Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

McGurk pulled his reddened thumb out of the bag and pressed the control switch. The chrome arm stopped moving.

My tall stool was cutting off blood to my legs and I squirmed and craned my neck. Arty was turned away from me, watching McGurk, who slumped down and sat on the bed. “I’ll show you the lubrication and drainage system, but …” He hiked at his trousers until both knees were bare, white and hairless. The shoes came up his shins and turned into grey socks. “But I guess you want my credentials,” McGurk said. He reached up his right pant leg. There was a snap and the shoe toppled over with the plastic shin and knee sticking out of it. A dim gleam came from the dark fold of the empty trouser leg. He slid his hand up the other trouser leg and both legs lay on the floor with steel shining out of the hollow tops of the knees. He pulled his pant legs up his thighs and showed the steel caps on the stumps. There were a groove, a few grip protrusions, and a number of electrical contact points protruding from each unit. He looked up, calmly waiting.

Arty pursed his wide lips and rolled them speculatively. “Shit,” he said. Then he sent a long arc of saliva at the nearest shoe. It hit the laces and trickled down across the holes. McGurk went on looking at him but there was a deep crease between his eyes.

“You figured it wrong. The whole thing,” said Arty. He rocked slightly, chuckling. “You’ve got yourself a little old disability there, so you took pleasure in feeling sorry for me. Well. You figured wrong.”

McGurk was twisting on the bed, reaching his powerful forearms down for the artificial legs. He straightened and jammed the steel ends onto his stumps with a clang. The gun was sweating in my hands.

“You figured …” Arty was watching carefully now; his eyes swung once to the mirror above his bureau that hid me and the gun on the other side, “… figured we had a common set of interests. Guess you have a hard time with the ladies. Well, I don’t. I’ve got women mooning around begging to take up my slack.”

McGurk was folding the chrome arm back over the turntable, feeding the control cable back into its hole, carefully closing the case, not paying any attention to Arty. Arty sucked his lower lip in between his teeth and popped it out again. He waved his right flipper vaguely. “You know you’re taking the wrong road on those stumps. You’re like a man with a beautiful voice taking a vow of silence. You’re working hard to pretend they aren’t there and you meet a girl in a bar and don’t tell her about those knees until you get to take your pants off. You ought to tan your thighs and walk on them. Wear silver sequin pads and dance on a lit stage where they can see you. All those soft girlies come knocking on your door borrowing sugar in the dead of night and sliming for you. You could have that. Not as much as I get but plenty … You’re just going along with what they want you to do. They want those things hidden away, disguised, forgotten, because they know how much power those stumps could have.”

McGurk was looking now, listening. I could see his eyes sliding on the console, the velvets, the soft, deep carpet. I put the gun on safety and stuck it back on its shelf. I flicked the switch as I went out so the lamp on the bureau in Arty’s room would go out and he would know I wasn’t covering him. I got a contract and took it to Arty. McGurk was smoking quietly and staring at the walls. Arty was saying, “… a sensible man doesn’t have to have the top of his head blown off to know the truth when he sees it.”

McGurk signed on as an electrician. He shook hands with me because he couldn’t with Arty. Then he went out to sell everything he owned, say goodbye to the two teenage sons who lived with his ex-wife, and furnish his station wagon for temporary living so he could follow the show.

When the blighted stump horse died, our Chick “took on something terrible,” as Mama said. I came out of the Chute that morning with my nose burnt from the smell of glass cleaner, and heard “woo-wooing” of a wet, breathy variety that seemed familiar. They were up on the generator hood by Grandpa’s urn. Chick was sprawled out flat with his face buried in his hands and Elly and Iphy patted him gently while they looked off in opposite directions at the sky.

I crawled up to help pat Chick. The twins said he’d found Frosty stiff and flat in his trailer. Talking to the fuzzy blond back of Chick’s head and the wet pink fist hiding his face, I said, “Shooty-pooty, Chick, it isn’t your fault. He was old and it was his time and you took such good care of him these past few months. He was probably happier than he’d ever been in his whole life.” But the Chick choked and Elly sniffed and said they’d already told him that but he loved the horse and had to cry. I took offense at her snotty ways and told her Chick loved everything and he was going to be a mess if he cried like that every time a geranium conked out in the redheads’ flowerpots or something. But Iphy was dreaming sorrowfully at the low grey sky and Elly was not to be baited. She just sighed, “Probably,” and went on patting Chick.

I slid down and went off to practice a funeral oration for Frosty. It wasn’t too bad, though it was never delivered. Doc P. dissected the horse for educational reasons and then had the roustabouts haul the remains to an incinerator.

Late. The camp dark. Two hours after closing. The family was sleeping and I sat in the kitchen sink looking out through the moon mist at the dark without my glasses. A scraping sound from outside. A step. It was behind me on the other side of the van. I slid to the floor, tiptoed to the door in bare feet, peeped silently through. My breath froze — a movement near Arty’s door. A tall figure moving there.

Assassin! I thought. In the instant it took me to get through the door I dreamed a long dream of Arty’s gratitude at my courageous self-sacrifice in saving him. I saw myself wrapped in white, propped on pillows. Arty enters, white-faced and shaken.… That was about as far as I’d got by the time I locked my arms around the thighs of the dark shape in Arty’s doorway and clamped my teeth into a bulge of buttock. The thigh flailed wildly and started to scream as I growled. Fingernails whacked and clawed at my head and scraped at my arms. Breathless shrieks pumped out of the murderer’s throat and vibrated through my teeth in adrenal heroics that lit my skull’s interior with an epileptic torch.

The light over the door flashed on and shouts closed over me. In relief at being rescued before I broke, though wondering if I would make such a sympathetic figure to Arty if I wasn’t in traction, I released my aching grip. Cloth pulled out of my teeth as big arms lifted and held me against a warm chest and a deep voice cracked, “Jeez, Miss Oly!”

A piccolo hysteria behind me in the doorway. Then Arty’s sympathetic voice, “Are you O.K.? Come in here and let me look.” My heart turned to steaming oatmeal as I wriggled around to see his dear worried face and the corpse of the terrorist I had foiled.

Arty wasn’t talking to me. He was in his chair just inside the door, leaning anxiously to examine a jagged rip in the black satin rump of a tall young norm woman whose sobbing face was hidden by a straight fall of blond hair.

“Killer!” I bellowed, struggling to break out of the blue-sleeved arms of the guard who held me. “She was breaking into your place, Arty!”

The big chest against my fists rumbled, “Jeez, Miss Oly!” and Arty’s chilly white face snapped an impatient look toward me. His wide lips stretched back over his angry teeth as he whipped out, “A guest. An invited guest simply ringing my doorbell!” Then, gesturing the tall, slim girl inside, he backed his chair away from the door.