"08 - Zeke by Timothy R. Sullivan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

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Zeke

Timothy Robert Sullivan

I don't really know Tim Sullivan, but I've run into him a few times at science fiction gatherings. Handsome, well-met fellow, he seems awfully normal to have written this story about a freak meeting a freak in a freak show. His biographical sheet, though, reveals a writerly kind of checkered past: flower child, taxi driver, construction worker, manager of liquor store and pinball arcade. He even stooped to teaching English at a Florida university

He's settled down now to writing for a living, working on a trilogy for Starblaze Press while selling fantasy stories to magazines like Twilight Zone, where this one, appropriately, appeared. His first novel, a tie-in to the series V, appeared in 1984.

Along Route 31, from the Georgia border to Key West, much of the old Florida remains. There one can still spend the night in a roach-infested "motor court," visit a roadside spiritualist, or marvel at the lethargic denizens of an alligator farm. This is the Florida of Indian=head coconuts, cracked swimming

pools, and concrete fountains claimed by their exhibitors to be the very ones for which Ponce de Leon searched.
It was the third time I had traversed old Highway 31, though I'd never done it alone before. After spending a childhood of miserable solitude, I had discovered in my teens that I could exploit my freakishness, that I could even use it to get girls. Down that sultry road I went, in a busload of freewheelin' hippie "freaks" back in the smoky days of Fall 1968. The "family" was smaller on my second trip down Route 31 in 1974; a blue Toyota carried me and Joannie, a girl who saw in me all the weird and wonderful things she'd never dared to do herself. The results of that romantic interlude were pregnancy, marriage, and a boy we named Danny. A real family.
So, for masochism's sake, I was heading a third time--all by myself, just like when I was a kid-down that seldom traveled road before long-distance driving became too exorbitant. Besides, I had an expense account; I'd been attending an exporters' convention in Atlanta, and had left a day early, on a Thursday morning. That way I could make a leisurely, bittersweet trek down memory lane. I wasn't planning to get back to work until Monday morning, so I had called to clear it with my boss. Okay, he had said, take your time, George. Not a bad guy, Mr. Noloff, but twenty-five years of selling heavy road equipment to banana republics had instilled in him a certain dictatorial air. I often dreamed, when he was being particularly imperious, of telling him off and chucking my job at Coastal Trading, Inc .... but there was always the rent, the payments on my year-old Plymouth Horizon, the alimony, and of course the child support, at a time when the price of a loaf of bread approached a buck.
Through a loose tweeter, the grinding white blues guitar of Johnny Winter vibrated. I turned it up anyway, cruising over the rolling hills of central Florida, orange groves sliding by on either side of the potholed two-lane blacktop. A curved damask strip of late afternoon sunlight melted into the treetops as I passed a tattered sign announcing MONSTERS, BEASTS,
FREAKS OF NATURE, JUST AHEAD, SR 74, in pastel colors that had once been lurid.
"This," 1 said over Johnny's melodic growls, "has got to be the world's sleaziest roadside attraction."
My tank was almost empty, and there weren't any open gas stations in sight, but I wasn't worried. There hadn't been a lit neon No in front of VACANCY on any of these fleabags' signs in years; they were all dying for business. I would spend the night in this next town-whatever town it was-and search for fuel in the morning.
The Horizon turned easily into the parking lot of the Azalea Motel, a low pink building with rust stains bleeding through the walls from the reinforcing steel rods beneath the concrete.
Such establishments rarely have lobbies, and the Azalea was no exception. Inside the cramped manager's office, a fat woman sat in the arctic gale of a Fedders air conditioner, watching "Hee-Haw." She couldn't hear me over the AC's ceaseless exhalations and the laugh track, but soon subdued strains of sweet country music replaced the canned yoks, making conversation barely possible. I negotiated a room key, but she didn't let it go at that.
"You look like the type might wanna see the freak show," she said.
It had been some time since an adult had made such a reference to my albinism. I always explain to children about the lack of pigmentation that makes my skin so white, but this woman was no child. I glared at her . . . and she glared right back until 1 lowered my eyes to the guest book.
"I'm Mrs. Nickerson," she said as I signed my name. "Bump-that's my husband-ain't here right now." She eyed my suitcase as if it were a dangerous animal.
"Oh." I assumed she was trying to tell me she wasn't taking my bag to my room for me. "Just point me in the right direction."
"Ain't but one direction." She gestured to her left.
"Uh . . . thank you, Mrs. Nickerson." I hefted my bag,

