Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

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He scolded, sympathized, made peace, moved people from one job to another, from one campsite to a more peaceful spot. He talked to the cooks in the big mess tent to make sure a vegetarian menu was available for those who wanted it. He sent runners from his platoon of disciples to give orders or deliver messages. He spent a good three hours rolling around among the chinless ninnies, the whiners, the leeches, the simps, and the good people in his congregation. He ended up back at his own trailer looking very tired and young. I shoved his chair up the ramp to the deck and opened his door for him

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“So you have a strike on your hands,” I said. He smiled going in and I followed him. He rolled straight to the desk and started pushing through papers. “I’ve got one rebel on my flippers,” he grinned, “but I always knew she’d turn one day. I’m not all that put out.”

“She’s got you over a barrel if she won’t cut anymore.”

Arty looked at me with a flat smile. “I’m not such a fool as that. I’ve had her training her own replacement for years.”

Iphy braided Elly’s hair so she wouldn’t drool on it. Iphy with hands like angel wings, combing and polishing the long gleaming strands while Elly lay against her. Elly’s head drooping forward on the too long, too thin neck, her face blinking emptily at the sofa cushions.

Iphy would wind the long braids into coiled black shells and pin them over Elly’s ears and then do her own. Then Iphy would turn the blank, soggy face toward her and sponge it carefully, brushing the eyebrows smooth and propping the lower jaw closed with one hand so that, for an instant, it looked like Elly. Until Iphy let go and the face fell down again.

Horst drove us to the meadow and parked the small van in the dust-white grass. Mama helped Iphy out and I handed around the plastic pails.

“You twins always have flying fingers,” Mama was chattering. “Flying fingers, but Oly and I will do our part as best we’re able.”

Horst leaned against the bumper with a stick in case we saw a snake, but he was soon asleep in the sun like one of his cats.

Mama stood against the dust-covered blackberry banks, reaching high into the rasping tangles of the thorns and humming. Iphy’s fingers were not flying. With the arm supporting Elly she held the bucket against their swollen belly and reached out with her other hand, dutifully nipping off the warm, dark berries and ignoring the ragged red lines scratched on her arms and their legs by the thorns. She was careful with Elly, holding her away from the bush, staggering awkwardly, catching their bare ankles in the vines, working slowly. I plodded along, picking and getting scraped.

The sun pounded down and the dust drifted up, and after a while Mama’s thin scat voice was far off. Iphy called to me: “I need to sit down.”

She was hanging on to a thick, drooping stalk of vine when I got to her. I took the bucket and tucked myself under Elly. The lolling blank face rocked against my head as Iphy slowly turned. We made our way out of the brambles.

“On the grass would be fine,” Iphy said. But I steered her around past Horst to the narrow shade beside the van. She sank down and pulled Elly’s head over to lie on her shoulder.

“I’ll just rest a little. Standing up in the sun …”

Horst was wide awake, blinking and tapping his stick in the dust, pretending he’d never been asleep. I went back to find Mama.

Later, at the sink in our van, Mama rinsed the blue stain and the odd spiders, caterpillars, and stems from the bucket.

“Not what we usually start with, but we can go again tomorrow. And this will set up nicely in about six, eight jars.”

The berries were beginning to simmer in the big pot on the back burner. Mama pushed her dark wooden spoon into the foaming berries and circled the wall of the pot slowly.

I leaned my hot arms on the table and said, “Iphy better not go tomorrow. She got tired today.” I was smelling the berries and Mama’s sweat, and watching the flex of the blue veins behind her knees.

“Does them good. The twins always loved picking berries, even more than eating them. Though Elly likes her jam.”

“Elly doesn’t like anything anymore.”

The knees stiffened and I looked up. The spoon was motionless. Mama stared at the pot.

“Mama, Elly isn’t there anymore. Iphy’s changed. Everything’s changed. This whole berry business, cooking big meals that nobody comes for, birthday cakes for Arty. It’s dumb, Mama. Stop pretending. There isn’t any family anymore, Mama.”

Then she cracked me with the big spoon. It smacked wet and hard across my ear, and the purple-black juice sprayed across the table. She stared at me, terrified, her mouth and eyes gaping with fear. I stared gaping at her. I broke and ran.

I went to the generator truck and climbed up to sit by Grandpa. That’s the only time Mama ever hit me and I knew I deserved it. I also knew that Mama was too far gone to understand why I deserved it. She’d swung that spoon in a tigerish reflex at blasphemy. But I believed that Arty had turned his back on us, that the twins were broken, that the Chick was lost, that Papa was weak and scared, that Mama was spinning fog, and that I was an adolescent crone sitting in the ruins, watching the beams crumble, and warming myself in the smoke from the funeral pyre. That was how I felt, and I wanted company. I hated Mama for refusing to see enough to be miserable with me. Maybe, too, enough of my child heart was still with me to think that if she would only open her eyes she could fix it all back up like a busted toy.

A redhead went tripping by, red heels stabbing the dust. She looked at me. Her mouth opened to say something, but then she looked away and minced on.

I decided I would go down to where the swallowers were parked and talk to the Human Pin-Cushion. I’d been watching him for weeks. I was nursing this fantasy that maybe he would like to run away with me and join up with some other show, some simp-twister, spook-house show that wintered in Florida and took life easy. I could talk them in for the Pin Kid and do his cooking and his costumes, and run the light-and-sound board for his act. A young Pin-Cushion, just striking out on his own, could do worse than have me for a partner. And, if I worked hard, he’d let me sleep with my arms and legs wrapped around him all night. The Pin Kid seemed to like me too. He laughed at my jokes and actually came looking for me once when I was rubbing Arty down.

You’d think dwarfs and midgets would have drifted through the Fabulon all my life. It was actually, though accidentally, very rare for me to see anyone like me. We’d had the usual monkey girls and alligator guys and an endless migrating herd of fat folks and giants.

Mama often said that fat folks went out of style because every tenth ass on the street now was wider than the one in the tent. Folks could see it free on any block. Giants were also out of work owing, according to Mama, to basketball and the drugs they fed to babies to make them tall enough to play the game.

“It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.” Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal.

It so happened that the Pin Kid who had joined up with our current pack of swallowers was a hunchback. He had regular arms and legs and a great torch of red hair. He was fragile as a glass swan, fine-skinned with freckles, brown eyes, and a clear, honest face. His name was Vinnie Sweeney. He was only twenty years old and he’d been working for years with other acts, trying to save enough money to get his own tent and trailer.

From the journal of Norval Sanderson: