Geek Love

4. Papa’s Roses

The Olympia McGurk profile in the personnel computer of Radio KBNK lists my training as “Elocution and diction, and microphonic presentation as taught by Aloysius Binewski,” which I wrote calmly and confidently into my résumé as though every well-trained voice would recognize the name of the master.

That was Papa, sitting in the back of the tent at the soundboard, wearing headphones and glaring at me as I stood on one foot on the stage with the old ragged microphone waving aimlessly near my mouth. Papa, hollering, “Boring!” at my fiftieth delivery of “Step right this way, folks!” or mimicking cruelly, “Ya-ta, ya-ta, ya-ta!” if I fell into a repetitive rhythm on “From the darkest mysteries of science, a revelation of poetic grace.”

“Move your lips, for shit’s sake!” howled Papa, or “Stop with the mouse farts and project!

“That’s a double-reed instrument! It is called a voice! It is not a comb wrapped in waxed paper! I gave it to you from the love in my guts for your scrawny and unmarketable carcass, so be kind enough to use it properly!”

And me all the while having to pee — coughing into the mike when my throat was tired and raw — eyes stinging and lips and chin crumpling in grief at his anger. The sweet tinkle of Electra on the bass and Iphy on the treble with Mama’s voice counting, “One and two and …” as the twins had their piano lesson inside the trailer. The gurgle and hum of the pumps that filtered my brother Arty’s “Aqua Boy” tank. And the dim round moon of baby Fortunato’s face peering at me from the dark of the risers above Papa.

If I finally did it right and got all the way through from “Step up, friends” to “A vision of the miraculous extravagance of Nature for the same simple price as an overcooked hotdog” without a single bellow of rage from my beloved papa, then he would swoop me up in huge arms and tuck me onto a shoulder, where I could grab his astounding hair in my fists and ride high through the tent flaps into the light, with Fortunato’s golden head chugging along far below, and we would parade the long street of booths with me laughing down at the red-haired girls who sold the candy and at the toothless wheelman and Horst the Cat Man all nodding at Papa’s instructions, and hearing, feeling his huge voice rumble out from beneath my legs, “This little beetle did her lessons just right today.”

It’s funny, in a dingy way, that I make my little living by reading. I have to smile because I used to avoid reading. It scared me.

It never bothered Arty. He read constantly — anything — but his favorites were ghost stories and horror tales.

When we were still children I was the one who turned his pages. He’d lie in bed reading late when everyone else was asleep. I lay beside him and held his lamp and turned the pages and watched his eyes move in quick jerks down the print. Reading was never a quiet pastime for Arty. He rocked, grunted, muttered, and exclaimed. He was in one of his toilet phases at that time. “Sweet rosy-brown arsehole” was his expression of pleasure. “Shitsucker” was the pejorative.

“Don’t you get dreams?” I asked him. “Don’t you get scared reading those at night? They’re supposed to scare you.”

“Hey, nit squat! These are written by norms to scare norms. And do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that’s what. You and me. We are the things that come to the norms in nightmares. The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choirboys — that’s you, Oly. And the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath — that’s me. And the rustling in the brush and the strange piping cries that chill the spine on a deserted road at twilight — that’s the twins singing practice scales while they look for berries.

“Don’t shake your head at me! These books teach me a lot. They don’t scare me because they’re about me. Turn the page.”

• • •

Maybe it’s mean to think, but the best time was before Chick was born. Things were simple. Papa would tell us about the hard times and explain that Arty had brought success to the show, and that Elly and Iphy had helped the business and, because he was a kind man, that even Oly had “done her part.” There was always work but it was good.

Mornings were our time. After lessons and before the stage shows began at 2 P.M. we were free creatures. Papa connected two chunks of tire tread with a nylon web, and attached web straps to fit over Arty’s fore and aft fins. With this rubber-tread armor on his chest and belly, Arty could slither almost anywhere.

Papa thought we should be mysteries that the townies couldn’t see without paying. But, if we were in the country, we were allowed to ramble as long as we stuck together.

“Get your asses the hell out of that tree!”

The farmer snapped his belt, doubled against itself, the strap wide enough to sting the air all the way up beside us among the Bings. Arty pressed his head back against the trunk and peered down at the man with the belt. He was old and strong and his eyes clicked on me as soon as I moved. I dodged out of sight and the belt snapped again. The leaves quivered above where Elly and Iphy were perched. They’d been bickering about how many cherries they could eat without sharing a bellyache and the runs. It must have been their high voices that drew this old codger. They were silent now, scared as usual.

“Come down now, or by all that crackles I’ll be up there after you!” He didn’t really sound mad. He’d stopped a ways out from the tree, too smart to come underneath where things might drop on him.

Arty’s mouth moved close to my ear. “You first, then Elly and Iphy. He thinks it’s kids.”

I crammed my voice into the top of my mouth and pitched it silly, “We’re coming, mister, don’t hurt us!” I took my dark glasses off and poked my head past the edge so he could see my ears sticking out from under my watch cap. I squinted so he couldn’t tell the color of my eyes. The farmer’s shrewd eyes tightened on me. His mouth quirked into one corner for a spit.

“I’ll hurt you in a minute.”

“We’ve got to help our brother, mister, just a second.”

Arty stretched his neck and clamped his jaw onto the last twig of cherries I held as I began climbing out of the tree crotch. “Elly,” I called deliberately, “Iphy, help me get Arty down.” A long leg appeared with a crumpled pink sock and a white sneaker. I peeked at the farmer. He cracked the folded belt against his high rubber boot. He was watching but he’d loosened a bit. The girls’ names did that, soft, old-fashioned things. And the “Don’t hurt us” had him disarmed.

“Psst!” Iphy was looking anxiously down at me while Elly maneuvered the descent. Arty muttered softly up at them, “Oly goes down first. You hand me down to her and then come.”

“We’re coming down, mister,” I called, and then slid away from Arty, down the trunk, gripping with toes and fingers in the deep cracks of the bark to slip down the easy slope of the tree on the side away from the brown-faced man with the belt. When I hit the ground I stepped back, bent forward, and rubbed my cap off against the trunk. I was reaching up for Arty when I heard the old bastard grunt. He’d seen my hump and my bald head. The twins were lowering Arty with three hands and hugging the tree with the fourth. Arty’s clothes hissed and snagged on the bark as he slid. I caught his hips on my chest and he slid down my belly to the ground. The twins bounced down the trunk, peering from both sides at the farmer. I turned to look at him. His eyes slit into suspicious surprise. Arty started humping toward him quickly. I jumped after. The twins caught up and Elly held my hand as we moved toward the farmer. He fell down on his butt in the grass. His belt rolled out flat beside him. We went past him fast and out of his cherry orchard.

Later in bed I decided Arty was smart. It was the order of our appearance that got the guy. Here he was cracking his belt and chuckling inside about another summer’s batch of kids in the cherry trees. He’d be rehearsing the story already, to tell his wife over chicken and biscuits in the kitchen, as he sat with his sleeves still damp from scrubbing and his hat off showing the pale stretch below his hair where the sunburn ended.

“Caught Jethro’s grandkids in the Bings today,” he’d say, “all up one tree, same as their daddy and his sis twenty years ago.” And he and his wife smiling at each other and her pouring the iced coffee and saying she hoped he hadn’t scared them too much. But while all this was readying behind his eyes we stepped out and dropped him. First me, twisted under my hump, the watch cap popping its bald shock, and then the 1.88 seconds for him to register the shape of Arturo and the way he moved, and, most important, which direction he was heading. If that had been all he might have taken a pitchfork to us. But then came the night-haired girls, milk-skinned, flower-eyed, and their two long legs in the slumping pink socks. The old man had thirty years of shooing kids from trees yanked out of him. I wondered if he would say anything at all about it to anybody.

Arty’s head jerked around and his eyes ripped at me. The shadows of sharp bone and muscle strained at his tight skin. Anger.

“Pick me up. Now. Pick me up.” He was heavy but I hoisted him from the middle until he leaned against me, upright, then crouched and hefted him onto my shoulder. His head and chest faced the rear, his round butt curving into my arms.

“I hate long grass. Hate it.” His voice came into my left ear as we moved slowly through the field. “You try humping along with your nose in the snakes and cow shit for a block or two.”

Arty always talked to the people. It was a central charm of his act that, though he looked and acted alien, part animal, part myth, he would prop his chin on the lip of the tank to talk “just like folks.” Only it wasn’t quite like folks.

At first, when Arty was tiny, Al was his enthusiastic master of ceremonies. Arty gradually worked his way in and took over the talking entirely. Before too long Al just stood out front and lured the crowd in.

Arty started with explanatory chat about his own physique but soon discovered the power of piffle and vapor. Greeting-card sentiments, intoned pretentiously in the stage-lit waver of the tank by such an intriguing little deviant, packed a surprising wallop.

Arty and Papa experimented. Arty’s show changed in small ways — a pink spotlight instead of red — or, occasionally, in big ways. It was always a sit-down show, a bench-and-bleacher act. The tank and Arty were the only focus. For a while Arty made a dry entrance. He came out on the platform above the tank before diving in. Then he decided that folks wanted to think that he lived in the water all the time — maybe even breathed water. After that he always made his first appearance in the water. He used a screen in the water for a while, hiding behind it and swimming out into the brightly visible part of the tank when Papa signaled. Arty got sick of waiting and had a big tube tunnel run up through the tank floor so he could wait dry in the back and make a dramatic swoosh entrance when the lights came up. Arty spewing upward in a burst of luminescent bubbles with a thrumming fanfare of recorded music. It got the crowd going.

Eventually Arty grew bored with the Gilled Illusion of Aqua Boy, and in his Arturan phase enjoyed parading before his throng (at a distance, in a golf cart) on dry land, but he stuck to the submariner identity for a long time.

As he bitterly pointed out, he wasn’t extravagant enough looking to hold a crowd for twenty minutes (the length of the show in those early days) by just lolling around and letting them gawk. He had to do something. The seal tricks of his infancy soon palled on him. Swimming was useful. The bright tank in the dim tent was a focus. The water and his floating form were soothing, hypnotic. People stared at the tank and his undulating figure as they would at a bright fire. The tank made him exotic but safe. “They can relax,” Arty theorized, “because they know I’m not going to jump up into their laps.” (Arty tended to be snide about laps, not having one of his own.)

“It’s a fiendish waste to get ’em into a beautiful sucker zone of mind and then not do anything with them,” Arty would lament. So he learned to talk. He recited rhymes, quoted the more saccharine philosophers, commented on human nature. The standard approach, and the line Papa always wanted Arty to take, was jokes, comedy, a creaking stand-up patter that would seem unique coming from the Aqua Boy. But Arty wouldn’t go for it. “I don’t want those scumbags laughing at me,” he’d snarl. “I want them amazed at me, maybe scared of me, but I won’t let them laugh. No. Oh, a little chuckle because I’m witty, sure. But not a running line.”

Arty’s few jokes, the brief crackling relief from a mystic format, were always dry and biting and directed outward, away from himself.

The misty cauldron of the act was a constant. “They want to be amazed and scared. That’s why they’re here,” Arty said.

Gradually, inevitably, he discovered the Oracle. “The guy who asks the question and thinks he hears an answer is the guy who makes an Oracle.” He’d been reading books on Oriental philosophy and was spouting it solemnly over the lip of the tank one day when a pale woman on the bleachers stood up and asked him whether her fifteen-year-old son, who had run away months before, was alive or dead.

Without thinking at all, without missing a beat, he whipped out, “Weeping at night alone and yearning for you, working like a man in daylight, silently.” She burst out bawling and hollering, “Bless you, thank you, bless you, thank you,” as she crawled out over a row of knees and left snorking into her hanky.

She must have told her friends because the next two shows were pimpled with shouted questions from the bleachers and Arty’s vague, impromptu answers.

He had the redhead who sold the tickets hand out three-by-five cards for people to write questions on. The act took on a distinct odor of palm reading and advice to the love-or-otherwise-lorn. Papa had thousands of “Ask Aqua Boy” posters printed and slathered up everywhere we went.

I never knew the twins very well. Maybe Arty was right in claiming I was jealous of them. They were too charming. The whole crew loved them. The norm crowds loved them. In towns we passed through regularly pairs of young girls would come to the show dressed in a single long skirt in imitation of the twins. Arty wasn’t delighted with their popularity either, of course. But he had a way of splitting them. To me they were inaccessible. They didn’t need me to do anything for them. Iphy was always kind to me. She was kind to everybody. But Elly was careful to keep me in my place. They were self-sufficient. They needed only each other. And Elly, rest her hard and toothy soul, ruled their body.

I remember Lil with a bundle of costumes in one arm and a bag of popping corn in the other as she stood rigid in the sawdust of the midway and lectured me sternly: “We use the plural form, Olympia, whenever we refer to Electra and Iphigenia. We do not say ‘Where is Elly and Iphy?’ We say ‘Where are Elly and Iphy?’ ”

If you stood facing the twins, Elly was on your left and Iphy on your right. Elly was right-handed and Iphy was left-handed. But Iphy was the right leg and Elly was the left leg. If you pulled Elly’s hair, Iphy yelped too. If you kissed Iphy’s cheek, Elly smiled. If Elly burnt her hand on the popcorn machine, Iphy cried also and couldn’t sleep that night from the pain. They ran and climbed and danced gracefully. They had separate hearts but a meshing bloodstream; separate stomachs but a common intestine. They had one liver and one set of kidneys. They had two brains and a nervous system that was peculiarly connected and unexpectedly separate. Between them they ate a small fraction more than one norm kid their size.

Jonathan Tomaini, the greasy-haired music-school graduate who became their piano teacher when they had gone past Lily, claimed that Iphy was all melody and Elly was rhythm exclusively. They were both sopranos.

Arty speculated that their two brains functioned as right and left lobes of a single brain.

Elly punished Iphy by eating food that disagreed with them. Iphy would sink into depressed silence, eating nothing. Elly’s favorite trick was cheese. Iphy hated constipation like cancer.

Elly varied the treatment by gorging on chocolate, even though she didn’t really like chocolate and it made her chin break out in zits. Pimples were very obvious on her milky skin. Iphy loved chocolate and never ate it for fear of pimples. Elly’s eating the stuff never gave Iphy pimples. The punishment was that Iphy had to sleep next to Elly’s pimples, had to live within inches of the molten eruptions.

Iphy felt sorry for everybody who wasn’t a twin. Elly despised me.

When Chick came along, both twins adored him. He was such a meek little feather that he worshiped them. Lil and Al were just loved. But Arty was different. He was separate. He fascinated Iphy and he terrified Elly. Elly’s harshness flared against anyone who might distract Iphy’s attention from her. The rest of us were just fantasy opposition. Arty was dangerous. He flirted with Iphy. He toyed with her.

Elly hated him. She acted, sometimes, as though Arty could tear Iphy away from her.

The Binewski family shrine was a fifty-foot trailer with a door at each end and a one-dollar admission price. The sign over the entrance said “Mutant Mystery” and, in smaller letters, “A Museum of Nature’s Innovative Art.” We called it “the Chute.” Like everything else in the Fabulon, the Chute grew and changed over the years. But the Chute had started with six clear-glass twenty-gallon jars, and those jars — each lit by hidden yellow beams and equipped with its own explanatory, push-button voice tape — were always the core.

The Chute was Crystal Lil’s idea, and she supervised it. She visited the Chute every day before the gates opened and polished the jars lovingly with glass cleaner. Later, when Al wanted to put the stuffed animals in, he had to clear it with Crystal Lil. She insisted on the maze at the entrance so that the six jars remained the climax of the walk through.

The stuffed animals in their lit glass windows were the usual humdrum collection of two-headed calves, six-legged chickens, and the mounted skeleton of a three-tailed cat. The only live exhibit was a trio of featherless hens that Al picked up from the chicken rancher who had bred them to save plucking costs on his fryers. He couldn’t sell them because customers were used to the pimply “chicken skin” of birds that had their feathers yanked. They didn’t trust the smooth-skinned look. These three were cheerful, baggy-fleshed creatures with floppy combs and wattles. They lived for two years before Lil found them, heaped dead in a corner of their cage, done in overnight by some microscopic enemy of innovation. Al had them stuffed and they stayed on in the same cage. One bent over, with head extended as though about to peck at the straw that would never again need changing. One stood alert, with its round yellow eye cocked at the passersby and its right foot curled as though in the act of stepping forward. The last sat cozily in a corner with one wing spread and its head tucked underneath, apparently looking for lice.

Lily would take her pills after breakfast and then go over to the Chute with her cleaning gear. She left the dark green floors and walls to the power-vacuum crew but the glass she did herself. Sometimes I would help, sometimes the twins. Mostly Lily did it herself. She would do a quick, decent job on all the glass windows in the maze, but her true purpose was her visit to the “kids” as she called them. The jars were Al’s failures.

“And mine,” Lil would always add. She would spray the big jars and polish them. She would talk softly, all the while, to the things floating in the jars or to whoever was with her. She remembered the drug recipe Al had prescribed for her pregnancy with each one, and reminisced about the births.

There were four who had been born dead: Clifford, Maple, Janus, and the Fist. “We always say Arty is our firstborn but actually Janus was the first,” Lil would say as she peered into the fluid that filled up the jar, examining the small huddled figure that floated upright inside.

Janus was always my favorite. He had a down of dark hair curling on his tiny scalp and a sweet sleeping face. His other head emerged on a short neck at the base of his spine, equally round and perfect, with matching hair. This rear brother squinted in perpetual surprise at the tiny buttocks under its nose. The four sets of minuscule eyelashes fascinated me and I wondered how the two would have gotten along if Janus had lived. Would they have bickered like Elly and Iphy? They could never have seen each other except sideways in a mirror. Probably the top head would have controlled everything and made his poor little butt-brother miserable.

Lil always fussed over Maple, who looked like a big rumpled sponge. Maple had two eyes but they didn’t relate to each other. Lil said Maple had no bones. She and Al had decided Maple was female because they couldn’t find a penis. Lil also clucked and sighed over Clifford, who looked like a lasagna pan full of exposed organs with a monkey head attached. The twins and I called Clifford “the Tray” when Mama wasn’t around.

The Fist wasn’t full term but it was obvious where the name had come from. “I only carried the Fist for five months,” Lil said, and that was her excuse for spending a shade less time on his jar.

Apple and Leona were the two who had lived long enough to die outside Lily’s belly. Apple was big but dull. She looked like a Tibetan cherub. Her coarse black hair grew close to her rumpled eyes. I myself could dimly remember her sleeping in the top drawer of Lil’s big bureau. She never moved anything but her lips, her eyelids, and her bowels. Her eyeballs were still pointing in vaguely different directions. Lil had fed her from a bottle and changed her, washing her limp body three or four times a day. Lil would talk to Apple and rub her and move things in front of her eyes, but there was never any response. Apple grew fat and there was a smell of old urine around her and the drawer. She was two years old when she died. A pillow fell on her face.

Arty always claimed that Al did it. Elly and Iphy would squeal when he said that, and I would shake my head and change the subject, but we never asked Lil and we never brought it up in front of Al.

Leona was the last jar before the exit and had four spotlights focused to pierce the formaldehyde in which she drifted. Lil would linger over the jar and once or twice I saw her cry as she pressed her forehead against the glass and crooned. “We had such hopes for her,” she would sigh. Leona’s jar was labeled “The Lizard Girl” and she looked the part. Her head was long from front to back and the forehead was compressed and flattened over small features that collapsed into her long throat with no chin to disturb the line. She had a big fleshy tail, as thick as a leg where it sprouted from her spine, but then tapering to a point. There was a faint greenish sheen to her skin but I suspected that Arty was right in claiming that Al had painted it on after Leona died.

“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 clear. 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. Assassin — 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 prestitched 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 pickup’s 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 windshield. The bed of the pickup was obviously empty. Snotty old cocksucker. 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 assistant 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 scrape 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 scummy 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 shiny 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 pushing him and he liked having me do it. He said it made him feel royal. Elly and Iphy each slung an arm over the other’s 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 muffled 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, scraping on the hot pavement, my hump burning. Lil’s voice flipped up in a quick shriek. I bumped 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 butt. 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 prongs 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 shirt 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 flashing 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 shell. 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 glass 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 partition. 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 glass 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 glasses 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 shiny 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, pushing 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 hoarded 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 buttock 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 buttocks 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 Al’s. 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 assume 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.

