Geek Love Part 4

"She was only seven months old," Lil would murmur. "We never understood why she died."

The sign in the jar room was bolted to the wall and had its own spotlight. It was carefully calligraphed in brown letters on a cream background. "HUMAN," it said. "BORN OF NORMAL PARENTS."

"You must always remember that these are your brothers and sisters," Lil would lecture. "You must always take proper care of them and keep the roughnecks from jouncing the jars around on the road."

The twins and I were expected to share responsibility for the jars if anything happened to Lil. This burden wasn't even mentioned to Chick or Arty.

Yet it was Arty who discovered that the kids in the jars floated close to the top when it rained and sank down to the bottom when the sky was clean Al never went into the Chute himself, but he would ask Lil for the weather report every morning when she came back from her visit

5

a.s.sa.s.sin- Limp-Wristed and Shy

Lillian Hinchcliff Binewski, eight months and two weeks pregnant with the most extravagant experiment in a flamboyant series. Crystal Lil bored with the bigness of her belly and the smallness of Coos Bay, Oregon, and fed up with the kaput generator that kept the show closed until a new coil could be installed that night, sat (Our Lil) in the foldaway dinette of the thirty-eight-foot Binewski Road King living van and decided to take a small van and drive over to a shopping center to pick up some prest.i.tched silver-sequined stretch material to make matching costumes for the kids. And one for herself after her belly deflated, with a bit of white tulle for a tail.

"Arty honey," she called, and stubbed her cigarette into the last grime of her breakfast wheat germ where it coated the blue bowl. Arturo, the Aqua Boy, was in the shower and toilet room and it took a minute for him to poke the door open. "Arty honey. We're going in to that big shopping center. Oly, you help him, baby. We'll all go."

The pink-eyed Olympia, six years old and bouncy, put down a copy of National Geographic and climbed up on the side bunk to take Arty's Dunlop belly-tread off its hook. Arturo was murmuring slyly as Lil tore a long pink fingernail while buckling her sandal. "I can't hear you, Arty. Be sure to pee before we leave."

"I said," Arty slithered up to Lil's foot and lay looking at her long, elegant toes, "do you think it's a good idea for us all to go?"

Lil stepped over him and swung open the outside door. "Elly-Iphy," she shrieked. From the big truck stage next door came the ripple of "Moonlight Sonata" for four hands and an answering shout from Iphigenia. "Come here, doves!" and the sonata cut off as Lil grabbed the ignition keys from the Buddha ashtray on the bookshelf.

Arty said, "I don't want the tread. I'll use the chair. It's easier in public."

On that sunstruck, restless day, Vern Bogner filled the pickups fuel tank at the first station down from the camp. He had stopped there on his way up to buy kerosene for the lantern. The old man at the pump watched the meter flip over and hollered at Vern, "You're leaving early! Get your limit already?" Vern stared grimly through the winds.h.i.+eld. The bed of the pickup was obviously empty. Snotty old c.o.c.ksucker. Sometimes you just wanted to go up in the woods and sit by a fire and slip around a few beers in peace.

Vern Bogner had been produce manager at the Seal Bay Supermarket for five years, and a.s.sistant for three years before that. As Vern explained in detail years later, it was a time when his whole life had begun to slide. Despite his experience, oranges had always been hard to stack. He had built mounds and pyramids of Floridas and tangerines and big and little inny and outy navels by the million but he had never been plagued by so many rolls and drops and avalanches as in the past few months.

His wife, Emily, didn't like him much lately. And when he came home from work and said "Hi" to his own kids, they just snorted and went on staring at the TV. Vern was not at all sure what was happening to him, but a decade later he could still describe the moment-to-moment sensations of that morning.

The day was muggy hot and the smell of gas mixed with the beer in his belly and lifted in a bitter sc.r.a.pe to the back of his throat. Emily sneered at him too. "Oh, Vern's got lots of trophies-stuffed green peppers, lettuce heads." And laughter. Even this sc.u.mmy old station jock was noticing, rubbing it in. Vern turned his head just enough to catch a glint on the barrel of the 30.06 where it hung on the window rack. He'd been out with his fifty-dollar license four times this year and hadn't fired a shot.

