Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“No.” Chick lay down with his sweating face in the tiny pool of shade next to me. The metal hood was burning me through my clothes. A little wind came by and touched my ears.

“Is it nice wearing sunglasses all the time? Is everything green?” He was blinking, getting ready to yawn.

“Chick! Chicky! You could sleep in the twins’ van on that pretty sofa. Listen! If anybody tried to hurt them you could stop him. Chick!” His eyes popped open, a puzzled crease came into his forehead.

“Oly, I can’t. Arty doesn’t want me to. Arty already said that I wasn’t to do anything. It’s like when Mensa Mindy, the Horse with the High I.Q., was scared of the fire hoop and Papa said I mustn’t help her. Whatever this is, it’s like that for the twins.”

The patient, solid explanation drove me, sliding on my belly, down the fender to the ground. He didn’t call after me. I looked back once but he was curled up there on the hot metal with his face in the shade of Grandpa’s urn, sleeping.

• • •

Papa shook hands with the Bag Man. “You’re going to be joining the family!”

The Bag Man grunted and gurgled and milked Papa’s hand with enthusiasm.

“Fine! Fine!” Papa chanted, trying to pull his hand away and looking around for help. “My little girls in there? I’ll just go speak to them! There! Excuse me! Thank you! Splendid to have you aboard! Talk soon!” and Papa escaped into the stage truck.

Iphy and Elly, listening frozen at the keyboard, shared a drooping weight of resignation in their common gut. “We knew it was no use,” Iphy explained later.

“Ah, there you are, doves! My sweet birds! I just met your betrothed outside! Unusual fella!”

He was too loud, too fast. He flung his arms around them and squeezed them together, planting kisses on their pale matching foreheads. Iphy clutched his hands and spoke softly.

“Papa, please! Don’t let Arty do this! Help us!”

“There, dreamlet! Of course I’ll help! Nothing but the finest! We’ll look at the calendar! Shut the whole shebang down for a day! Have a fabulous wedding!”

“Papa, listen! No. No. We don’t want to marry him! We hate him! We’re afraid of him! Arty is trying to force us — to punish us! Papa, don’t let him do it!”

Now Papa, imprisoned in the four white arms, was wriggling to escape.

“Oh, my sweetlings! You’re mistaken! Your brother talked the whole thing over with me early this morning. He means the best for you. Given it a lot of thought! This Bag Man — Vern, is it? Don’t know him, myself. Seen him tagging after your brother, of course. Arty swears by him! Solid as Gibraltar! Loves you dearly! Do right by you! Natural fears, girlish hesitation! Even your mother! Thought of doing a bunk on our wedding day! Where would I be? I ask you!”

He was a large, determined man with many years of experience in slippery maneuvers. They couldn’t hold him. He was still talking fast in the bombastic shorthand of the huckster as he sidled toward the exit.

“Papa,” they chorused, “help us!”

“Adore! Adore you, my butterflies! Your mother will be so proud!” and he was gone.

The twins sat back down on the piano bench. Iphy, who told me this later, says they were both thinking about the gun.

“We didn’t really expect any help from Papa. But we’d stuck that gun into the storage space in the piano bench. You know how the top lifts up? We were sitting on that gun and the idea of it seemed to crawl up inside us like a snake between our legs.”

I hid, sulking in my cupboard under the sink with Mama’s sewing machine gabbling a few feet away. Mama was not alarmed at my hiding in there with the door shut. She was glad of the company and talked fitfully to her hands, needing no answers. She was mainly preoccupied with lunch and the way the meal symbolized the breakdown of the family.

“Nobody shows up. They wander in three hours late, sniffling and expecting … But I am not running a short-order house.… That Chick is ill and I know it and Al and all his pills and potions can claim to heaven that there’s nothing wrong but you cannot fool a mother about her own … drifting … caught up in alien currents leading mercy knows where.… Next thing we’ll get a telephone call and never even notice they left.”

I was going over the list of possibilities. I wondered about Horst or a few of the old wheelmen, or even the redheads. Papa’s cronies, Horst included, would never interfere with Binewski business. If I went to the redheads they might do something. I fantasized marching legions of angry women in high heels and bulging blouses. Then I imagined Papa standing in the dust of the midway with his arms crossed on his chest watching them come toward him and waiting for the exact moment to bellow, “You’re all shit-canned! Pick up your checks!”

What made me really sick was that I didn’t want the twins to be rescued. I was glad Arty was mad at them, delighted that he didn’t want to see them, cock-a-hoop delirious at the thought of them utterly out of the running for Arty’s attention. Big, festering chunks of my heart glowed with a dank cave light of celebration at their lovely talented lives trapped by the Bag Man.

The Twin Club girls who collected the Elly and Iphy posters, autographs, and photos, the duos of vapor-skulled gigglers who showed up in souvenir twin shirts and homemade twin skirts, what would the twin fans think of their glamorous idols being humped by the tube-faced Bag Man? Gross! Gawwwd!

But I hated myself for that gloating. The pleasure terrified me. What if I were really a monster? What if they were really miserable and I didn’t do my best to help? What kind of thing would that make me?

“One-thirty, dove!” called Mama. I crawled out of the cupboard and went off to the dressing room to grease Arty for the two o’clock show.

“He must have shut down all the alarms and had Arty give the high sign to the guards. Elly grabbed the gun when we heard the outside door. We sat there in bed waiting for the bedroom door to open. She was ready to use it, but he knocked.

“It was a shy knock … three gentle taps … and then the door opened slowly and he peered around it. He waved hello. I felt sorry for him. He seemed so shy. Elly waved the pistol and hollered that she’d shoot. But he just came in slowly, kind of bobbing and bowing apologetically with every step. He sat down at the foot of the bed with his veil puffing in and out and his one sad eye peeping at us. He took out his note pad. There was a message ready on the first sheet. He tore it off and handed it to me. It said, ‘I love you. Please let me be tender to you.’

“While I was reading it he was writing another. The new note said, ‘If you would rather kill me, it will be O.K.’ Elly looked at that note and drew a bead on his head. His hands came up and opened his shirt at the throat. He pulled it open and patted his bare chest. The veil came untucked and I could see the plastic bag that hung there and a section of hose hanging down. Elly sat with her elbows propped on our knee, both hands aiming the pistol. She waited a long time. The Bag Man was very still, waiting. Finally she just dropped the gun and looked at me. She said, ‘I wish he hadn’t knocked. I could have done it if he’d just opened the door without knocking.’ It was a lot worse for Elly than it was for me. She isn’t used to doing things that aren’t her idea.”

Arty heard the shot and was clambering into his chair when I roared in.

“Mama’s in there! With the twins! She just went in!”

“Quick! Push me! It’s faster!”

Rushing, terrified, I jammed a wheel on the door and nearly pitched Arty out on his head. The cry came, high and thin. The twins were screaming as we leaped through their living room and rushed the bedroom door.