Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Oly, is the baby all right?” Mollie was rattling the screen door. “Oly?”

Chick subsided to unhappy burbles and hiccups, and I slid him back onto the blanket. “Arty?” I whispered. No answer. No movement. At the foot of the bed lay a big rumpled pillow with a grey spot of dampness in its creased middle. The pillow had been tidy at the head of the bed the last time I’d peeked in. Chick could have moved it, but Arty’s talk about Leona the Lizard Girl hit me again. I knew. Arty had tried to smother the Chick.

I hung over the bedside, reaching to touch him. “Arty?” His head was heavy, his fins limp.

Mama and Papa mustn’t find out. I jumped down, grabbed Arty by the rear fins, and pulled him back down the carpeted ravine to the bedroom door, and out into the living section of the van.

“Oly? Are you O.K., honey?” Peggy was at the screen door. “Is the baby O.K.?” Mollie called.

Chick was hiccuping in the bedroom. He sobbed occasionally. Arty was very still. I turned his head to the side so I could see his face. His eyes were closed. A big patch on his forehead was beginning to turn blue. I took a deep breath and ran to the door. The redheads stared in at me. “I think Chick’s O.K.… But Arty …” I lifted the latch and began to cry.

I huddled on Mama’s bed with Chick during the uproar, and heard the grownups decide that Arty had climbed up on the kitchen counter and fallen off onto his head. He was still unconscious when Mama rushed him off to Papa’s infirmary trailer.

Chick sat up beside me, his fuzzy hair frowzled, and patted my cheeks with his tiny hands. He ran his fingers into my nostrils and mouth until I smiled, painfully. Then he smiled too, with his few teeth all showing in his floppy grin.

Above us on the painted metal wall was a shallow dent the size of a dinner plate.

“Oh, Chick,” I said.

The twins marched in and commandeered the baby. “If you’d been inside where you were supposed to be,” said Elly, “this wouldn’t have happened.”

“You could have helped Arty get what he was looking for,” said Iphy.

I hugged my knees and stared numbly at them. The rat was awake in my belly.

They took Chick out to the dining booth to play with him and I lay there on Mama’s big lavender bed and thought about Arty coming in through the screen door and finding nobody and humping his way back to the bedroom and seeing Chick asleep on the bed. I saw him push his way carefully up to the pillows and grapple one onto the baby’s sleeping face, Arty leaning on it with his whole weight. So Chick woke up and threw Arty just as he’d throw a toy or a chunk of banana. Without touching him.

Mama stayed at the infirmary with Arty but Papa came back with the news.

“The poor little apple batted awake and says, ‘Mama, Papa,’ first thing. I whooped and your mama stopped crying. He couldn’t remember a thing about it. He’s got a concussion and a dog hair of a skull fracture, but praise be, he’ll be right in no time.”

Elly shrugged. Iphy clapped her hands. “I’m so glad.”

I laced my fingers over my pointed chest and closed my eyes, breathing in gratitude that I hadn’t got him killed and that he’d been clearheaded enough to “forget” what had happened.

We fed Chick from a bottle until Mama and Arty came home the next afternoon. He was good about it. But when Mama noticed the dent in the wall a few days later I told her that Chick had thrown his bottle at it once while she was gone. She tsked but didn’t scold him. It was too late, she said. “You have to ‘No’ him just when he’s done it. He wouldn’t know why I was fussing at him now.”

Arty lay on his bunk in the middle of everything and we danced to his tune. The twins waited on him and I helped him to the toilet, and Mama spent all her time thinking of delicate things for him to eat. He was happy. He was polite. He smiled and laughed at the jokes we made to amuse him.

He couldn’t read for a while. His eyes wobbled and trying to focus gave him headaches. I read to him in my slow, stumbling way and he corrected and scolded and made me go on for hours. By the time he could read for himself again, I could read almost anything, though my pronunciation was still shaky on words I didn’t know.

Mama did her duty by Chick but fussed over Arty. For days Chick barely appeared outside the bedroom. Then Mama brought him out and tucked him in beside Arty “to watch while Mama makes supper for her beautiful boys,” as she put it. I felt my stomach claw its way into my throat, but Chick snuggled up to Arty happily and played with his fin. Arty blinked for a second and then went along with it.

I secretly swore to make Arty the king of the universe so he wouldn’t be jealous of Chick.

Arty’s big tent stayed folded on the trucks through a dozen moves. It cut into our take dramatically. Papa tried to keep Arty from knowing how much money we were losing with him out sick. When Papa sat late in the dining booth doing the books, Arty would ask, “How’s it going?” and Papa would sigh and say, “Fine, boychik. Don’t you worry your poor busted noggin about it.” This put Arty into a foul mood for several days. Finally one night, late, he called out from his bunk, “I guess the show doesn’t need me, Papa. You’d do fine with just the twins if I died.” Then Papa went and scooped him up and took him to the table and showed him how the gross had slipped. Arty was happy again and started going over the accounts with Papa.

It was more than a month before he tried going back into the tank at all. His first test trip into the water was a shock. Papa and I leaned on the tank to watch as he flipped down in his usual straight-to-the-bottom flow. He burst through the surface seconds later, gasping. “It hurts!” he puffed. “And I can’t hold my breath.”

Papa was grim and silent as he carried Arty back to our van. I knew he was wondering what would happen if Arty couldn’t dive anymore. That afternoon he got a set of weights and a bench from the storage truck, remnants of an old strongman act. He set up a gym on the stage behind Arty’s tank. Arty began working out and was back in the water within the week. Not long afterward, Arturo the Aqua Boy was back in lights and packing them in.

A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.

I sat on the counter of the Marvelous Marv booth and kicked my feet slowly. No drips came through the green awning but the air was so full of water that it congealed on my face and clothes whenever I moved. I was watching the summer geek boy, a blond Jeff from some college in the far Northeast, as he leaned on the snack-wagon counter across the way and flirted with the red-haired girl running the popcorn machine.

Behind me in the Marv booth, Papa Al and Horst sat facing each other on camp stools with the checkerboard between them. Marvelous Marv had the afternoon off and Horst’s cats were fussing and coughing at the damp. The cats’ voices roared around their big steel trailer but came echoing dimly through the rain.

Al’s cigar butt arced out over the counter past my elbow, spitting red as it died in a puddle.

“Long as you’re playing with your boots instead of your brains,” drawled Horst, “why don’t we make this next game for my new tiger cub that I’m going to pick up in New Orleans? I win, you buy me that cub for my birthday.”

I could hear Papa’s match scraping the stool leg, then the hiss and a silence that produced a reek of green tobacco from his new cigar.