When he saw the tall sign for the new shopping center, Vern flicked the turn signal. A brand-new supermarket took up one side of the lot. The dime store and hairdresser and the rest were on the other side of the five acres. He liked visiting other supermarkets. He'd take a quick tour of the produce section on his way to the beer. A couple of travelers would get him home.

He had parked and was reaching for the keys when he happened to see a van door open all the way across the lot. A long and distinctly female leg stretched out. It ended in a s.h.i.+ny red sandal with a high heel. Vern paused and waited for the other leg. The legs belonged to an enormous belly, thin arms, and a pile of whipped-cream-colored hair.

Then the things crawled out of the van and began milling around the tall pregnant woman. Vern stared as the wheelchair was unfolded and the small lumpy bald thing helped the limbless worm thing up into it. Then he reached back for the 30.06 and smoothly, still staring, pumped a round into the chamber.

Arty's chair had an extended control arm that he could reach, but I liked pus.h.i.+ng him and he liked having me do it. He said it made him feel royal. Elly and Iphy each slung an arm over the others shoulder and hopped along, grinning at the old woman who had stopped to stare at us with her shopping cart half off the curb. The twins were ahead of Arty and me, and I could just see Lil's head bobbing in front of them.

I had just put my head down to push when I felt the sting on my hump and saw the little rip come into the back of the chair with a m.u.f.fled cracking sound. Arty jerked in the chair and let out a roar. The twins toppled forward and the arm around Iphy's neck was spilling red. "Gun!" That was Arty shouting and I was down on my knees getting a breath to cry as he flopped out of the chair and rolled crazily under the tail end of the nearest car. I scrabbled after him, sc.r.a.ping on the hot pavement, my hump burning. Lil's voice flipped up in a quick shriek. I b.u.mped my back on the metal and was trying to cry but I could see Elly and Iphy, with their arms wrapped tight around each other, rolling fast and disappearing behind another car. They left a trail of red blotches where the arm touched as they rolled.

A car horn blared suddenly and didn't stop. The flat bleat floated in a solid layer on the air and human voices popped and chittered far away. I could feel Arty's heat against my leg. I dropped flat and cranked my neck around to look at him. He was on his belly. Blood was running out of his short shoulder and smearing across his flipper before it dripped onto the shade-cool tarmac. His lips were sputtering and big flat tears were sheeting out of his lower lids while his eyes whipped back and forth, searching and mean.

My own eyes and nose were running and the burn on my hump was like a big bee sting flaming poison up through my neck and all the way down to my b.u.t.t. It was interesting to see the tears coming out of Arty's eyes. I had never seen that before. I never thought of him crying. My own shaky breath and the taste of tear snot on my lip were familiar. Easy. Even the burn on my hump was exactly my size. But Arty's way of crying was new to me. His body was crying but his brain wasn't. The eyes above his tears were as sharp as ever. The blood from his shoulder was sliding faster than the clear fluid from his eyes, but to me the tears were more alarming.

The horn stopped and sirens grew up in its place. Voices jumped and barked and Arty and I lay pressed to the shade beneath the brown crust of the car belly until Lil came creeping and sniffling on her knees, peering under all the cars and calling to us. She couldn't talk when she found us. She dragged me out first and I sat quivering on the hot pavement while she reached far under the car for Arty. The hand that she balanced on had smears of bright red, drying fast. She tugged Arty into the light. She hiked him up onto her belly and stood up. I clung with both hands to the end of her blue blouse and we scuttered across the wide lane to the next row of cars. Behind a small red car Elly and Iphy lay flat on their backs with a big grey-uniformed woman kneeling between their heads. The twins were puckered and red from crying. They stared at the arm that the woman was pressing with a white bandage. The woman's flat eyes and tight mouth never changed as she moved, wrapping the thin arm. Behind them, on the curb, sat the old woman who had stopped her shopping cart to watch us. A man in grey was holding her wrist and talking softly to her. He lifted the p.r.o.ngs of a stethoscope to his ears and slid the listening bell into the collar of her dress, but the old woman's eyes were on me, and then on Arty as Lil laid him down.

Lil was saying, "These too, please. These too, please," meaning Arty and me, until more grey uniforms came and put big, hot hands on us and tore my s.h.i.+rt from the back. The bee sting on my hump got a breath of clear air and sizzled fresh. I watched another man put fingers on Arty's neck and Arty's wide lips opened with strings of spit webbing the dark inside his mouth and a high whine came out while white squares of gauze were pressed against the blood. Lil sobbed and caught herself and sobbed again, stroking Arty's head as he lay on the pavement with the big hands moving on him.

