Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

When Chick fed the cats he dropped the meat through the ventilator slots in the roof. We stood outside the refrigerator truck and watched the big bolt lift and the door swing open. Chick reached over and took my hand. “Is this O.K.? I want to hold your hand while I’m moving the meat.” He was looking pinched. “Sure,” I said. A beef quarter floated off its hook inside the truck and wobbled out. It flopped onto the big chopping block. The cleaver came out of its slot in the truck’s tool rack. Chick worked fast. The blade flashed upward five times quickly and six chunks of meat sailed through the air with exposed fat gleaming. The cats were coughing and spitting as the trapdoors over the ventilator slots lifted simultaneously. The chunks dropped through with a single thunk to the floor. Another quarter jumped out on the block and the door shut while the cleaver was rising and falling. Chick was squeezing my hand gently. The cleaver dipped its square tip into the cutting block and stayed there while the chunks lifted, circled like cumbersome crows, and headed slowly for the flaps in the roof.

“You could do it without the cleaver, Chick,” I said.

“Yeah, but I’d feel the meat more. Can you feel it?”

He was taller than I was and he looked down at me with such a serious intensity that I felt a small quiver of fear. “Feel what?”

He frowned. Words never came all that easily to him. “Well, how … dead … the meat is.”

I stuck my tongue out at the corner of my mouth and squinted at him through my sunglasses. Anybody else in the family except Lily would be pulling something if they talked like that, trying to spook me so they could laugh at me later. Chick was so straight he was simple. He could never really understand the joke when the rest of us were telling whopping lies.

“No,” I said. “I don’t feel anything.” He pursed his mouth and I heard the meat land inside the cages and the snarling of the cats. Chick looked so sad I knew I’d failed him. “I’m sorry, Chick.”

He swung an arm over my shoulders and leaned his face down against my head. “It’s okay. I just thought you might feel it if I held your hand.”

“Shit,” said a clear voice behind us. We wheeled together as though we were the twins. It was one of the red-haired girls. She shrugged her round shoulders at us through her peacock shirt and laughed nervously. “I just never get over how you do that, Chick,” and she waved gaily and teetered away on her tall heels.

We watched her go, Chick’s arm still around my shoulders, my arm around his waist. For one instant my eye escaped and I could see us as we must have looked to the redhead. Two small figures, one bent and distorted, shielded by cap and glasses, and this slim, golden boy-child, several inches taller, holding the dwarf close while chunks of meat sailed over them in the air. I hugged Chick. His peach cheek rubbed my forehead and nose. I wondered how he did move things and, while that wondering was creeping into my skull, I realized that I had never wondered about it before. Had any of us really wondered? Even Al and Lil? Or had we all been so caught up in the necessity of training him and protecting him and protecting ourselves from him and figuring ways it would be safe to use him and finding out exactly what he could or couldn’t do that we never got around to wondering?

“Chick,” I said to his fine yellow hair, “how do you move stuff?”

His head came up slowly from my shoulder and he looked surprised. Then his face focused. I was thinking how ridiculous never to have asked him. He started to blush. He let go of me and passed his hands over his ears as though he knew I was making fun of him. “Oh, you know,” he said. The cleaver levered itself out of the chopping block, flew to the sterilizer hose hanging from the refrigerator truck, and danced in the white gush from the nozzle. The hose stopped and the cleaver leaped toward the truck door, which opened just enough to let it in. Then the door closed and I knew the cleaver would be settling into its slot. Chick was bright pink now.

“No, I don’t know, Chick. Tell me.”

A small rock by the truck wheel began to spin in place. It flipped over, still spinning, then hopped onto its side and began to roll in a tight circle. The equivalent, probably, of another kid scuffing his shoes or twiddling his own ear in embarrassment. He was my little brother, of course, so I got impatient. “I’ll pinch you, Chick! Tell me how you move stuff!” The rock lay down quietly.

“Well, I don’t really. It moves itself. I just let it.” He looked at me anxiously while I chewed on that and found it unsatisfying.

I shook my head. “Don’t get it.”

“Look,” he turned me toward the cats. The side of the van lifted and the prop poles slid into place so I could see the cats in the shade. They were all eating, standing over the meat, wrenching it, or lying with chunks between their paws, fondling it.

“You know the water tank at the back?” said Chick. As I watched, the small taps over the troughs in each cage opened slightly and trickles of water flowed. One of the Bengals leaped at its tap and began batting the stream with its paw. “Water always wants to move but it can’t unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction.” The tap that the Bengal was playing with suddenly opened wide and a gush of water splatted into the big whiskers. The cat jerked back and then lunged forward, pressing his whole face into the heavy spray, twitching his ears ecstatically. “If you give it a big hole,” said Chick, “a lot comes out. If you give it a pinprick you get a slow leak.” He was struggling to make me understand. I watched the tiger play and felt a thickness between my ears. “I’m just the plumbing that lets it flow through. I can give it a big path or a small one, and I can make it go in any direction.” His anxious eyes needed me to understand. “But the wanting to move is in the thing itself.” We started off toward the big tent.

“Did I help?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

• • •

Arty, wheedling from the sofa, called, “Chick, I’ll bet there’s a lot of that roast beef left over from dinner. I sure would like a sandwich made out of that beef, with mayonnaise and horseradish. What do you say? Will you make me one?”

Chick, with a comic book under his arm, having worked for hours at other people’s jobs and looking now for just an apple and a visit with Superman — this vegetarian Chick, who will eat unfertilized eggs and milk but never (no, please don’t make him) fish or fowl or four-legged beasts or anything that notices when it’s alive and talks to him about it if he touches it — this Chick knows Arty is being mean, and will force him to move the meat rather than using his hands and a knife, and says, “Sure, Arty, white or whole wheat?”

He tries. He gets the plate of beef from the refrigerator and casually grabs a knife from the drawer.

“Chick!” snaps Arty indignantly. “You’re not gonna use a knife, are you?”

Caught, Chick admits, “I was gonna move the knife.”

But Arty roars, “Drop all that norm shit! Why did Papa give you that gift if you’re going to piss it away like a norm? Move the meat. Move the meat!”

And so precise leaf-thin pages of beef separate themselves from the pink roast and arrange themselves with a swoop of mayo and a flip of horseradish on a dancing pair of homestyle whites, and they all come together on a pretty blue plate that glides out of the dish rack to give them a ride over to where Arty is picking his teeth with a fin and watching.

“There you go,” says Chick.

“Thank you so much,” says Arty, who is perfectly capable of making his own sandwiches if there is nobody around to do it for him. Arty clamps a fin on the sandwich and takes an enormous bite, watching Chick’s face as he chews. “Dullicious!” he mouths around the mess.