23
The Generalissimo’s Big Gun
From the files of Norval Sanderson:
(Iphigenia, pregnant, hugging the lobotomized Elly on the sofa in the twins’ van—conversation with N.S.)
“Oly has a boyfriend? Oly and the Pin Kid? How could she have time for that? She’s always with Arty.
“I almost had a boyfriend, once. Elly would have let me. She thought it was O.K. She shut down when I talked to him. Whenever he came around, she’d cut her voltage way back and stay quiet. She wanted me to go ahead and love him.
“He was just a geek. He was clean between his shows. Laundry, hospital corners on the sheets when he made his bunk up. He was a poor boy, he said, so he knew how to take care of himself. I thought how good it would be … like you’d be proud to clean and cook for a man who knew how to clean and cook. It would feel right taking care of a man who could take care of himself.
“But he was a norm. At first I thought he was pretty even though he was a norm. But it grows on you. After a while it was his being such a norm that got to me, touched me.… I don’t know. Like colors or a spring tree against that kind of blue sky that pulls your heart out through your eyes. Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees. He was like that, the geek boy. He made normal seem beautiful to me. And Elly said it was O.K. She wanted me to. So I did. I saw him and was happy. Then I wanted to talk to him and she let me. Then I couldn’t be happy unless I was near him, unless he was talking to me.
“He laughed a lot and told silly jokes and was going away to college in the fall. He had such a wonderful time being the geek. And he had long, perfect teeth. The redheads called him a darling.
“He started paying attention to me. He would come and find us and talk to me. Not to Elly but to me. He’d bring his lunch in a bag and sit by us. He’d wait outside in the morning and walk us to practice. But he talked just to me. He told me things about himself. Sweet, sad things. And Elly damped herself way down.
“And a terrible thing happened. He seemed to forget about her. He forgot she was part of me. That was what we’d meant to happen. Elly was glad. She’d crow in bed at night. He touched me. He’d put his hand on my hair, gently. He took my hand. I saw it in his eyes, so I stopped it. Elly was mad. She bit me on the inside of my arm until we both cried. But she wanted to get me away from Arty. She didn’t care about the boy at all. She wanted me to love somebody else than Arty. You know Elly. She figured I was going to love somebody whether she liked it or not and she decided she could handle anybody but Arty. Arty is too much for her.
“She was mad when I stopped. I couldn’t help it. It was a thing that cracked and spilled in my head. Elly understood but she was mad. I know better now. I’ll never let it happen again.
“He started to love me, you see? He was so pure, like that leaf against the sky. I don’t mean he was naïve or innocent or a virgin or even a virtuous boy, though he was nice, but that he was purely, from tip to toe, from nose to tail, absolutely what he was. That was normal with a big N. That was what I loved. But when the look in his eye changed, I realized, if there’s one thing a healthy, beautiful, utterly normal boy does not do, it’s fall in love with half of a pair of Siamese twins.
“That’s how I learned. It’s O.K. for me to love a norm like that. But if he comes to loving me it’s because I’ve twisted him and changed him. If he loves me he’s corrupted. I can’t love him anymore. I won’t pretend it didn’t hurt.”
(Arty—conversation with N.S.)
“There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees.
“Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.”
(Arturo in response to critics)
“It’s interesting that when these individuals choose—and it is their choice always—to endure voluntary amputations for their own personal benefit, society professes itself shocked and disapproving. Yet this same society respects the concept that any individual should risk total annihilation in war, subject to the judgment of any superior officer at all and for purposes ranging from a promotion for the lieutenant to higher profits for the bullet company. Hell, they don’t just respect that idea, they flat expect it. And they’ll shoot your ass if you don’t go along with it.”
N.S.: If you could make it happen by snapping your fingers, wouldn’t you want your whole family to be physically and mentally normal?
Oly: That’s ridiculous! Each of us is unique. We are masterpieces. Why would I want us to change into assembly-line items? The only way you people can tell each other apart is by your clothes. (Miss Olympia begins to giggle and refuses to answer seriously to further questions.)
Zephir McGurk’s love life took place in his safari car with the khaki canvas shades pulled down all around. If surplus females arrived on Arty’s doorstep, or if one didn’t appeal to Arty (whose taste, when you come right down to it, was for standard pneumatic types with commercial grooming products), he would send her on to McGurk. Arty’s line wasn’t particularly imaginative. He would give her the old “If you would do me a great service, console my trusted lieutenant in his spartan dedication” routine.
It evidently worked often enough to keep McGurk healthy and even-tempered. McGurk was such a gent that nobody who went tap-tapping at his windshield in the dark after the midway was closed ever went screeching in fear or pain or shame through the camp before dawn. There were occasional exits like that from Arty’s van, but the guards would catch them and calm them and give them hush money.
McGurk’s little trysts were always discreet. He was never seen with female company and he was never late to work. We figured he escorted them to the gates and kissed their hands adieu before first light. Arty claimed that McGurk actually fed them to Horst’s cats, but that was Arty. McGurk was silent on the subject and would not be baited.
Once, when I was in trouble and pacing the camp in the dark, I did hear something. But I had maggot brains that night and may have imagined half of it and misunderstood the rest.
