Aaaiiieee

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Martin handed the performer some cash. Then the two of them straightened up their clothing and turned back inside the Five-In-One building, leaving Walt to recover himself a bit. His job was done. This was how he made his living. But at least he was here shooting pictures and not in Europe shooting bullets at Nazis. And at least he didn’t have to work in a freak show, and give blow jobs in an alley. He hadn’t sunk to those kind of depths—right?

  * * *

  Walt was mildly curious as to what other attractions might be housed within the “Museum of Wonders and Terrors,” so after locking up his camera safely in his automobile’s trunk, he paid his admission at the door and entered into the building’s gloomy interior.

  During the summer, this show would take to the road. Some shows relocated to places like Gibsonton, Florida in the colder months, but this was one that stayed on, indoors and warm. In theory. Walt found the large single room inadequately heated, and felt sorry for several of the scantily-costumed exhibits within. It was these scanty outfits, however, that increased his interest, and centered his focus on one performer especially.

  There was only a trickle of customers at this time of day, most honest men at work or war and children at school, but those who were here seemed drawn primarily to the same creature Walt was…less intrigued by the sword swallower, Baby Susie the Eight-Hundred Pound Woman (her vast arms, bared by the dress she wore to show off her wealth of flesh, goose-pimpled by the cold), and Ed/Edna, looking both femininely haughty and mannishly tough. A dwarf loped quickly by Walt and bumped him, apologized. Walt realized he’d been staring across the room, through the milling people, in a kind of hypnotic daze. He shuffled closer to the woman who a banner proclaimed was “Betty Ann Johnson—The Woman With Two Bodies!”.

  Walt hung back behind two other men—short, wiry sailors in rumpled white—and peered over their shoulders, as if he couldn’t break out of being the stealthy voyeur.

  Betty Ann Johnson was a black woman, wearing what amounted to a two-piece bathing suit (not common or encouraged at the time), white against the rich chestnut brown of her bared skin, her body soft and rounded—not so that she was chubby, but she did have the ripeness of a fertility goddess, whose fecundity had perhaps gone astray. Her hair was drawn back from a handsome face with broad high cheekbones, full dark lips, and far-spaced, almond-shaped eyes. She was chatting amicably with members of the small crowd, answering questions, and when her gaze swept across Walt he took one involuntary step back.

  Between the sailors, who were no doubt half titillated and half repulsed (their revulsion and titillation no doubt amplified by the color of the woman’s skin), Walt saw a large, misshapen growth protruding from the woman’s mid-section on her left side. It was as though a smaller black woman had curled up in a fetal position and buried her head and upper body shyly inside the body of the first…or, as though it were a baby that had never entirely emerged from the womb.

  This second body was entirely unclothed, though the way its distorted form and withered limbs were situated, no embarrassing portions were revealed. It was a bit difficult for Walt to make sense of what he was seeing. There was a full, rounded body that looked as healthy as the greater part of Betty Ann, its flesh just as chestnut rich. But was it a bottom? A belly? Neither or both? In any case, from this grew one twisted arm and two legs, bent back upon themselves. Though the thighs started out full, they tapered quickly into wasted useless sticks with underdeveloped toes, just as the scrawny arm ended in a gnarled hand.

  One of the sailors said to the woman in a grating twangy drawl, “I seen someone like you in a carnival once, but he was a man from India who had a little twin that was a girl stickin’ out of his belly.”

  Betty Ann’s voice was soft and polite as she disagreed with the sailor. “Well, a doctor who came here and saw me one time said that can’t be. He told me that only two brothers or two sisters can be joined together like this.”

  “Well I’m telling you what I seen,” the sailor persisted, bristling. “It was dressed up in a little dress like a doll, with its head in his guts.”

  “That doesn’t make it a girl,” said Walt, and the two sailors turned and he felt the black woman’s eyes upon him again. He knew she wouldn’t have continued her debate with the sailor, but he had come to her defense without meaning to step out of his voyeur’s shadows. He went on, “I’m a twin, too—and only fraternal twins can be male and female. My twin was a girl. But only identical twins can be siamese twins.”