"I'm older than I thought," said a thin voice, and the old woman on the curb lay down. The man in uniform crouched over her and her head turned to stare at us as he lifted her arm to a needle.

The ambulance was crowded but Lil wouldn't let them separate us. Elly and Iphy were at the head of the cot with Arty at the other end. I lay on my side on a padded bench and Lil sat next to me with her long cool hand on my head. The grey-uniformed woman moved slowly and carefully. She asked one of the men to stay with her. She didn't want to be alone in the back with us. The doors were open and we were still waiting. I could see through the doors to the other side of the parking lot where the pickup was parked with the driver's door wide open in front of the supermarket. There were four flas.h.i.+ng police cars and the soft distant static of radios talking to each other. A grey figure came away from them and jogged quickly toward us. Blond, with a mustache, his uniform starched and neat. He was grinning and shaking his head as he grabbed a wing of the rear doors in each hand.

Lil bent over me, toward him. "Who is he? Why did he do that?" Her voice was rough.

The young man nodded to the woman in uniform who sat next to Arty but didn't touch him. "Some loony. Just crazy. He's moaning that he missed." The young man closed one side of the door. "Just rocking in the back of the cruiser saying, 'How could I miss?'" The last door closed and the scared eyes of the woman in uniform skittered around at each of us. The ambulance began to move.

When they dropped and flopped and the wheelchair flipped over, Vern felt a sudden warm pleasure that slid off into shock as they fell out of sight. The disappointment was a hot, wet bladder bursting in his chest. They were lined up. In line. His old man would have got all of them with that one steel-jacketed sh.e.l.l. The awful, soggy weep of failure shook him.

He was pressing his face to the smooth rifle stock, oiling it with tears, when a state trooper grabbed the barrel and yanked the rifle through the open window and out of his grasp. His cheek was sliced and bruised by the escaping stock. When the door squawked open he whimpered at the big gun looking at him. The trooper's boots had the same blood-mahogany depth that his father had rubbed into the wood of the 30.06.

He was leaning his forehead against the steel-wired gla.s.s that screened him from the front seat. His hands dangled between his knees, the cold cuffs clipped into the ring bolt on the floor of the patrol car. He had fallen into the momentary peace of blankness. His mind was stretched out flat, featureless. A trickle of color and motion at the outer edges of his eyes informed him that the troopers were moving slowly around the car. There were calm, heavy voices and others lighter, thin, and fast. Witnesses, he told himself. The police had arrived so quickly. He was impressed at their efficiency.

Then it occurred to him that a patrol car might have actually been in the parking lot at the very moment when it happened. He thought of a trooper in the aisle of the supermarket, buying cookies to eat in the cruiser. A faint bubble of old resentment rose in him. They were always after sweets. Few people came to his beautiful fruit bins when they were after a treat ...

A dull knocking at the window to his right became insistent. He swiveled his eyes reluctantly, pressing his forehead harder against the part.i.tion. A shopper. Her long face with incredible peach skin flushed ripe to the dark hairline pursed and spread its peach-crack lips. The teeth, like sweet corn kernels, whitened at him. The window gla.s.s vibrated, telling him " ... solutely right, right, you were absolutely ... and she was pregnant again ... right ... you did the ... decent ... right" before a pair of blue jodhpurs appeared behind the face and the face jerked away and he saw the dimpled arm swing down over the window beside the distended blouse of the beautiful pregnant girl. She grasped what must have been the handles of a baby stroller and disappeared, and he listened to the rattle of the stroller wheels as the baby and the fetus and their peach mother huffed away.

The sadness of his bruised and aching cheek began to penetrate the calm flow of his breathing. Vern cried again and it wasn't long before the snot hung all the way to his wrists and eased the rub of the metal cuffs.

The nurses were not as disgusted as the doctors but even they were giggling at each other and moving jerkily. The policeman with the thick gla.s.ses was sitting in an orange plasti-form chair and trying to keep his holster and his belt radio from jabbing him as he wrote down what Lil said. Lil would talk quickly for a few seconds and then fall silent. Her eyes swiveled frantically from one sheet-wrapped table to the next as she tried to watch us all. The young policeman wrote intently on his yellow pad and then distracted Lil from her surveillance with another question.

