly and stood over me while I pumped the hydraulic leveler for her van. She gave me rigid orders about clipping the weeds and gra.s.s all around her van and then made me go over the whole area with a rake for litter. Then she introduced me to the garbage. She had very strict ideas about garbage. Each full bag in the can beside her van had to be slipped inside another bag and wrapped in a particular oblong shape and tied with string in a proper square knot. Three of these small parcels went into one large bag, which was then wrapped and tied with the same knot. Then the large parcel could be carried to the camp collection.

She considered it proper that I, or someone more efficient, should be dispatched by Arty to do her ch.o.r.es. She wasn't at all grateful.

When I got back to her van the door was closed again. I hadn't yet managed to get inside. I pushed the door buzzer. Her voice scratched out of the speaker, "Yes."

"I'm finished with the garbage, ma'am."

"That's all for today, then. Have a bath and pay special attention to cleaning under your nails. Report back tomorrow morning."

A month and several towns later I still hadn't set foot in her van. I'd filled her fuel and water tanks, emptied her septic system, gift-wrapped her garbage every day, and in each new site I'd leveled her van, policed her area for litter, and generally kissed her cold and pendulous b.u.t.tocks for nothing.

In the meantime she had taken over Al's precious infirmary trailer.

The sick call was cut in half. Al kept up his Monday-morning exams of the family but they were conducted in our dining booth. He didn't have the old zest for it. He went on tapping and listening and demanding news of our bowel movements. He still lifted our eyelids and peered into our throats and ears and scowled at our nails and rubbed blue gunk on our teeth and, for those of us with hair, checked for lice and ticks, but he didn't have his old glow of joy in doing it. He was sneaking behind her back.

I found this clipping years later in the private papers of the reporter Norval Sanderson, who joined the show sometime after Dr. P. Norval had resources that we Binewskis lacked. When he wanted info on someone's past, he could tap records and microfilm files from any newspaper in the country.

(UPI) A coed at the University of New York was admitted to St. Theresa's Hospital today after having performed abdominal surgery on herself in her dormitory room.

University authorities revealed that Phyllis Gleaner, 22, a third-year bio-chem major, pressed an alarm buzzer in her dormitory room, which summoned the building's custodian at 4:30 A.M., Tuesday. Responding to the buzzer, custodian Gregory Phelps found the student lying on a sterile table, wrapped in b.l.o.o.d.y sheets and surrounded by instruments.

"She was weak but conscious," said Phelps. "She told me not to touch anything in the room but to call an ambulance. She said the room was sterile and she didn't want me touching anything. She was very strong on that. I could see blood all over and from what I saw in the mirrors around her I didn't want to upset her so I went and called the emergency number."

Police surgeon Kevin Goran, M.D., examined Gleaner's dorm room after she was removed to the hospital. "It was a makeshift but functional operating theater," said Goran. "She had instruments for fairly major abdominal surgery, and an ingenious arrangement of mirrors, which allowed her to work inside her own abdominal cavity."

Emergency staff at St. Theresa's reported that Gleaner was conscious and coherent when admitted, but was very fatigued. "She was not really in shock," said Dr. Vincent Coraccio, staff surgeon at St. Theresa's. "What was remarkable was the competence of the work. She'd gone all the way in and was finished, evidently, but she got too tired to close the incision. That's when she called for help. All I had to do was st.i.tch her up. A very tidy job."

Gleaner administered local anesthetics to herself throughout the surgical procedure. Her statements to the hospital staff indicate that Gleaner believed a remote-control device had been implanted next to her liver by an unnamed undercover organization. Gleaner believed that the device was being used to monitor and direct her activities. She performed the surgery in an effort to rid herself of the device. No such device was found by police in searching Gleaner's dormitory room, nor by the medical staff in treating Gleaner.

The clipping was stapled in Sanderson's notebook. One page of his sprawling hand revealed the rest of his Doc P. research.

In an article appearing two days later, the same reporter revealed that university officials attempting to contact Gleaner's family discovered that the background on file was fict.i.tious. She had not attended the schools that she claimed. Her records were forged and falsified. No relatives or friends could be located in the small Kansas town - Garden City - she claimed as her home. The university was embarra.s.sed, particularly since Gleaner's academic record at that inst.i.tution was brilliant. Her professors acknowledged that she was a reserved individual and denied any knowledge of her private life. They affirmed that her work had been consistently excellent. Cla.s.smates claimed little knowledge of Gleaner. She was aloof from everyone.