I’d gone to cool my face on Grandpa’s urn. I was lying on the hood of the generator truck with my face against the silver loving cup that held the old Binewski ashes and served as a hood ornament. Whoever drove the generator truck would always complain that the wind whistled through the urn’s handles like a siren at any speed past thirty-five. Al just said, “Tough,” and that was that.
On the hottest night Grandpa seemed to cool off before anything else. Leaning a cheek or my forehead against the urn felt like packing ice in my burning brain. So there I was, finished blubbering but still half loony, leaning my face on the urn, when I heard something. It came from McGurk’s safari car, parked just ahead of me. I could have spit on his bumper. It was a rough, strangled sound and I figured it must be McGurk’s climax song. But it kept going on. It scared me. I thought someone was dying. I remembered what Arty said about McGurk’s feeding his women to the cats, and I thought he was strangling somebody. Then I heard a word in his own voice. “Please,” he said. Then the ropy, gurgling sound started again. He was crying. For a minute there was another voice, softer and smooth—quick. I couldn’t tell what she was saying. Then McGurk again, desperate, almost shouting, “Don’t you see? There’ll be nothing left of you that I can get a grip on!” Then the soft woman’s voice drifted monotonously among McGurk’s ugly sobs. I got down and went away from there.
There were promotions scheduled for the next morning
. Four women were due to “complete their liberation.” All had abandoned their legs entirely and were left with arms only from the elbow up. They were ready to shed their arms at the shoulder. These liberations were supposed to take place between 8 and 11 A.M. Dr. Phyllis would spend the afternoon whittling on fingers and toes.
I figured McGurk’s lady had to be one of those who were doing arms. I thought about going to the line outside the infirmary early to try to figure out which one it might be. I decided against it. I didn’t want to know.
McGurk seemed the same as usual that day and every day afterward. That’s why I say I may have misunderstood or imagined the whole thing.
Up on the roof of the van, Arty flopped in exhaustion. “Hey, oil me, Oly. Will you?”
It was scary to have him ask. I crouched over him, rubbing my fingertips into the knotted tension of his neck and shoulders.
“You’re ugly, brother, and you’ve got rigor mortis from the nipples up.
His eyes closed and his face relaxed slightly.
“Silence, anus,” he responded ritually. He took a long, slow breath and held it before he spoke again. “I think Elly’s coming back some, don’t you?”
“She doesn’t flop as much. Maybe not as limp as she was?”
“Yeah. I think she’ll come back some. Not like before, though.”
“Maybe Iphy’s just learning to handle her better. Balance and support.”
He shook his head against the mat, eyes clenched shut.
“No. She’s coming back. Just takes time. She’ll be able to help take care of the baby.”
“Maybe. You know, Chick could help you sleep nights. You look about three hundred years old.”
“Chick doesn’t like me. I wouldn’t want to tempt him.”
“He’s still sore about Elly.”
“And other things. Another chore. He’ll do it, though. And Papa’s mad at me. He says we’ll kill the whole outfit by hanging it all on one novelty act. That’s what he’s calling my show lately. A novelty act. He says my ‘fans’ will pass away when some new fad hits the air. Mama is mad too but she pretends not to be.”
“You’re a creep, I guess.”
“Did you ever wish you were dead?”
“Not lately.”
“Guess it’s you and the Pin Kid, hunh?”
I stopped kneading his spine and looked at his shadowed profile. He looked like a sleeping hieroglyph against the blanket. I forced my thumbs to rotate so he wouldn’t notice.
Down the line I could see Mama outside the Chute. She was folding a dust cloth and talking to someone still inside the door of the Chute. It was Iphy, walking out huge and awkward. Elly’s head tucked into Iphy’s throat, the cloth billowing around the frail legs beneath them, the belly balanced in front of them.
“I can see Iphy. She looks like an old car.” Mama and Iphy tottered out of sight.
“The Pin Kid seems O.K. You could do worse. Do you reckon you’ll leave?” His eyes were open now, his neck twisting to let the eyes touch me. His eyes were grey, very pale. I pinched his round, hard buttock, slapped his back sharp and loud.
“Trash! Stuff it, Arty.”
He closed his eyes again. “I’m gonna cut down to three shows a week. Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, eight P.M. Flat.”
“Papa will flip.”
“That’ll give him his carnival back the rest of the time.”
“Mama will think you’ve fallen to the vilest depths of leisure.”
“Oly … stick by me. How about it?”
His eyes were open again, looking straight at a fold of blanket in front of him. The big chain-link fence was below us on one side of the van. It stretched a long way and the Arturan camp sprawled out from it in a refugee confusion.
“I’m gonna stick a broom,” I muttered grimly, “up your ass, brother, and peddle you as an all-day sucker.”
Massaging the twins on the sea-green carpet of their front room, crawling around on my knees to reach the peculiar juncture of the split spine, the small of their backs that was actually much wider, nearly two backs wide.
“Sorry I can’t quite lie on my stomach.”
“It’s O.K., Iphy. Does that hurt?”
“Hurts good.”
Elly stretched limply away from Iphy, folded oddly across Iphy’s side.