Elly and Iphy took the longest. Arty and I were both lying on our bellies, each on our own starch-itchy table, watching as the doctor with the long black braid bent over the twins' wounded arm. The doctor muttered at the white-faced nurse, who kept handing over the wrong s.h.i.+ny metal thing. A doctor with bad skin came back and stood between me and Arty. She began feeling me all over, tapping, listening through chilly instruments. She hated to touch me. I could feel it and my stomach got cold inside. She edged around the table, pus.h.i.+ng her fingers into the sides of my hump but avoiding the thick bandage at the crest.

An old doctor went up to Lily and began to talk to her in an earnest way, putting his stethoscope into the pocket of his white coat and pulling it out and putting it back. Elly and Iphy were not chattering. They stared at each other and at the arm between them and at the braid that dipped and swung as the dark face of their doctor squinted at their blood. Arty was watching my pimple-faced doctor. I looked at Arty, checking to see if these goings-on were all right. He licked his lips and squinted. The bandage started on his shoulder and rode up the side of his neck. It was hard for him to turn his head. The sweat was beading out of his scalp. He was staring at the zit-skinned hands on my hump when he yelled, "Leave her alone! She's all right!" and the doctor's hands leaped away from me.

"There now, steady, little fella." The big nurse leaned a hesitant, damp-looking hand on Arty's back to hold him down. Arty's face went into a deep bruise color that he h.o.a.rded for serious tantrums.

He opened his mouth wide-his eyes bulging furiously at me all the while. "Lil!" he bellowed. "Call Papa, Lil! They'll try to keep us! They'll take us and keep us!"

Lil was glaring at the oldest doctor and saying in her proper Boston, "I certainly could not condone such a thing without consulting their father."

"Papa!" howled Arturo, and the twins began to cry their syncopated harmonic wail and I slid off my table and was trying to get my teeth to grip in the full, tight flesh beneath the fat pink nurse's b.u.t.tock to distract them from Arty, and Arty curled back to bite the big pink hand as the long braid of the dark doctor swung like a whip at the sound of the instrument tray emptying its dozen chrome miracles in a fire rain onto the tiled floor.

That was when Papa came in with Horst the Cat Man. Arty shut up and the pink nurse went to wash his hand. The twins lay back down for the taping to be finished. Papa spoke his best South Boston and the doctor gave up and said he wouldn't be responsible.

Horst scooped the twins up. One of their tear-streaked faces peeked over each of his shoulders. Papa picked Arturo up very gently and took my hand. With Lil close behind, Papa led us all through the swinging doors and past the grey-haired lady blinking at the desk and out through the emergency entrance to where the little van was parked.

6.

The Lucky One

She is looking. Her fingers skim the red skull, flutter down the crumpled features, twitch in brief visits to the ears, then slide down for a brief grasp of the tiny jaw. Both her hands now spread, touching the tiny arc of the breastbone, clasping the shoulders tenderly. Lifting the two arms to their bent limit, her fingers probe the joints, checking the dimpled knuckles, counting, recounting the small larval fingers, reaching for the thorax, a firm grasp on the concave b.u.t.tocks that crease into thin legs, and again the searching repeated. Count of the pea-sized toes. Her eyes slide up to the flat, hooded eyes of her husband, my father, the sire and deliverer. He looks away, picks up damp cloths, busies himself with cleanliness. Her eyes and hands return to the faintly squirming infant. She flips him neatly, his chest in her left palm and her right hand now throbbing in terrible anxiety over the tiny padded spine.

"But ... " she begins, turns the babe back to re-examine his front. "But, Al ... " And the tent of wrinkles appears on her smooth milk forehead, the doubt that I had never seen in her eyes before. Al turns away and then quickly forces himself to come back to her. He puts his hands on her cheeks and strokes softly.

"It's true, Lil. There's nothing. He's just a regular ... regular baby." And then Lil's face is wet and her breath is bubbling nastily. Al is darting at me where I am holding Arty up in the doorway, and Elly and Iphy are pulling on my arm, and Al says, "You kids fix some supper for yourselves - get, now - leave your mom to rest." And Lil's soggy voice is crying, "I did everything, Al ... I did what you said, Al ... What happened, Al? How could this happen?"

