Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

The tab-and-slot construction of the fiberboard wall was loose at the corner above us, drooping. “Here, climb up and pull on it.”

She hauled me up by my hands, balancing me as I climbed to her knee, her hip, her back. “I’m gonna stand up now,” she warned. I stepped onto her shoulders, propping myself against the wall, and tore at the loose flap.

“Mama! Crystal Lil!”

“Hey,” from the dark above us.

“Oly, get out of the way. We’ll lower Mama to you. She’s hurt. Her chest.” It was Elly up there in the dark. I gave the redhead a few extra bruises sliding down. She caught the long, white legs that slid out of the ceiling. Mama’s favorite yellow-flowered skirt was torn, and the blue veins on the backs of her thighs glittered oddly in the dimness. She moaned feebly as she eased downward. “Mama?” Her arms came last. The twins let go and she fell jerkily into the corner with a yelp.

“A light,” Mama said.

The twins lowered themselves through the hole and dropped beside me. They were sodden and they stank. Their hair and clothes were damp with the blue ooze from the chemical toilets.

“It’s all our fault,” Iphy whimpered. “My fault is what she means,” said Elly. They crouched over Mama and the redhead leaned over her, gently pushing Mama’s shock of white hair back from her forehead. Lil was wandering in her head.

We stretched her out flat under the sink and the redhead tore a scrap off the yellow-flowered skirt to lay over Mama’s nose and mouth so she could breathe in the floating dust.

The twins were filthy. “Nothing broken?” asked the redhead. “Then sit over there. That smell makes my sinuses ache. Crapper dumped on you, eh?”

“I acts,” Mama announced calmly from the floor. “Me is acted upon.” We all looked at her.

“Is that grammar?” asked Iphy. Mama laced her fingers together on her belly as though she were napping in her own bed.

“I don’t know. It may just be talk.” The redhead picked at a scrape on her elbow. “I’ll go look outside in a minute. It might be letting up.”

The wind was gusting now, taking breathing breaks between attacks. There was a little more light. The twins slumped on the floor against the first booth. Their faces were as blank as uncut pies. Their eyes stayed fixed on Mama.

“Happy birthday!” I grinned. Their mouths crimped painfully.

“Were you in here all morning? Mama was worried.”

The two matching faces nodded slightly. The redhead chuckled and whacked at the knees of her jeans, shedding puffs of dust. “It’s their first time bleeding. They thought they were dying.”

Elly glowered, eyebrows bunching downward. “We knew what it was.” Iphy’s eyes tilted up anxiously in the middle, “We didn’t know it was going to happen to us , though. We don’t feel good. And it’s scary. Elly didn’t want to come out but I did. I tried to get her to come out but she wouldn’t.”

Elly shook her head impatiently. “How long do these things last? All night? Or what?”

Lil’s voice came from under the rag, “I would have told you more but I wasn’t sure it would happen to you.”

My heart was beating a panic in my ears, “Mama, will it happen to me?”

Iphy licked at her muddy lips, “Elly wouldn’t come out even when Chick and Mama found us. She wouldn’t let me unlock the door. Mama told Chick to unlock the door and bring us out but he wouldn’t. Because we didn’t want to. But it wasn’t both of us. It was Elly. Our legs went to sleep sitting on that toilet.”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

“Ah, Elly, loosen up. Don’t be so crabby,” groaned the redhead. She patted my head. “Your mama sent me for you so you could crawl under the door of the booth.”

“I would have kicked you if you’d tried,” snarled Elly.

“For Christ’s sake, girl, why make so much of a fuss?” The redhead was exasperated. “It happens to every female.”

“Yeah? Well, it changes things for us. It throws in a lot of new stuff to think about.”

A truck horn started blaring nearby. Its flat voice, thinned by the wind, repeated itself monotonously. Mama opened her eyes. “Dear Al is so impatient.”

“He doesn’t know where you are.” The redhead stood up. The whites of her eyes were blatant in her dust-clotted face. She reached above me to the knob of the horizontal door and pushed it open. The clogged sand in the sill rained down. A rip of wind circled the room, rubbing grime into our faces.

“All right, ladies, party’s over. Everybody out.”

“I’m so glad I had that cake in the refrigerator,” said Crystal Lil. “We wouldn’t have had a bite if I’d left it on the counter.”

We were having the twins’ birthday party on Mama’s big bed. She lay propped mightily on pillows with Papa’s elegant bandage wrappings showing through the front of her kimono and her fresh-washed hair frothing like egg whites above her naked, unpainted face.

We vacuumed for an hour and still the red dust drifted in the air. But now, having showered in relays, wearing clean clothes, we could blink our sore eyes and pick the dry, gritty boogers from our noses in exhausted contentment. Papa, leaning against the pillows next to Mama, winked his scoured red eyes at us. “You girls look a bit better now. Less like a demon crew and more like hungover angels.”

Arty and Chick, of course, were clear-eyed and boogerless, having spent the storm in Arty’s air-conditioned van. We all ate cake and traded long, absurd, and competitively exaggerated accounts of How Terrifyingly Near to Death the Sandstorm Brought Me. Papa’s version had him wandering from trailer to van hollering questions against the wind and getting unsatisfactory answers and “wondering where, by the shriveled scrotum of Saint Elmo, you’d all been blown to.” He took refuge in the generator truck and got the bright notion of sounding the truck’s horn, “like a foghorn, so, if you were wandering in that fiend prairie, you could home in on it.”

“Save a big piece for Horst,” Iphy ordered, “and one for the redhead who helped us. What was her name?”

“Red.”

“ All the redheads are ‘Red,’ scummy! They have regular names, y’know!”

Arty had soothed and entertained his (newly discovered) little pal during the storm by letting Chick read aloud to him from Arty’s ancient greeting-card collection. When the wind shifted and Arty’s van considered tipping over, Chick prevented it.

Chick did not have a story. Chick did not eat his cake. His plate sat on his lap as he stared around at each of the fascinating taletellers in turn. He wasn’t enjoying himself but he didn’t say anything. Only after we’d kissed Mama and Papa goodnight and were drifting off toward our beds, Chick caught up with us in the narrow place beside the twins’ door, looking up at them sadly.

“What is it, sweets?” asked Iphy.

“I knew where you were. I should have brought you out, huh?” His eyes were growing in his face like the size of the question. Elly smoothed a hand across his hair.

“No, Chicky, you did just right.”

“If I had got you out like Mama wanted, you would all have been home like me and Arty. Mama wouldn’t have got a broken rib. You wouldn’t have got scared.”

I let go of his hand and punched him softly on the arm. “Don’t feel guilty about me, I had a great time!” and I sagged off to my warm cupboard, leaving the twins to console him or not.

I was standing on Arty’s dresser polishing the big mirrored one-way window to the security booth. He was lolling on his new velvet divan leafing through a torn magazine retrieved from the pile in the redheads’ trailer.

“If I were an old-money gent with a career in the family vault,” Arty proposed, “and heavy but discreet political influence, how would I dress?”