Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Lil, honey, this is a small town. The laundromat is most likely not open twenty-four hours.”

“I thought we could put him on top of a drier and put in enough coins to keep it going all night.” Al was patient, driving stolidly.

“We’ll find a place that opens early. A snappy-looking business. Owner a local pillar. Not white-collar, though. No insurance or real estate. I don’t want him brought up by an office worker.”

Arturo’s ribs swelled against me as he inhaled, then his soft voice, “A gas station, maybe. Sure to be one on the main drag.”

Al took it as though it had come from his own mind. Arty had that knack.

“A gas station would be about right. You bundle him up warm, Lil. They’ll open early to catch the mugs going to work.”

Lil was fumbling in the dark.

“I can’t find the writing pad,” she called. Her voice had tears high up near the surface now. Al’s big hand touched my scalp.

“Help your ma, Oly.”

I found the writing tablet and a pencil in the drawer. Lil had gone back to the bedroom. Iphy and Elly were asleep as I slid by their bunk. I was proud to be up and useful while they slept.

Lil was propped up on the pillows of the big bed. She was pulling on the long red gloves that she used for shows. The baby slept beside her, wrapped tight in the yellow blanket that had covered each of us in turn. Lil’s face was flat and wet with pain. I handed her the pad and pencil and climbed up beside her. She sat up and leaned over the tablet. She gripped the pencil between her long red fingers and opened the pad to the blank middle pages. She rubbed the page with her gloved hand, turned it over and rubbed the other side. Then she turned it back and began printing carefully against the sway of the van. Some tears came out while she wrote and she tipped forward so they would fall onto the page.

“Please take care of my baby,” she read aloud as she wrote. Signed, “Unemployed and unwed.”

She sighed, tore the page out and folded it. She saw me looking at her. She smiled a weak smile. Her glove came out and rubbed my smooth head.

“I signed it that way so the people who find him will think that is the reason he was left. I said ‘unemployed’ rather than ‘out of work’ to give people the idea that his parents weren’t illiterate, anyway. Maybe if they think he came from educated people they’ll assume he’s got good genetic stock. It might give him a better chance.”

I put my nose into the palm of her glove. I liked her for thinking about that. I liked her for grieving over this regular baby. It made me feel important and loved. I thought she would have really cried if she’d had to give me up.

The morning before, while the plans were still forming, Al had checked out the van. Arty crawled underneath and talked to Al while he cranked the wrenches around. I tried to get close enough to hear but couldn’t. Later, at the breakfast table, Al told it as though it had occurred to him without outside help.

“We could go into a big supermarket and wait in an aisle until there was no one else in sight and push the cans of beans aside — you know how deep those shelves are — and lay him on the shelf at the back and then stack cans in front of him again and walk away. When he started to cry it would just take them a few minutes to find him.”

Lil was intrigued, of course, but insisted on stowing her babe not behind plebeian beans but behind artichoke hearts, escargots, some comestible expensive and erudite enough to guarantee that the customer who shoved the cans aside and discovered this sweet morsel would have a certain cachet of worldliness and money.

Then Al remembered the surveillance cameras and other security hardware and discarded the idea. But I knew it had come from Arty originally. It smacked of him.

So, we were doing what Al referred to as “the sensible thing.” The elderly thin flannel blanket and the kid’s unremarkable underwear had all been checked for identifying labels, or floating sequins, that might pin the job on us. Even the cardboard box, an ex-cradle for canned pumpkin, had been checked. Al phoned a grocery from a booth in our last pit stop to make sure they had the brand in the area. Standard brown-paper insulation, layered and crumpled for warmth. Nothing so foolish as a newspaper from anywhere along the route.

And the red gloves, the long suède arms reaching past the elbows, with three cunning buttons at the slit wrist to close them and the fingers so supple her nails and knuckles showed through. And the mid-page of the writing pad wiped of fingerprints. These minor dodges my parents performed as automatically as the swallowing of spit. The thinking part came in avoiding too much thought, in the spontaneous flare of not scouting ahead — not speeding — and in the care that Al had taken with the van’s checkup back there in Whore Meadow, Idaho, where he made sure we would not break down, run out of fuel, or blow a tire before we were well away from the last sight of our own castoff perfection. The Binewskis weren’t crooks, but we had a sense of timing.

I was rustling in the drawer next to the sink for tape. Mama wanted tape to fasten the note on the baby. It was dark and I could see Al’s head and shoulders against the bright windshield when the van slowed. I grabbed the sink edge to balance as we pulled off into popping gravel. Al doused the lights.

“Oly, is your mama ready?” His voice was close to me.

“Just about, Papa.”

“Tell her to be quick. We don’t want to stop for more than one minute and I’m going to make just one pass through town, so we’ve got to spot the place and decide fast. Tell her.”

I had the roll of tape in my fist. I shut the drawer and headed for the crack of light showing at the edge of the sliding door to Mama’s room at the end of the van.

She was sitting on the bed with the baby’s cardboard box beside her. She looked up at me as I whispered Papa’s message. She nodded and reached out a red-gloved hand for the tape. We were moving again. She tore off tape and neatly plastered the note to the flap of the box. Tears ran quietly down her cheeks. There was a crackle from the paper in the box. The baby was moving slightly. Mama’s eyebrows peaked in a tent above her nose as she looked at me through her red eyes.

“He might wake,” she whispered wetly. “He’s been asleep almost three hours. He’ll be hungry.” Her voice squeaked out through the whisper. “Tell Papa we have to wait till I can feed him. Tell him to park somewhere.” A push in her eyes sent me back, feeling my way toward the cockpit, with tears coming out of my own eyes. As I reached for the support bar behind Papa, the van reeled beneath me and we were turning right beneath a streetlight into the purple shadows of a three-island, twelve-pump gas station with its “CLOSED — open again 6 A.M.” sign large and pale in the window of the office. On the wall of the office, a tire with a clock in its center hung numbly, with one hand drooping to 12:35.

“Papa,” I started to say, as he lurched up from the seat and swung toward me.

“Gangway, Oly,” he snapped as he pushed past me, a wave of heat and cigar smoke and father flesh moving away toward the open door of the bedroom. Arty smiled at me from the passenger seat. He reared his head back, baring his teeth to show me his excitement.

“No, Al!” came Lil’s voice from the bedroom.

“Quick, Lil, get a move on!” and I could see Papa bending over the visible corner of the big bed, reaching.

“Al, I’ve got to feed him! He’s awake!”

But Papa was pulling and the cardboard box slid toward him with Mama’s long red gloves attached to it.

“Lily, there isn’t time!”

A thin, monotonous siren wailed from the box as Al lifted it and the reaching red gloves towed Mama along in her limp robe. Papa came through the door toward us and put the box down on the floor next to the side door as Mama rushed behind him, with the light from the bedroom door shining through her pale hair. Papa opened the side door and peered out, and Mama hit the light switch as she leaned over the box. Her pink robe and red-gloved hands dove toward the wadded papers that filled the box around the baby.