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. 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 suède arms reaching past the elbows, with three cunning buttons 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 Whore 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.

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 windshield 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 pass 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 cockpit, 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 passenger 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 shining 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.

Papa said, “Hand it to me, Lily,” as he stepped down to the pavement and turned around to see, as Arty saw, and I saw, Lily tilting oddly, her head against the door frame, her robe spreading open around her, her whipped-cream hair jerking out in thick snakes that tried to escape from her head in all directions. We heard the ping of hairpins hitting the window, the floor, the wall, and Mama’s gasp and muffled shriek as she lifted off the floor and floated, lying on the air while her thick-strapped brassière stretched away from her with an ugly, ripping sound, and her feet, in pale lavender socks, stretched wobbling toward the light in the ceiling, and her hair fell in coils over her face. “Mama! Lil! Mama!” we all howled, as her huge blue-veined breasts burst through the brassière and she dove into the cardboard box, falling with her breasts in the box as her arms waved and her head lifted against the pull from the box and her white legs twitched and crawled on the floor beneath the rucked and flapping robe and one lavender sock rumpled its way off her foot.

Then Al was on his knees in the doorway, stroking her head and saying, “Sweet shit, Lily,” through her soft sobbing. Arty grunted, his head craned around the back of the seat. His eyes overran his wide face. I sat on the floor against the cupboard with my mouth and eyes open, and Elly and Iphy sat up in their bunk with bewildered eyes and wide befuddled mouths saying, “Mama,” in a drawn-out complaint. A painful, thin whine came out of my own nose and only one voice was silent, only one of all the Binewskis was not adding to the noise, and that was the paper-padded morsel in the box, who was invisible except for one tiny hand opening and closing in a tangled strand of Lil’s white hair. The baby was not crying anymore. When, for an instant, we were all silent together, we could hear the chuckling smack of his lips at the bruised brown nipple.

It was a minute or two before Lily could sneak an arm into the box and lift the baby up to her as she collapsed onto the floor, and sat with her feet mixing with my feet. One fat arm and the fuzzy knot of head buried in her breast were all that showed of the baby outside his cone of blanket. Al crawled in and sat on the floor beside her.

“What happened?” he asked.

She looked at him with her eyes so wide open that the whites showed all the way around her wobbling blue irises. She laughed shakily. “I guess he wanted to nurse.” She looked down at the little rumpled face and Al stared at a hairpin on the floor in front of him.

The twins, groggy in their bunk, and Arty with his chin propped on the back of his seat, and I, slumped in the corner, sat gawking as Mama’s tired face slowly developed a swelling over her right eyebrow where she’d banged her head on the wall when she dove into the box. She shifted slightly to get more comfortable and her robe slid away from her knees. They were scraped raw, with beads of blood swelling out through the pores.

“Are you saying,” Al stretched out a hand and carefully picked up the hairpin, “that the baby did that? Hoisted you up like that?”

Mama’s eyes snapped with anger. “I told you he was hungry!”

The tiny fist, like a spider on a sand dune, clenched and opened and clenched against Mama’s breast. The suckling sound went on.

Papa was staring at that hand. His lower jaw looked oddly soft and slack beneath his mustache. He got slowly up on his knees and picked up two more hairpins. He found another pin on the windowsill and stood up, looking at the hairpins in his hand. Mama concentrated on the small face at her breast. She seemed calm, forgetful of the tears and the ragged, dangling remains of the brassière.

“Well,” Papa cleared his throat, “we need to think a little bit, Lily. I’m going to drive on up the road. We’ll find a rest stop and pull over for the night.” Mama nodded peaceably.

The twins went back to sleep and I crawled into my cupboard and Arty humped his way into his bunk and Mama and the baby went back into the bedroom. Al drove in the dark until he came to a pulloff surrounded by high black firs. Arty and I stayed awake for a long time listening to Papa and Mama in their bedroom. Papa cleaned and dressed Mama’s knees and put a cold pack on her thick blue eyebrow bruise. He put the sleeping baby into the crib beside their big bed, and they sat watching together and saw the thin flannel blanket curl slowly up in a twisted bundle and then push toward the headboard of the crib, where it lay twitching and scrubbing back and forth all by itself while the baby slept. Arty and I both heard Papa say, “He moves things. He moves things.” We heard Mama start to cry again softly when Papa said, “He’s a keeper, darling. He’s the finest thing we’ve done! He’s fantastic!”

Things were quiet after that, except for what the dark trees were doing among themselves outside. “Poor Arty,” I thought. “He’ll be miserable.”

We stopped on an edgeless plateau that stretched to nothing on all sides, making the eye desperate, shriveling the brain to dry hopelessness between the dreary sheets of sky and ground. Papa climbed out of the driver’s seat, threw back the side door, and jumped down. Mama was in the bedroom with the door closed, still sleeping. Elly and Iphy were huddled on their neat bunk with a puzzle. I was trying to read over Arty’s shoulder as I turned pages for him. None of us looked out the windows. We all hated the bleak, flat stretches. Papa had left the door propped open and a rip of wind twisted into the van, missing our pages and carrying dust and the rough sting of sage with it. Papa was out there, walking in the desert.

He’d been silent all morning, and excited. He wouldn’t let any of us sit up front with him. We’d squared away our beds and the twins put out cold cereal for breakfast and handed a mug of coffee up to Papa. Arty had been quiet too.

Papa’s boots crunched on the gravel outside and his head came through the open door.

“Step out here, dreamlets,” he said, then disappeared. None of us wanted to get out into that wind but we went, silently. Arty came last and just slid down onto the step and lay there blinking at the grit in the air. The twins leaned on the van and I stood near them watching Papa. He paced in front of us. Just a few steps in each direction and then back. The wind thumped and whacked at his jacket flaps and lifted his black hair against the grain. He looked away most of the time, out over the plain at the waving stubs of brush and broom. When he glanced at us, between phrases, his eyes were dangerous. We listened gravely.

“Your mama and I have decided to keep the new baby.”

Each of us, he said, was special and unique and this baby looked like a norm but had something special too. He could move things with his mind.

“Telekinetic,” said Arty flatly.

Yes, telekinetic, Papa said. And he explained that it was a thing he didn’t know about, that none of us knew about, and that we’d have to be very careful for a while until we figured out how to deal with it and what it was good for.

“We’ll join up with the show by morning and discuss the situation with Horst. Horst is a trainer and training is what we need. Horst can also keep his trap shut. Now here’s the important thing.” And he said we were to act as though he were just a norm baby, even with people in the show who we liked and trusted.

“The army will want him,” said Arty.

“Well, they aren’t going to get him,” said Papa.

We all had to stick together like troopers, said Papa, and the baby’s name was to be Fortunato, which means Lucky.

Though his body did only the normal cherubic things, Fortunato’s effect on the environment at the age of three weeks was already far beyond that of a hyperactive and malicious ten-year-old. He had to be confined to the cubicle we called our parents’ bedroom. Mama moved everything breakable, shreddable, or toxic out of her room so the baby wouldn’t destroy it or himself. Our tidy van became a heaped bunker. Platoons of makeup bottles and boot-polish cans stuffed the cupboards. All the sequined clothing hung over the twins’ bunk. Lamps, clocks, and framed photos littered Arty’s unmade bed. Papa’s medical magazines and books were stacked everywhere. Mama’s sewing machine moved under the sink with me. I slept with my knees touching my chin.

Six of us could live comfortably in the thirty-eight-by-ten-foot van only by dint of religious housekeeping. The mess wore us down. We hated it. Obviously training had to begin immediately for this seventh member of the family.

With some well-placed hints from big brother Arturo, my ingenious father hit upon the expedient of glycerin and black tape for wiring Fortunato’s little buttocks to a miniature electric train transformer and a battery pack. Whenever Fortunato broke dishes or pulled hair or lifted Lil in the air and held her against the ceiling, Papa would gently turn on the power. In a matter of days, however, the precocious Chick, as we called him, learned to unplug the transformer and whip Papa’s curly pate with the cord.

Deprivation techniques were substituted, Clyde Beatty style, but Fortunato had to sleep in a heavy wire cage during that experiment because, when Lil refused to nurse him, he would simply yank her toward him and reenact his debut performance.

The raw potential of Fortunato’s abilities spurred my parents to research. By the time Chick was four months old. Al introduced the behavioral principles of B. F. Skinner and reinforcement theory successfully replaced deprivation.

Mama finally dared to bring him out of the Chick-proof bedroom. It was several weeks more before she could actually step out of the van with the baby in her arms and walk through the camp without his moving every bright-colored thing in sight.

7. Green — as in Arsenic, Tarnished Spoons, and Gas-Chamber Doors

The real trouble, as usual, was Arty. He’d always been jealous. He didn’t mind me so much because money was the gauge of his envy and I didn’t make any.

The twins, however, drove him wild. After every show he would hook his chin over the edge of his tank, spraying me with the overflow, to demand the number of tickets sold at the gate. “How many?” he’d holler. But it didn’t matter — thirty in Oak Grove, three hundred in Phoenix, a thousand in Kansas City. What he really wanted to know was how he had done compared to the twins. If they had as many or more in their audience he was furious.

Sometimes in those days he would flash to the bottom of the tank and sulk, holding his breath for incredible minutes, eyes bulging outside the sockets so they hid the lids entirely.

When I was five and first took over the duty of helping him after his shows, he terrified me with this tactic. He muttered, “I’ll die. I might as well,” and I wailed and hopped in agony as he sank, staring through the glass.

I ran shrieking to Papa. He clapped his cheek and bellowed at me not to humor Arty when he was “playing prima donna!”

I ran back dithering, chewing my hands in fright, until Arty finally allowed himself to roll slowly over and drift, belly up, toward the surface, where my short arms could reach him with the crook and tow him to the side. I patted and smoothed his water-swollen scalp and kissed his cheeks and nose and ears, weeping and begging him not to be dead because I, useless though I was, loved him. At last he blinked and sighed and let his breathing become visible and growled for his towel.

All this over a few tickets one way or another when he was ten years old. I knew he wouldn’t take to the Chick.

Nearly dawn. The show was closed down. Lil and Papa were asleep. The twins were snugged in their bunk snoring. Fortunato, the Chick, lay silent in his crib with the blanket twitching around him in his dreams. But at this end of the van twelve-year-old Arty sat propped against the table looking over the ticket-count sheets. I crouched on the floor with my back to the cupboard doors. If he was angry I would pop open one of the doors and creep inside bawling, shut myself into the blackness and pull my cap down over my eyes so I could cry into the wool, and pull Lil’s old sweaters over me. He shook his head. The yellow light gleamed on his skull and I began to sniffle a little. He threw a look at me — sharp — I gulped down my snot and grinned at him feebly. He turned back to the ticket sheets. His voice started slow and soft.

“Now, you know very well what I’m seeing here.” He wasn’t looking at me but I nodded, ready to cry. He was looking at the papers in a sad, doubtful way. His voice dripped regret. “Nobody expects you to bring in the kind of money that I do.” I shook my head. That would be absurd. “Or even,” he pursed his mouth, “what the twins manage.” I put my eyes down onto my knees and sighed, my whole worthless body quivering. “It isn’t your fault that you’re so ordinary. Papa accepts the responsibility for that.” The moment of silence told me that he was looking at me. I could feel his eyes on my hump.

As I cried he pointed out the discrepancies. When I did the talking for his show the tickets were 15 to 50 percent less than when Al did it. We both knew that Al only let me do it when we were in Podunk burnt-out towns for a quick stopover and that the sales were down all through the midway in those places. Still, there was some ghastly truth in Arty’s needling. Some probing of my guilt that was right no matter how he lied about it.

Then he would threaten me with the “institution,” which was the place that I would be sent to if I didn’t shape up. “No matter how generous and kind Papa and Lil are — they wouldn’t have any choice,” he would say. His sympathy and understanding washed around me with razors caught in the flow. Arty’s depiction of the “institution” scared me more than death or snakes. The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. The word alone would set my chin trembling. I would beg and grieve and he would allow that I deserved another chance.

“We don’t have to keep new kids,” Arty sneered. “Sometimes we don’t keep ’em and sometimes they don’t last.” He was in his mean lecturing mood, twisting his head to look at me over the back of his chair as I pushed him through the grey dawn to visit the dog act. “You don’t know about the ones before you,” he warned. “The ones that died. Papa and Mama don’t talk about them, but I remember.”

“I help Mama with the jars in the Chute.” I grunted, shoving hard to force the chair wheels through the sawdust. Arty snorted and shook his head. “There were three before me and two more before the twins. There was another one just before you. That’s why Papa let her keep you, because the other one died just before. It gets her down. You wouldn’t have been a keeper if the other one had lived. She gets low when she loses one and it bothers Papa to see her like that.”

He was trying to make me cry but I didn’t care. I was happy to have him talking to me. He’d been cranky and sullen for a long time. He went about his work, did his shows, ate, slept, read books, and didn’t talk much except when he was laying weasel trails for Mama and Papa.

“Which one was it? Just before me?”

Arty rolled his eyes and dropped his voice. “Leona.” He drew it out like a moan, watching me. I ducked my head and pushed his chair. Leona with the alligator tail would definitely have been a keeper. Leona would have had her own show tent and glow-in-the-dark posters in silver and green. Arty mused wistfully, “Papa was very excited about Leona. He thought about showing her in a tank. He was hoping she’d stay hairless but he could have depilated her if she’d started sprouting. He even thought about putting her in with me. Papa saw the billing as tadpoles. Different stages of tadpoles.”

He was light and airy about it. I stopped pushing and walked around to face him for a minute. He was nodding and blinking, pretending nostalgia for poor Leona.

“That must have scared you, Arty.” I grinned.

A slow smile spread gradually across his rubbery mug. He wriggled his forehead at me, for all the world like Papa dancing his eyebrows. “Poor Leona. She just went to sleep one night and never woke up. Mama was just about crazy when she found her the next morning.” Arty’s round, wide head did its snake dance, turning on his neck in mock grief, and I knew the taut slide of his skin over tendon and meat, and loved the shadow dip of his bones underneath and the wide smooth roll of his lips.

What I felt was fear. Arty saw it in my face and slid into his whip-master act fast. “Onward, Jeeves,” he snapped. “To the dogs!” I scuttled back to push, wading through the sawdust and keeping my butt muscles clenched to avoid filling my pants.

“Is it O.K. if me and Arty play with Skeet?” I asked. The dog reek from the trailer door might have been Mrs. Minuti’s breath. She swallowed and tried to focus through her hangover. Her hair was short and spiky with a clot of last night’s supper caught above her ear. She pulled her nightgown out from her chest and belched softly. “Sure,” she nodded. She didn’t complain about the hour or the fact that Skeet was her star poodle because we were the boss’s kids and dog trainers are easy to come by. She disappeared inside the trailer and Arty stared tensely at the open door. The dog came scratching around the doorway and jumped down beside me, with his long leash trailing up to Mrs. Minuti’s shaking hand. She gave me the leash and told me not to let him wander loose.

I hooked the leash on a back post of Arty’s chair and wheeled him toward a hard-packed grassless stretch behind the booths. The dog bounced along nosing everything, pissing ten times in two minutes.

By the time we got to the clear spot the dog seemed to have calmed down a little. “You just stay close and be quiet,” Arty told me. I sat down to watch. Arty called the poodle to him and the silly dog put a paw up on Arty’s chair and cocked its ears at him, wagging the pompom on the end of its skinny tail.

Arty hadn’t explained what he had in mind. I sneered, “Arty the wild-beast trainer,” to myself. On the other side of the booths the camp was just beginning to wake up. An occasional trailer door slammed. A voice or two sounded faintly. A mechanic turned over one of the ride engines and let it sputter to death.

Arty looked the dog in the eye. The dog sat, obediently alert, directly in front of Arty, watching his face. Arty froze with his eyes open, focused on the dog, but his face sleep-smooth, expressionless. At first the dog was happy as an idiot — short confidential flips of tail against ground, a swiveling of sharp ears, tongue-dripping grin. Gradually the dog lost confidence, licking its chops and closing its mouth, tilting those ears questioningly forward at Arty. An anxious burst of tail rapping. Then Skeet shoved his nose forward, sniffing worriedly at Arty, letting a thin, high whine out through his nose, skootching his ass nervously against the dirt. Arty sat with his fins curled and still, his face thrust slightly forward and down. The poodle didn’t dare look away from Arty’s face but began to lick his own nose repeatedly, stand up, then sit down fast with his tail under him, letting his ears droop. Finally, whining, ears flattened, head down and wobbling moron eyes wincing at Arty, the dog slid to the side with a yelp as though he’d been kicked.

Arty threw himself against the back of his chair, breathing deeply with his eyes closed. Skeet backed to the end of his leash and did his best to slink out of his collar. Arty sat back up and looked around for the dog.

“Skeet! Come here!” he ordered. The dog bolted to the end of the leash, snapping himself into the air. He flopped onto his back and lay there, belly up, and began to yowl. Arty laughed a little to himself and said we could take him back. “I can practice my hate thoughts on the norms in the midway, too,” he said.

Arty never bad-mouthed Chick openly. Anything that obvious would have shocked Papa and Mama into the blue zone. But I knew. I was the one who did the most for Arty. I spent a lot of time with him and a lot of time thinking about him. I loved him.

Privately I thought that Mama and Papa loved him only because they didn’t know him. Iphy loved him because he wanted her to and she couldn’t help it. Elly knew him and didn’t love him at all. She was afraid of him and hated him because she could see what he was like. I was the only one who knew his dark, bitter meanness and his jagged, rippling jealousy, and his sour yearnings, and still loved him. I also knew how breakable he was. He didn’t care if I knew. He didn’t care if I loved him. He knew I’d serve him absolutely even if he hurt me. And I was not a rival to him. I didn’t have an act of my own. I drew the crowds to him rather than to myself.

I was supposed to listen for Chick. He was asleep on Mama’s bed and I was supposed to stay inside and wait for his waking squeak. I would change his diaper and give him some apple juice and play with him until Mama was finished with the twins’ piano lesson.

But the sky was blade-blue, the windows were open, and the redheads were spinning tales just outside. I could hear them laughing. They were lying on blankets in the sun, drinking soda and slathering themselves with oil. The whiff of coconut and lanolin came drifting in through the window.

I was supposed to sit inside by myself and read but Peggy’s soft voice began a story, and the other redheads quieted to listen. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I went out through the screen door and around the van to flop on the grass beside the blankets. With the window open I thought I’d hear Chick as soon as he woke. I picked and chewed grass stems as Peggy talked.

It was about a very young boy, fourteen or so, and Peggy claimed it was true. He died for love, she said. His family was poor. He was cut out for heavy work and bad pay, but he was a sweet kid, and he loved a cheerleader in his school. She wouldn’t even look at him, of course. Her life was different. But then she got sick and the doctors said it was her heart. She would die, they said, unless she could get a new one. The word went around the school that she was waiting for a donor. The boy was terribly sad for a while, but then he told his mother that he was going to die and give his heart to the girl. His mother thought this was just his sweetness talking. He was healthy. But a few days later he dropped dead. Instantly. A brain hemorrhage, they said. Surprisingly, the doctors found that his bits actually were compatible to the cheerleader’s, and they transplanted his fresh heart into her. It worked. Now she dances and cheers again with the poor boy’s heart.

The redheads were impressed. Vicki said it would be weird to feel your life pumping through this heart that had loved you. Lisa wondered if the cheerleader would be haunted.

“He was probably worth three of her,” said Mollie. “A heart like that.”

Then from the bedroom of the van just behind me came a single loud slam like a twelve-pound hammer on sheet steel. In the fading echo Chick was screaming.

I was halfway around to the screen door before the redheads even started telling me that my baby brother must have fallen out of bed. Peggy and Mollie were up, following me. By raw luck the screen door latched behind me as I whipped through.

Chick was on the bed, purple-faced and howling. I jumped up beside him and pulled him into my arms. He was shaking and gasping between shrieks. He couldn’t make so much noise if there was anything stuck in his throat. I felt for his diaper pins. Were they sticking him? Then I saw Arty.

He was crumpled face down on the floor in the narrow crack between the bed and the wall. He wasn’t moving.

“Oly, is the baby all right?” Mollie was rattling the screen door. “Oly?”