Gleaner has consistently refused to make any statement or to answer any questions about her self-surgery or her falsified background. Her only comment, relayed through a nurse's aide, was that the university had no cause for alarm since her tuition and fees had always been paid.

11.

Blood, Stumps, and Other Changes

The twins turned fourteen in Burkburnett, Texas, during a Panhandle sandstorm as red as a drinkers eye. Birthdays were the only holidays the Binewskis noticed and we celebrated them with all the gusto we could muster. But that fourteenth for the twins was in a rough spot. Wichita Falls had denied us a permit and the front man - new to the job, and a reptile anyway - was scared to tell Al. We didn't find out until the police met us at the lot and escorted our cavalcade out of town, with Al cursing melodically all the way to our next scheduled stop, which was Burkburnett. Burkburnett hadn't decided whether we could have a permit or not. We put up in the railyard next to the slaughterhouse and slept with the whish and thunk of the oil pumps for night music.

There were oil wells everywhere. The soil had been abandoned to dust and lizards, and the backyard of every wind-blistered bungalow in town had thrown over ideas of shade or geraniums in favor of the whiskey promise in the mutter of those green gra.s.shopper pumps. Every pump was set in concrete and snugged in by a barb-topped chain-link fence eight feet high. There were pumps in the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour liquor store. There were three pumps on choice plots surrounded by the artificial turf that covered the Terra Celestial Memorial Gardens boneyard. A dozen ravenous steel insects sucked at the s.h.i.t-caked loam in the mile-square meatfield of empty pens where the beeves, when there were beeves, milled waiting for the knife. The white board fences of the paddocks were guarding only oil pumps that week. The packing plant was closed down.

Past our corner of the meat yard the town began, or ended, in a blasted heap of storefronts leaning on each other to face a million miles of Texas rushing straight at them over the mindless, moundless plain.

The twins woke up bickering. I could hear Elly's harsh whispers behind the screen. Then Iphy, who never really learned to whisper, "Not better than you. It's different, Elly. Please. Just for our birthday." It was the same old quarrel. Iphy wanted to sit next to Arty at breakfast. Elly always insisted that they sit in the left side of the dining booth so that she was between Iphy and Arty, who always sat in his special chair at the end of the booth. Elly hated the giggling that hit Iphy when she sat next to Arty. Arty didn't seem to care. I was the one who helped Arty with his food.

I crawled out of my cupboard and tiptoed into the toilet cubicle. Elly was grumbling. She must have given in. She'd given in on Arty's birthday the year before and sulked the whole day. The pink joy from Iphy's smiles had twisted me up. I looked in the mirror trying to see the fear on my face. It was in my liver and invisible.

Arty would rather have Iphy cut his meat than me. The blinds squeaked open in the twins' room. Their voices came out together. "A horse!" they said, and then a paired sigh, "Poor thing!"

They left the van door open and, when I came out, they were standing on the bottom slat of the board fence peering through.

"Many happy," I said, and hugged their long beautiful legs. Then their hands were pulling me up by the arms and I grabbed at the top rail and peered over. Iphy said, "Hang on to her," and Elly's arm clamped under my hump.

"He's sick," said Iphy, who thought all unfamiliar animals were male. "She's old," said Elly, who a.s.sumed that all living things were female until proven otherwise.

The horse had been orange once but a grizzle of white had paled its coat. Its white muzzle drooped to the ground on a thin, tired neck. Its ears were loose and hanging. Its eyes were nearly closed. Bones jutted through spine, ribs, sharp cow flanks. The tail was so long that it dragged in the muck.

"The feet!" said the twins. The horse was not sleeping. It moved half a step forward. First a rear hoof and then the opposite forehoof lifted slowly out of the black mud that covered them to the fetlocks. Then the horse stopped, lifting again that rear leg, holding it curled so the hoof was above the mud. The hoof was long and curved forward like a human shoe worn over on the outside. The legs were muddy to the knee and bowed oddly.

The sun leaked up over the edge of the plain. The horse stood in shadow in its tiny pen. "Its feet are rotten," muttered Elly. Iphy began to sniff in sympathy.

I could feel the faint thunk in the fenceboards from the pumps far off in the middle of the tight maze of paddocks. The sun's yellow knife slit the air, not yet reaching the ground or even the fences, but just touching the heads of the pumps as they rose and then losing them as they bobbed down into the shadow again. The feeble horse stood sunk into itself. Not an ear twitched. Not an eyelid flickered. An early-morning fly crawled over its hanging lips.

"Happy birthday," Arty said.