  “Well she ain’t no siamese twin, neither—shows what you know, slick. Siamese twins is like two whole bodies connected up. She ain’t got but half a sister, there, slick.” The sailor grinned threateningly, and his buddy mirrored the leer as if he were a twin, himself.

  Walt held open his jacket to show his holstered .38. “Why don’t you scientific experts go look at the fat lady, huh?” The double grins faded, and the sailors moved on, perhaps wondering if Walt’s abused fedora and the black gun clinging to his ribs like a parasite itself made him a gangster or a cop, instead of the hired investigator he actually was.

  The knot of people broke up, no doubt intimidated by the air of potential ugliness, leaving Walt briefly alone with Betty Ann Johnson.

  “Thanks,” the black woman said. “So, you’re a twin, too, huh?”

  “Yeah. But that’s a long story.”

  “I see.” She obviously didn’t, but she gave him a smile that was bright against her lovely skin.

  For a moment, Walt hesitated awkwardly, trying to keep his eyes off the form that bulged in the air between them, its gnarled half-arm seeming to reach for him. Then he stammered, “Ah, hey…it’s getting near lunch time, and maybe you wouldn’t mind, uh, going with me? My treat?”

  He saw the woman’s smile flicker at the corners, and he regretted what he’d done. She replied, “That’s awful nice of you…but you sure you wouldn’t mind being seen outside with a girl like me?”

  “I got no problem with Negro people.”

  Her smile resumed its previous proportions, and she gestured at the figure protruding from her abdomen, to the left of the inviting dark wink of her navel. “I meant this.”

  Now it was Walt who grinned, embarrassed. “I wouldn’t ask you if I was worried about it.”

  Betty Ann shrugged. “Well, I am hungry. I eat a lot, I’m afraid. Got to eat for Sally, too.”

  “Sally. Did your parents give her that name?”

  “No—I did. There’s a place right down the street we can go. They’re used to our kind in there, by now. So what’s your name, mister?”

  He told her. They shook hands. Walt thought that they both seemed to linger slightly too long at the contact of their warm flesh.

  * * *

  Seagulls knifed white against the ashen sky, lifted on the icy wind like the few flakes of snow that fell. Walt and Betty Ann walked past shut up arcades and tourist shops, returning from the greasy little diner where they had lunched and had coffee. They took their time on the way back. Betty Ann wore an open coat over a voluminous flower-print dress that made her look pregnant with a Shetland pony, Walt thought. Then he thought of the centaur, and other mythological beings. Gods, goddesses, wonders with the bodies of humans mixed with those of other creatures. Marvels…

  At the moment, they were not laughing and chatting comfortably as they had in the diner. Walt had begun telling Betty Ann about his parents, and the two of them were grim, did not look at each other.

  “They were both drunks,” Walt told her. “They’d both pass out, and my sister Louise and I had to make our own supper. When there was food enough in the house to cook. They both had other lovers, too. So one day my father came home—my sister and I were outside playing…we didn’t see it…not until afterwards—my father came home and found my mother with her latest boyfriend. And he was jealous. And he shot her with a shotgun. And then the boyfriend. And then himself.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Betty Ann told him softly, not looking up fro
m the pavement. She had her left arm cradled under her veiled twin, to help support its weight as she walked.

  “The state sent my sister and I to two different foster homes. We were eight years old. And we’ve never been together again.”

  Betty Ann came to a stop and looked at him, forcing him to do the same. The emotion in her face was earnest, and painful to him. “But you’re a private eye!” she protested. “You could find her now!”

  “It’s too late,” he muttered.

  “But…”

  “I did find her. I saw her…I watched her. She’s married now, has kids. She looks happy. I couldn’t talk to her. I left her alone. She’s happy now.” Walt returned his gaze to the sidewalk, and resumed walking. Betty Ann fell in beside him again.

  When they were outside the “museum” (a couple going inside pointed to Betty Ann’s bulging dress and whispered to each other), Walt swallowed a slug of saliva and asked, “Could I take you to a movie some time?”

  “I don’t like to go out in public too much, Walt,” she told him gently.