Chick subsided to unhappy burbles and hiccups, and I slid him back onto the blanket. “Arty?” I whispered. No answer. No movement. At the foot of the bed lay a big rumpled pillow with a grey spot of dampness in its creased middle. The pillow had been tidy at the head of the bed the last time I’d peeked in. Chick could have moved it, but Arty’s talk about Leona the Lizard Girl hit me again. I knew. Arty had tried to smother the Chick.

I hung over the bedside, reaching to touch him. “Arty?” His head was heavy, his fins limp.

Mama and Papa mustn’t find out. I jumped down, grabbed Arty by the rear fins, and pulled him back down the carpeted ravine to the bedroom door, and out into the living section of the van.

“Oly? Are you O.K., honey?” Peggy was at the screen door. “Is the baby O.K.?” Mollie called.

Chick was hiccuping in the bedroom. He sobbed occasionally. Arty was very still. I turned his head to the side so I could see his face. His eyes were closed. A big patch on his forehead was beginning to turn blue. I took a deep breath and ran to the door. The redheads stared in at me. “I think Chick’s O.K.… But Arty …” I lifted the latch and began to cry.

I huddled on Mama’s bed with Chick during the uproar, and heard the grownups decide that Arty had climbed up on the kitchen counter and fallen off onto his head. He was still unconscious when Mama rushed him off to Papa’s infirmary trailer.

Chick sat up beside me, his fuzzy hair frowzled, and patted my cheeks with his tiny hands. He ran his fingers into my nostrils and mouth until I smiled, painfully. Then he smiled too, with his few teeth all showing in his floppy grin.

Above us on the painted metal wall was a shallow dent the size of a dinner plate.

“Oh, Chick,” I said.

The twins marched in and commandeered the baby. “If you’d been inside where you were supposed to be,” said Elly, “this wouldn’t have happened.”

“You could have helped Arty get what he was looking for,” said Iphy.

I hugged my knees and stared numbly at them. The rat was awake in my belly.

They took Chick out to the dining booth to play with him and I lay there on Mama’s big lavender bed and thought about Arty coming in through the screen door and finding nobody and humping his way back to the bedroom and seeing Chick asleep on the bed. I saw him push his way carefully up to the pillows and grapple one onto the baby’s sleeping face, Arty leaning on it with his whole weight. So Chick woke up and threw Arty just as he’d throw a toy or a chunk of banana. Without touching him.

Mama stayed at the infirmary with Arty but Papa came back with the news.

“The poor little apple batted awake and says, ‘Mama, Papa,’ first thing. I whooped and your mama stopped crying. He couldn’t remember a thing about it. He’s got a concussion and a dog hair of a skull fracture, but praise be, he’ll be right in no time.”

Elly shrugged. Iphy clapped her hands. “I’m so glad.”

I laced my fingers over my pointed chest and closed my eyes, breathing in gratitude that I hadn’t got him killed and that he’d been clearheaded enough to “forget” what had happened.

We fed Chick from a bottle until Mama and Arty came home the next afternoon. He was good about it. But when Mama noticed the dent in the wall a few days later I told her that Chick had thrown his bottle at it once while she was gone. She tsked but didn’t scold him. It was too late, she said. “You have to ‘No’ him just when he’s done it. He wouldn’t know why I was fussing at him now.”

Arty lay on his bunk in the middle of everything and we danced to his tune. The twins waited on him and I helped him to the toilet, and Mama spent all her time thinking of delicate things for him to eat. He was happy. He was polite. He smiled and laughed at the jokes we made to amuse him.

He couldn’t read for a while. His eyes wobbled and trying to focus gave him headaches. I read to him in my slow, stumbling way and he corrected and scolded and made me go on for hours. By the time he could read for himself again, I could read almost anything, though my pronunciation was still shaky on words I didn’t know.

Mama did her duty by Chick but fussed over Arty. For days Chick barely appeared outside the bedroom. Then Mama brought him out and tucked him in beside Arty “to watch while Mama makes supper for her beautiful boys,” as she put it. I felt my stomach claw its way into my throat, but Chick snuggled up to Arty happily and played with his fin. Arty blinked for a second and then went along with it.

I secretly swore to make Arty the king of the universe so he wouldn’t be jealous of Chick.

Arty’s big tent stayed folded on the trucks through a dozen moves. It cut into our take dramatically. Papa tried to keep Arty from knowing how much money we were losing with him out sick. When Papa sat late in the dining booth doing the books, Arty would ask, “How’s it going?” and Papa would sigh and say, “Fine, boychik. Don’t you worry your poor busted noggin about it.” This put Arty into a foul mood for several days. Finally one night, late, he called out from his bunk, “I guess the show doesn’t need me, Papa. You’d do fine with just the twins if I died.” Then Papa went and scooped him up and took him to the table and showed him how the gross had slipped. Arty was happy again and started going over the accounts with Papa.

It was more than a month before he tried going back into the tank at all. His first test trip into the water was a shock. Papa and I leaned on the tank to watch as he flipped down in his usual straight-to-the-bottom flow. He burst through the surface seconds later, gasping. “It hurts!” he puffed. “And I can’t hold my breath.”

Papa was grim and silent as he carried Arty back to our van. I knew he was wondering what would happen if Arty couldn’t dive anymore. That afternoon he got a set of weights and a bench from the storage truck, remnants of an old strongman act. He set up a gym on the stage behind Arty’s tank. Arty began working out and was back in the water within the week. Not long afterward, Arturo the Aqua Boy was back in lights and packing them in.

8. Educating the Chick

A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.

I sat on the counter of the Marvelous Marv booth and kicked my feet slowly. No drips came through the green awning but the air was so full of water that it congealed on my face and clothes whenever I moved. I was watching the summer geek boy, a blond Jeff from some college in the far Northeast, as he leaned on the snack-wagon counter across the way and flirted with the red-haired girl running the popcorn machine.

Behind me in the Marv booth, Papa Al and Horst sat facing each other on camp stools with the checkerboard between them. Marvelous Marv had the afternoon off and Horst’s cats were fussing and coughing at the damp. The cats’ voices roared around their big steel trailer but came echoing dimly through the rain.

Al’s cigar butt arced out over the counter past my elbow, spitting red as it died in a puddle.

“Long as you’re playing with your boots instead of your brains,” drawled Horst, “why don’t we make this next game for my new tiger cub that I’m going to pick up in New Orleans? I win, you buy me that cub for my birthday.”

I could hear Papa’s match scraping the stool leg, then the hiss and a silence that produced a reek of green tobacco from his new cigar.

“Hell, Horst. I’ve already gifted your birthdays for the next ninety years.”

The click of the checkers being laid out for the new game sounded on top of the thin tinkle of the piano from the twins’ practice session in the stage tent. I tried to hear Lil’s voice counting shrilly over the treble but the rain didn’t carry it.

“That baby’s birthday is coming up,” said Horst.

“Almost three,” grunted Papa, “and I’m still boggled. Keep thinking of great things for him to do and then realizing we can’t have it. Begin to think maybe this little guy is too much for me to handle.”

“Nice temper that child has,” Horst’s careful voice, not pushing. “Wished I had a cat as willing and sweet as that child. Wants to please.”

“All my kids are sweet and willing! Show me a family of troopers anywhere to beat them!” Al wasn’t really angry, just doing his duty by his own. “But that’s not the problem,” he added. “No,” Horst agreed.

The sound of a checker jumping twice, then a long silence. Jeff, the geek boy, gave up his wooing for the moment and slogged dejectedly away from the popcorn counter. The red-haired girl smiled after him and smiled as she stabbed pointed sticks into a row of apples for dipping in caramel. She began humming a song I didn’t recognize.

I rolled through the crowd in the midway with my head at the general crotch level. Music and lights blaring, a thousand arms sweating around a thousand waists. Children, fussing and begging and bouncing, hung onto the tall norms. The legs scissored past me, slowing when they approached me. I was just walking through, from one end to the other, trying to feel the instant when the wallet in my blouse front was meddled with. If I felt anything I would stop and throw my hands in the air and Papa, sitting up there on the roof of the power truck with Chick in his lap, would see me and then I’d walk on.

“Fuckin kee-rist! What happened to you?” asked a knock-kneed drunk tottering in front of me. I grinned at him and swerved around, with a little cramp in my lungs. Arty and the twins couldn’t come out in the crowd like this. Once the gates opened and the norms trickled through, my more gifted siblings hid. The crowd won’t pay for what they can see free. There were security reasons as well. They were “more obvious focal points for the Philistine manias of the evilly deranged.” That’s how Papa put it.

A small child looked into my face and wanted to stop but his mother dragged him on. Sometimes when I felt the eyes crawling on me from all sides, I got scared thinking someone was looking who wasn’t just curious. I knew it was my imagination and I got used to it, learned to shunt it away. But sometimes I held on to it quietly, that feeling that someone behind or beside me in the crowd — some guy leaning on the target booth with a rifle, or some cranky, sweating father spending too much on ride tickets to keep his kids away from him — anybody could be looking at me in the sidelong way that norms use to look at freaks, but thinking of me twitching and biting at the dirt while my guts spilled out of the big escape hatch he’d cut for them. That helpless rasp of death waiting as he hurt me … a feeling like that is special. Sometimes you hold on to it quietly for a while.

I told Arty about it once. Arty narrowed his long eyelids and said I was flattering myself and there was nothing about me special enough to make anybody want to kill me. Arty was the master deflater, but his reaction convinced me only that he didn’t want to kill me. Funny how target potential became a status symbol among us.

At the end of the midway in front of the Ghost Coaster the wallet was still sweating in my shirt. I climbed the entry ramp so I could see the top of the generator truck down at the other end. Papa, with his boots dangling over the roof edge, was dancing Chick on his knees. I waved. He didn’t see me. I waited, and waved again. There, he looked. His arm shot straight up signaling me to come back. Chick would probably try again while I was on the way. I jumped down and swam back through the crowd and the music.

The wallet was still in my shirt when I got back to the power truck. Horst was leaning on the front bumper watching Papa count a wad of greenbacks. I took out the wallet and handed it to Papa. “Why couldn’t he do it?” I asked.

Papa grinned and jiggled his eyebrows at me. “Ah, my froglet, you haven’t looked inside that wallet!”

I watched as he unfolded it and spread the pocket. Empty. The sheaf of one-dollar bills he’d put there before I started was gone.

“You didn’t feel anything?” asked Papa. I shook my head, watching Chick in his coveralls with no shirt and no shoes and his arms and legs wrapped around Grandpa’s shiny urn, absorbed in making breath fog on the mirror metal.

Looking back, it strikes me that we never made sensible use of Chick. I remember when Chick was three or so, helping to get him dressed, packing a small bag with extra clothes and his toy bear. Al would take him sometimes for a few days — just the two of them. “The beauty of it is being so totally inconspicuous,” Al said. “A guy with a little kid is more innocent than a man with his wife on his arm. A man and his wife can get up to all sorts of shenanigans together, but the world sees a man with a kid and they figure he’s a good guy and has more important things to tend to than robbery.”

Those were the pickpocket trips. Al would trundle off in his quietest suit with Chick in tow, and take train or plane to “The Money Crowds.” They went to the big horse tracks, to the summer Olympic games. They spent four magnificently profitable days at the World’s Fair and one top-notch night in the parking lot of the world’s biggest gambling casino, with the star-spangled crowd at ringside watching Lobo Wainwright lose his world middleweight boxing championship to that consummate ring general, Sesshu Jurystyf.

All they took was cash. Chick would locate a goodly wad and extract it delicately from wallet, purse, clip, or money belt, leaving the victim with the wallet or purse intact and unmoved. The only real problem, according to Papa, was new bills, which tend to be noisy. Evidently a faint crackle is rarely noticed in a big crowd, however, and they soon learned to pick loud moments.

The most dangerous phase was as the cash left its container and drifted away from its original owner. After that Chick snaked the stuff along close to the floor, winding through legs and under chairs and so on. Nobody ever noticed. The money always arrived in a neat bundle, folded flat, and would slither up Al’s pant leg and snuggle into a pouch sewn onto Al’s garter.

Later Chick could tell the number and denominations of the bills but early on he couldn’t count reliably and Al would wait until they got back to their room at night to slip the bulging pouch off and tally the loot. It added up.

Al had an eye for clothes and manner and he enjoyed picking the targets. His argument was that as long as they stuck to cash they were doing no one a deep injury. “Nobody carries more cash than they can afford to lose,” Al would say, beaming at us over our bedtime cocoa. “Now, if we messed with their credit cards we might do some damage. But take the cash from a high roller at 8 P.M. and all he does is rethink a single evening out.”

In a good crowd, on a good night, they might take ten to twenty thousand in a few hours. They were careful — a cheap seat high in the balcony — targets separated from each other, unknown to each other, and very rarely discovering their loss until they were away from the place where it happened.

Al came back with great stories and Chick was always glad to be home. He would arrive looking slightly purple under the eyes and eager to sit in laps.

We all hated these special trips of his. Not Mama, of course, but Arty and the twins and I. The show was our world and Papa’s world. It had always been world enough. None of us had ever slept in a hotel or eaten in a restaurant or flown in a plane. Papa enjoyed it all too obviously. And we suspected, each of us, blackly and viciously, that Papa preferred his norm kid to us. With Chick he was free to go anywhere. We could live only in the show.

There were a couple of dozen of these trips after Chick turned three. Papa was feeling worldly. He bought three-piece suits and sometimes even wore one on the show lot.

Chick was nearly four on the morning he and Papa left for a mountain-lake resort that had always refused Binewski’s Fabulon a permit. We weren’t high-class-enough entertainment for that set. There was a big poker tournament in the major hotel there and, in the same weekend, a championship fight. Papa figured to find a lot of cash in the pockets.

We were set up in the semi-suburbs somewhere and the crowds for the midway were steady but not phenomenal.

I stuck close by Arty when Papa was away, and Arty was nastier than usual all day. He spat in my face after his first show because the twins had sold eighty more tickets than he had.

The last show that night went well for him, though, and he was already chinning himself out of the tank when I got there afterward. He’d outdrawn the twins and I was waiting for him to ask about ticket receipts, but he was thinking about something else. I wrapped him in a fresh thick towel and put him in his chair. He had to be tired from the four shows that day but he seemed sharp and eager. “Get me down to that phone booth on the street.” We went out the rear entrance and down the dark side of the midway behind the booths. Just a few yards away, the simp-twister rides and the games were having their last spasm of jump on a summer night.

“Tim’s on the gate,” I told the back of Arty’s head. “He’ll come with us.” We weren’t supposed to leave the grounds at all but I figured the guard would be persuadable.

“No. We’re going out through the delivery gate,” barked Arty. “Nobody is going to see us, and nobody is going with us.”

The phone booth near the lamppost had a folding door and a phone book hanging in shreds on a chain. I was nervous trying to sidle Arty’s chair into the booth and had to pull him back three times before I got the wheels centered. “Calm down, piss brain.”

“I feel like I’ve got hair, Arty.”

“That’s goose bumps, ass face. You’ve got the yellows at being out in the big, bad world. Climb up. There’s a coin here somewhere.”

The coin was wrapped in a slip of paper.

“The number’s on that paper.”

I stood on his chair and examined the phone.

“Hand me down the receiver.”

He tucked it between his ear and his shoulder while I cautiously dropped the coin in and began to dial.

“I’ve never used a phone, Arty. Have you?”

“Pay attention to the numbers.”

Then I heard the ringing start.

A half hour later Arty was scrubbed and pink and stretched out on his belly on the rubbing table. I trickled oil into the flesh rolls on the back of his neck and rubbed it up onto his smooth, round skull and down into the diamond-dented muscles of his shoulders and spine. His eyes were wide, staring at the wall.

“Who were you talking to? What’s it about?” I asked.

His fins spread slightly and his shoulders twitched in a shrug that came up through my hands.

“Never mind, anus. Just rub.”

We had recently bought a big new living van. For the first time the twins and Arty each had a small room. Chick slept on a built-in sofa-bunk. The cupboard beneath the sink was bigger than in the old van and Mama had painted the inside a deep hot blue called “Sinbad.”

I suppose that van was part of the profit from Papa’s trips with the Chick, but the show was growing and doing well too. Every town we played seemed to spill out some new act that would appear on our doorstep begging Papa for an audition.

The new van came equipped with a maroon leather rubbing table in Arty’s room. He insisted on having his walls covered with matching wine-colored cloth. I wondered where he’d got such an idea.

Papa and Chick arrived in a taxi the next day as Mama was fixing lunch. It was a hot Saturday and the midway was going full blast. Papa looked tired and angry. Chick sat in the twins’ lap and ate peanut butter and jelly. Papa took only iced tea.

“Now, Al, whatever happened?” Mama pressed.

“Bastardly thing, Lily.” Papa shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of it. We’d checked in and I went to take a look around while Chick napped in the room. Then I take him down to the restaurant and we’re just about to order when three of the hotel dicks and an assistant manager jump us and walk us to an office off the lobby and ask for ID. They’re very polite and I’m carrying on like the bewildered but cooperative citizen when the head of security slides in. He fixes me with an eye like a mackerel’s ass and says, ‘We’ve heard about you, sir. We’ve heard a great deal.’ They check me out of the hotel right then and tell me I am not welcome in any of their nine hundred branches of coo-coo-prick flophouses, ever. How do you like that? They didn’t seem to tumble to the Chick at all, but they had me figured for a pickpocket using the kid as a front. I’ve slipped somewhere, but damned if I know how.”

Arty listened with a concerned wrinkle above his nose but stayed quiet. He didn’t need to say a thing.

It was the end of Chick’s career as a pickpocket. Papa set himself to “think again,” as he put it.

It was a while before Papa got back to thinking seriously about Chick. One of the swallowers got an infection from the burns in his mouth and Papa spent weeks in his little trailer workshop improving a burn salve.

The twins had begun writing music and they did a lot of pouting because Papa wouldn’t let them play their own songs in their act.

“Classics. That’s what people want. Stick to classics,” Papa would say. “You play something they’ve never heard before, how should they know whether you’re playing well or not?”

Horst bought a new cat just to distract Elly and Iphy from their hurt feelings. It was a scabby leopard cub rescued from some roadside zoo, and Chick and I and the twins all got ringworm from playing with it. Papa had a wonderful time curing the stuff but Arty wouldn’t come near any of us. He used the ringworm as an excuse to abandon his new room and to start bunking in the dressing room on the stage behind his tank. He never moved back into the family van. He ate with us once the ringworm was gone, but his real life became private. He spent his time “backstage” as he called the room behind the tank. Papa put a guard on the place and complained about the added expense.

Mariposa, the jaw dancer from the variety tent, had been with the Fabulon since I was a baby. She did gymnastics while hanging from her teeth on a twenty-foot pole fastened to the harness of a cantering white horse named Schatzy. Mariposa had a pug nose and a wide grin and Crystal Lil liked her.

When Mariposa stuck her head in through the open van door while we were eating lunch, Mama called to her to come in and join us. The jaw dancer refused, saying she was rehearsing something new. “But I want you to come and look at my four-o’clock turn, Lily. Tell me what you think.”

Mama and Chick and I slipped into the tent toward the end of the show when the Strauss waltz was introducing Schatzy and Mariposa, and we stood in the aisle between the banks of bleachers. Schatzy was old but proud and light-footed. She arched her neck and hiked her tail into a banner as she lolloped around the ring.

High up near the lights and rigging, Mariposa, in a flame-red costume, stretched and contorted and spun, dangling by her teeth as she and the pole rocked scarily with Schatzy’s gait.

I climbed onto a prop box to watch and Mama hoisted Chick up to straddle her hip so he could see. Though we had a clear view when Mariposa fell, we were never sure exactly how it happened.

She started to swing her legs, setting up to slip into a handstand on top of the pole. Either her timing was off by a flicker or else Schatzy broke stride. Suddenly the flame-colored figure was loose and hurtling downward. She flopped onto the back of the still-cantering Schatzy, drilling the horse to the ground.

In the instant’s silence of indrawn breath as the crowd prepared its roar, Chick’s voice shrieked out. Schatzy’s long, proud head screamed hideously into the sawdust.

Mama pushed Chick into my arms and ran for the ring. Papa was already there, crouching over the bodies in his chalk-white jodhpurs. I wanted to see but Chick, beside me on the box, filled my arms and my face with his howling. His mouth hung loose and his closed eyes sheeted clear fluid and his terrible voice went on and on. People were pushing past us to leave the tent, the crowd evacuating the scene. In the noise I didn’t even hear the bullet that finished Schatzy, but I knew that it had happened because Chick stopped his siren screech and fell into simple broken sobs. “It hurts,” he cried. “It hurts.” I got him down off the box and rushed him, sobbing, through the press of legs and out of the midway to our van.

