Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

We all hated these special trips of his. Not Mama, of course, but Arty and the twins and I. The show was our world and Papa’s world. It had always been world enough. None of us had ever slept in a hotel or eaten in a restaurant or flown in a plane. Papa enjoyed it all too obviously. And we suspected, each of us, blackly and viciously, that Papa preferred his norm kid to us. With Chick he was free to go anywhere. We could live only in the show.

There were a couple of dozen of these trips after Chick turned three. Papa was feeling worldly. He bought three-piece suits and sometimes even wore one on the show lot.

Chick was nearly four on the morning he and Papa left for a mountain-lake resort that had always refused Binewski’s Fabulon a permit. We weren’t high-class-enough entertainment for that set. There was a big poker tournament in the major hotel there and, in the same weekend, a championship fight. Papa figured to find a lot of cash in the pockets.

We were set up in the semi-suburbs somewhere and the crowds for the midway were steady but not phenomenal.

I stuck close by Arty when Papa was away, and Arty was nastier than usual all day. He spat in my face after his first show because the twins had sold eighty more tickets than he had.

The last show that night went well for him, though, and he was already chinning himself out of the tank when I got there afterward. He’d outdrawn the twins and I was waiting for him to ask about ticket receipts, but he was thinking about something else. I wrapped him in a fresh thick towel and put him in his chair. He had to be tired from the four shows that day but he seemed sharp and eager. “Get me down to that phone booth on the street.” We went out the rear entrance and down the dark side of the midway behind the booths. Just a few yards away, the simp-twister rides and the games were having their last spasm of jump on a summer night.

“Tim’s on the gate,” I told the back of Arty’s head. “He’ll come with us.” We weren’t supposed to leave the grounds at all but I figured the guard would be persuadable.

“No. We’re going out through the delivery gate,” barked Arty. “Nobody is going to see us, and nobody is going with us.”

The phone booth near the lamppost had a folding door and a phone book hanging in shreds on a chain. I was nervous trying to sidle Arty’s chair into the booth and had to pull him back three times before I got the wheels centered. “Calm down, piss brain.”

“I feel like I’ve got hair, Arty.”

“That’s goose bumps, ass face. You’ve got the yellows at being out in the big, bad world. Climb up. There’s a coin here somewhere.”

The coin was wrapped in a slip of paper.

“The number’s on that paper.”

I stood on his chair and examined the phone.

“Hand me down the receiver.”

He tucked it between his ear and his shoulder while I cautiously dropped the coin in and began to dial.

“I’ve never used a phone, Arty. Have you?”

“Pay attention to the numbers.”

Then I heard the ringing start.

A half hour later Arty was scrubbed and pink and stretched out on his belly on the rubbing table. I trickled oil into the flesh rolls on the back of his neck and rubbed it up onto his smooth, round skull and down into the diamond-dented muscles of his shoulders and spine. His eyes were wide, staring at the wall.

“Who were you talking to? What’s it about?” I asked.

His fins spread slightly and his shoulders twitched in a shrug that came up through my hands.

“Never mind, anus. Just rub.”

We had recently bought a big new living van. For the first time the twins and Arty each had a small room. Chick slept on a built-in sofa-bunk. The cupboard beneath the sink was bigger than in the old van and Mama had painted the inside a deep hot blue called “Sinbad.”

I suppose that van was part of the profit from Papa’s trips with the Chick, but the show was growing and doing well too. Every town we played seemed to spill out some new act that would appear on our doorstep begging Papa for an audition.

The new van came equipped with a maroon leather rubbing table in Arty’s room. He insisted on having his walls covered with matching wine-colored cloth. I wondered where he’d got such an idea.

Papa and Chick arrived in a taxi the next day as Mama was fixing lunch. It was a hot Saturday and the midway was going full blast. Papa looked tired and angry. Chick sat in the twins’ lap and ate peanut butter and jelly. Papa took only iced tea.

“Now, Al, whatever happened?” Mama pressed.

“Bastardly thing, Lily.” Papa shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of it. We’d checked in and I went to take a look around while Chick napped in the room. Then I take him down to the restaurant and we’re just about to order when three of the hotel dicks and an assistant manager jump us and walk us to an office off the lobby and ask for ID. They’re very polite and I’m carrying on like the bewildered but cooperative citizen when the head of security slides in. He fixes me with an eye like a mackerel’s ass and says, ‘We’ve heard about you, sir. We’ve heard a great deal.’ They check me out of the hotel right then and tell me I am not welcome in any of their nine hundred branches of coo-coo-prick flophouses, ever. How do you like that? They didn’t seem to tumble to the Chick at all, but they had me figured for a pickpocket using the kid as a front. I’ve slipped somewhere, but damned if I know how.”

Arty listened with a concerned wrinkle above his nose but stayed quiet. He didn’t need to say a thing.

It was the end of Chick’s career as a pickpocket. Papa set himself to “think again,” as he put it.

It was a while before Papa got back to thinking seriously about Chick. One of the swallowers got an infection from the burns in his mouth and Papa spent weeks in his little trailer workshop improving a burn salve.

The twins had begun writing music and they did a lot of pouting because Papa wouldn’t let them play their own songs in their act.

“Classics. That’s what people want. Stick to classics,” Papa would say. “You play something they’ve never heard before, how should they know whether you’re playing well or not?”

Horst bought a new cat just to distract Elly and Iphy from their hurt feelings. It was a scabby leopard cub rescued from some roadside zoo, and Chick and I and the twins all got ringworm from playing with it. Papa had a wonderful time curing the stuff but Arty wouldn’t come near any of us. He used the ringworm as an excuse to abandon his new room and to start bunking in the dressing room on the stage behind his tank. He never moved back into the family van. He ate with us once the ringworm was gone, but his real life became private. He spent his time “backstage” as he called the room behind the tank. Papa put a guard on the place and complained about the added expense.

Mariposa, the jaw dancer from the variety tent, had been with the Fabulon since I was a baby. She did gymnastics while hanging from her teeth on a twenty-foot pole fastened to the harness of a cantering white horse named Schatzy. Mariposa had a pug nose and a wide grin and Crystal Lil liked her.

When Mariposa stuck her head in through the open van door while we were eating lunch, Mama called to her to come in and join us. The jaw dancer refused, saying she was rehearsing something new. “But I want you to come and look at my four-o’clock turn, Lily. Tell me what you think.”

Mama and Chick and I slipped into the tent toward the end of the show when the Strauss waltz was introducing Schatzy and Mariposa, and we stood in the aisle between the banks of bleachers. Schatzy was old but proud and light-footed. She arched her neck and hiked her tail into a banner as she lolloped around the ring.