“No wonder your back’s bitching, getting pulled in different directions by Elly and the belly.”
Iphy’s pale face softened in pleasure. “Elly belly, weak as jelly.”
“Arty thinks Elly’s coming back some,” I said.
“Does it make him feel better?”
“Do you think she is?”
“Sometimes. For a second. No more. That’s good. Now work on Elly.”
I inched slowly up Elly’s arms and shoulders, probing, stretching, lifting, rotating but feeling how much of her muscle was gone into soupy flab like the dismal mush in her skull.
“Iphy?”
She blinked awake.
“Having that baby inside …” I held Elly’s neck in my fingers and felt the strong hammer of her blood. “Is it bad or good?”
Iphy blinked again. “Good. Inside me is good. The bad is outside.”
“Arty’s not happy.”
“I know.” Her tone was peculiar. Something familiar made me look up. She was absolutely twinkling. She pulled her lips flat, widening her grin grotesquely. She tipped her head back, let her eyes droop to slits. The colored beads of her eyeballs slid from side to side and her voice rolled out in Arty’s pompous, patronizing bell of power: “Happiness! Happiness, I tell you! Are you listening? Happiness? You Poor Paralyzed and Constipated Dung Chutes! Happiness is Not the POINT!”
I fell down laughing and Iphy laughed and we rolled giggling and kicking on the thick softness of the carpet, tangling hilariously with the flopping, laughless Elly until I hurt all over from laughing and kind Iphy stretched away from her dragging belly trying to breathe but was caught by the laughter again and again.
“Whyever,” she gasped, hee-heeing. “However,” she ha-ha’d, “could we love??” which set her off again and me with her, chortling, “love him!!” and screaming with the sunburst air of laughter and pounding our heels on the carpet and kicking our heels toward the ceiling until we both collapsed, exhausted, into feeble titters. Only Iphy had the strength at last to shout, “He’s such a SIMP!” which set us off again.
I went to tell the Pin Kid that he and I were washed up. Kaput. Finito. He was lounging on his bed of nails while he worked some new spots around his belly button with the needles. I hunkered beside him, watching him lift a flap of skin and shove the big pin through, then hold the flap in one hand, twiddling the knob at the needle head idly as he waited for the thin trickle of blood to dry up.
“Ya know, Vinnie,” I said, “I decided to stay with my brother.” It was hard for me. A swallower girl was hanging freshly laundered curtains on the backdrop nearby. Some of the kids were throwing things into the air and not letting them hit the ground, juggling practice, with a scratchy tape blaring Mozart or something.
I watched the gem-sharp face of the Pin Kid absorbed in his own white skin. I looked hard to see if I’d hurt him. Maybe my whole life was set in that instant. I was a sixteen-year-old freak brat. If he’d said anything—a word might have been enough, “Don’t,” or a crease of the brow, a shadow of pain in his eyes could have seduced me. The pain I was looking for in him would have been my excuse, my motive, my escape tunnel to the world beyond the Binewskis.
But he half smiled in puzzlement. His eyes like the pebbled gut of a fast creek, bright and open and empty but willing to be full.
“Well … sure,” he said. As though he’d never imagined anything else for me.
“I mean,” I said, frowning until my glasses slipped and my bare pink eyes popped into the light at him, “I mean always.” I stopped because he was rolling off the nails and he’d forgotten to pull the big needle from his belly skin and the thin red blood was spatter
ing his cut-off jeans. When he turned away from me, reaching for a shirt, I could see the rash of tiny pockmarks from the nail points reddening his lovely arched back, his curving graceful hump with the brightness of blood barely restrained at the surface of his white skin.
“Well, Oly … Well, sure … Hey, Arturo, he needs you.” This Vinnie, the Pin Kid, was a nice boy. Even half-choked with disgust he tried not to hurt me.
That’s when it clicked that the mechanics of my life were not going to run on the physics that ruled the twins or Mama in her day. If I bled it didn’t mean what Iphy’s blood meant. If I loved it wasn’t the same as Iphy’s love or the love of bouncy girls in the midway.
Arty had done his best to teach me this all along but I had seen him as a special case, not governed by the prosy gravity that held the rest of us. Vinnie, the Pin Kid, tried to keep me from knowing that he’d never thought of me the way I had thought of him. His kindness scalded me awake.
My new eyes saw the old things. He’d felt the needle in his belly as he’d pulled the shirt over his head. Now his big hands, cleverly knuckled, slid out the needle, dropped it into a tall jar of alcohol, dabbed antiseptic on the two small holes above his belly button. He pulled the shirt down and tucked it into his red-spattered jeans.
“You’re lucky, Oly,” looking gravely out from his deep eyeholes. “My ma cried a lot just looking at me. You’re right to stick by your family.”
He stacked his props in his trunk and slid the nail bed out of the way. His legs were longer than me. His narrow shoulders nipped up near his tiny ears with the swirl of hump arching behind him. He moved as though he were all legs, a smooth bobbing in his gait that poured in through my eyes and settled in my right lung like a pool of ice. I got up while his back was turned and crept away.
Geek Love Page 34
