Zeke

Timothy Robert Sullivan

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.

By the time I got to the canal bridge, I couldn’t stop thinking of Danny. I hadn’t wanted a child, judging the two of us far too immature for such a responsibility, but Joannie had refused to consider abortion. I never told her how scared I was that the child would be a freak like me. But when I saw that normal, beautiful baby, I was happy for the one and only time in my life. At first Danny was kind of a novelty, but when he got a little older and we started to get to know each other, I think we were more than father and son. We were friends.

Still, the bickering between Joannie and me got worse and, oh, she always had a sharp tongue. When we finally decided to split, there was never any doubt about who was better suited to bring up Danny. I was an aging albino hippie earning a shaky income from the exporting trade. She, on the other hand, was solidly establishment; she’d never touched a drug, never even smoked a cigarette. I knew it was only right, and yet I resented her for the way things had turned out.

A year had passed since she took my son away from me. He was only five when his home fell apart. On Sunday he’d be celebrating his sixth birthday, and his father was too scared of

a verbal whipping-“Why don’t you get a job where you can make enough money to provide the things Danny needs?”-to be where he could help Danny blow out the candles. I’d have to mail him a present in the morning. Would it get to Miami in time?

The jog road was dusty and bumpy as the night descended. On the other side of the canal there were no orange groves, just palmetto clumps and Florida pines. Down the road was a house made of cinder blocks, one story high, with no windows in the front, like a porn parlor. The house was flanked by two sago palms in the terminal stages of “lethal yellowing disease,” their drooping fronds like black spiders’ legs in the deepening gloom.

1 parked in front of the house, and the Horizon bogged down in the sugary sand. I wondered if its wheels would be able to spin free, and, if not, whether Boca Blanca had a wrecker. As I walked toward the house, I reflected that mine had not always been such a defeatist attitude.

“Whatever happened to the Woodstock Generation?” I muttered, recalling a more innocent time when I could toke up and consider obliterating war, racism, and injustice. Particularly the injustice that I suffered because I happened to be born a “whiter shade of pale,” to borrow a phrase from the old Procol Harum song.

A light around the side of the little house threw a patch of amber on the sand. There was a screen door, and what looked like the kitchen on the other side of it. I took a whiff of jasmine-scented air and rapped.

From within came a stirring, a rustling of paper, the creaking of a chair sliding across the floor, footsteps; there was no television or radio to dilute these intimate sounds, only the chirruping of crickets. A shadow appeared on the screen, followed by a thin, stooped old man, wearing baggy pants and smiling.

“I’ve, uh, come to see the freak show,” I said.

He nodded and unhooked the screen door. “Through here,” he said, leading me through a room filled with books

and magazines, literary and scientific journals in a state of disarray on tables, sofa, and floor. Curiouser and curiouser.

The back door opened into a dark shed, and the old man pulled a dangling string, illuminating a naked hundred-watt bulb that cast swinging shadows on four small cages and, something draped with a greasy cloth. The cages were made: of pine and chicken wire. In them were four unfortunate animals-not the usual circus freaks, but strange enough in their various ways.

How do you define a freak, anyway? The word is used to hurt more often than to inform or amuse. At least these creatures would never know what people called them.

The most striking of the animals was a two-headed calf. One of the heads was a shrunken, lolling appendage with dead eyes and flaccid lips, but the rest of the calf seemed healthy enough.

In spite of the terrible stench, I moved closer to the cages

Next to the calf, so help me, was a snake with legs. Spindly little useless things, but four limbs nonetheless. It was asleep on a pile of hay inside its two-foot-square prison.

Then there was a “giant lizard,” as the old man called it nothing but an iguana.

The fourth cage held a featherless chicken, its hideously

pocked flesh a repulsive sight. In its nakedness, the fowl resembled a scrawny old man. It stared at me so murderously

that it must have thought I plucked it myself. _

“Donations appreciated,” my affable host said as he shuffled toward the door.

