Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Just don’t let Dr. Phyllis know,” Papa muttered with every pour from his big bottle of Triple B.

“Roxanne Tuxbury always rides a kick-start cycle,” explained Horst, “and the thighs on that woman are as long and strong as her laugh, which you can pretty much pick up in Arkansas if the wind is right. She wears a little leather halter three hundred and sixty-five days of every year.”

Papa jammed a big spoonful of Triple B under Horst’s mustache and bent his famous Binewski eyebrows. “Too bad Dime Box isn’t on our agenda this year. Maybe you ought to take a little van and hop down there for a week. Catch up with us after you’ve vented your glands or blown your gasket with Roxanne.”

Horst swallowed hard to keep the Triple B down and glared at Al. “Leave the cats? If you had the sense to winter decently in Florida it’d give a man a chance to …”

The bells started suddenly. Chick and Arty, who’d disappeared early that morning, came rolling up fast and shouting, “Elly! Iphy! Come out here!”

The twins, bug-eyed and wincing, crawled out of the dinette where we’d been finishing arithmetic lessons and waiting for breakfast. Mama forgot her biscuits and I trailed along. Papa and Horst laughed as we all trooped down along the hard clay track toward Dr. P.’s. Arty had a tape player in his wheelchair playing the taped bells loud. The show folk poked their heads out and strolled along, redheads and roustabouts. The flat grey of the day crept up our backs as we came to the shabby covered trailer parked near Dr. P.’s gleaming white mobile clinic.

Arty’s chair stopped and Iphy’s hand was caught tight in Arty’s shoulder fin as Chick stepped forward. There was a rustle and bump from inside the trailer, and then the frost-coated, candy-orange horse stuck his head out the door and came prancing down the ramp to the ground with his mane braided in blue ribbons and his eyes rolling nervously as he arched his thin neck and crow-hopped in the dust. We all inhaled as we saw the long form of the horse, the Dachshorse, the chopped and channeled Basset Horse perched on starry stockings and realized that all four of the mush-boned feet were gone. The horse had been cut off just below the knees and was dancing his sprightly senile horse dance on stocking-covered, rubber-padded half-leg stumps.

“Ain’t that something?!” Papa shouted. The redheads “wowed” softly and clapped, and Horst whistled a knife blast through his teeth that flattened the old horse’s ears. Arty grinned and bowed in his chair, and Chick watched the old horse steadily. Dr. P. did not appear at all.

We all went close to look and pat the sweating, scared horse, and to examine the sock-covered stumps and admire how his tail was tied up in blue ribbon so it wouldn’t drag in the dust. Chick stayed close, holding the halter rope. The twins stroked the quivering coat of the stunned old beast and glanced at each other as Arty told them that, though it was late, this was his birthday present to them.

“Thank you, Arty,” they chorused. Papa was praising Dr. P. and Mama set off running for the home van with a cry of “Biscuits!” and the group shifted and scattered.

Chick let the halter rope slide through his hands and the horse reached for a surviving clump of grey-green near the trailer wheel and bumped his jaw on the ground because he wasn’t used to being so low down. Or that’s what I thought. Arty leaned back in his chair and looked worriedly at Iphy. “Are you glad?”

Elly watched the horse stepping gingerly on his shortened limbs, his huge body balanced precariously. Iphy took a breath and patted Arty’s shoulder. “But is he okay, Arty? Doesn’t he hurt?”

Chick interrupted quickly, “No, he doesn’t hurt at all.” And I, leaning on Arty’s chair arm, wondered if Chick was doing it all, holding the horse up and making him dance. Elly’s face turned toward us and she was old. She had sunk into some dark place behind her eyes, and whatever she was looking at wasn’t me or Arty.

“So this is what it’s going to be like,” she said. Her voice was as dry as the sand that stretched to the sad edge of the sky.

The twins stayed as far away from Frosty the horse as they could, despite Arty’s nagging them to “visit their pet.” Chick took care of the horse. He would probably have croaked when he first woke up and noticed that his feet were gone if it hadn’t been for Chick’s literal support. Whether Chick had actually kept the brute’s heart pumping against his will I don’t know. Every morning Chick spent a few minutes jollying the horse into facing another day.

I can’t be sure how much information or help Chick got from Dr. P. What is sure is that the tyke spent time with the doctor every day and he wasn’t always taking out her elaborate garbage. All he would say when I grilled him was, “She’s showing me how to stop things from hurting.”

Chick also spent time with Arty. Suddenly Arty’s nasty attitude had switched to fond big-brotherhood. He let Chick do a lot of work for him — the brand of charity Arty was most generous in dispensing. Arty also debriefed the kid every time he came away from Dr. Phyllis’s van. Chick was Arty’s mole in the doc’s previously impregnable camp. This was clever, considering that none of the rest of us had even got through her door, but I figured it for dangerous.

“What if she decided to dissect him to see how he works?” I asked. “What if she decides to make a big reputation by writing papers about him for scientific journals?”

“Naah. She won’t,” Arty assured me. “She wants to keep him to herself. She’s teaching him to be a painkiller. She says that old horse would have kicked off right away if she’d dosed it with drugs to knock it out. She told Chick about the pain dingus in the horse’s brain, drew pictures, and had him fool around inside until he figured out how it worked. She says Chick put the horse to sleep, kept it unconscious, and sat on the pain dingus so the horse didn’t have any shock reaction at all. She thinks Chick will help her be a great surgeon. She’s not gonna advertise him. She knows she’d lose him if she did.” Arty paused and thought for a second. He gave me an odd, worried roll of his eyes. “She might decide to take over the planet or something, but I’m trying to keep a tight rein on that kind of stuff. I think it’ll work.”

Arty was busy. It’s amazing to me even now how much privacy he had in his own van, how much time he spent seeming to lounge around, and how much he got done by giving orders. He was working. His show was changing. He hired his own advance man — a specialist named Peabody who popped in once a month for an hour and then drove out again in a perpetually gleaming sedan. Peabody wore bank-grey suits and an air of smug humility that clashed with the style of the racetrack types who did the job for Al. Every town we hit held a larger crowd waiting docilely for Arty. They weren’t always poor. They weren’t always old.

News cameras were common enough on the midway. We were often booked as a feature of some local crawdad festival or Miss Artificial Insemination pageant or whatever, that drew coverage for us. But the reporters also started doing more interviews with Arty in his tank.

Whatever he was telling them was what they wanted to hear. We were all running flat out to keep up with the crowds. Papa trucked in a portable chain-link fence to close off Arty’s stage exit from the people who wanted to touch him and talk to him after his shows.

Arty got a golf cart to toot back and forth in. Papa’s guard crew increased to fifty large men dressed in sky-blue uniforms with spangled Binewski badges and arm patches. They carried discreet, telescoping electro-shock sticks and stun-gas spray canisters.