Mariposa had cracked her pelvis and one ankle but Schatzy’s spine snapped irrevocably. I crawled into Chick’s bunk with him and held him while he cried. He was still crying when I drifted off for a nap.

That night and all the next day, Chick wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t get out of bed or dress or do his chores. He lay curled under his blankets, facing the wall. If Mama turned him over and held his face to talk to him, he started to cry. If Papa picked him up and rocked him, his tears started. When Arty came in and sneered at him, he stared hugely and silently until even Arty was embarrassed and went away.

Two days after Mariposa’s fall, Papa decided Chick needed a dose of Binewski’s Beneficent Balm and made Mama hold him while the black spoonful was thrust between his teeth. Late the next day, while the rest of us were working in the midway, Chick finally told Mama that he could have held Mariposa up when he knew she was falling. He had let her drop because he was scared Mama would be mad if he moved a person. Mama gave him permission to save anybody from pain or accidents. Chick drank some fruit juice then, and eventually began to eat again. But he would never eat meat after that. No meat at all.

When Chick was five he lived on corn and peanut butter and he understood more English than he could use. He learned fast and his coordination for moving things was much better than his actual physical ability. He couldn’t tie his shoes with his hands but he could do all of Horst’s fancy sailor knots — from a Turk’s head to a monkey’s fist — just by looking at the cord.

“My fingers don’t do what I want them to,” he told me. He was trying to write “Love, Chick” on a horrible water-paint picture of a tiger that he’d made for Mama. She always liked it when he did things with his hands. Arturo jeered at him for it. Arty figured he should use his hands only when there were strangers around. Arty’s line was “You’re acting like a fucking norm.” The twins didn’t jeer. They doted on Chick, and taught him to read.

It was becoming apparent that Chick himself had only one ambition and that was to help everybody so much that they would love him. That’s where my problem began. Chick left me chewing dust in the slave-dog department. He could do everything better than I could and he never made snide remarks. He was a lovely brat.

That winter was a slow time for the show. Business was steady but we all had time to think and doze around. Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results.

Arty was hanging upside down from his exercise bar doing smooth, steady curl-ups.

“Papa and Horst are teaching Chick to gamble,” I announced. Arty did two more curl-ups before he said, “What games?”

“Roulette and craps.”

Arty grinned at his own navel. He was deep in his workout, covered with fine sweat. He made one final reach upward and grabbed the grip on the bar with his teeth, coiling himself tightly so his shoulder fins could delicately manipulate the buckles that held his hips in the harness. He swung out, let go of the bar, and landed rolling.

He wriggled to the weight bench and, hooking his hip flippers under the straps, leaned back, tensing his belly as the flippers alternated flexing and relaxing to lift the weights on each side. He started to chuckle out loud, watching the weights rise and fall at the end of his blue-veined, white-tendoned flippers.

“We’re lucky, you know,” he laughed, “that Papa has such a small-potato brain.” He laughed deliberately, timing his breathing with the lifts. I watched his corrugated belly do its seductive ripple, complicated by the added rhythm of the laugh.

“Papa’s a genius,” I said stoutly. This was Binewski doctrine.

“Heh heh heh,” went Arty’s belly. There was scorn in his eyes. It was familiar enough on his wide mug, but not toward Papa. He was trying to shock me.

“If Papa had discovered fire,” Arty sighed to the beat of his lifts, “he’d think it was for sticking in your mouth to amaze a crowd.… If Papa had invented the wheel … he’d have laid it flat … put a merry-go-round on it … and figured that was as far as it went.… If he’d discovered America … he would have gone home and forgot about it … because it didn’t have any hot-dog stands.”

I sat with my hump propped against the back of Arty’s big tank. The clean chlorine smell of the water drifted in and out of my lungs.

Al figured six to eight weeks was enough to get Chick started as a big-time gambler. The two of them spent hours every day with Horst — our resident encyclopedia of worldliness — and Rudy the Wheelman. Rudy’s experience supposedly encompassed a stint as a professional contract-bridge player that had ended when his wobbly ethics were revealed and he was informed that, if he ever picked up a deck of cards again, he would lose both his hands. Rudy had taken refuge in the obscurity of the Wheel Booth and the comfort of his small, cheerful wife. Mrs. Rudy was dedicated to folding sheets of paper into birds, fish, giraffes, and other intriguing forms. She could not work the midway because she modestly refused to dye her mousy hair red, but she helped around the lot in many ways.

Obviously Chick couldn’t crawl into a rental tux and sip his chocolate milk from highball glasses in the mirror-ceilinged casinos of the planet. This, like pocket picking, was supposed to be done long distance. I don’t know the procedure. Papa wasn’t secretive about it, he just never went into detail. Papa had a tiny lapel microphone hooked to a transmitter and Chick had a receiver so Papa could give him instructions.

Practice time for Chick and Papa was early, just after breakfast, which cut into my voice lesson, or eliminated it. I had a tape recorder to use when Papa couldn’t make it, but I knew the tapes were piling up in a cigar box in his desk and Papa never got around to listening to them.

Chick knew I was upset, and that Arty was thoroughly pissed. But he couldn’t help being happy at all the time Papa spent with him, and he did his best to make it up to us.

He discovered a new way to clean Arty’s tank. Instead of watching a pair of brushes and a sterilizer hose go over the drained tank, Chick stood in front of the full tank and took out every cell, probably every molecule, that wasn’t supposed to be there. The green on the glass disappeared in broad, straight swaths like wheat in front of a mower. When Chick was finished the tank was so clean it was almost invisible. A round greenish cloud hung above it. Chick blinked at the cloud and it sailed dreamily across the stage toward the open door of the toilet. There was a faint splash and then the toilet flushed.

Arty and I were sitting on the exercise bench to watch because Chick had come chirping about his “new way!” My mouth hung open as I thought about setting the Chick on my own cleaning chores. Arty looked steadfastly at Chick, whose proud grin began to weaken and slide off into doubt. “Show-off,” said Arty quietly.

Chick’s face crumpled. “I didn’t mean it, Arty. I’m sorry.” Arty dropped to the floor and crawled into his room, thumping the door shut behind him.

For obvious reasons “show-off” was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning “sweetheart” into a thumb in the eye.

I sat looking at Chick. I knew what he felt. The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating. Poor little stupe. He was just a baby. He hunkered down against the tank with the side of his soft face against the cool glass for comfort. He didn’t dare look at me for sympathy. He didn’t cry. He just crouched there and ached.

I squinted at Arty’s door. He had his radio turned up loud. I got up and walked over to the Chick. His eyes swiveled at me in fear. He thought I was going to pinch him or say something nasty. That proved he couldn’t really read minds. I put my arms around him. I rubbed my cheek against his curly ear. He slung an arm around my neck. I whispered, “It’s a great way to clean.”

“Truly?” he whispered. I could hear the tears in his throat.

The dumb little fuck was supposed to be so goddamn sensitive, how come he couldn’t figure it out? All he had to do to make me like him was need me. All he had to do to make Arty like him was drop dead.

Papa and Chick left with great fanfare. We all went along when Horst drove them to the airport. I can’t remember where we were except that it was not Atlantic City, because that’s where Papa and Chick were going. They were planning to stay for five days — a long trip but Papa wanted to break Chick in to the game slowly and delicately. Chick had heard that there was a swimming pool in their hotel. Chick was sure he was going to learn to swim like Arty. Arty was utterly charmed to hear this, of course.

That night the show closed down peacefully, but when Lil went to give out the tills the next morning she discovered that the entire take from the two days before — around $20,000—was gone. The alarms had been cut at their source and the safe — a silly, tinny affair anyway — had been popped open like a melon on pavement. Old-fashioned plastique, Horst said, and crudely handled.

Horst went out to the airport for Papa and Chick early on the morning of the sixth day. Papa had looked bad the last time he’d come home from picking pockets. This time he looked like deaths rectum. He hugged us all fervently, which was awkward because he wouldn’t let go of Chick and carried him the whole time. Chick himself was white and still and didn’t smile.

Papa collapsed into his big chair with Chick in his lap. We children arranged ourselves discreetly while Mama fussed in the refrigerator and Horst lit his pipe.

“You both look worn to shreds,” Mama was clucking.

Papa gave a walleyed look around at our waiting faces and I was afraid he was going to send us out so he could talk to Mama and Horst. The clink of ice cubes distracted him, and then Mama handed him a tall glass of her famous lemonade.

“Al, I want Horst to explain about the safe,” Mama began. Horst actually reached to take the pipe out of his mouth but Papa cut them both off.

“Lily, I gotta tell you. Horst, I got to get this out. I don’t know what in creeping Jesus to think.”

Horst waved his pipe, but Mama twisted her hands, anxious. “Are you ill? Whatever happened?”

“I came within a gnat’s ass of losing Chick,” Papa said. “That’s what happened.” Chick whimpered on Papa’s chest and got a pat. “No. I wouldn’t really lose you, honey. It’s O.K.”

I grimaced at Arty but he was hunched over in his sofa-bunk, watching Papa, and didn’t notice.

It took a while for Papa to get it all out. He hadn’t got it organized as a story yet. At first, he said, they’d taken it slow and easy.

“I didn’t lay any bets at all the first night. Just watched and had him practice. Gave wins to the good faces and grief to the apes and assholes. It was fun, sending some poor hack driver on the roll of his life with his skinny wife hanging on his arm in a faint, thinking ‘Shoes for Junior.’ Then watching their eyes as they stood under the chandelier and I say ‘Red 26’ into my button and pay off their mortgage, and whisper ‘Red 19’ and send their baby to college with twenty minutes at the wheel.

“The fat pricks with the diamond teeth are going off in fits. I was there awhile and then all of a sudden we went dead. Scared the crap out of me. Nothing. I turned in to a quiet corner and I’m practically screaming into the mike, but the wheel goes its own merry way. I go running for the elevator thinking the receiver’s broke or he’s sick or he’s been playing with matches. A million things. But the little turd is crapped out in his chair with the receiver buzzing in his lap. Asleep. I got him into his jammies and tucked him into bed and he didn’t peep. With the trip and everything he was just burnt out. He’d never done that before.…”

They had done well for a couple of nights.

“I’m percolating with forty thousand in the kick, and Chick’s eating big soft pretzels and floating in the pool every day and learning to paddle a little. Then, by the fourth night, I’m down the strip. This is no shit, Horst, three blocks. Three from the hotel room and the kid’s still got it. No problem. I took him there one time only and he had no problems. Not with the crowds or the distance or anything else.

“So I’m leaning on the table doing a quiet gosh-and-golly hick routine over my roll, when this punk in a red sweat suit, carrying a tennis racket, comes up beside me. He’s been there awhile, just watching, and I swear I was smooth as glass, Horst. Slicker than snot on a rock. Nobody would guess. Well, this punk in the sweats could have been a boxer to look at him. Broad on top, narrow ass. Skinny legs. He lays a hand on my arm and says, ‘You’re doing very well tonight, Mr. Binewski.’ He’s calling me Binewski when I’m traveling as Stephens. A young guy. Clean-looking. Short hair, face like a baby’s butt. Blond. You tell me, Horst, what the fuck should I have done? Am I supposed to say, ‘You must mean some other guy. I’m Stephens’? He’s easing me away from the table, his hand on my arm, out to the lobby saying, ‘Wonderful run you’ve been having, Mr. Binewski.’ And I’m thinking it’s another house-dick roust. The crew from Tahoe must have fingered me to every hotel on the planet. He says, ‘How’s your little boy?’ Cyanide-sweet, leading me along. Out by the door I finally ask him for bona fides. I say, ‘Are you with the casino?’ He says, ‘No. I’m with a larger organization.’ It’s not clear, you see, Lily? When the house dicks jumped me before there was nothing mysterious about it.

“But I don’t want to talk tough or panic because the Chick can maybe hear me and get scared. Then the guy asks where Chick is. Taking a nap, I say. This guy says, ‘Are you sure?’

“I just took off running — out the door, three blocks — left my chips on the table. Had nine heart attacks getting back to the room, but there’s Chick, calm in front of some old movie on the TV, eating a cucumber sandwich on wheat, and the receiver in his lap dead and cold.

“I just about died of relief. Give the kid a pat and sit down to look at my transmitter. Finally figure out the thing is dead. Something’s wrong or been done to it. I’m diddling with it when Chick looks at me and says, ‘Those other guys are coming,’ through his mouthful of sandwich. And I say, like a numbnuts, ‘What other guys?’ And the door opens and three guys come in. Chick ignores them and starts eating the carrot slices off his room-service plate.

“These guys were crazy young. The kind that show up in the spring to hire on and swear they’ll stay forever but they speak good English and their teeth are straight and you know they’ll go back to college in September but you hire them anyhow, even though they make stupid mistakes and wallop their own feet with the mallets, and every other year or so one of them decides to unionize the ride jocks and tries to go out on strike. But they work hard and they’re lively and they keep the redheads sparkling.”

Papa took a deep breath and stopped. Horst grunted encouragingly around his pipe stem, and Mama got up to refill the lemonade glasses. Papa sipped and sighed.

“I was six kinds of jerk-off not to take you with me, Horst. These guys amble through the door looking like college kids and one of them has a handgun that looks like the CO₂ pistols we used to use on the neighborhood cats. He levels this thing at me and I’m sitting there like a geeked capon, my mouth flopped open, and Chick crunching carrots beside me. The one with the gun starts some ‘Hey, Mr. B.’ kind of street snot, and one of the others goes into the bathroom and turns the water on in the tub, hard. The third guy takes the transmitter out of my hand and rips the mike cord out of my shirt and walks me over to the wall to splay out so he can feel me down.

“The other guy comes in, the guy in the red sweats from the casino, and Chick turns up the TV volume. I guess he couldn’t hear with all the fuss. And I’m still spread out, hands on the wall, looking over my shoulder. The one little asshole has a hand in the small of my back to keep me there and the punk in red nods and goes to the bathroom door and the water quits and he and the guy from in there come out and he nods at Chick.

“This guy in red has a little popgun and he leans on the wall near me while the other fucker picks up Chick, just like that, and I turn around yelling and the other two grab me and slam me against the wall. That’s when Chick noticed there was something wrong. He yelped and they covered his mouth. This one bastard loops a belt over my elbows behind my back and cranks it tight, and the other cocksucker crams a pair of my own socks in my mouth while he holds the popgun to my head. They shove me over to the bathroom door and the guy in red gives an order, and the guy holding Chick puts him into the full bathtub, clothes and all. There’s a rag tied around Chick’s mouth and …”

Papa stopped to gulp lemonade and then sop the sweat from his nose and forehead and cheeks. Mama is frozen, staring at him.

“So Chick’s up to his neck with his eyes bulging at me over the gag and the guy in red leans close to me and says, ‘Now, Mr. B., this is just to let you know how very sincere this message is,’ and he tells me to keep out of the gambling joints. That I’m treading on staked turf and I should go home and be nice. Then the creeping little reptile says, ‘Now we’re going to show you how it could be if you didn’t understand us.’ And he nods and the guy who’s clamped onto Chick starts pushing him under. Chick is looking at me and kicking and splashing and I jump, and I don’t know what happened. I must have bumped the guy because he fell over the tub and bounced off the wall. Chick went to the bottom and the bastards were clubbing and clawing me.

“Next thing, I’m sitting in the tub yanking Chick out of the water while one fucker leans over me with a wet gun. His two buddies are worried over the guy on the floor, the one who pushed Chick under. He’s out cold and there’s blood running out of his ears and nose. They haul him out through the door and the one with the gun backs out after them. Last thing he says is, ‘Take it to heart, Mr. B. No betting games. Not here. Not anywhere.’

“The bastards got my kick, too. Found it in my socks. Didn’t even bother with my wallet. They knew I wouldn’t call the cops. Chick cried all night.”

Papa closed his eyes and smoothed both big arms around the now sleeping Chick. Mama’s voice was hoarse and puzzled. “Chick wasn’t afraid of them?”

Papa didn’t answer. I watched Arty, who was staring at the ceiling in ferocious concentration. I knew it as though I’d been there. Chick had cried, not because he was afraid, but because he’d moved the guy and hurt him, cracked him against the wall.

Mama sent us all out so Papa could nap.

• • •

It was an iron-grey morning with a low sky. By the time I pulled a sweater over my head, Elly and Iphy had Arty strapped into his chair and were pushing him down the row behind the midway, talking at him. I ran to catch up. Elly was demanding, in a hard voice, “How did you do that to them, Arty? I know you did it. I want to know how.” Arty wagged his head in denial. Iphy leaned forward, touching Arty’s neck gently. “Arty, the Chick looked terrible. And Papa. Why do you hate the Chick? You mustn’t …” Elly slapped Iphy’s hand back.

Catching up, I grabbed an arm of the chair and trotted along as it trundled down the dirt track. “It’s not Arty’s fault,” I protested.

Elly snorted at me, pushing the chair faster. Iphy shook her head mournfully, “You don’t know, Oly.”

“For shit’s sake!” Arty snapped. “Oly, call Papa. Go get Papa!”

“Don’t you dare bother Papa now,” Elly drilled at me. I hopped along beside them in dithering bewilderment. Arty stretched his chin toward the chair’s motor-control stick, but Elly’s hand whipped to his shoulder and yanked him sharply back, holding him. “Just sit still. We’re taking you for a ride.”

“Morning, kids!” hollered the point guard. “Morning,” chirped Elly. The show was sluggish in stirring this morning. It might rain and the redheads were yawning in their wagons.

“Take me to my stage,” Arty ordered, his eyes flicking at me.

“This way, Elly, Iphy,” I pointed, trotting back a few steps to lead the way. Elly pressed her lips and walked faster in her own direction with Iphy, sadly determined, pushing beside her. When I caught up again they were on the rear ramp of the deserted Mad Mouse roller coaster. Arty twisted in his straps to glare at the twins. “You stupid shits!” he snarled.

Elly grinned. “Are you scared, Arty?”

“Elly, don’t,” I wailed. “Iphy, don’t let her.”

The wheels of Arty’s chair were on the rails that the Mouse cars rode. Elly and Iphy, planting their white sneakers on the ties between the rails, bent their backs and pushed as the chair slid up the tracks, climbing the steep slope.

The Mouse cars hooked onto a chain-driven winch that ground its way up the center of this slope and brought them to the highest dropoff point, where gravity would carry them and their whooping, screaming cargo down through steep-banked turns with the customers’ hands glommed sweating onto the safety bars.

“Please, Elly!” I hollered as the damp earth dropped away beneath me. I couldn’t stand up on the tracks, but crept upward on all fours, shaking as I stared down past the black oiled chain with its heavy prongs to the flattened grass and mud below. I imagined the twins’ sneakers above me, slipping, tripping, tangling, and the twins crumpling to the rails and losing their grip on the chair, which — in my slow-motion mind — tipped backward over the big rear wheels, toppling over the sprawling twins and slamming down at the wrong angle so that its aluminum frame with its hogtied cargo went shuddering down the now thirty-five, now forty, now forty-five feet to the clanging smash of the mud.

“Arty?” I yelled, with my fists frozen to the rails.

Elly’s hiss sizzled down at me, “Shut up.”

I crouched and stared up the rails at the broad pumping hips and thin legs straining into their sneakers. They were very close to the top.

“What do you want?” Arty’s voice rose sharp and frail in the grey air. The twins stopped pushing, stood leaning against the steep slope. Iphy’s voice, pulling air awkwardly from the work, “You have to leave Chick alone, Arty.” And then Elly’s flat tone, “You have to realize that things can happen to you, too, Arty.”

“Stuff you. Both of you,” he snapped.

“All right.” Elly was pushing again. Iphy leaned into the slope, digging with her toes. The chair creaked on the rails. “Get me the fuck down!” Arty bellowed. “You’re dead, Elly Binewski. Your ass is fucking meat!” His huge voice floated thin on the air and all I could see was the edges of the wheels beyond the twins’ moving legs. They were at the dropoff point.

“It’s real, Arty,” Elly was whispering hoarsely. “Iphy couldn’t stop me and you know it.” Then Iphy, contradicting, “Oh, Arty, we would never really hurt you. Elly loves you. But you have to understand.”