key dangling from my free hand, and went back out into the still considerable heat like a good boy. Sunset had now created a peach-colored world, except for blood-red ixora, yellow hibiscus, and purple bougainvillea, whose roots snaked into the broken walk alongside the motel. I didn't see any azaleas.
The room wasn't as bad as I'd expected: plasterboard walls; a reasonably unlumpy mattress sheathed in fresh linen; a lampshade emblazoned with a horse's head, the animal's sensitive eyes gazing longingly toward the alcove harboring the sink (why don't motels ever have sinks in the bathrooms?); clean white towels; a color TV with a sick tube, making the actors look a little bilious; a slightly musty smell; and a shower, which I promptly tried out.
After cleaning up, I decided to go for a walk. There were three vehicles besides mine in the parking lot. One was a green Ford pickup loaded with sacks of peat moss. A big man, fat, fiftyish, and sunburned, was finishing the loading. He wore a white undershirt, the kind with shoulder straps, and his few remaining hairs were plastered to his creased skull with hair cream. Once he noticed me and nodded, I asked him if he was by any chance Bump Nickerson.
"None other," he replied, wiping sweat from his brow. He shook my hand, and then leaned against the tailgate while I asked him what went on in these parts.
"Florabella Tavern's closed for renovations. There's a movie in Apopka, but that's twenty-five mile. Ain't much in Boca Blanca nowadays."
"I guess there wouldn't be." So that was the name of this burg: Boca Blanca, or White Mouth, if my rudimentary Spanish didn't fail me. Funny, I thought, Boca, or "mouth" always refers to a bay or inlet, but this Boca is nowhere near the Atlantic or Gulf coasts ....
"No, Sir," Bump agreed. "No, Sir,"
"Apopka's got the closest entertainment, huh?" No place to lose myself here, like there was in Miami when my loneliness became intolerable. "What about the freak show?"
"'At's the on'y thing till the Fiorabella opens up agin."
Bump shrugged. "Course, it's a little off the beaten path."
"Oh, yeah?" I'd always had a penchant for the bizarre, and this seemed a sufficiently mysterious diversion to cure my melancholy. "How do I get there?"
"South two mile, then a left, jis past the canal bridge. She's down the jog road there another mile or so."
I thanked Bump and got into the Horizon. Smacked the gas gauge a couple of times and decided six miles wouldn't drain it dry. So off to see the Fat Lady, the Dog-faced Boy, or whatever exotic creatures might infest Boca Blanca's version of the Big Top. Odd that it was located off the main road, I thought. As the stars brightened over the darkening orange groves, I expected to hear the pizzicato guitar that used to preface "The Twilight Zone."
"George Hallahan," Rod Serling's gravelly voice intoned inside my skull, "thirty-two years old. A rather peculiar looking idealist who once foolishly thought he could help fashion a better world out of a cloud of cannabis smoke. George found that he couldn't even hold his own life together, much less an ailing society. Now, driving on a back road in Florida, the disillusioned albino ex-hippie exporter is headed straight toward . . ." Straight toward a tacky freak show. Appropriate.
The stigma of albinism hadn't been quite so bad in the New England town where I spent the first eight years of my life. A bout of rheumatic fever had made me unable to tolerate the cold weather, however, and my father, a civil servant, took a job in Miami at my mom's instigation. So, for my sake, the family went south, and I grew up a ghostly exile among the bronzed gods and goddesses.
Then came the Summer of Love. I grew my white hair long, and wasted people thought I was far out. There wasn't a cynical bone in my body the first time I dropped acid, at a rock festival near Orlando-even after I recovered from the severe case of sun poisoning I got from dancing naked under the blazing sun-but reality soon reared its ugly head during my radical-college days. The tear gas and truncheons the cops

wielded at the political conventions at Miami Beach in '72 taught me a valuable lesson about the way things are, as opposed to the way I thought they ought to be.
Then there had been the courtship of Joannie, culminating at the Saturn Motor Lodge on good of Route 31. Love? I don't know; looking back, I think I just had to have her because she was such a nice girl. Cute, brunette, upper-middle= class background; what more could I have asked for? Not that she was guiltless in this bizarre misalliance of woman and freak. How neat it must have seemed to her murky sense of developing social consciousness to miscegenation with a misfit. Danny's birth had shortly thereafter squelched that particular living fantasy, forcing my capitulation to the ogre of capitalism in the bargain.
Every single one of these misadventures had been a failure in some painfully essential way, each taking a bigger chunk of my soul than the last.