Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

When they passed the “WELCOME TO SEAL BAY” sign on the coast road Teddy’s voice came drifting up over the back seat. “Dad …” softly. And then, “Dad.” Vern nodded at him in the rearview mirror. He could see the boy’s pale, grimy face in the early-morning light. They were both dirty. Brenda’s hair was tangled, hadn’t been combed in days. The T-shirts and jeans he had bought them in Anaheim were stained and wrinkled. A tang of puppy smell filled the air around them.

Vern had seen several posters now that he knew what he was looking at.

“Everything’s going to be all right, son,” Vern nodded cheerfully at the road. “I’m going to fix everything.”

“Dad … Are you taking us home to Mama?” Teddy’s voice was as shaky as a man with a snake on his chest. Brenda’s eyes were huge in the rearview mirror and she didn’t say anything.

Vern scowled at the road, “No. She’s not good for you.” And then they were on their own street and every house and bush was familiar to Vern except that the Bjorns had painted their house blue and put a greenhouse on their side porch. Vern was talking very fast.

“You’re going to stay in the car and I’m going in to fix your mother and then we’re going to see the Grand Canyon like I said and you’re never coming back here again and you’ll stay with me always. Now you stay right in the car.” He pulled into the driveway and Emily’s car was in the garage and the curtains weren’t opened yet and she had let the grass go and the milk and the paper were on the step and he didn’t even hear Teddy’s voice saying, “Dad, what are you going to do? Dad? Dad? Dad?” or Brenda beginning a strange little song of “No Dad, please Dad, no Dad, please Dad,” because he was slinking out of the car, leaving the door open so Emily wouldn’t hear it close and he crept back to the trunk and opened it and was taking the shotgun out of its box and breaking it and shoving in shells from the box of ammo and he didn’t even notice the two small bodies beside him, tugging at him, yelping, “No, Dad, don’t hurt her — no, Dad!” and “Please please no no please please.” He swung his arms once to get clear and then pushed through the door that led from the garage to the kitchen and he saw the plastic cabbage that Emily had stuck in a frame on the kitchen wall as a joke years ago and he was reaching for the knob on the bedroom door and when the door opened Emily was there. She was pulling a pair of pants up her thick legs and her blouse wasn’t buttoned yet and she looked up at him with her hair flying around her head and he saw her fear in her heavy face and he saw the fear spot just where her neck joined her body — the deep dent where the life eddied close to the surface and he brought the shotgun up and it reached all the way to her, which made him realize she had been right all those years when she complained that the room was too small, and the tips of the barrels almost rested in the hollow of her throat and he squeezed and one economical barrel went off and a lot of Emily went out through her back onto the unmade bed and all the way across to break the big mirror over the dresser and spray the pale lavender wall with dark splotches.

Vern offered Arty a tattered envelope crammed with news clippings to fill in the gaps. Teddy and Brenda had run screaming to the neighbors, a retired couple who had known the children since they were born. Mrs. Feddig called the police while Mr. Feddig held the hysterical kids in his arms. When Mrs. Feddig got off the phone, she took the kids and her husband slid into his gardening boots and was just opening the door to look out when they all heard another blast, louder this time, from the yard next door. Mrs. Feddig had a good grip on Brenda but Teddy got away and was right behind the old man when he poked his head through the shrubs and looked into the Bogners’ front yard.

Vern Bogner was wandering around the middle of the overgrown lawn. He was staggering — gently waving his arms. When he wheeled around Mr. Feddig saw no face at all, just a black and red fountain of jumping, bubbling meat with shreds of what might be bone, and the whole front of the man’s tan work clothes was covered with it. Teddy screamed until the police came.

Vern was always a lousy shot. His aim had been a disappointment to his dad in the woods and fields when he was a kid. He’d been just that hair off true when he had the Binewski bambini lined up in his sights. He managed to blow his wife out through her own back by dint of a 12-gauge within two inches of her breastbone, but when the final big shot came due he stuck the second barrel of that same 12-gauge under his chin and managed to blast off 75 percent of his face, including his mouth, nose, larynx, one ear, and one eye, and still miss — MISS, mind you — the vital areas that could have finished him.

Certainly he would have bled to death soon if left to his own devices, but the Seal Bay paramedics had been having a slack season. They were full of enthusiasm and delighted at the chance to use all their shiny equipment. Vern lived.

Vern never did have much sense of humor, and after he’d transformed himself, by this clumsy method, into what was known ever after as the “Bag Man,” he was downright maudlin. He spent a year in the hospital and had a lot of surgery. But there are limits to what even an imaginative plastic surgeon can do.

The “Bag” moniker originated in the plastic pouches that hung from the ends of various tubes running into and out of what was left of his head. Since he had no jaw left, neither upper nor lower, eating, when he finally got off IVs, was a delicate liquid process accomplished with various protein solutions and a squeeze bulb attached to the appropriate tube. Breathing was also tricky, and he dripped and gurgled into one of those plastic bags all the time.

Later, when he was required to keep company with people other than medical professionals, he wore a kind of heavy grey veil draped from his forehead with only his right eye peeking out. The bottom of the veil was always tucked into his collar and the whole thing was bulgy and lumpy from the tubes and bags inside. He had sight in that right eye and he could hear with his right ear. He couldn’t talk or taste or smell. He had a hard time if he caught a cold, and he needed more surgery and constant medical supervision.

The murder trial was brief. He lay on a rolling cot in the courtroom and pled guilty by writing the word on a pad of lined yellow paper. He was sentenced to life.

He spent a while in a screened-off corner of a ward in the State Prison Infirmary and made weekly trips by ambulance to a hospital. Then he got evicted from jail. There were budget cuts and congressmen complaining about how expensive it was to keep the Bag Man. After a lot of heeing and hawing they threw him out.

The Bag Man went back to his mother’s dairy farm. He hadn’t got over the idea of the children. Teddy and Brenda were living with Emily’s parents and he was not allowed to see them. He wrote them long letters full of advice and apple-pie wisdom and complicated descriptions of his garden and what to do for slugs and how marigolds related to bush beans and how that was a lesson in being a man.

Emily’s mother picked those letters out of the regular mail with her kitchen tongs and slid them into a big manila envelope. When the envelope was full she sent it to the kids’ welfare office and started on another one.

The Bag Man sat next to his mother on the sofa every night and watched the news.

It was 2 A.M. The last stragglers had been herded out of the gates an hour before and the show was bedding down. The midway was dark but all around us there were lights in the trailers and vans. Horst was hosting a card game. The candy girls’ barracks was full of redheads coming out of the showers with their hair in towels, ready to put their feet up and smoke a little weed and bitch about the townies and about their men, old, new, used, broken. Al and Lil were winding up the night’s count and having a drink together with their legs tangled under the dinette table in their trailer. The twins would be brushing each other’s hair and chattering on their bed.