“O.K. I give.” Arty was too quick. Elly knew him. “Not so easy, brother.”

From my paralyzed station on the rails I saw the Elly half straighten suddenly, erect, beside the hunched figure of Iphy. Her arms flew up, as though saluting a crowd. “Hang on!” shrieked Iphy, her hunched shoulders disappearing as the wheelchair slipped forward and dangled over the edge of the drop. Only Iphy’s long hands held it now.

“No! Uncle! I give!” wailed Arty.

From below and behind us came a horrified bellow, “Get the hell DOWN from there, you stupid little bastards!” It was the point guard, Papa’s Marine, gaping at us from the ground in shock.

Elly’s arms flipped down and she hunched beside Iphy, grabbing the back of the wheelchair again. “It’s all right,” hollered Elly. “We’re coming!”

Then one sneakered foot slid, slowly, down a few inches, then the other, moving toward me. I backed down jerkily, so relieved I could have puked, while the guard’s huge shoulders below us bobbed back and forth, his arms stretched out to catch us if we should fall, his voice rumbling that our old man would have his ass as well as his job if we dropped off that goddamn girder while he was on duty and he fucking well KNEW that we knew better, until we were all on the ground trundling along in our own sweat, peaceful and relaxed, nodding at the guard. Arty silent and Elly and Iphy smiling sweetly.

Arty made me take him to his stage and unbuckle his straps and leave him alone. He wouldn’t talk at all.

I was furious when I came out and saw the twins strolling off to rehearse with their sheet music. I stalked up to Elly and gave her my fiercest glare. “You tried to kill him.”

Iphy reached toward me, as if to give me a hug, “Oly, she didn’t tickle me or anything. She just let go.” Elly dragged her on, and snapped back at me, “You’re just Arty’s dog! He’d kill us all and you’d stand there holding his towel.” They sailed on.

Papa took some of Mama’s pills and slept that day and through the night that followed. The show closed at 9 P.M. and the camp shut down by 10. Even with my cupboard door shut I could hear the rattle and gasp of Papa snoring. It seemed pitiful. I couldn’t stand hearing it.

I crawled out in my flannel nightgown and went barefoot through the door and down the hard clay ruts past the dim grey vans and trailers. There were lights on in the redheads’ windows but I wanted Arty.

The guard at the back steps of his stage truck nodded as I went in. It was warm and humid in the dark. The heated water tank kept the backstage tropical.

Arty hollered, “Yes,” when I knocked. He was lying on the bed with the maroon satin bedspread, reading. I crawled up beside him.

“Who do you think it was,” I asked, “the guys who stuck up Papa?”

Arty squinted at me for a second. I was asking but I didn’t want to know. Maybe he decided to teach me a lesson.

“Remember last summer’s geek?” He pretended to be looking at his book.

“The yellow-haired boy from Dartmouth?”

“George. They were his fraternity brothers at college.”

I nodded. Arty tipped his head so he could scratch his nose with a flipper.

“The guy Chick moved. Was he hurt bad?”

Arty shook his head slightly. “Fractured skull. He’ll be all right. What bothers me is that they got Papa’s kick. That means they got paid twice.”

My head did a slow interior waltz and swooped back to the same word. Twice. So it was Arty who stole the money from the safe, or arranged it. Where would he get explosives? Or learn to use them? I stared at him as he lay against the maroon pillow. He had changed without my noticing. He was thicker. His neck was heavily muscled and set solidly into his heavy chest. Beneath the thin, sleeveless shirt his muscle was as defined as ever but larger, bulkier. Even the wrist joints of his flippers seemed strong. Where the three long toes of his hip fins bent to clutch the bedspread, I saw a curling fuzz of hair clouding the top of each knuckle. I stared. It was the only hair I had ever seen on his glass-clean body. I knew than that he’d gone outside and away from me. For the past few months I’d scarcely seen him. All the hours of every day he had been on his own — not just escaping the irritations of Chick and the twins and their rival stardom, but befriending the geek, talking to people I didn’t know, talking talk I hadn’t heard, making phone calls without me to dial for him.

I complained, “Taking the money was against the family. Scaring Papa was against the family.”

His eyes stayed closed but his head rolled impatiently on the pillow, “Not in the long run.”

I couldn’t understand that. The angry, weak sounds of Papa’s story, the way those tinhorn brats had stampeded him, Papa the Brawl Buster, Al the Boss, the Ringmaster, Papa the Handsomest Man. I felt robbed. My champion was revealed as a scam and I was embarrassed at all the years I’d let myself feel that Papa was any protection at all. It was Arty’s fault.

I opened my mouth to blame Arty, to yell. But there was something odd about him. He was curling slowly onto his side, tighter and smaller. His face was stony except for a puckering twitch beside the long, pale ovals of his closed eyes. A tear squeezed out from under one lid and disappeared immediately into the creasing flesh. It was years since I’d seen Arty cry, not since he abandoned tantrums and went over to the cool, hard image he admired. But it might not have been a tear. His eyes opened and stared past me.

“Elly,” he said. “I’d kill her but the cunt would take Iphy with her out of spite. And Chick! Can’t anybody but me see what he is? What he’ll do to us? He’ll end up smashing this whole family like an egg if we’re not careful.” His eyes swiveled at me in a queer begging gesture.

“You’re jealous,” I sneered. “You want to be the only star!”

He threw himself back on the pillow. On any other face his expression would have said despair and resignation. “Yeah, you too, I know. He’s cute. Almost like a norm. And he’s innocent. As innocent as an earthquake.

“Papa gave all those solemn orders of secrecy when he was born but it’s Papa who brags and puts Chick on jobs outside where people can see him moving things. There’s nobody on the lot that doesn’t know! They come on in Pittsburgh, quit in Tallahassee, and tell all their friends and the lady next to them on the bus. How long, Oly? How long before the Feds are tucking us all behind barbed wire in the interests of national security?” He’s leaning over, glaring at me, shouting.

“Oh, Arty.” It came out soft from my throat. Tired. “You’re just making excuses.”

Now he grew angry, rigidly upright, balanced on his hip flippers and quivering. “Hey! Did you ever think maybe I deserve what I get? Hey? Elly is nothing. She couldn’t get a job in a B-bar playing that plinka-plinka crap. All she’s got is Iphy. Papa gave it to them on a platter.

“Me? You know what they do with people like me? Brick walls, six-bed wards, two diapers a day and a visit from a mothball Santa at Christmas! I’ve got nothing. The twins are true freaks. Chick is a miracle. Me? I’m just an industrial accident! But I made it into something — me! I have to work and think to do it. And don’t forget, I was the first keeper. I’m the oldest, the son, the Binewski! This whole show is mine, the whole family. Papa was the oldest and he got the show and Grandpa’s ashes. Before me the whole place was falling apart. I’m the one who got us back on the road. When Papa goes it’ll be me.

“The twins don’t care if I draw a bigger crowd than they do. They don’t have to play or dance or sing. They could sit on a bench and wave and they’d still get crowds. They can afford to be easygoing. Nobody’s going to upstage them. And Chick! Of course he’s amazing. That’s my curse. I’m a freak but not much of a freak. I’m like you, fucked up without being special. There’s nothing unique about me except my brains and the crowd can’t see that.

“You know what I hate? Iphy should have been mine. She should have been hooked onto me. Papa fucked up there. We don’t need Elly. If I had been twins with Iphy we would have had something. We could have done something. But my time’s coming.”

The flame energy of his anger and disgust flickered. He eased back onto the pillow and a peculiar childface replaced his sneer. He was afraid. His shoulder fins reached toward each other but could never touch, never meet. Falling short, they lay like a failed prayer across his chest.

He lay there staring at nothing, tired out by the draining of his own venom. I crawled up behind him and snuggled close, my belly to his back. This was my reward for endurance. He would never ask for my arms around him but times like this he would allow me to warm him, to warm myself against him. I nuzzled into the back of his neck, breathing carefully so as not to irritate him. I felt his fin stroking my arm. When he spoke again I could feel the low vibration of his voice all over my body. “You know, Oly, I’m surprised. I didn’t think Papa would be so easy to beat. Not this soon. It’s kind of scary.”

9. How We Fed the Cats

Al, the handsomest man, looks bewildered and groggy over his first cup of coffee. His mustache is sprung and wild to match his sleep-jagged eyebrows as he peers around the table at us, asking, “What’s this I hear about high jinks on the Mouse Rack with the wheelchair? Eh, dreamlets?”

We all grin dutifully and Elly does her “Oh, Papa!” routine to disarm him while Mama blearily hands around filled breakfast plates, and drags her kimono sleeves through the butter every time she reaches across the table.

I cut Arty’s meat slowly while my chest fills with a yearning that would like to spill out through my eyes and nose. It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, “Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we’ll make it right.” The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child’s need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear’s worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

The shadow stayed in Chick’s eyes, and a dimness, a kind of fog, settled on him. I think he never quite got over having hurt the frat goon. Chick was crazy like that. Something in his chemistry mixed up with the way the family trained him. He got twisted so that he was more afraid of hurting someone else than of being hurt himself, more scared of killing than of dying. In the numb, dumb way that he knew things, Chick understood Papa’s disappointment and felt guilty for it.

Papa took to having depressed spells during which he was inclined to sit alone in odd spots with a bottle. High on a two-day binge, he ordered posters for a “World’s Strongest Child” act, but he shelved the idea during the hangover. Sometimes Horst, or the twins or I, would make a suggestion to try to cheer him up.

“What about sports?” I’d ask. “What if a pole vaulter got just a tiny boost from Chick at the right moment and you happened to have a bet on the guy? What if a ball got a little nudge toward a goal line?”

But Papa would shake his head and pat my hump. “Oly, my dove, your grandpa told me long ago, and I should have remembered. He used to say, ‘If you don’t mess with the monkey, the monkey won’t mess with you.’ ”

Al and Horst were going off on business for the day. Al told Chick to feed the cats and Chick, as usual, bit his tongue, turned pale, and nodded without saying anything.

Chick bit his tongue more than any kid I ever heard of. Sometimes Al had to use fire-eater’s salve on the inside of Chick’s mouth.

After Al left, Chick slid up to me at the sink where I was doing the breakfast dishes. “Come with me, Oly, please?” The dishes flew out of the sink in a silent, clatterless flock. They dipped through the rinse water and dried in the air as they jumped, ten at a time, to their places in the cupboard. I laughed and wiped my hands. Arty was holed up with a book and the twins were practicing piano with Lily.

“Sure,” I said, “but how come? You’ve fed them lots of times.”

His soft face rumpled lightly in worry. “I know. But I don’t like it.” His eyebrows went up in a peak of resignation. “I like the cats. It’s the meat. I don’t like moving it. Just come along, O.K.?”

Horst always parked the cat van near the refrigerator truck where the meat was kept. When he fed the cats himself, Horst would toss a quarter of beef out onto the ground, jump down after it, slam the truck door, wrestle the beef around by its lone leg and whack chunks off it with a huge cleaver. Horst fed the cats through the cage doors, but nobody else on the lot felt comfortable doing that. Horst liked telling stories about how unpredictable cats are. I always suspected him of doing it deliberately to keep people from messing with them. If that was his reason it certainly worked.

The sides of the cat van were hinged at the top and could be cranked up like awnings, shading the cages. There was steel mesh outside the bars, and the walls separating the paired Bengals and lions and leopards were inch-thick plates of steel. Al tried to get Horst to put clear plate plastic up instead of bars and the steel screen but Horst said it would ruin the effect. “People think big cats should be behind bars. And the screen gives them the feeling that they could get their fingers clawed off if they stuck them through. Besides, the cat smell is important too, and if I put plastic up I’d have to air-condition the whole rig.”

When Chick fed the cats he dropped the meat through the ventilator slots in the roof. We stood outside the refrigerator truck and watched the big bolt lift and the door swing open. Chick reached over and took my hand. “Is this O.K.? I want to hold your hand while I’m moving the meat.” He was looking pinched. “Sure,” I said. A beef quarter floated off its hook inside the truck and wobbled out. It flopped onto the big chopping block. The cleaver came out of its slot in the truck’s tool rack. Chick worked fast. The blade flashed upward five times quickly and six chunks of meat sailed through the air with exposed fat gleaming. The cats were coughing and spitting as the trapdoors over the ventilator slots lifted simultaneously. The chunks dropped through with a single thunk to the floor. Another quarter jumped out on the block and the door shut while the cleaver was rising and falling. Chick was squeezing my hand gently. The cleaver dipped its square tip into the cutting block and stayed there while the chunks lifted, circled like cumbersome crows, and headed slowly for the flaps in the roof.

“You could do it without the cleaver, Chick,” I said.

“Yeah, but I’d feel the meat more. Can you feel it?”

He was taller than I was and he looked down at me with such a serious intensity that I felt a small quiver of fear. “Feel what?”

He frowned. Words never came all that easily to him. “Well, how … dead … the meat is.”

I stuck my tongue out at the corner of my mouth and squinted at him through my sunglasses. Anybody else in the family except Lily would be pulling something if they talked like that, trying to spook me so they could laugh at me later. Chick was so straight he was simple. He could never really understand the joke when the rest of us were telling whopping lies.

“No,” I said. “I don’t feel anything.” He pursed his mouth and I heard the meat land inside the cages and the snarling of the cats. Chick looked so sad I knew I’d failed him. “I’m sorry, Chick.”

He swung an arm over my shoulders and leaned his face down against my head. “It’s okay. I just thought you might feel it if I held your hand.”

“Shit,” said a clear voice behind us. We wheeled together as though we were the twins. It was one of the red-haired girls. She shrugged her round shoulders at us through her peacock shirt and laughed nervously. “I just never get over how you do that, Chick,” and she waved gaily and teetered away on her tall heels.

We watched her go, Chick’s arm still around my shoulders, my arm around his waist. For one instant my eye escaped and I could see us as we must have looked to the redhead. Two small figures, one bent and distorted, shielded by cap and glasses, and this slim, golden boy-child, several inches taller, holding the dwarf close while chunks of meat sailed over them in the air. I hugged Chick. His peach cheek rubbed my forehead and nose. I wondered how he did move things and, while that wondering was creeping into my skull, I realized that I had never wondered about it before. Had any of us really wondered? Even Al and Lil? Or had we all been so caught up in the necessity of training him and protecting him and protecting ourselves from him and figuring ways it would be safe to use him and finding out exactly what he could or couldn’t do that we never got around to wondering?

“Chick,” I said to his fine yellow hair, “how do you move stuff?”

His head came up slowly from my shoulder and he looked surprised. Then his face focused. I was thinking how ridiculous never to have asked him. He started to blush. He let go of me and passed his hands over his ears as though he knew I was making fun of him. “Oh, you know,” he said. The cleaver levered itself out of the chopping block, flew to the sterilizer hose hanging from the refrigerator truck, and danced in the white gush from the nozzle. The hose stopped and the cleaver leaped toward the truck door, which opened just enough to let it in. Then the door closed and I knew the cleaver would be settling into its slot. Chick was bright pink now.

“No, I don’t know, Chick. Tell me.”

A small rock by the truck wheel began to spin in place. It flipped over, still spinning, then hopped onto its side and began to roll in a tight circle. The equivalent, probably, of another kid scuffing his shoes or twiddling his own ear in embarrassment. He was my little brother, of course, so I got impatient. “I’ll pinch you, Chick! Tell me how you move stuff!” The rock lay down quietly.

“Well, I don’t really. It moves itself. I just let it.” He looked at me anxiously while I chewed on that and found it unsatisfying.

I shook my head. “Don’t get it.”

“Look,” he turned me toward the cats. The side of the van lifted and the prop poles slid into place so I could see the cats in the shade. They were all eating, standing over the meat, wrenching it, or lying with chunks between their paws, fondling it.

“You know the water tank at the back?” said Chick. As I watched, the small taps over the troughs in each cage opened slightly and trickles of water flowed. One of the Bengals leaped at its tap and began batting the stream with its paw. “Water always wants to move but it can’t unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction.” The tap that the Bengal was playing with suddenly opened wide and a gush of water splatted into the big whiskers. The cat jerked back and then lunged forward, pressing his whole face into the heavy spray, twitching his ears ecstatically. “If you give it a big hole,” said Chick, “a lot comes out. If you give it a pinprick you get a slow leak.” He was struggling to make me understand. I watched the tiger play and felt a thickness between my ears. “I’m just the plumbing that lets it flow through. I can give it a big path or a small one, and I can make it go in any direction.” His anxious eyes needed me to understand. “But the wanting to move is in the thing itself.” We started off toward the big tent.

“Did I help?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

• • •

Arty, wheedling from the sofa, called, “Chick, I’ll bet there’s a lot of that roast beef left over from dinner. I sure would like a sandwich made out of that beef, with mayonnaise and horseradish. What do you say? Will you make me one?”

Chick, with a comic book under his arm, having worked for hours at other people’s jobs and looking now for just an apple and a visit with Superman — this vegetarian Chick, who will eat unfertilized eggs and milk but never (no, please don’t make him) fish or fowl or four-legged beasts or anything that notices when it’s alive and talks to him about it if he touches it — this Chick knows Arty is being mean, and will force him to move the meat rather than using his hands and a knife, and says, “Sure, Arty, white or whole wheat?”

He tries. He gets the plate of beef from the refrigerator and casually grabs a knife from the drawer.

“Chick!” snaps Arty indignantly. “You’re not gonna use a knife, are you?”

Caught, Chick admits, “I was gonna move the knife.”

But Arty roars, “Drop all that norm shit! Why did Papa give you that gift if you’re going to piss it away like a norm? Move the meat. Move the meat!”

And so precise leaf-thin pages of beef separate themselves from the pink roast and arrange themselves with a swoop of mayo and a flip of horseradish on a dancing pair of homestyle whites, and they all come together on a pretty blue plate that glides out of the dish rack to give them a ride over to where Arty is picking his teeth with a fin and watching.

“There you go,” says Chick.

“Thank you so much,” says Arty, who is perfectly capable of making his own sandwiches if there is nobody around to do it for him. Arty clamps a fin on the sandwich and takes an enormous bite, watching Chick’s face as he chews. “Dullicious!” he mouths around the mess.

“Good. I’m glad.” Chick smiles and steps out of the van and walks around behind the generator truck, where he vomits painfully and tries to think of something besides what the cow said to him as he sliced her.

They were fighting and their door was locked. The thumping woke me. I burst out of my cupboard thinking of elephants or earthquakes. The thin paneling of their cubicle room thonked toward me a fraction of an inch. I could hear them gasping. I ran to their door. The knob wouldn’t turn. The early sunlight slanted in through the window over the sink. A huge body slammed against the door on the other side. They’d wake up Al and Lil. I slid Chick’s door open and his huge eyes were waiting for me. He was afraid.

“Help me,” I whispered. “The twins are fighting.”

He rolled out of his blankets and grabbed my arm. His hand was wet.

“Unlock it.”

He looked at the doorknob. It turned. The door opened. They were rolled in a knot on the bed with spider elbows jerking out and in, a flailing leg whacking a heel into a thin, pajama-clad back. Their breathing was short and loud and a hand came out of the mess, pulling a long skein of black hair up into the light of their small window.

“Hold their hands.” I nudged Chick. Two hands spread out against the pillow and a fist landed with a smack and a squeak. “All the hands! All!” I snapped. Four arms splayed in the air away from the twisted bundle of pajamas. A leg swung back for a kick and then froze.

“Can you hold them?”

Chick nodded, looking at me. His eyes had crusts of sleep in them. Elly’s face lifted out of a mass of black hair — a red scratch across her forehead. She drew back on her long neck and shot forward, whooshing out a phtt of air as she spit into the tangled hair beneath her.

There was no hiding it from Al and Lil. The scratches and bruises were so visible that the twins couldn’t do their act for four days. They were sick and sore. They lay in bed with their faces turned away from each other all that day. Al and Lil were very upset.

“You must never do that again! You must never fight with each other!” The old incantation poured in shocked desperation from the parental mugs. The twins refused to explain what it was about.

Chick was helping me drain sewage tanks that afternoon. We were both glum. We stood and watched the gauge on the pump that emptied our van’s tank into the tanker truck. I kept thinking about what they’d looked like when Chick had opened the door. Like a thing that hated itself.

“They always bicker,” I said.

