Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Whatever his intentions, Sanderson was with us to stay. He switched from tweed to twill. He talked casual business, regularly, with C. B. Ford. It took him two years just to shed four toes — two on each foot — but he conscientiously deposited each toe, as he dropped it, in its own jar with its own worm and sold it for the usual price.

The twins were counting the miniature tomatoes in each other’s salads at dinner one night when Papa announced that they were getting their own van, “like Arty’s.” Lily was horrified. They were too young at eighteen to live alone, she protested, even in a T-shape set-up with the family van and Arty’s. The swallowers would sneak in and rape them and whatnot. The sword swallowers and the fire eaters were Lil’s bogeymen at the time. She got hot thinking of the twins at the mercy of the swallowers.

“When they were tiny morsels, still trying to crawl away from each other and getting tangled up, I said, ‘Blast the heart that takes them from me!’ ”

Iphy looked scared but Elly, cool and slow, said, “We’ll take it. I know this is Arty’s idea. He’s got something in mind. But we’ll take it anyway.”

The twins ordered carpets and walls of sea green, and sky-blue drapes and furniture, and a scintillating emerald bathroom. Their bedroom and its huge bed were dusty rose.

In honor of my fifteenth birthday, Mama moved my clothes and treasures into the twins’ old compartment in the family van. I sat there sometimes, but I went on sleeping beneath the kitchen sink because the open expanse of unsheltered bed seemed as wide and flat as Kansas.

The twins showed up in the family van for every meal. “See, Lily,” Papa said one night as the twins sat on the floor winding Mama’s embroidery thread onto cards, “you’d hardly know they moved.”

“Who moved?” asked Mama.

• • •

Elly had hold of my sleeve and was giving me her “or else” look.

“O.K., Oly, I want you to do me a favor.”

Iphy’s gentle hand lay on my other sleeve and her voice was desperate, “I don’t want you to do it, Oly! Please!”

“What?” I was flustered. Elly held out a white envelope.

“Take this over to the judges’ stand at the other end of the park.”

Iphy tried to reach the envelope but it was in Elly’s far hand, out of Iphy’s reach. “I won’t like you, Elly! I won’t speak to you!”

“This is for one of the judges. A man named Deemer,” Elly continued, calmly fending Iphy off while tucking the envelope into my hand and folding my fingers over it. “He’s very tall and he’s bald except for a brown rim around the back. He’s wearing a suit and a name tag. Give him this and then run. Don’t say anything to him. Don’t wait for an answer.”

Iphy flattened her hands over her face. Her fingernails were nearly white. She wasn’t crying. She was hiding. I stood clutching the envelope and staring at Iphy’s long, thin fingers covering her whole face and tangling with her dark hair.

I took Elly’s envelope on the long walk down the screaming midway and through the barbecue smoke of the picnic grounds beyond, to where rows of folding chairs creaked in the grass under the fat behinds watching the crowning of Miss Dalrymple Dairy or the Catfish Queen or whatever it was.

I saw the guy on the judges’ stand next to the stage. He was young to be so bald. He had the quiet look of a storybook schoolteacher. He stood behind three fat ladies and a short man with a big belly who was blatting into a microphone hooked to a pathetic sound system. I circled behind and scraped my arm climbing up through the warped plywood at the back of the stand. The speaker’s podium and the wide folks were in front of me. I don’t think the crowd could see me. I just touched his damp, pale hand, saw the long face turn down toward me and the eyes widening. Then I jammed the envelope into his hand and scuttled back down to the ground and away as fast as I could.

I saw that thin man once more, for a single minute in the moonlight in the twins’ doorway at three the next morning. I was spying on Arty’s door when the crack of light appeared from the entry to the twins’ van five feet away. I slipped out onto the platform and saw him almost clearly as he stepped out. He was wearing the same suit. He looked tired. The door closed behind him.

I stared without moving, thinking to myself that the envelope had been an invitation and that, wow, when I got my own van there would be norm guys coming to visit me.

I’ve sometimes wondered if the Binewski view of the world stunted my sympathy muscles. We were a close family. Our contact with norms outside the show was in dashes and flashes — overheard phrases, unconnected to lives. Outsiders weren’t very real to me. When I spoke to them it was always with a show motive, like a seal trainer using varying tones to coax or command. I never thought of carrying on a conversation with one of the brutes. Looking back I think the thin man was upset and confused. At the time I wondered if Elly had got her way but had been murdered as a result.

He lowered his head to walk away and saw me. “You brought the note.” He said it flatly, his voice light and even but unfocused as though he’d just waked up. “That was strange.” He jerked his head back at the closed door leading to the twins. “I don’t think I was right. I think I did something … wrong. One of them didn’t want it. She cried and scratched at me. The other one … did.” He shook his head slowly, jabbed his hands into his suit-coat pockets, and lurched down the steps and away, leaving me with the sounds of his shoes fading in the gravel.

I figured he’d killed the twins but my previous experience in nabbing assassins to protect Arty made me cautious. I went looking for the corpse before I gave the alarm. The door was unlocked.

I could hear the shower water rushing but I thought he might have slit their throats in there so I leaned on the bathroom door and hollered their names. The water turned off and the door popped open. Elly was wrapping a towel around her hair as she snapped, “What do you want?” Iphy was red-eyed, toweling their crotch.

“That guy just left, I thought …”

Iphy lifted her eyes to me like the ghost of a murdered child. “She just sold our cherry!” she cried. “And I was saving mine!”

“Aah, crap!” growled Elly. I trailed them into the pink bedroom and climbed up on the bed to look at the red streak on the dusty rose sheets while they were rifling a closet for their robe.

“Anyway!” Elly piped between the hanging clothes. “You keep your toad yap shut about it, Oly!”

“I will! Jeez!”

“And Squeak-brain here is going to button up, too. Right?”

“Elly, stop. Oly can know.”

“You didn’t have to tell her.”

They were digging in their own sparsely furnished refrigerator with me peeping around the door before they got squared away about my not being able to tell because Elly would put red-hot needles in my eyes if I did and Iphy couldn’t stop her, and Iphy couldn’t tell because she was just as guilty as Elly. Their soft, bitter bickering was almost soothing if you didn’t listen to the words. They came up with a jug of pink lemonade and grabbed three paper cups and we all went in and sat on the sea-green carpet in the living area.

“So, was it fun?” I asked. “Or did it hurt?”

“Sure,” shrugged Elly.

“Awful,” winced Iphy.

“I thought there’d be more blood.”

“I thought he’d stay for a while afterward. You scared him off with your blubbering.”

“You don’t sound as if it was really fun.”

“The redheads say it gets better.”