Al liked the snaky backroads in the hills. He drove like a rock, his whole body slumped in a twitchless, nerveless mound. Even his mustache seemed frozen over his mouth. Only his eyes flicked constantly and his hands moved the wheel just enough and no more. Arturo sat in the big co-pilot's seat, strapped upright, his eyes flickering like Als. I leaned on Arturo, half dozing in the dark with the color points of the instrument panel warming my eyes.

Lil hung on the support bar behind us. Her pale hair and face caught the red glow of the dash lights. She swayed lightly on the turns.

"It's nearly midnight, Al." Her voice was a stretched tissue of sound that meant she was not going to cry, that she was deliberately squeezing back the more obvious forms of grief. It was harder to deal with than her crying. Al s hand tugged at a strand of mustache and then returned to the wheel. His eyes never left the road.

"We'll hit Green River in another half hour ... Did you write the note?" His voice was genially matter-of-fact.

Her body swayed behind me and I could smell a heavy wave of sleep and milk and sweat from inside her robe.

"I've been thinking a laundromat," she said. "It would be warm. Women go there."

The new baby had to be left somewhere. Al sent the rest of the show east to Laramie. Green River, he said, was a good town, clean, where a regular boy could grow up well. The plan was to drive through in the night, leave the baby on a doorstep where he would be found quickly, and then head out, leaving no clues to connect him with a carnival hundreds of miles away. A freighter went past going the other direction. Wind shook us from the floorboards up. Al waited until the roar was gone.

"Lil, honey, this is a small town. The laundromat is most likely not open twenty-four hours."

"I thought we could put him on top of a drier and put in enough coins to keep it going all night." Al was patient, driving stolidly.

"We'll find a place that opens early. A snappy-looking business. Owner a local pillar. Not white-collar, though. No insurance or real estate. I don't want him brought up by an office worker."

Arturo's ribs swelled against me as he inhaled, then his soft voice, "A gas station, maybe. Sure to be one on the main drag."

Al took it as though it had come from his own mind. Arty had that knack.

"A gas station would be about right. You bundle him up warm, Lil. They'll open early to catch the mugs going to work."

Lil was fumbling in the dark.

"I can't find the writing pad," she called. Her voice had tears high up near the surface now. Al's big hand touched my scalp.

"Help your ma, Oly."

I found the writing tablet and a pencil in the drawer. Lil had gone back to the bedroom. Iphy and Elly were asleep as I slid by their bunk. I was proud to be up and useful while they slept.

Lil was propped up on the pillows of the big bed. She was pulling on the long red gloves that she used for shows. The baby slept beside her, wrapped tight in the yellow blanket that had covered each of us in turn. Lil's face was flat and wet with pain. I handed her the pad and pencil and climbed up beside her. She sat up and leaned over the tablet. She gripped the pencil between her long red fingers and opened the pad to the blank middle pages. She rubbed the page with her gloved hand, turned it over and rubbed the other side. Then she turned it back and began printing carefully against the sway of the van. Some tears came out while she wrote and she tipped forward so they would fall onto the page.

"Please take care of my baby," she read aloud as she wrote. Signed, "Unemployed and unwed."

She sighed, tore the page out and folded it. She saw me looking at her. She smiled a weak smile. Her glove came out and rubbed my smooth head.

"I signed it that way so the people who find him will think that is the reason he was left. I said 'unemployed' rather than 'out of work' to give people the idea that his parents weren't illiterate, anyway. Maybe if they think he came from educated people they'll a.s.sume he's got good genetic stock. It might give him a better chance."

I put my nose into the palm of her glove. I liked her for thinking about that. I liked her for grieving over this regular baby. It made me feel important and loved. I thought she would have really cried if she'd had to give me up.

Later, at the breakfast table, Al told it as though it had occurred to him without outside help.

"We could go into a big supermarket and wait in an aisle until there was no one else in sight and push the cans of beans aside-you know how deep those shelves are-and lay him on the shelf at the back and then stack cans in front of him again and walk away. When he started to cry it would just take them a few minutes to find him."

Lil was intrigued, of course, but insisted on stowing her babe not behind plebeian beans but behind artichoke hearts, escargots, some comestible expensive and erudite enough to guarantee that the customer who shoved the cans aside and discovered this sweet morsel would have a certain cachet of worldliness and money.

Then Al remembered the surveillance cameras and other security hardware and discarded the idea. But I knew it had come from Arty originally. It smacked of him.

So, we were doing what Al referred to as "the sensible thing." The elderly thin flannel blanket and the kid's unremarkable underwear had all been checked for identifying labels, or floating sequins, that might pin the job on us. Even the cardboard box, an ex-cradle for canned pumpkin, had been checked. Al phoned a grocery from a booth in our last pit stop to make sure they had the brand in the area. Standard brown-paper insulation, layered and crumpled for warmth. Nothing so foolish as a newspaper from anywhere along the route.

And the red gloves, the long suede arms reaching past the elbows, with three cunning b.u.t.tons at the slit wrist to close them and the fingers so supple her nails and knuckles showed through. And the mid-page of the writing pad wiped of fingerprints. These minor dodges my parents performed as automatically as the swallowing of spit. The thinking part came in avoiding too much thought, in the spontaneous flare of not scouting ahead-not speeding-and in the care that Al had taken with the van's checkup back there in Wh.o.r.e Meadow, Idaho, where he made sure we would not break down, run out of fuel, or blow a tire before we were well away from the last sight of our own castoff perfection. The Binewskis weren't crooks, but we had a sense of timing.

The morning before, while the plans were still forming, Al had checked out the van. Arty crawled underneath and talked to Al while he cranked the wrenches around. I tried to get close enough to hear but couldn't.

I was rustling in the drawer next to the sink for tape. Mama wanted tape to fasten the note on the baby. It was dark and I could see Al's head and shoulders against the bright winds.h.i.+eld when the van slowed. I grabbed the sink edge to balance as we pulled off into popping gravel. Al doused the lights.

"Oly, is your mama ready?" His voice was close to me.

"Just about, Papa."

"Tell her to be quick. We don't want to stop for more than one minute and I'm going to make just one pa.s.s through town, so we've got to spot the place and decide fast. Tell her."

I had the roll of tape in my fist. I shut the drawer and headed for the crack of light showing at the edge of the sliding door to Mama's room at the end of the van.

She was sitting on the bed with the baby's cardboard box beside her. She looked up at me as I whispered Papa's message. She nodded and reached out a red-gloved hand for the tape. We were moving again. She tore off tape and neatly plastered the note to the flap of the box. Tears ran quietly down her cheeks. There was a crackle from the paper in the box. The baby was moving slightly. Mama's eyebrows peaked in a tent above her nose as she looked at me through her red eyes.

"He might wake," she whispered wetly. "He's been asleep almost three hours. He'll be hungry." Her voice squeaked out through the whisper. "Tell Papa we have to wait till I can feed him. Tell him to park somewhere." A push in her eyes sent me back, feeling my way toward the c.o.c.kpit, with tears coming out of my own eyes. As I reached for the support bar behind Papa, the van reeled beneath me and we were turning right beneath a streetlight into the purple shadows of a three-island, twelve-pump gas station with its "CLOSED - open again 6 A.M." sign large and pale in the window of the office. On the wall of the office, a tire with a clock in its center hung numbly, with one hand drooping to 12:35.

"Papa," I started to say, as he lurched up from the seat and swung toward me.

"Gangway, Oly," he snapped as he pushed past me, a wave of heat and cigar smoke and father flesh moving away toward the open door of the bedroom. Arty smiled at me from the pa.s.senger seat. He reared his head back, baring his teeth to show me his excitement.

"No, Al!" came Lil's voice from the bedroom.

"Quick, Lil, get a move on!" and I could see Papa bending over the visible corner of the big bed, reaching.

"Al, I've got to feed him! He's awake!"

But Papa was pulling and the cardboard box slid toward him with Mama's long red gloves attached to it.

"Lily, there isn't time!"

A thin, monotonous siren wailed from the box as Al lifted it and the reaching red gloves towed Mama along in her limp robe. Papa came through the door toward us and put the box down on the floor next to the side door as Mama rushed behind him, with the light from the bedroom door s.h.i.+ning through her pale hair. Papa opened the side door and peered out, and Mama hit the light switch as she leaned over the box. Her pink robe and red-gloved hands dove toward the wadded papers that filled the box around the baby.