Chick nodded, watching the gauge dial. “But they were really trying to hurt each other.” Chick’s head fell forward, his chin nearly touching his chest. The back of his neck was so thin and golden, and his tawny head was so big above his skinny shoulders. Seeing him hit my lungs like an ice pick through the ribs. He was pretty.

“I wonder what it was about?” I murmured.

Chick sighed. His head wobbled. “Iphy said his name in her sleep,” he said.

Lil made Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Chicken for dinner. She was rubbing lemon juice over her hands to get rid of the garlic smell while we all sat around the table waiting for the oven bell to sound.

The twins were excited about something, whispering to each other. Al was talking about an old road manager he’d run off the midway twenty years before. The guy had shown up again that day looking for a job.

“Vicious god, Lil! He looked eighty years old! He looked like the grave had spit him back up, disgusted!”

Lil tsked over her lemon-juice hands. Arty watched the twins. Chick and I leaned on Papa from opposite sides, leeching his warmth.

Lily was dishing out the chicken when Iphy finally spoke up.

“We have a new turn for our show!” Iphy glowed. It had to be tricky. Iphy always did the talking if a “No” was possible. It was hard for anybody to say “No” to Iphy.

“We do a standing vertical jump onto the piano top and spring off into a synchronized-swim dance number in the air. We fly out over the audience and back while the piano goes on playing the ‘Corporal Bogwartz Overture’! Doesn’t that sound great? We practiced this morning! We’ll use pink floods and three pink spots to follow us over the crowd. Do let us, Papa! Chick can handle the whole thing so easily. He knows the music already. He learned it in two sessions! It takes exactly one and a half minutes and it’ll be our finale. He can just run in during the last five minutes of each show, stand behind the screen, and be finished when we touch the stage for the bow! Please, Papa, Mama? Come and see it after dinner; you’ll love it!”

Chick was hiding his face behind Al’s arm. Arty’s eyes stayed on Lil’s big spoon, lifting out chicken and putting pieces on plates.

Al was laughing. “What a picture! Wouldn’t that flatten ’em? Hey, Crystal Lil! How about these girls? Sharp?”

“Flying,” Lil murmured. “Mercy.”

Elly was pink with eagerness, her hopeful, fearful eyes fixed on Arty, who said nothing. He rocked slightly in his chair, seemingly interested only in the food that was accumulating on his plate with the help of Lil’s spoon.

It never happened, of course. Arty quashed it. If the outside world tumbled to it, or even suspected it was not a trick, we’d drown in power plays for Chick. Stay with the straight path of what we were each gifted with.… Did we think Al hadn’t done enough for us, that we had to monkey with his work? Iphy was disappointed but willing to understand. Elly never said anything about it.

We probably looked sweet, the twins and I, in our blue dresses under the shady apple trees, with big bowls in our laps, snapping green beans on a summer afternoon. But the apples on the tree were gnarled and scabby and the twins’ glossy hair and my sunbonnet covered worm-gnawed brains.

“Arty wouldn’t hurt anybody.” I was lying vigorously as I snapped away at the smooth-skinned beans. “You’re the one, Elly. You’re jealous of Arty when he’s just trying to take care of family.”

“Oly, you know Chick would be floating in formaldehyde if it looked like he was going to steal any of Arty’s thunder by being a big success.” Her hands ripped the beans to pieces, dropping the tips and strings into one bowl and the usable chunks into another. Iphy’s hands did the same task lightly, delicately.

I pushed on doggedly through my beans. “Arty still thinks Chick can be useful.”

“Sure,” Elly sniffed. “As a workhorse and a slave. Chick can save us a lot of money. It takes ten men five hours to put up the tops that Chick can put up in one hour by himself. And Chick’s pay is a pat on the head.”

Iphy sighed, “You should be kinder.”

Elly muttered at her own fingers, “I’m just taking care of you and me. That’s all I’m thinking about. He hates us. He’s selfish.”

“Not selfish! Scared! He’s scared all the time, Elly! You know it!” Iphy’s hand lifted in fright, demonstrating Arty’s terror. I shrugged off goose bumps, thinking, I’m scared too. Because I know Arty. I know him better than either of you do.

“Let him be a preacher. Let him have all those creeps sucking around him. They’ll puff him up. But he’d better leave us alone, and Chick too. And you can tell him that, Oly. There, take all these beans to Mama!”

“Be nice, Elly,” I pleaded. “Just be nice.”

“I’ll be nice,” she muttered dangerously. “You’d both let him cut your throats before you’d complain!”

• • •

Without any of the family taking much notice, Arty became a church. It happened as gradually as the thickening of his neck or the changing of his voice. From time to time one of us would remember that things hadn’t always been that way. It wasn’t that Arty got a church, or created a religion, or even found one. In some peculiar way Arty had always been a church just as an egg is a chicken and an acorn is an oak.

Elly claimed that it was malice on Arty’s part. “He has always had a nasty attitude toward the norms. Iphy and I like them except for the hecklers and drunks. They’re good to us. Papa tends the crowds like a flock of geese. They’re a lot of work and a bit of a nuisance but he loves them because they’re his bread and butter. Mama and Chick — and you too, Oly — you three don’t even know the crowds are there. You don’t have to work them. But Arty hates them. He’d wipe them all out if he could, as easy as torching an ant hill.”

“Truth” was Elly’s favorite set of brass knuckles, but she didn’t necessarily know the whole elephant. If what she said about Arty was “true,” it still wasn’t the whole truth.

Arty said, “We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise. Even a rat’s-ass dwarf jester got credit for terrible canniness disguised in his foolery. Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. The norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us as cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanctity.”

The first time I remember him talking like that was one very rare night when he had an ear infection and couldn’t do his act. I stayed with him while the rest of the family worked. He sat on the built-in couch in the family van surrounded by the popcorn he’d spilled, the kernels getting smashed into the upholstery as he bounced around talking and dipping his face into his bowl of popcorn and nipping at hot chocolate through his straw. I laughed because he had butter smeared around his eyes as he pumped this piffle at me.

I was crushed when Arty ousted me from the Oracle. Originally, I had been the one who sorted through the question cards and actually went on stage to press the face of the chosen card against the side of the tank while Arty hovered, bubbling on the other side, to read it and then shot to the surface to give the answer. Then Arty decided he wanted a redhead to do it. He had them parade in a giggling line outside their dorm wearing shorts and bras so he could choose the best figure. He said the crowd would have more respect for him if he was waited on by a good-looking redhead. “They’ll wonder if I’m balling her, decide that I am, and think I must be a hell of a guy if this gorgeous gash puts out for me even though I’m so fucked up. If it’s Oly waiting on me, they figure it’s just birds of a feather.”

I still took care of him after each show, but for a long time I sulked and ignored the act.

The Aqua Boy changed again. For a while, he answered only generic questions distilled from the scrawled bewilderments and griefs that piled up on the three-by-five cards. Then he stopped answering at all and just told them what he wanted them to hear. Testifying, he called it.

What Arty wanted the crowds to hear was that they were all hormone-driven insects and probably deserved to be miserable but that he, the Aqua Boy, could really feel for them because he was in much better shape. That’s what it sounded like to me, but the customers must have been hearing something different because they gobbled it up and seemed to enjoy feeling sorry for themselves. You might figure a mood like that would be bad for the carnival business but it worked the opposite way. The crowd streaming out from Arty’s act would plunge deeper into the midway than all the rest, as though cantankerously determined to treat themselves to the joys of junk food and simp twisters to make up for the misery that had just been revealed to them.

Arty thought about the process a lot. Sometimes he’d tell me things, only me, and only because I worshiped him and didn’t matter.

“I think I’m getting a notion of how to do this. O.K., a carnival works because people pay to feel amazed and scared. They can nibble around a midway getting amazed here and scared there, or both. And do you know what else? Hope. Hope they’ll win a prize, break the jackpot, meet a girl, hit a bull’s-eye in front of their buddies. In a carnival you call it luck or chance, but it’s the same as hope. Now hope is a good feeling that needs risk to work. How good it is depends on how big the risk is if what you hope doesn’t happen. You hope your old auntie croaks and leaves you a carload of shekels, but she might leave them to her cat. You might not hit the target or win the stuffed dog, you might lose your money and look like a fool. You don’t get the surge without the risk. Well. Religion works the same way. The only difference is that it’s more amazing than even Chick or the twins. And it’s a whole lot scarier than the Roll-a-plane or the Screamer, or any simp twister. This scare stuff laps over into the hope department too. The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous. Bad! Well, I’m working on it. I’ve got the amazing part down. And the scary bits are a snap. But I’ve got to come up with a hope.”

Arty had the advance men make up special flyers to hit certain churches. “Refuge!” they blared. “Arturo, the Aqua Boy!” and then a list of our dates and sites. Though Arty never mentioned anything resembling a god, or an outside will, or life after death, church groups started showing up. In the grim blasted regions where the soil had failed or the factories were shut down, whole congregations would drift through the gates, ignoring the lights and sights of the midway, and find their way to Arty’s tent. They paid their price and sat numbly in clumps on the bleachers waiting as long as it took for his show to begin. When it was over, they would leave the grounds together, ignoring everything.

“Too poor to play,” Papa said.

“The one buck they’ve got, I’ll get,” said Arty. But it wasn’t the money that excited him. It was that those who never would have come to the carnival came just for him.

Mama was dreamily pleased. “Arty’s spreading his wings,” she said, nodding to herself. But his wingspread took in more than the bleachers in his own tent. And all this time he was taking over more and more control of the carnival itself, and becoming more obvious in the orders he gave.

10. Snake Dance — Immaculate

I was eleven years old that year. Chick turned six and the twins were approaching their fourteenth birthday. Arty was sixteen and in a hurry.

He got his own big van with a platform to connect it to the family van. No fuss about it. Papa just shrugged when Arty had him write out the check. The guards lugged the furniture from the dressing room behind Arty’s stage, and I arranged it. Mama busied herself moving Chick into Arty’s long-abandoned cubicle in the family van.

As Arty got stronger, Al and Lil wilted. Each week they seemed softer and browner at the edges. Lil was scatty and vague more often. You could catch her any hour of the day with her collection of pills and capsules shuttling in and out of the handbag she kept by her. She did her work but she got thinner and her breasts began to droop. Her clothes didn’t hang on her in the old smooth way. Her makeup was a little blurry to begin with and tended to slip by lunchtime. Long before closing each night the mascara and rouge would slide into thick smudges. There was something missing in her eyes.

This was the year she decided she had taught the twins all that she was able, and hired the fancy piano man to teach them. Arty claimed that this was the cause of her frail weeping. The twins said it had started after Chick was born and had simply increased.

We didn’t ask for Papa’s opinion. Al was listless one minute and irritable the next. He’d go out to give orders in the morning and find that Arty had already passed the word for the day. He’d nag and snap and stand over the crews while work was being done. He took to spending more time with Horst and to showing up half buttoned into his tailcoat and with his mustache unwaxed for his Ringmaster routines. Then Dr. Phyllis appeared.

Al had always fancied himself a healer. His hobby was reading medical journals. He collected first-aid kits and drugs. He was an enthusiastic amateur general practitioner, and as soon as we could afford it — years before Arturism was in swing — he bought a small second-hand trailer and set it up as a little infirmary. His fascination with human mechanics certainly came before and probably sparked his idea for manipulating our breeding, and he did have a knack for it. We thought of it as part of his Yankee spirit. He was enthralled by medicine but furious with doctors for hogging the glory just because they’d managed to get a piece of paper to hang on the wall.

With Al’s hobby, the Fabulon had been nearly independent of medical folk. Horst was called in as a consultant on veterinary chores, but Al handled anything human himself. The flame eaters figured him for a genius because he cured the many blisters on their lips and inside their mouths. Over the years he set fractures, relocated joints, diagnosed and treated venereal diseases, and dosed infections from the kidneys to the tonsils.

It was Lil who soothed brows, changed sheets, and read aloud for the sick, but it was Al who did the flashy stuff. He lanced boils with a flair, gave vaccinations, irrigated ears, noses, and rectums with equal zest, and made a grand production of extracting a sliver. He was a masterly stitcher—“scarless wizardry,” as he himself claimed. His career triumph happened the night an elderly lady collapsed in the front row at her first sight of Arty. Al recognized a heart attack, ripped her purple cotton dress down from the throat and clapped disposable electrodes to her chest within seconds of her tumble to the sawdust. He did it right there in front of Arty’s tank with seven or eight hundred people in the bleachers watching. She jolted. Her eyeglasses slid off. She voided her colon rather noisily, and was alive again, if not conscious.

It was the custom for the midway folk to appear on Monday mornings at Al’s clinic if they had complaints. A lot of people said Al “should have been a doctor,” and that his talent was wasted in the Fabulon. Al didn’t see it that way. “I’ve got a captive practice of sixty souls,” he’d say, increasing the numbers as the show’s population grew to eighty, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and sixty.

Then Dr. Phyllis arrived. She drove into the lot one morning and parked thirty yards back from the cat wagon, which happened to be the last trailer in line that day.

She sat at the wheel and looked out through the windshield for a while. I saw her because I was stumping around the cat wagon rehearsing a lead-in talk. I kept on, pretending not to notice but taking in the shiny white van with a pair of tangled snakes climbing a staff painted next to the side door. I could barely see the vague pale figure behind the polarized windshield. We’d been on the lot for two days and were all set up, so the crews were taking it easy that morning, sitting on trailer steps talking and drinking coffee.

Horst was shaving beside his living van, using a portable razor while he looked into the rearview mirror on the driver’s side. Everybody on the lot saw the van arrive but nobody reacted. For all we knew it was an act that Al had hired and not mentioned.

I was thinking she was a snake dancer because of the vipers on the van. I was morbidly fascinated by snakes. The van door opened, a pair of steps flopped out, and she appeared.

She was dressed in white — the uniform, the shoes, stockings, gloves, and of course the snug cap and the face mask. Only her glasses were neutral, clear, the eyes behind them blurred by their thickness.

She stepped smartly down and strode toward the nearest guard. It was Tim Jenkins, a big mahogany weightlifter who had retired from perpetual corporal status in the Marines and had been taken up by Al while his scalp was still visible under his military haircut. Tim was serious about guard duty and clicked his heels as the short, sturdy white figure approached him.

I’d stopped my pacing and was staring, boggle-eyed, at her. I knew it was a woman because of the broad hips and bulging prow. I was figuring her for a Hindu snake dancer — imagining flame shows with reptiles flickering over her gradually revealed flesh, slipping up her arms under the white sleeves, and so on.

I couldn’t hear what she said but Tim nodded and looked at Horst. Horst had been watching everything in his mirror. He flipped his razor through the driver’s window onto the seat of his van and strolled over. Tim was making introductions and Horst nodded and stuck out a hand. The figure in white pointedly jammed her gloved hands into the pockets of her white jacket. Horst let his hand drop and settled back a hair on his heels. Horst strolled away with the lady in white, toward the two Binewski vans. I trailed at a distance.

It was a bright, warm morning in Arkansas, I think, or maybe Georgia. The dust was brick red on my shoes as I leaned on the generator truck and looked down, pretending to mind my own affairs. I could have kicked myself for picking that fender to lean on when I realized that the fractured thrum of the generator would keep me from hearing any conversation. The white lady was waiting outside Arty’s van. She was carrying a thin vinyl briefcase, white. She stood quite still with no nervous movements. Chick’s small face peered from the window of the family van.

Arty came out in his chair. His forehead folded down over his eyes with questions. He doesn’t know her, I thought. He didn’t send for her. He nodded and said something. She spoke, her hands on the white case. Arty guided his chair down the ramp, and she fell in beside him, going slowly away from the vans, talking. She tucked the case under her arm and jammed her hands in her pockets again.

The case didn’t stay where she put it but slid out behind her and floated toward the open door of the family van at an altitude of four feet or so. She whipped around and despite the mask I could tell she was glaring at the flying briefcase. Arty looked over his shoulder, stopped, opened his mouth, and shouted at the van. The case stopped just before it entered the door, turned in midair and zipped back to the white lady at twice the speed it had left her. She reached out a gloved hand, snatched it, and stuck it back under her arm. Arty was talking to her. She nodded. They turned away and, with him rolling and her walking, they paraded up and down and around the lot, talking for a long time.

“I think she’s creepy,” said Electra. Iphigenia bobbed her head gravely in agreement and popped a slice of apple into her mouth. Arty ignored them both.

“How is she going to be paid? Percentage? Salary? Only when somebody’s sick? Or only as long as everybody is well?” Al slid his eyes nervously, trying to be businesslike. Arty was forced to abandon his soup and his pretense of oblivion. He stared around the table at us and then turned to Papa.

“Don’t worry about her money. I’ll take care of it. She’s got a lot to offer us. She’s a stroke of luck for this show. She’s not a school hack, at least. She’s good at what she does.”

Papa looked guiltily into his soup bowl.

Lily smiled dreamily. “It will be nice having an educated lady around.”

Al patted her hand. Arty was concentrating on his soup again, crossing his eyes to sight down his straw. Chick sat beside Lil in the back of the dining booth, smiling and watching the peas lift, individually, from his soup, jerk slightly until the drip of broth fell back into the bowl, and then swoop down to rest in a military row on his plate. Chick never did like peas. I caught Iphy’s eye. She raised her brows and pursed her mouth. Elly wrinkled her nose at me. We girls agreed, silently, that even if we had bubonic plague, the lady in white wasn’t going to lay a finger on us.

Dr. Phyllis cowed Al. After that first day he never questioned her presence, or her credentials. He wouldn’t even try to ask where she’d come from or what she’d been doing before she joined us. He dithered and protested that she was a “lady” and a good medic, and “By the blistered nipples of the Virgin,” he didn’t need to know any more than that. The twins and I shook our heads at how little fight he put up when his private passion was usurped. I nagged him to ask questions because, if he didn’t come up with some information, Arty would make me try. It seemed that despite his long conversation with her Arty didn’t know much more about her than the rest of us did.

I was putting Arty onto the little elevator platform that ran up the outside of the family van one morning when he cocked a wink at me and said, “I guess you’ll have to get old Doc P. to let you look through her microscope.”

I put a foot on the platform beside him, grabbed the lever, and we went slowly up.

It was a sunny morning. Warm. I don’t know where we were — a small valley. All around the camp were deep pastures cut by streams with rough hills beyond. The highway sliced through and ran toward a small town, whose chimneys we could see above the trees. There were songbirds racketing in the scrub oaks on the slopes. The honk of a pheasant drifted up from the long grass. Arty wriggled off the elevator onto the roof. He liked to sunbathe up there when he could. Al had put a low rail around the top of the van so Arty wouldn’t fall off, at the same time he installed the elevator.

Arty stuck his toe into the elastic of his trunks and worked them down until they sagged off him. He rolled over and arched his back, tilting his belly to the sun, stretching lushly.

“Yep,” he said, “Little Oly had better do her stuff on Doc P.”

“Here’s your fly swatter.” I put it beside him with the handle close to his head, where he could reach it. Arty was, as he claimed, “fly Mecca,” and he hated them.

“Don’t ignore me, Oly,” he murmured as I rubbed suntan oil on his chest.

“I won’t do it. I don’t like her.”

“Oly, you like her. You like her a lot. She’s a fascinating, intelligent woman and you can learn from her.”

“Right,” I said, capping the bottle.

“Give her an ear to pour into. Nobody does that better than you.” He turned his head to watch me step onto the elevator.

“Don’t piss on anybody from up here,” I said. “Papa got really mad last time.” I lowered myself, looking away from him, looking at the brown creek that eased through the grass behind the van.

Three hours later I was hauling Dr. P.’s garbage to the camp dumpster and cursing her and Arty and myself in a thin blue vapor of rage that hissed through my nose with every breath. She had accepted my offer of help coldly and stood over me while I pumped the hydraulic leveler for her van. She gave me rigid orders about clipping the weeds and grass all around her van and then made me go over the whole area with a rake for litter. Then she introduced me to the garbage. She had very strict ideas about garbage. Each full bag in the can beside her van had to be slipped inside another bag and wrapped in a particular oblong shape and tied with string in a proper square knot. Three of these small parcels went into one large bag, which was then wrapped and tied with the same knot. Then the large parcel could be carried to the camp collection.

She considered it proper that I, or someone more efficient, should be dispatched by Arty to do her chores. She wasn’t at all grateful.