  “I understand…” He was unhappily ready to give up on it at that moment.

  “You want to come visit me tonight? After I’m done?” She gestured to the windows above the museum. “I live up here. We could talk some more. Have a drink.”

  Walt’s mood lifted. He smiled again, and once more they shook hands. Once more the warm press of their contrasting flesh.

  “What time?” he asked.

  * * *

  Music murmured dark and smoky from the phonograph in Betty Ann’s flat, one floor up from the Five-In-One show. She poured Walt a whiskey. He had removed his fedora and wrinkled jacket, and had left his gun at home with his camera.

  Walt sipped, sighed at the painful warmth, laid his drink aside. He spread his arms. “Care to dance?”

  Betty Ann, hiding her bathing suit and twin beneath her flowered tent of a dress again, spread her hands above the ungainly shape that was covered like a corpse under a sheet. “Sally sort of gets in the way.”

  “Wait,” Walt said, and moved around in back of Betty Ann. She started to turn to face him but he held her shoulders in place. Then, he embraced her softly from behind, resting his hands on her waist above where her hips flared. She put her hands over his, and they began to slide back and forth as one—or as three—to the murky melancholy music.

  “This is nice,” Betty Ann said.

  “Yes.” Walt drew her closer against his front. “This is nice,” he repeated, close to her ear, so finely and perfectly formed.

  Her full bottom pressed against his front, and soon he began to grow hard against it. His erection ached to lie in its inviting dark cleft, the thin but imprisoning layers of their clothing preventing it.

  Walt bent his head to her neck, and kissed her brown skin there. It was as warm as her hand had been. She reached up one of her hands, and laid it upon his cheek.

  Walt then turned the woman around to face him, impulsively, passionately. He embraced her from the front, but a bit to one side, the twin between them as if to keep them apart. Still, he got his arms around her. Locked his mouth to hers. They exchanged tongues, and still swayed to the music.

  After several minutes of this, Walt kneading her left breast through her clothing as they kissed, he stepped back from her and began to bunch up her dress. But Betty Ann took his hands gently. Her face looked pained.

  “I’ve seen it,” Walt reassured her. “Remember? I’m not afraid. I’m not disgusted.”

  “It’s all people ever see,” she whispered, her voice husky with emotion. “It’s like I’m the one who never got to live…”

  “I’ve seen her already,” Walt repeated. “Now I want to see the rest of you…”

  Slowly, Betty Ann’s hands slipped away from his. Slowly, he raised her dress up over her head. It caught a moment, snagged on one of Sally’s legs. Betty Ann quickly reached to untangle it.

  Again, the white bathing suit-like outfit, as startling against her skin as her teeth when she smiled. She wasn’t smiling now—still looked timid, afraid—but he could feel the heat uncoiling off her skin, coming in slow panting waves from her slightly open mouth.

  He removed her top. His lips and tongue brought her nipples, almost black against her dark skin, to a hardness so exciting he had all he could do not to bite down on them. His hands ran across her smooth shoulders, and then drifted down to find the edge of her outfit’s bottom portion. He began to skin it from her. His forearm nudged against the swell of Sally’s body. They both ignored it. They backed as one toward the sofa in her tiny living room.

  Atop Betty Ann on the sofa now, Walt hastily unbuttoned his shirt and unzipped his trousers with one hand. She helped him by pulling off his white shirt and pushing his trousers down his legs with her toes. She helped him further by taking his engorged cock in hand and nuzzling its head against her lower lips, which parted to admit it. He fed himself long and deep into her, inside her where it was moist already and so wonderfully, tropically hot in contrast to the cold awaiting them outside her little apartment.

  Sally brushed against his side as he moved rhythmically inside Betty Ann, his body at a slight angle atop her. They both disregarded the intrusive contact as best they could.

  * * *

  Walt came to see her nearly every day, as his work permitted. He did not pay her, as Ed/Edna’s lovers did; he offered to help Betty Ann, but learned she made a whole lot more money than he did, and had bought her parents a nice home and sent her brothers and a cousin to college.

  Every time he visited her, they had a drink or two. Most times they danced. And always, they ended up in her bed.