Iphy sat next to Arty at breakfast. Al had gone to the sheriff's office to get the verdict on our permit for Burkburnett. Lil hugged the twins every time she pa.s.sed them and made elegant little melon salads for breakfast. Elly didn't talk. Iphy mourned for the horse all through the meal.

"I want my chair." Arty was brisk, up to something. I dragged the chair outside and set it up in front of the door. He clambered into it from the top step and looked around. "Over by that horse." And I pushed his chair through the dust to the fence. He leaned forward and peered through the slats. The horse hadn't moved. Arty's face rumpled in disgust. He sank back against the chair and looked at me speculatively. "Well. Go get the doctor. Bring her here." I ran.

The doctors big van was by itself at the end of the line with fifty yards between it and the last trailer. She never parked close to the others. Her blinds were open. The twined snakes painted on the van's side held the intercom in their mouths. I pushed the b.u.t.ton. The sun was up now, slanting warm and yellow over my hands. The intercom speaker hissed and then her voice came out calmly. "Yes." I delivered the message. "One moment," she said. The speaker hissed again and went silent. I climbed down off the step block to wait for her. I didn't like to think of her door opening too close to me.

The air was still and dry with a musty, thick taste. The only familiar smell was the faint tang of fuel from the van. We hadn't opened up yet. We hadn't put our mark on the air. I tried to see past the cl.u.s.ter of vans and trucks and trailers to home-to the place at the other end where our van sat, with Arty out front next to the near-dead horse in its pen. Everything was in the way. I pulled my cap down over my ears and jigged anxiously in the dust. I didn't want to look in the other direction toward the dry s.l.u.t town with its dark windows shaded against us. I bit my tongue when the door opened. The antiseptic smell slid out first. Then I saw her thick-wedged white shoes with the ankles leaping from them. "Lead the way, please," she said. And she stepped down toward me. I scuttled.

Dr. Phyllis should have had a nice voice. It was cool and high and always controlled. She never ran off into the ragged edges of sharp like Lil or Iphy. But it still wasn't pleasant. It was monotonous as a sleepwalker. Her words came out cleanly, nipped off surgically with a slightly heavy breath where an r should be. She spoke Lil's old tongue, the long, smooth one from the right side of the hill in Boston. Though, when Lil asked her, Dr. Phyllis said she'd never been there. That talk made Lil want her to stay. Lil thought it would be good to have a woman with the show who spoke that way - as though she and Lil might drink tea in the van and talk about home. But it never happened. I didn't mind Lil liking her. Lil was silly about who she liked. But Arty was different.

The dust puffed up behind me as I ran. I hoped it would settle on her white uniform. I wished she wasn't wearing the mask so she would breathe my dust and cough. But she never came out without the mask over her nose and mouth. The white cap was always pulled down tight over her forehead and completely covered her hair. In between were the big thick spectacles. She was completely protected. She didn't speak to me, and she kept up with me easily, walking fast.

Chick was leaning on the arm of Arty's chair as we came up. The two of them were watching something in the dust.

I heard Arty say, "Push them together." Chick's head nodded and a small grey snake rose a foot into the air, suspended from its middle like a shoestring, and then dropped back into the dust.

"They're not paying attention," said Arty.

"Good morning," said Dr. Phyllis in her high, perfect voice. The snake and a horned toad rose quickly and flew away together into the desert. Chick hid his head against Arty's chest.

"Doctor!" said Arty. "Take a look at this horse."

She walked stiffly past me, her hands folded in front of her crotch. "I am not," she said calmly, "a veterinarian."

Arty jabbed his chin into Chick's wheat-colored hair. "Scat!" he snapped. The child jumped away from the chair and turned to run. When he saw me, he reached out his soft hand and ran up to me.

"Let's go see what Mama's putting in the birthday cake," I said. He smiled and we climbed into the van.

Chick sat on the counter, still except when his mouth opened to receive the gobbets of chocolate frosting that would occasionally lift from the bowl that Lil was dipping from. "Stop it, Chick," Lil would murmur. And he would smile sweet chocolate at her, and the curl that dropped in front of her ear would stretch out in a soft caress over her cheek and then spring back. I crouched on the floor with my hump against the cupboard door and watched Arty and Dr. Phyllis through the open door.

Her white skirt was stretched tight over her thick legs and square hips. She was pushing her hands deep into her front pockets and rocking on her wedge heels. She gazed through the fence at the decrepit horse. Arty leaned back in his chair and looked up at her, smiling. I couldn't hear what they said.

A brown blob danced in front of my nose. I opened my mouth. It dipped, circled in the air, and zipped onto my tongue. Frosting.