When I got back to her van the door was closed again. I hadn’t yet managed to get inside. I pushed the door buzzer. Her voice scratched out of the speaker, “Yes.”

“I’m finished with the garbage, ma’am.”

“That’s all for today, then. Have a bath and pay special attention to cleaning under your nails. Report back tomorrow morning.”

A month and several towns later I still hadn’t set foot in her van. I’d filled her fuel and water tanks, emptied her septic system, gift-wrapped her garbage every day, and in each new site I’d leveled her van, policed her area for litter, and generally kissed her cold and pendulous buttocks for nothing.

In the meantime she had taken over Al’s precious infirmary trailer.

The sick call was cut in half. Al kept up his Monday-morning exams of the family but they were conducted in our dining booth. He didn’t have the old zest for it. He went on tapping and listening and demanding news of our bowel movements. He still lifted our eyelids and peered into our throats and ears and scowled at our nails and rubbed blue gunk on our teeth and, for those of us with hair, checked for lice and ticks, but he didn’t have his old glow of joy in doing it. He was sneaking behind her back.

I found this clipping years later in the private papers of the reporter Norval Sanderson, who joined the show sometime after Dr. P. Norval had resources that we Binewskis lacked. When he wanted info on someone’s past, he could tap records and microfilm files from any newspaper in the country.

(UPI) A coed at the University of New York was admitted to St. Theresa’s Hospital today after having performed abdominal surgery on herself in her dormitory room.

University authorities revealed that Phyllis Gleaner, 22, a third-year bio-chem major, pressed an alarm buzzer in her dormitory room, which summoned the building’s custodian at 4:30

A.M

., Tuesday. Responding to the buzzer, custodian Gregory Phelps found the student lying on a sterile table, wrapped in bloody sheets and surrounded by instruments.

“She was weak but conscious,” said Phelps. “She told me not to touch anything in the room but to call an ambulance. She said the room was sterile and she didn’t want me touching anything. She was very strong on that. I could see blood all over and from what I saw in the mirrors around her I didn’t want to upset her so I went and called the emergency number.”

Police surgeon Kevin Goran, M.D., examined Gleaner’s dorm room after she was removed to the hospital. “It was a makeshift but functional operating theater,” said Goran. “She had instruments for fairly major abdominal surgery, and an ingenious arrangement of mirrors, which allowed her to work inside her own abdominal cavity.”

Emergency staff at St. Theresa’s reported that Gleaner was conscious and coherent when admitted, but was very fatigued. “She was not really in shock,” said Dr. Vincent Coraccio, staff surgeon at St. Theresa’s. “What was remarkable was the competence of the work. She’d gone all the way in and was finished, evidently, but she got too tired to close the incision. That’s when she called for

help. All I had to do was stitch her up. A very tidy job.”

Gleaner administered local anesthetics to herself throughout the surgical procedure. Her statements to the hospital staff indicate that Gleaner believed a remote-control device had been implanted next to her liver by an unnamed undercover organization. Gleaner believed that the device was being used to monitor and direct her activities. She performed the surgery in an effort to rid herself of the device. No such device was found by police in searching Gleaner’s dormitory room, nor by the medical staff in treating Gleaner.

The clipping was stapled in Sanderson’s notebook. One page of his sprawling hand revealed the rest of his Doc P. research.

In an article appearing two days later, the same reporter revealed that university officials attempting to contact Gleaner’s family discovered that the background on file was fictitious. She had not attended the schools that she claimed. Her records were forged and falsified. No relatives or friends could be located in the small Kansas town — Garden City — she claimed as her home. The university was embarrassed, particularly since Gleaner’s academic record at that institution was brilliant. Her professors acknowledged that she was a reserved individual and denied any knowledge of her private life. They affirmed that her work had been consistently excellent. Classmates claimed little knowledge of Gleaner. She was aloof from everyone

.

Gleaner has consistently refused to make any statement or to answer any questions about her self-surgery or her falsified background. Her only comment, relayed through a nurse’s aide, was that the university had no cause for alarm since her tuition and fees had always been paid.

11. Blood, Stumps, and Other Changes

The twins turned fourteen in Burkburnett, Texas, during a Panhandle sandstorm as red as a drinker’s eye. Birthdays were the only holidays the Binewskis noticed and we celebrated them with all the gusto we could muster. But that fourteenth for the twins was in a rough spot. Wichita Falls had denied us a permit and the front man — new to the job, and a reptile anyway — was scared to tell Al. We didn’t find out until the police met us at the lot and escorted our cavalcade out of town, with Al cursing melodically all the way to our next scheduled stop, which was Burkburnett. Burkburnett hadn’t decided whether we could have a permit or not. We put up in the railyard next to the slaughterhouse and slept with the whish and thunk of the oil pumps for night music.

There were oil wells everywhere. The soil had been abandoned to dust and lizards, and the backyard of every wind-blistered bungalow in town had thrown over ideas of shade or geraniums in favor of the whiskey promise in the mutter of those green grasshopper pumps. Every pump was set in concrete and snugged in by a barb-topped chain-link fence eight feet high. There were pumps in the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour liquor store. There were three pumps on choice plots surrounded by the artificial turf that covered the Terra Celestial Memorial Gardens boneyard. A dozen ravenous steel insects sucked at the shit-caked loam in the mile-square meatfield of empty pens where the beeves, when there were beeves, milled waiting for the knife. The white board fences of the paddocks were guarding only oil pumps that week. The packing plant was closed down.

Past our corner of the meat yard the town began, or ended, in a blasted heap of storefronts leaning on each other to face a million miles of Texas rushing straight at them over the mindless, moundless plain.

The twins woke up bickering. I could hear Elly’s harsh whispers behind the screen. Then Iphy, who never really learned to whisper, “Not better than you. It’s different, Elly. Please. Just for our birthday.” It was the same old quarrel. Iphy wanted to sit next to Arty at breakfast. Elly always insisted that they sit in the left side of the dining booth so that she was between Iphy and Arty, who always sat in his special chair at the end of the booth. Elly hated the giggling that hit Iphy when she sat next to Arty. Arty didn’t seem to care. I was the one who helped Arty with his food.

I crawled out of my cupboard and tiptoed into the toilet cubicle. Elly was grumbling. She must have given in. She’d given in on Arty’s birthday the year before and sulked the whole day. The pink joy from Iphy’s smiles had twisted me up. I looked in the mirror trying to see the fear on my face. It was in my liver and invisible.

Arty would rather have Iphy cut his meat than me. The blinds squeaked open in the twins’ room. Their voices came out together. “A horse!” they said, and then a paired sigh, “Poor thing!”

They left the van door open and, when I came out, they were standing on the bottom slat of the board fence peering through.

“Many happy,” I said, and hugged their long beautiful legs. Then their hands were pulling me up by the arms and I grabbed at the top rail and peered over. Iphy said, “Hang on to her,” and Elly’s arm clamped under my hump.

“He’s sick,” said Iphy, who thought all unfamiliar animals were male. “She’s old,” said Elly, who assumed that all living things were female until proven otherwise.

The horse had been orange once but a grizzle of white had paled its coat. Its white muzzle drooped to the ground on a thin, tired neck. Its ears were loose and hanging. Its eyes were nearly closed. Bones jutted through spine, ribs, sharp cow flanks. The tail was so long that it dragged in the muck.

“The feet!” said the twins. The horse was not sleeping. It moved half a step forward. First a rear hoof and then the opposite forehoof lifted slowly out of the black mud that covered them to the fetlocks. Then the horse stopped, lifting again that rear leg, holding it curled so the hoof was above the mud. The hoof was long and curved forward like a human shoe worn over on the outside. The legs were muddy to the knee and bowed oddly.

The sun leaked up over the edge of the plain. The horse stood in shadow in its tiny pen. “Its feet are rotten,” muttered Elly. Iphy began to sniff in sympathy.

I could feel the faint thunk in the fenceboards from the pumps far off in the middle of the tight maze of paddocks. The sun’s yellow knife slit the air, not yet reaching the ground or even the fences, but just touching the heads of the pumps as they rose and then losing them as they bobbed down into the shadow again. The feeble horse stood sunk into itself. Not an ear twitched. Not an eyelid flickered. An early-morning fly crawled over its hanging lips.

“Happy birthday,” Arty said.

Iphy sat next to Arty at breakfast. Al had gone to the sheriff’s office to get the verdict on our permit for Burkburnett. Lil hugged the twins every time she passed them and made elegant little melon salads for breakfast. Elly didn’t talk. Iphy mourned for the horse all through the meal.

“I want my chair.” Arty was brisk, up to something. I dragged the chair outside and set it up in front of the door. He clambered into it from the top step and looked around. “Over by that horse.” And I pushed his chair through the dust to the fence. He leaned forward and peered through the slats. The horse hadn’t moved. Arty’s face rumpled in disgust. He sank back against the chair and looked at me speculatively. “Well. Go get the doctor. Bring her here.” I ran.

The doctor’s big van was by itself at the end of the line with fifty yards between it and the last trailer. She never parked close to the others. Her blinds were open. The twined snakes painted on the van’s side held the intercom in their mouths. I pushed the button. The sun was up now, slanting warm and yellow over my hands. The intercom speaker hissed and then her voice came out calmly. “Yes.” I delivered the message. “One moment,” she said. The speaker hissed again and went silent. I climbed down off the step block to wait for her. I didn’t like to think of her door opening too close to me.

The air was still and dry with a musty, thick taste. The only familiar smell was the faint tang of fuel from the van. We hadn’t opened up yet. We hadn’t put our mark on the air. I tried to see past the cluster of vans and trucks and trailers to home — to the place at the other end where our van sat, with Arty out front next to the near-dead horse in its pen. Everything was in the way. I pulled my cap down over my ears and jigged anxiously in the dust. I didn’t want to look in the other direction toward the dry slut town with its dark windows shaded against us. I bit my tongue when the door opened. The antiseptic smell slid out first. Then I saw her thick-wedged white shoes with the ankles leaping from them. “Lead the way, please,” she said. And she stepped down toward me. I scuttled.

Dr. Phyllis should have had a nice voice. It was cool and high and always controlled. She never ran off into the ragged edges of sharp like Lil or Iphy. But it still wasn’t pleasant. It was monotonous as a sleepwalker. Her words came out cleanly, nipped off surgically with a slightly heavy breath where an r should be. She spoke Lil’s old tongue, the long, smooth one from the right side of the hill in Boston. Though, when Lil asked her, Dr. Phyllis said she’d never been there. That talk made Lil want her to stay. Lil thought it would be good to have a woman with the show who spoke that way — as though she and Lil might drink tea in the van and talk about home. But it never happened. I didn’t mind Lil liking her. Lil was silly about who she liked. But Arty was different.

The dust puffed up behind me as I ran. I hoped it would settle on her white uniform. I wished she wasn’t wearing the mask so she would breathe my dust and cough. But she never came out without the mask over her nose and mouth. The white cap was always pulled down tight over her forehead and completely covered her hair. In between were the big thick spectacles. She was completely protected. She didn’t speak to me, and she kept up with me easily, walking fast.

Chick was leaning on the arm of Arty’s chair as we came up. The two of them were watching something in the dust.

I heard Arty say, “Push them together.” Chick’s head nodded and a small grey snake rose a foot into the air, suspended from its middle like a shoestring, and then dropped back into the dust.

“They’re not paying attention,” said Arty.

“Good morning,” said Dr. Phyllis in her high, perfect voice. The snake and a horned toad rose quickly and flew away together into the desert. Chick hid his head against Arty’s chest.

“Doctor!” said Arty. “Take a look at this horse.”

She walked stiffly past me, her hands folded in front of her crotch. “I am not,” she said calmly, “a veterinarian.”

Arty jabbed his chin into Chick’s wheat-colored hair. “Scat!” he snapped. The child jumped away from the chair and turned to run. When he saw me, he reached out his soft hand and ran up to me.

“Let’s go see what Mama’s putting in the birthday cake,” I said. He smiled and we climbed into the van.

Chick sat on the counter, still except when his mouth opened to receive the gobbets of chocolate frosting that would occasionally lift from the bowl that Lil was dipping from. “Stop it, Chick,” Lil would murmur. And he would smile sweet chocolate at her, and the curl that dropped in front of her ear would stretch out in a soft caress over her cheek and then spring back. I crouched on the floor with my hump against the cupboard door and watched Arty and Dr. Phyllis through the open door.

Her white skirt was stretched tight over her thick legs and square hips. She was pushing her hands deep into her front pockets and rocking on her wedge heels. She gazed through the fence at the decrepit horse. Arty leaned back in his chair and looked up at her, smiling. I couldn’t hear what they said.

A brown blob danced in front of my nose. I opened my mouth. It dipped, circled in the air, and zipped onto my tongue. Frosting.

“Thanks, Chicky,” I mumbled. My cap slid forward onto my nose and then back to its original position. Dr. Phyllis leaned an elbow on the top board of the fence and turned her mask and spectacles toward Arty. She propped a white-gloved hand on her hip and nodded. I licked the last of the frosting out of my teeth and let it trickle down my throat.

“I wonder where the twins are,” said Lil. The cake was beautiful. Lil had cut it into the shape of two hearts that interlocked.

I gave the word to Horst and he went right away. He took a pair of musclemen along to help pull the little trailer. I sat on the step of the cat van, smelling the Bengals and waiting for Papa. There were a few cars moving on the distant street now. A barbershop had its door open and a curtain of red and white fly strips hung limp. The guards were drinking from big Thermoses at the end of the lot. It felt odd to be parked without the gates and the booths and the tops going up around me.

After a while Dr. Phyllis marched by, followed by Horst and the two bullies pulling the covered trailer. She had them park it next to her big van. Then she went inside her van. Horst came to me slowly. He dropped heavily onto the step beside me. “Horse thieving now!” he said.

“Papa will find its owner and pay for it.” The men were grunting and cussing inside the little trailer. The old horse would not get up.

“I wouldn’t feed that critter to an alley cat. Grey meat and little of it.”

One of the young men jumped out and stood at the tailgate to pull. With his hands wrapped in the dung-fouled tail he crouched and crab-walked backward. The pale, gaunt flanks hove into view. The flabby hooves and rear legs fell out onto the ground. The blond man inside the trailer was pushing from the other end. The horse rolled out and lay on the ground. Its head flopped down on the end of the long neck and lay still. The white flapping nostrils flared and drooped. The blond man hopped out of the trailer with a rope hackamore and fitted it onto the limp head. He clipped a rope to the chin ring and ran it to the axle of Dr. Phyllis’s van.

The guards were moving slightly, standing up, putting their Thermoses behind their stools. A big man crossed the street and walked across the rutted stubble of the lot. Papa. The two guards walked halfway to the vans with him and then went back to their posts. Papa came on. He looked angry.

Burkburnett had forbidden our opening on Sunday. We’d have to wait until the following day. Al was pissed off. He was cursing the cowardly advance man who had done a bunk the first time he ran into a snag. “Missing Friday and Saturday in Wichita Falls — and having to open on the slowest day of the week in a town that couldn’t buy a week’s worth of toilet paper for the crew!”

I told Papa what Arty wanted. Al groused but then went off to look for the owner of the horse.

At lunchtime, Lil realized she hadn’t seen the twins since breakfast. She flew into a panic and went jittering around on her high red heels with her hands clutching her own shoulders. She teetered from guard post to guard post questioning the big blank-faced men. “Ain’t seen ’em, ma’am. Couldn’t miss ’em if they’d come this way.” And they’d switch their chaws and wobble their eyes anxiously as she skittered away, hoping that the little freaks hadn’t slipped by them while they were swapping lies about hot nights in Baton Rouge.

Papa was somewhere talking to a man about a horse and I trailed after Mama piping, “Maybe so,” and “Ah, they’re all right!” and “Maybe they’re buried in the meat yard, shall I get some shovels?” in my most reassuring way as she burbled through her Mom’s-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight. Lil had got to the finger-twisting stage and all the red-haired girls turned out to look. We opened all the empty boxcars on the rail siding and examined all the padlocks on the big sliding doors to the packing plant and were on our way back through the camp line, stopping at every van, trailer, and truck camper. The whole show was on hold because Papa hadn’t given the set-up order yet, and Arty was occupied with something else.

Mama decided the twins were having a nap in their own room and we were on our way to look when I noticed the sky. It was a vague milky sheet. Far off at the dull edge of the plain, a blood-red line lay between the earth and the sky. As I watched, the red thickened to a bar and then a band, climbing the sky.

Arty and Chick were next to Dr. P.’s van at the end of the line. Dr. P. herself, arms cocked to plant her white gloves on her white hips, stood in front of Arty’s chair nodding her mummy-wrapped head. Chick looked like he was hiding behind Arty’s chair.

The wind was picking up. It riffled Chick’s hair and pushed Dr. P.’s skirt flat against her legs. Off to the side the old horse lifted its head on a curved and quivering neck, scrabbling at the earth with its mushy front hooves, trying to get grip enough to heave itself upright.

Horst trotted by me with the two guys who had moved the horse. I started to run. I could see Dr. P. opening her van door and waving for Chick to go in. Chick looked at her but both his hands were fastened to the arm of Arty’s chair. Arty’s chin was jerking toward the door and the doctor. Arty was telling Chick to go with her.

“We’re gonna shove that maggoty goat back into the little trailer!” Horst yelled at me as I passed him. It was too far to Dr. Phyllis’s van and I was too slow. Her door closed on Chick and he was inside, alone with her. Arty had the bulb control in his teeth and was wheeling merrily toward me when I grabbed his chair arms.

“What’d you do that for?” I puffed. “What’s she gonna do to Chick? Don’t leave him with her!”

“Push me home! He’s all right. Come on! Double it! Run!”

I grabbed the chair handles automatically and slogged toward his van, still craning my neck to look back at the blank closed side of Dr. P.’s white van. Horst and his helpers were torturing the decrepit brute back into the trailer. I stopped pushing. “Arty, what is she doing to Chick?”

His smooth-skinned head bobbed at the side of the chair. “Milk and cookies. Teaching him to play checkers. Move it! I have to piss so bad I can taste it.”

I threw myself forward, plodding, watching my feet stir the dust into the wheel ruts and noticing that the odd, thin light from the sky threw no shadows at all.

Mama was frantic. Papa was trying to tell her about the fat, bristly tick of a man who owned the horse and had tried to convince Al it was blood stock and would be a three-year-old in prime fettle as soon as it got some oats in its belly. Mama was whipping over every surface in the van looking for a note. A ransom note from the kidnappers or a farewell note from the runaway twins. “I left a note in my mother’s sugar canister when I ran away,” she muttered. Papa followed her, rambling on about the “used cayuse peddler” and finally noticed something amiss. Mama turned to him with clenched fists and a flaming face.

“Help me find them!”

“What the …??” Papa snatched at her wrist, turning her arm over, checking the number of injection tracks. I saw them toppling into anger.

“Papa, the twins are missing.”

“Ah, the flabby-gashed mother of god!” howled Papa as he sailed out the door trailing Mama. The wind slung the door wide with a flat whack and rushed into the van. I pushed the door closed behind me and took the two steps to Arty’s van. I turned the knob without knocking and slid inside. Silence. Carpet. The clean, rich room dim except for a yellow pool of lamplight where Arty lay calmly on a wine velvet divan with a book. He watched me wrestle his door closed.

“Do you know where they are?”

He shook his head. “But you can soak some towels and pack the windows and door frame for me. Help keep the dust out.” His eyes fell back to his book.

I wet towels in the tub, wrung them out, and punched them into the window frames. Through each window I could see the crew moving the vans and trailers, turning them end-on to the coming wind. There was movement in the windows of some of the other trailers as other hands tucked wet rags or papers against the cracks.

“Shall I go get Chick?”

Arty looked at the clock. “He’ll be coming here in a few minutes. He’ll make it before the dust comes down.”

“There he is.” I could see him through the window, holding hands with a red-haired girl as he ran to keep up with her long legs. They were ducking their heads, hunching into the wind, the red-haired girl with her free hand holding her high-rise hair, which blew up and back around her groping fingers.

“Did you ever wonder,” Arty asked, in his coolly speculative tone, “why he doesn’t fly? He should be able to.”

I yanked the door open as the pair hustled up the steps.

“Oly dear!” said the red-haired girl. “Crystal Lil wants you, honey! Chick found the twins. Come on.” I was staring at Chick, looking for bruises, psychic scars, electrodes planted behind his ears. Nothing. He was caught up in the excitement of the wind.