“Uh, fine. But I don’t think I’ve seen everything yet, have: I?” I turned toward the thing under the greasy cloth, in a cage that appeared to be circular at the top, unlike the others. -

Hitching up his trousers, the old man looked from me to. the covered object and back again. “Well …”

I waited. The old man clearly didn’t want to show me what was under that cloth, which naturally made me want to~ see it all the more.

“He’s asleep, I think.”

“He?”

The old man didn’t seem to hear me. He lifted a corner of the cloth and peeked under it. “No, it’s all right … if you’re sure you want to see him.”

“Yes.”

Without ceremony, he undraped a large glass terrarium, standing back with the greasy cloth in his gnarled farmer’s hands.

I don’t know how long I stood there with my mouth open, staring at that incredible sight. I remember the old man speaking to me as if in a dream: “That’s the way most folks act when they see him.”

The thing was an albino monkey … no … the white fur was flesh … bald, like the chicken … arms and legs bent at ridiculous angles … as stooped as the old man ….

No, not stooped. The impossible thing stood erect on a bed of dark chips. Its joints suggested a Rube Goldberg cartoon in their complexity. With delicate, hinged hands much too large for its eighteen-inch body, it grasped the lip of the terrarium, gazing at me from between its pipe stem arms with crimson eyes.

It was a mockery, an image from a funhouse mirror in a nightmare. As if to imitate my gape, the creature opened its mouth, revealing a ribbed whiteness inside, a furrowed snowfield here in the stifling Florida summer. No discernible sound came from that virginal cavity.

The chicken clucked, the sound bringing me a little closer to reality. Without taking my eyes off the creature, I whispered, “What is it?”

“He,” the old man corrected me. “He’s a person. Might look and act a little different, but he’s folks. Just like me … just like you.”

“What?” I glanced at him to see if he was goading me as Mrs. Nickerson had at the motel. But there was no malice in his weather-beaten face. He nodded at the strange creature.

“Ain’t he sum’p’n?”

“Where did you get him?”

“Well, he’s been livin’ with me since I was, let’s see … twenty-six. Before that he stayed with of Bo Wadley till Bo passed away, and Bo told me his daddy kept him ‘fore Bo was born. Claimed he was livin’ around here ‘fore white men ever come to Florida.”

“Boca’ Blanca,” I said. A revelation. The Spanish must have named their settlement for this creature perhaps four centuries ago. “But how could he have been around so long?”

The old man sucked on his false teeth. “Jis longer-lived that.. us, I guess.”

“What does he eat?”

“Dead plants, rotten wood, peat moss. Takes a little water with it.”

I could make out the baroque pattern of the ribs, a surrealist structure beneath striated bands of muscle and smooth, milky flesh. The physique was vaguely humanoid, and the gleaming red eyes were unfathomable. These features were grotesque enough, but that mouth twisted the ridged skull into a painful prognathous expression that opened like a funnel-a scream of silence that touched an empathic chord inside me.

“Why do you keep him in this shed with these deformed animals?” I demanded.

“Why, it was his idea,” the old man said reproachfully. “We got to have money to get along on, so he come up with the idea of a freak show some years back. After a while, he got in the habit of sleepin’ out here, sorta keepin’ a eye on things.”

“His idea? Did I hear you right?”

“Yup. He’s smart as a whip. Showed me where to find these critters-cept for the lizard. Him we bought from a pet shop in Orlando.”

“This is beyond belief.” I shook my head. “He’s …”

“Sum’p’n, ain’t he?” It was Bump, carrying a sack of peat moss through the shed door.

“You’re in on this, too?” I asked.

“In on what?” Bump said. “I run a garden s’ply ever since

the interstate highway and Disney World pulled the rug out from under the motel bidness. Oncet a week I bring Zeke out some peat moss.”

“Zeke!” I laughed, remembering the old gospel song about Ezekiel’s “dry bones,” an image that perfectly suggested the creature in the terrarium.

“Got to call him sum’p’s,” Bump said, and he laughed too. “Never did tell us what his right name is.”

“Prob’ly where he come from,” the old man said, “they don’t have names same as we do.”

“Where he comes from …” The thought inspired awe, wonder.

“A long ways away,” Bump said softly. “A long ways.”

“Another world,” 1 said, even more quietly.

The old man was grave, and none of us spoke while we considered the implications of what we had just said.

After a while Bump tore open the sack, scooping out some peat moss with a meaty hand and dropping it into the snifter-shaped terrarium. Zeke’s twiglike fingers, catching the offering, were nearly as long as Bump’s. Instead of eating in front of us, Zeke set the peat moss chips among those already spread on the floor of his terrarium.

“Not ever’body knows what they seein’ when they come in here,” the old man said, frowning. “Bump’s wife, now, she don’t care for things that are … different.”

“So I noticed,” I said.

“She thinks to this day he’s jis some kinda hairless monkey.”

“Hell, Levon,” Bump said, “she never stuck around long enough to see him read and write, and she never would believe me. Rayette can’t hardly read, herself, and she don’t want to nohow. It’s all she can do to set in front of that damn TV all day long.”

Having vented his spleen, Bump stuck his hand inside the terrarium. Grasping two fingers, Zeke allowed himself to be lifted out of the terrarium and set on the straw-covered shed floor. He was wearing a tiny pair of beige shorts.

It seemed wrong for Zeke to be here. My fitful sense of :: social morality awakened briefly as I considered our Duty to Mankind. “Kennedy Space Center’s not far,” I said. “Why don’t you let somebody over there have a look at Zeke?”

“Let him ‘splain about things hisself,” Levon said.,

The diminutive alien led us inside the house in a jerkily

articulated walk, the calf lowing as Levon closed the shed

door. The adjoining room was littered with reading material.

Next to a battered old sofa, a slate leaned against one of the ,

cinder-block walls. Zeke picked up a piece of chalk and wrote, -s

“I have no desire to go anywhere.” -

“Maybe they could get you back home someday,” I said. l

“By the time your spacecraft are able to go that far,” he wrote in carefully blocked-in letters, “I will no longer be living.”

“But the things you must know!” I protested. “Don’t you want to share them with us? Help us?”

Zeke bowed, showing two pinpricks on top of his snowy t skull that I took to be his ears. The chalk squeaked in the still -s room as he wrote, “My technological expertise is limited, but even if it weren’t, there would be difficulties.”

“Difficulties?”

“In bypassing so many levels of technical sophistication.”

“I see.” I had skipped third grade. Adjusting to life in fourth grade was hell, intellectually and emotionally. At least the kids my age were used to “Whitey,” as I came to be called. The bigger kids really put me through the meat grinder, and I had trouble with my math, too. So you might say I had found a it difficult to bypass only one level of sophistication.

Zeke wiped the slate clean with a chalk dust-caked eraser, and then wrote, “How well does the average human being understand the principle behind a machine he or she uses every day?”

“.Like television?” I was amused to think of Rayette Nickerson contributing to our discussion.

“Yes, television,” Zeke wrote, “or even an automobile? Our machines were autonomous. They built themselves, “

maintained themselves, but were still slaves to do our bidding. I couldn’t begin to show you how to make even the simplest of them.”

So much for saviors from the stars. Still, there was wonder enough here, even without miracles. “But how did you end up on Earth?” I asked. “Where did you come from?”

Instead of answering, Zeke beckoned for me to follow him through the kitchen. With both hands, he pushed open the groaning screen door and went outside. The stars gleamed like ice and the night breeze was cool, quickly drying the sweat on my forehead. It took me a moment to identify a pungent odor wafting over the jasmine as Zeke. I hadn’t noticed his exotic smell inside the house because of the animals, whose odor persisted even into the living room. His aroma surprised me because I had already come to regard him as human, perhaps more like me than anyone I’d ever known. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was just … different.

