Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Good. I’m glad.” Chick smiles and steps out of the van and walks around behind the generator truck, where he vomits painfully and tries to think of something besides what the cow said to him as he sliced her.

They were fighting and their door was locked. The thumping woke me. I burst out of my cupboard thinking of elephants or earthquakes. The thin paneling of their cubicle room thonked toward me a fraction of an inch. I could hear them gasping. I ran to their door. The knob wouldn’t turn. The early sunlight slanted in through the window over the sink. A huge body slammed against the door on the other side. They’d wake up Al and Lil. I slid Chick’s door open and his huge eyes were waiting for me. He was afraid.

“Help me,” I whispered. “The twins are fighting.”

He rolled out of his blankets and grabbed my arm. His hand was wet.

“Unlock it.”

He looked at the doorknob. It turned. The door opened. They were rolled in a knot on the bed with spider elbows jerking out and in, a flailing leg whacking a heel into a thin, pajama-clad back. Their breathing was short and loud and a hand came out of the mess, pulling a long skein of black hair up into the light of their small window.

“Hold their hands.” I nudged Chick. Two hands spread out against the pillow and a fist landed with a smack and a squeak. “All the hands! All!” I snapped. Four arms splayed in the air away from the twisted bundle of pajamas. A leg swung back for a kick and then froze.

“Can you hold them?”

Chick nodded, looking at me. His eyes had crusts of sleep in them. Elly’s face lifted out of a mass of black hair — a red scratch across her forehead. She drew back on her long neck and shot forward, whooshing out a phtt of air as she spit into the tangled hair beneath her.

There was no hiding it from Al and Lil. The scratches and bruises were so visible that the twins couldn’t do their act for four days. They were sick and sore. They lay in bed with their faces turned away from each other all that day. Al and Lil were very upset.

“You must never do that again! You must never fight with each other!” The old incantation poured in shocked desperation from the parental mugs. The twins refused to explain what it was about.

Chick was helping me drain sewage tanks that afternoon. We were both glum. We stood and watched the gauge on the pump that emptied our van’s tank into the tanker truck. I kept thinking about what they’d looked like when Chick had opened the door. Like a thing that hated itself.

“They always bicker,” I said.

Chick nodded, watching the gauge dial. “But they were really trying to hurt each other.” Chick’s head fell forward, his chin nearly touching his chest. The back of his neck was so thin and golden, and his tawny head was so big above his skinny shoulders. Seeing him hit my lungs like an ice pick through the ribs. He was pretty.

“I wonder what it was about?” I murmured.

Chick sighed. His head wobbled. “Iphy said his name in her sleep,” he said.

Lil made Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Chicken for dinner. She was rubbing lemon juice over her hands to get rid of the garlic smell while we all sat around the table waiting for the oven bell to sound.

The twins were excited about something, whispering to each other. Al was talking about an old road manager he’d run off the midway twenty years before. The guy had shown up again that day looking for a job.

“Vicious god, Lil! He looked eighty years old! He looked like the grave had spit him back up, disgusted!”

Lil tsked over her lemon-juice hands. Arty watched the twins. Chick and I leaned on Papa from opposite sides, leeching his warmth.

Lily was dishing out the chicken when Iphy finally spoke up.

“We have a new turn for our show!” Iphy glowed. It had to be tricky. Iphy always did the talking if a “No” was possible. It was hard for anybody to say “No” to Iphy.

“We do a standing vertical jump onto the piano top and spring off into a synchronized-swim dance number in the air. We fly out over the audience and back while the piano goes on playing the ‘Corporal Bogwartz Overture’! Doesn’t that sound great? We practiced this morning! We’ll use pink floods and three pink spots to follow us over the crowd. Do let us, Papa! Chick can handle the whole thing so easily. He knows the music already. He learned it in two sessions! It takes exactly one and a half minutes and it’ll be our finale. He can just run in during the last five minutes of each show, stand behind the screen, and be finished when we touch the stage for the bow! Please, Papa, Mama? Come and see it after dinner; you’ll love it!”

Chick was hiding his face behind Al’s arm. Arty’s eyes stayed on Lil’s big spoon, lifting out chicken and putting pieces on plates.

Al was laughing. “What a picture! Wouldn’t that flatten ’em? Hey, Crystal Lil! How about these girls? Sharp?”

“Flying,” Lil murmured. “Mercy.”

Elly was pink with eagerness, her hopeful, fearful eyes fixed on Arty, who said nothing. He rocked slightly in his chair, seemingly interested only in the food that was accumulating on his plate with the help of Lil’s spoon.

It never happened, of course. Arty quashed it. If the outside world tumbled to it, or even suspected it was not a trick, we’d drown in power plays for Chick. Stay with the straight path of what we were each gifted with.… Did we think Al hadn’t done enough for us, that we had to monkey with his work? Iphy was disappointed but willing to understand. Elly never said anything about it.

We probably looked sweet, the twins and I, in our blue dresses under the shady apple trees, with big bowls in our laps, snapping green beans on a summer afternoon. But the apples on the tree were gnarled and scabby and the twins’ glossy hair and my sunbonnet covered worm-gnawed brains.

“Arty wouldn’t hurt anybody.” I was lying vigorously as I snapped away at the smooth-skinned beans. “You’re the one, Elly. You’re jealous of Arty when he’s just trying to take care of family.”

“Oly, you know Chick would be floating in formaldehyde if it looked like he was going to steal any of Arty’s thunder by being a big success.” Her hands ripped the beans to pieces, dropping the tips and strings into one bowl and the usable chunks into another. Iphy’s hands did the same task lightly, delicately.

I pushed on doggedly through my beans. “Arty still thinks Chick can be useful.”

“Sure,” Elly sniffed. “As a workhorse and a slave. Chick can save us a lot of money. It takes ten men five hours to put up the tops that Chick can put up in one hour by himself. And Chick’s pay is a pat on the head.”

Iphy sighed, “You should be kinder.”

Elly muttered at her own fingers, “I’m just taking care of you and me. That’s all I’m thinking about. He hates us. He’s selfish.”

“Not selfish! Scared! He’s scared all the time, Elly! You know it!” Iphy’s hand lifted in fright, demonstrating Arty’s terror. I shrugged off goose bumps, thinking, I’m scared too. Because I know Arty. I know him better than either of you do.

“Let him be a preacher. Let him have all those creeps sucking around him. They’ll puff him up. But he’d better leave us alone, and Chick too. And you can tell him that, Oly. There, take all these beans to Mama!”

“Be nice, Elly,” I pleaded. “Just be nice.”

“I’ll be nice,” she muttered dangerously. “You’d both let him cut your throats before you’d complain!”

• • •

Without any of the family taking much notice, Arty became a church. It happened as gradually as the thickening of his neck or the changing of his voice. From time to time one of us would remember that things hadn’t always been that way. It wasn’t that Arty got a church, or created a religion, or even found one. In some peculiar way Arty had always been a church just as an egg is a chicken and an acorn is an oak.