“Leave him with me!” Arty yelled from the divan. Chick’s eyes sprang eagerly past me, his face opening, pleased. He trotted in as I pulled the door shut.

The redhead grabbed my hand. Hurrying. The wind pushing so I felt my weight lifting away from me. The sky was a deep rust above us and the shouts of the crew around us were shredded to yelping bits that flipped past like no language at all. “Where?” I bellowed.

I thought she said, “The Schultzes!”

We blew past the generator truck, the refrigerator truck. I saw Horst shoving a wad of wet paper into the ventilator slot of the cat wagon and then the sand hit us. The red-haired girl screamed a short, high whistle interrupted by coughing, hers and mine. It was needles from behind, a million ant bites blistering the back of my neck, burning through my clothes. In front it was worse. A hot cloud of granulated suffocation filling nose, mouth, and eyes with dry powder that stuck to any moisture. It liked the roof of the mouth, the caves behind the nose, and especially the throat.

The refrigerator truck toppled onto its side behind us. We ran and the wind tried to make us fly.

The ten-toilet men-and-women Schultz was broadside to the wind. The same heaving gust that flattened the redhead and me toppled the Schultz off its trailer. On my belly in the dirt with my face buried in my arms, I felt the crash more than I heard it. Then a hand was pulling me up, and slipping my blouse up to cover my nose and mouth. The redhead rushed me along, her own blouse snugged to her face with the other hand. The fine dust sifted through the cloth but I could breathe a little. The wind ripped up my back, raking my hump, clawing at my bare head. My cap had blown away with my sunglasses. There was no sound — the blank roar of the wind-borne sand was seamless.

Hands hoisted me at the armpits and I fell, free and blind, but landed before I could yelp. Inside. Out of the wind. The redhead had found the door at one end of the Schultz and got me through it. I sat in the dark, painfully blinking sand out of my eyes with tears. The deep boom of the wind beat at the tin wall as I lay against it. A warm body lurched into me, collapsed beside me. A hand felt my head, my hump. The air was soft and thick with floating dust and the sick, sweet tang of chemicals and worse. The redhead’s warm voice breathed in my ear, “I’ll bet this crapper hasn’t been pumped since Tulsa.”

It wasn’t actually a Schultz-brand portable toilet. It was a Merry-Loo in a truck box with five booths on each side, self-contained cold-water supply for washbasins, MEN on the port side, WOMEN to starboard. Papa had picked it up cheap with its own truck trailer. It was built of thin fiberboard and was so light that a car or a small pickup could pull the whole rig.

“Yuck! I’m leaning on a slimy urinal!” The redhead scooted over, pushing me into the corner. My head banged on something hard and I reached to feel pipes and chilly porcelain, dripping. The sink. My eyes were flushing out sand and I began to see well enough to know that it really was dark in there.

“The twins and your mom are on the other side. We’re on the men’s side. If they’re still there … Lil! Lily!” she shouted.

“Mama!” I yelled, and then coughed with the red dust rasping deep in my pipes. The murk fuddled me. The room was on its side. The sink above me hung the wrong way. If I turned on the tap, the water wouldn’t fall into the basin, it would pour onto my head. We were crouched on a wall with the linoleum floor at our backs. What little light there was came in a brown-gravy mist through the plastic skylight in what was normally the roof but was now the far wall. The sand-heavy wind cast dark, rushing shadows across it. Just beyond the urinal that lay beside us, the booths began. The liquid seeping from the cracks reminded me that all the toilets were lying on their backs.

“They’re above us.” The redhead was standing up on shaky denim legs. “Wow! I’m a little woozy!” Fluid was dripping down from what was serving as the ceiling. “Look, that wall is popping!”

The tab-and-slot construction of the fiberboard wall was loose at the corner above us, drooping. “Here, climb up and pull on it.”

She hauled me up by my hands, balancing me as I climbed to her knee, her hip, her back. “I’m gonna stand up now,” she warned. I stepped onto her shoulders, propping myself against the wall, and tore at the loose flap.

“Mama! Crystal Lil!”

“Hey,” from the dark above us.

“Oly, get out of the way. We’ll lower Mama to you. She’s hurt. Her chest.” It was Elly up there in the dark. I gave the redhead a few extra bruises sliding down. She caught the long, white legs that slid out of the ceiling. Mama’s favorite yellow-flowered skirt was torn, and the blue veins on the backs of her thighs glittered oddly in the dimness. She moaned feebly as she eased downward. “Mama?” Her arms came last. The twins let go and she fell jerkily into the corner with a yelp.

“A light,” Mama said.

The twins lowered themselves through the hole and dropped beside me. They were sodden and they stank. Their hair and clothes were damp with the blue ooze from the chemical toilets.

“It’s all our fault,” Iphy whimpered. “My fault is what she means,” said Elly. They crouched over Mama and the redhead leaned over her, gently pushing Mama’s shock of white hair back from her forehead. Lil was wandering in her head.

We stretched her out flat under the sink and the redhead tore a scrap off the yellow-flowered skirt to lay over Mama’s nose and mouth so she could breathe in the floating dust.

The twins were filthy. “Nothing broken?” asked the redhead. “Then sit over there. That smell makes my sinuses ache. Crapper dumped on you, eh?”

“I acts,” Mama announced calmly from the floor. “Me is acted upon.” We all looked at her.

“Is that grammar?” asked Iphy. Mama laced her fingers together on her belly as though she were napping in her own bed.

“I don’t know. It may just be talk.” The redhead picked at a scrape on her elbow. “I’ll go look outside in a minute. It might be letting up.”

The wind was gusting now, taking breathing breaks between attacks. There was a little more light. The twins slumped on the floor against the first booth. Their faces were as blank as uncut pies. Their eyes stayed fixed on Mama.

“Happy birthday!” I grinned. Their mouths crimped painfully.

“Were you in here all morning? Mama was worried.”

The two matching faces nodded slightly. The redhead chuckled and whacked at the knees of her jeans, shedding puffs of dust. “It’s their first time bleeding. They thought they were dying.”

Elly glowered, eyebrows bunching downward. “We knew what it was.” Iphy’s eyes tilted up anxiously in the middle, “We didn’t know it was going to happen to us, though. We don’t feel good. And it’s scary. Elly didn’t want to come out but I did. I tried to get her to come out but she wouldn’t.”

Elly shook her head impatiently. “How long do these things last? All night? Or what?”

Lil’s voice came from under the rag, “I would have told you more but I wasn’t sure it would happen to you.”

My heart was beating a panic in my ears, “Mama, will it happen to me?”

Iphy licked at her muddy lips, “Elly wouldn’t come out even when Chick and Mama found us. She wouldn’t let me unlock the door. Mama told Chick to unlock the door and bring us out but he wouldn’t. Because we didn’t want to. But it wasn’t both of us. It was Elly. Our legs went to sleep sitting on that toilet.”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

“Ah, Elly, loosen up. Don’t be so crabby,” groaned the redhead. She patted my head. “Your mama sent me for you so you could crawl under the door of the booth.”

“I would have kicked you if you’d tried,” snarled Elly.

“For Christ’s sake, girl, why make so much of a fuss?” The redhead was exasperated. “It happens to every female.”

“Yeah? Well, it changes things for us. It throws in a lot of new stuff to think about.”

A truck horn started blaring nearby. Its flat voice, thinned by the wind, repeated itself monotonously. Mama opened her eyes. “Dear Al is so impatient.”

“He doesn’t know where you are.” The redhead stood up. The whites of her eyes were blatant in her dust-clotted face. She reached above me to the knob of the horizontal door and pushed it open. The clogged sand in the sill rained down. A rip of wind circled the room, rubbing grime into our faces.

“All right, ladies, party’s over. Everybody out.”

“I’m so glad I had that cake in the refrigerator,” said Crystal Lil. “We wouldn’t have had a bite if I’d left it on the counter.”

We were having the twins’ birthday party on Mama’s big bed. She lay propped mightily on pillows with Papa’s elegant bandage wrappings showing through the front of her kimono and her fresh-washed hair frothing like egg whites above her naked, unpainted face.

We vacuumed for an hour and still the red dust drifted in the air. But now, having showered in relays, wearing clean clothes, we could blink our sore eyes and pick the dry, gritty boogers from our noses in exhausted contentment. Papa, leaning against the pillows next to Mama, winked his scoured red eyes at us. “You girls look a bit better now. Less like a demon crew and more like hungover angels.”

Arty and Chick, of course, were clear-eyed and boogerless, having spent the storm in Arty’s air-conditioned van. We all ate cake and traded long, absurd, and competitively exaggerated accounts of How Terrifyingly Near to Death the Sandstorm Brought Me. Papa’s version had him wandering from trailer to van hollering questions against the wind and getting unsatisfactory answers and “wondering where, by the shriveled scrotum of Saint Elmo, you’d all been blown to.” He took refuge in the generator truck and got the bright notion of sounding the truck’s horn, “like a foghorn, so, if you were wandering in that fiend prairie, you could home in on it.”

“Save a big piece for Horst,” Iphy ordered, “and one for the redhead who helped us. What was her name?”

“Red.”

“All the redheads are ‘Red,’ scummy! They have regular names, y’know!”

Arty had soothed and entertained his (newly discovered) little pal during the storm by letting Chick read aloud to him from Arty’s ancient greeting-card collection. When the wind shifted and Arty’s van considered tipping over, Chick prevented it.

Chick did not have a story. Chick did not eat his cake. His plate sat on his lap as he stared around at each of the fascinating taletellers in turn. He wasn’t enjoying himself but he didn’t say anything. Only after we’d kissed Mama and Papa goodnight and were drifting off toward our beds, Chick caught up with us in the narrow place beside the twins’ door, looking up at them sadly.

“What is it, sweets?” asked Iphy.

“I knew where you were. I should have brought you out, huh?” His eyes were growing in his face like the size of the question. Elly smoothed a hand across his hair.

“No, Chicky, you did just right.”

“If I had got you out like Mama wanted, you would all have been home like me and Arty. Mama wouldn’t have got a broken rib. You wouldn’t have got scared.”

I let go of his hand and punched him softly on the arm. “Don’t feel guilty about me, I had a great time!” and I sagged off to my warm cupboard, leaving the twins to console him or not.

I was standing on Arty’s dresser polishing the big mirrored one-way window to the security booth. He was lolling on his new velvet divan leafing through a torn magazine retrieved from the pile in the redheads’ trailer.

“If I were an old-money gent with a career in the family vault,” Arty proposed, “and heavy but discreet political influence, how would I dress?”

I looked back over my hump to see if he was pulling my leg. He had his nose in the magazine so I answered, “Quietly.”

“But what’s quiet for a man with my build?”

“I don’t know.” I climbed down and wiped my footprints off the dresser top. “A tweed T-shirt? Gabardine bikini trunks? Charcoal silk socks?”

“Socks.” He stretched his bare hip flippers, flexing each of the elongated digits separately. He hated socks. “But I suppose they’d be warm.” He kept turning pages. “Oh, Toady. Why were the twins hiding in the latrine?”

So that was it. I dropped my cleaning rag and hopped onto the divan, grabbing his lower flippers.

“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me about Chick and Doc P.”

“It’s no big deal. She doctors that horse for me, I let her study Chick.”

“Study how?”

“Talk to him. Ask questions. Observe. What about the twins?”

“They started bleeding that morning. It got Elly spooked.”

“Bleeding?”

“Their first time. Do you think I’ll bleed too?”

He yawned. “I’m going to do some work now. You’d better go.”

Chick’s legs and sneakers were sticking out, toes down, from under the family van. “Whatcha doing, Chick?”

“Looking at ants.”

I flopped onto my belly and wormed in beside him, careful not to crack my hump against the van’s undercarriage. A school of small ants swarmed on a damp lump in the dirt.

“That looks like cake.”

“It’s my piece of the birthday cake. They like it.”

“You were over at Doc P.’s again this morning, weren’t you? What’s she like?”

His hot pink face flashed at me, smiling. “She’s going to make Frosty the horse well. And she’s going to let me help her. She’s going to show me how to stop things from hurting. Arty says it’s good. But today I just moved her garbage out.”

The twins and I were wiping the jars in the Chute with dust cloths and spray cleaner. I rubbed the big jar hard and peered through at Leona the Lizard Girl floating calmly inside. “Is Mama sick?” I asked.

“She has to sleep,” said Elly. “Papa gave her an extra shot so she could sleep. It’s good for her ribs.”

They were cleaning both sides of Apple’s jar. Iphy kept one hand spread across their wide, flat stomach.

“Does it hurt, Iphy?” I asked.

Elly snorted. “She keeps thinking about it.”

“Let Oly do the Tray, Elly. I’ll throw up if we have to do the Tray.”

“You won’t puke. Close your eyes while I do it.”

“You think about the bleeding, too,” Iphy protested.

“Yeah, but I’m not going, ‘Ooh, what’s that? Does it hurt?’ every time something rolls over in our belly. I’m thinking what it means for us.”

I was working on Maple’s jar by then, spraying and wiping. “What does it mean?”

Iphy’s eyes were closed as Elly examined the Tray’s jar for fingermarks and smears. “What if we can have a baby? Don’t you ever think about what’s going to happen when we grow up?”

Iphy shook her head, eyes closed. “Nothing will change.”

“What will change?” I was suddenly scared. Elly was impatient with both of us.

“Stupid! What do you suppose is going to happen when Mama and Papa die?”

Iphy’s eyes popped open. “They’re not going to die!”

“Arty will take care of us,” I said, dusting the “BORN OF NORMAL PARENTS” sign. “He’ll be the boss.” But I was thinking I’d marry Arty and sleep with my arms around him in a big bed and do everything for him.

“Right!” Elly sneered. “We can depend on Arty!”

Iphy tried to be reassuring. “I’m going to marry Arty and we’ll take care of everybody.…”

Elly’s spray bottle hit the floor as her right hand closed into a white fist and sailed in a short, tight hook to Iphy’s mouth, where it smacked, spreading Iphy’s lips and snapping her oval head back on her long-stem neck. Iphy tried to stuff her dust cloth into Elly’s mouth and block another punch at the same time. They fell, squealing and thrashing, biting and pulling hair. I stood staring through the green lenses of my huge new sunglasses at the convulsing tangle of twins on the floor. I probably could have stopped them, but I didn’t feel like it. I turned and shuffled out of the green-lit jar room and down the narrow corridor, leaving the twins to their mutual assault.

We were still in Burkburnett when Dr. Phyllis did the job on Frosty with Chick to help and Papa joining in for the messy bits. They did it late one night in a smallish tent that reeked of antiseptic. The tent was so brightly lit inside that, from the outside, it glowed like a damaged moon heaving with shadows.

I sat fifty feet away on the hood of the humming generator truck and watched their silhouettes. Chick, a tiny motionless lump at one end of a long dark heap, and the squat, bulging form of Dr. P., standing for long periods in one place with only her head and shoulders moving. Al was busy, the large Papa shadow bending, stooping, rushing from one end of the glow to the other, seeming to pace nervously.

They made the big table from a pair of sawhorses and a steel door from one of the vans. The scarcely breathing heap in the middle was the ancient horse.

While Mama and the twins slept, while all the camp fell dark and the midway lights cooled in their sockets and the night guards shifted and spit and sighed at their scattered posts, I watched, leaning on Grandpa’s urn, feeling its cold bite working through my hump to my lungs.

A light filtered through the window of Arty’s van but no movement showed on the glass.

It took a long time. The black sky should have ached with cold but there was no wind. The stillness was almost warm, almost comfortable. No frogs, no crickets, no birds sounded. I nodded off and woke with cramped shoulders and a sprung neck.

The rotten edge of the sky was moldering into arsenic green when the light in the tent went out. The grey fabric was suddenly dull and three shoddy figures crept out through the flap and trailed away.

I could hear Papa talking in low tones. As they passed me, Chick reached up to grab Papa’s hand, the small boy figure drooping sleepily over stumbling legs.

• • •

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can’t die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land. Horst theorized that we’d all live longer for “wintering in these scalped zones.” The redheads moaned that it just seemed longer. As the days and miles went on they stopped moaning and leaned toward long silences. Their faces took on the flat, wind-tracked look of prairie. “The grave looks good by bedtime,” they said, but the complaints lacked their usual spice and crackle.

We’d holed up near Medicine Mound and were taking fearful advantage of the truckers and riggers and a crowd that had come down 250 miles from the Indian Nation in customized maroon buses with fiddle and accordion bands playing next to the toilets and ice chests full of beer every five seats. The Indians stopped off to stretch their legs and their eyeballs at our facilities on their way to the annual stockholders’ meeting of some oil company.

Horst himself was reminiscing about the Texas town called Dime Box and the glories of Old Dime Box, which seemed isolated in his eyes to the broad, strong hips of one Roxanne Tuxbury (pronounced Tewbury) who ran a motorcycle-repair shop there and was undismayed by the indelible stench of cat in a man’s chest hair.

Papa was handing out doses of his most rancid tonic before breakfast. “The winter sun is kind of green and doesn’t have the Go juice. That’s why you get so sleepy.” Horst was leaning on the door waiting for his secret spoonful of vile black Binewski’s Beneficent Balm.

“Just don’t let Dr. Phyllis know,” Papa muttered with every pour from his big bottle of Triple B.

“Roxanne Tuxbury always rides a kick-start cycle,” explained Horst, “and the thighs on that woman are as long and strong as her laugh, which you can pretty much pick up in Arkansas if the wind is right. She wears a little leather halter three hundred and sixty-five days of every year.”

Papa jammed a big spoonful of Triple B under Horst’s mustache and bent his famous Binewski eyebrows. “Too bad Dime Box isn’t on our agenda this year. Maybe you ought to take a little van and hop down there for a week. Catch up with us after you’ve vented your glands or blown your gasket with Roxanne.”

Horst swallowed hard to keep the Triple B down and glared at Al. “Leave the cats? If you had the sense to winter decently in Florida it’d give a man a chance to …”

The bells started suddenly. Chick and Arty, who’d disappeared early that morning, came rolling up fast and shouting, “Elly! Iphy! Come out here!”

The twins, bug-eyed and wincing, crawled out of the dinette where we’d been finishing arithmetic lessons and waiting for breakfast. Mama forgot her biscuits and I trailed along. Papa and Horst laughed as we all trooped down along the hard clay track toward Dr. P.’s. Arty had a tape player in his wheelchair playing the taped bells loud. The show folk poked their heads out and strolled along, redheads and roustabouts. The flat grey of the day crept up our backs as we came to the shabby covered trailer parked near Dr. P.’s gleaming white mobile clinic.

Arty’s chair stopped and Iphy’s hand was caught tight in Arty’s shoulder fin as Chick stepped forward. There was a rustle and bump from inside the trailer, and then the frost-coated, candy-orange horse stuck his head out the door and came prancing down the ramp to the ground with his mane braided in blue ribbons and his eyes rolling nervously as he arched his thin neck and crow-hopped in the dust. We all inhaled as we saw the long form of the horse, the Dachshorse, the chopped and channeled Basset Horse perched on starry stockings and realized that all four of the mush-boned feet were gone. The horse had been cut off just below the knees and was dancing his sprightly senile horse dance on stocking-covered, rubber-padded half-leg stumps.

“Ain’t that something?!” Papa shouted. The redheads “wowed” softly and clapped, and Horst whistled a knife blast through his teeth that flattened the old horse’s ears. Arty grinned and bowed in his chair, and Chick watched the old horse steadily. Dr. P. did not appear at all.

We all went close to look and pat the sweating, scared horse, and to examine the sock-covered stumps and admire how his tail was tied up in blue ribbon so it wouldn’t drag in the dust. Chick stayed close, holding the halter rope. The twins stroked the quivering coat of the stunned old beast and glanced at each other as Arty told them that, though it was late, this was his birthday present to them.

“Thank you, Arty,” they chorused. Papa was praising Dr. P. and Mama set off running for the home van with a cry of “Biscuits!” and the group shifted and scattered.

Chick let the halter rope slide through his hands and the horse reached for a surviving clump of grey-green near the trailer wheel and bumped his jaw on the ground because he wasn’t used to being so low down. Or that’s what I thought. Arty leaned back in his chair and looked worriedly at Iphy. “Are you glad?”

Elly watched the horse stepping gingerly on his shortened limbs, his huge body balanced precariously. