Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

The frail, colorless girl on the screen is far away and small on a park bench. She sits, twisting her shirttail edgily and looking nervously around. I can’t make her face out clearly.

“What do you think?”

I squint through my glasses, trying to see the wispy features. “Isn’t she like an ‘after’ already?”

Miss Lick slaps her knees. “True enough!”

“I mean,” I try to see the outline of the girl’s breasts under her shoddy shirt, “she’s got nothing to sell you.”

“Oly! What do you think I am?” Miss Lick is hurt. “She could use some schooling and a decent job. Those skinny mice have got nothing. All they can do is latch onto some man or die.”

“I didn’t mean …”

“Sure. Forget it. Here’s the bang-tail filly again. I’ll think about that con sharper. Maybe something can be done. The bang-tail has me flummoxed, though.”

I clench my teeth and telescope my head downward between my shoulders. The “bang-tail” is Miranda. I’ve already spent hours watching replays of Miranda lounging on the steps of the art school, eating ice cream as she walks down the street, waving her tail on a velvet-draped stage during one of the Glass House private showings. Here she is again, flirting with her Binewski eyes, stretching her wide Arturan mouth to loll a tongue suggestively around the ice-cream cone, alert to the effect she’s having on the guy in the coveralls waiting beside her for the traffic light to change. It screws me up totally to see Miss Lick’s films of Miranda.

“What’s she about? Hopeless, you think?” Miss Lick is sensitive to my moods. “Say it, Oly, is she useless?”

“No!” I snap and then wave my hand weakly, trying to soften it.

“I haven’t heard a peep out of her in weeks. There’s one month left to her school year. She’s supposed to go straight in to surgery the week after the semester ends. But you’d think she’d call. I have a bet with myself that she’ll hit me up to double my cash offer. The hell of it is, I don’t know if it’s worth it. Art types. But I made the offer and I’ll stick by my word. She’ll do the tail and then we’ll see. Thing is, she’s made the tail erotic rather than a disfigurement. Maybe I’ll stop with that. I’m soft but I’m not nuts. No use wasting money and time and energy on a stupid cow who can’t benefit …”

“She’s not stupid.” It slips out before I could stop it.

“Yeah, she is, but I can never resist …”

“Not stupid!” Miss Lick looks at me with her mouth poised for a word, her clever eyes calm on me, waiting. I feel everything slipping away from me, all the care and planning, and volunteer misery. “I don’t know! Don’t mind me. I feel sorry for her.”

Miss Lick always melts at “feeling sorry.” “Hey, don’t I know? Don’t I just know precisely?”

“I mean,” I dig my fingertips into my knees for control, “she’s already in school. Where’s the percentage?”

“The men like that tail. I could subtract that distraction for her as a start. That’s what I had in mind.”

I take a taxi back to my alien apartment, crawl under the bed with two blankets, and huddle there on the orange carpet.

• • •

“So the nutso wants to sell me a nine-millimeter full-auto with a clip as long as an elephant’s dong and he won’t let up. He’s revving his tonsils and I’m standing there staring at him, thinking what he’d look like with that clip rammed up his …”

Miss Lick is lolling on the fir-needle sponge beneath the trees. She stretches out on her belly, arms stuck out in front of her, hands clasped warmly around what looks like a small gun, just the tip of the barrel showing beyond her puffy knuckles. The thing blaps like a knife in the eye when she squeezes. A dark blotch appears on the sheet of typing paper tacked to the tree fifty feet away. She milks off four shots and then pushes up to her knees and breaks the pistol open, its barrel lifting at the root like a shotgun as she nips the casings out with a sturdy fingernail.

“Hot!” she winces. “Want to look?”

By the time I reach the shredded target paper, she’s reloaded and caught up with me, the ground snapping and hissing under her weight. She flicks the paper scraps away and fingers the yellow splinters that look as though somebody small and very rough had busted out of the old fir. “Nice tight pattern.” She looks at me for praise.

I nod, though it’s too high up for me to see inside the teacup-sized crater. I don’t tell her for fear she’ll lift me up to look.

“So I walked out,” she continues the tale. “If the silly sucker had just sold me what I wanted he could have made his money and saved his breath.”

She sticks the gun into the holster under her left arm. I hear a small snap as she buckles the gun nest closed.

“Ready for work?” she claps and grins and reaches for the heavy machete leaning at the foot of the tree.

She gives me thick gloves and I follow her all afternoon as she chops at the saplings and brush and blackberry vines that clog the back acres of “the homestead” as she calls it.

The big brick house with its turrets and diamond-paned windows sits close to the road, surrounded by civilized green and leased to the regional director of a major computer manufacturer. “He always invites me to his sociable dos on the terrace,” says Miss Lick, “and his wife tries to maroon me in the library with one of the firm’s middle-aged bachelors or get me drunk and show me pictures of starving babies to make me blubber before she tells me how much the firm contributes to famine relief. She’s inventive, I have to admit. And he’s subtle.”

The wooded acreage isn’t included in the lease. “I get my firewood here,” she explains. She just likes it out here. She wears boots and a wide tweed bag of a skirt with her hooded sweatshirt to wallop around in the woods. She calls it “tending the park” or “minding the homestead.”

She cuts brush and I drag it out and throw it on a heap that rises and spreads in the small clearing.

She’s rambling on about guns. “I used to carry my old man’s.45 but the bastard was built for a hip holster. Barrel was too long to be discreet in a lady’s suit. The poor broad that makes my clothes got old suddenly every time I walked through her door. So I got this little bitch of a COP. Stands for Compact Off-duty Police. Fires a.357 Magnum round. Has a rotary hammer like the old Sharps and Brownies. Guy, when I bought it, tried to sell me a little automatic. Told me a lady needed more than four shots. I says to him, Well, if I shoot some sonofabitch I’m not gonna miss, ya know. And he shuts up like a bank on Sunday. I think it’s a cute gun. I like those four big barrels looking down on anybody who’d give me a hard time. Little gun, big bite. Always liked a.45 though. Cut my teeth on them because my dad always had them. He taught me to shoot.”

She talks and swings the heavy blade, tearing the cuttings away with her gloved left hand and pushing them behind her to where I plod.

Thomas R. Lick seems to have been the only man in her life. Her tongue is modeled on his. Without ever having known him or heard him speak, I know she mimics him. She moves like him. She looks like him. Her politics and prejudices and pride are almost certainly his. And I look like Arty.

I am thinking about Arty and throwing an armload of spider-and-scratch onto the heap when she hollers, “Hey! Shit-for-brains!” in her jollying-the-help tone. “Boss is gone! Break time!” She comes red-faced from the dark of the trees. I sit down, suddenly nauseated.

“Hey! Don’t faint.” She is patting me clumsily, smoothing my hump, pressing my head down so my wig slides to my glasses. I start giggling helplessly and bat at her to get free. “I’m all right.”