With a little flourish, Zeke indicated the heavens. Overhead were Venus and Mars, and in the west was brilliant Jupiter. The Pleiades were peripherally visible, hard to see when I looked directly at them. Just to the north were Perseus and Cassiopeia, frozen in an eternal marital spat, like Joannie and me. Happiness seemed as unattainable as Zeke’s planet.

“He never tells how he come here,” Levon said, “or why. And you can ask him till you’re blue in the face. When he don’t want to talk about sum’p’n, he jis don’t talk.”

We stood in the moonlight by two sickly palms. Zeke’s unaccountably graceful figure was as immobile as his crimson eyes were dispassionate. Had my initial impression of anguish been nothing more than a distorted projection of my own pain?

Then Zeke’s mouth jutted forward, widening once again into that terrible, silent scream. As though in sympathetic reaction, the night sounds of insects and hoot owls quieted. Zeke lifted a hand, opening his fingers as if to grasp the stars and pull them to Earth. His entire body trembled while he stretched onto the tips of his splayed feet. And then he

slumped so close to the sand I thought he would fall. He managed to stay on his feet, though, staring down at the crabgrass.

My face felt flushed, and a drop of perspiration rolled down my forehead in spite of the cool breeze. I was embarrassed-this vision of pain was like a distorted reflection of my own soul-and had to look away.

So I said good-bye to Bump and Levon, their homely faces showing the depth of their emotion at their friend’s anguish. Taking a five-dollar bill from my wallet, I slipped it to Levon as a donation.

“He gits tired,” Levon said.

I nodded and, without turning back, walked the few yards to my car.

I felt, rather than heard, Zeke behind me. My hand on the open car door, I turned to him. I squatted so that we were more or less on the same eye level.

In the dim illumination shed by the car’s dome light, Zeke raised his fragile hands to touch mine. I stretched out my fingers and their tips met his. His fingers were warm, and emotion seemed to emanate from them, entering me. Something went out of me, too. Something sour and ugly I had been carrying around for far too long. Zeke absorbed it like dirty water in a sponge.

I won’t say that I was suddenly whole, like the laying on of hands is supposed to make you, I was just relieved. Not a revelation or a cleansing, but an exchange, a sharing. Zeke shared my pain … and I shared his.

It took only an instant, and then our fingertips parted. I stood, still transfixed by Zeke’s ruby eyes. They no longer seemed dispassionate; I had, in a sense, seen with them. There was no sudden Fujicolor image of an alien world, only the feeling of a loss so great that acceptance had been the only alternative to death. My problems seemed so insignificant next to Zeke’s that I felt ashamed of myself for wallowing in self-pity.

“So long, Zeke,” I said, “and thanks.” As I got in the car

and shut the door, the dome light winked out, leaving a vague, pale shape outside in place of Zeke. I started up the motor and backed out of the sand with no problem. As I headed back toward Route 31, there were three shrinking silhouettes in the rearview mirror, two men and the small figure of a being from another world. Was he an exile, a fugitive, a lost traveler? He would die on this planet, but even so, he had made the best of things.

Next morning, as I walked down to the office to pay my bill, I noticed that Bump’s pickup wasn’t in the parking lot. Maybe he had spent the night at Levon’s, or maybe he was just out early, delivering garden supplies to some of his more conventional customers.

Mrs. Nickerson’s manners hadn’t improved. She was watching “Bowling for Dollars,” but turned grudgingly away to take my money. While I signed my check, she asked, “So you seen the freak?”

I looked straight at her, masking my hostility. “Yes, I did. Don’t you think we look a lot alike?”

The smirk vanished from her puffy face, and she turned stify back to her television program. I smiled. The question had freaked her out, but it wasn’t really a joke. Especially for Zeke. Coming from so far away, living so long with no chance of getting home. he had to be Earth’s greatest expert on alienation.

It was already sweltering and muggy at half past eight, but I walked out of that air-conditioned office whistling. After all, I still had plenty of time to make it back for Danny’s

birthday party.’