  After the first several awkward times, in which he had done all he could to minimize contact with Sally, Walt began to be less concerned about it. He would lie more directly across Betty Ann, Sally pressed up fully against his side as if growing out of him instead, and he would even rest his hand on the parasitic twin’s rounded ball of a body—as smooth as Betty Ann’s own curved flesh—while pumping in and out of his lover. On the fourth time they made love, things became so impassioned—both of them sheened in sweat, Betty Ann’s legs hooked over his calves, her soles pale and toes clenched—that Walt took hold of one of one of Sally’s legs at the knee where the limb began its tapering and held onto it as he cried out in climax.

  Ever the love-making, but marriage never came up. Marriage would be unthinkable to the world outside these close walls. Not so much because of the half-dead, half-buried sister depending from Betty Ann’s body, but because of her color. One time only she mentioned it. With her head resting on his bare arm, she mused quietly, “I can never be married like my parents. Like my brother Sam. I can’t live like they do. Sally won’t let me. We’re stuck together in every way, Sally and me.” And she had laughed sadly. Walt had, too. But he hadn’t contradicted her.

  One night when he stayed over, as he increasingly did, they listened to the ocean’s wintry ghosts wail through the chasms and ravines of the city beyond these windows. Sheets pooled sweaty around them, a bottle glowing ambery on the floor. Walt was kissing the soft swell of Betty Ann’s belly, pressing his lips into her navel where the mysterious link to another human being had been long ago severed. She ran her fingers absent-mindedly through his bristling short hair.

  His lips moved from her belly to the greater swell of Sally. “Hi, Sally,” he purred playfully, to attract Betty Ann’s distracted eyes. He smiled, and ran his tongue up the swollen hump. He began to stroke one thigh, which if his eyes were closed would have been indistinguishable in itself from Betty Ann’s. A bit more curiosity took hold of him, and he moved the heavy thigh aside. Nestled between the parasite’s legs, which were always cocked to one side in such a way that the public was protected from the view, was a small patch of knotty black hair.

  “Hmm, what do you have here?” he teased quietly, and traced the tip of his forefinger along the folded crease at the center of that kinky hair. He smiled again at B
etty Ann, who smiled back at him shyly, and he returned his attention to the slit he caressed. He wet the tip of his finger in his mouth, then rubbed the seam some more.

  After a minute or so of this, he was surprised to find his fingertip could slip between the secret lips, to a warm and moistening interior. He pressed his finger in deeper, worked it until he could insert two fingers. Shifting his position, growing hard, he inserted two fingers of his other hand inside Betty Ann herself.

  He couldn’t take this very long. With his fingers still inside Sally, his cock so hard that its solidity ached, he penetrated Betty Ann and began to rock his hips madly.

  And after a minute or so of this, Walt slipped out of Betty Ann, took his cock in hand, and rubbed its end against Sally’s dampened slit. With just a little resistance from tighter muscles, a more restricted channel, he was inside, snugly sheathed. Propping himself up over the twin so as not to lie directly atop its bony limbs, he resumed his passionate thrusting. The slick sloshing noise of his movements within the underdeveloped body excited him to further heights, and he cried out loudly as he burst fiery inside it, holding tightly onto one leg at the joint of its knee.

  Afterwards, they lay heavy and hot, again listening to the ocean wind. Walt was running his hand over Betty Ann’s belly, but she had stopped running her hand over his short bristling hair.

  * * *

  Walt was going down on Betty Ann. It was something men didn’t boast about to each other, for fear of coming across as sick, dirty, perverted. Years ago, an older female cousin had introduced Walt to the forbidden pleasure.

  After pressing his nose and lips against Betty Ann’s dark mound, Walt slipped sideways to Sally. Spread her legs that never moved on their own, the hand that never moved on its own jutting in the air like the insensate claw of a gargoyle grown from the body of a cathedral. Walt pressed his nose and his lips to the dark mound of the headless sister that dangled from the belly of his lover, hooking each of her thighs around his ears. He moaned softly against the slick flesh, his penis hard between his belly and the mattress, which was as damp as the floor of a jungle.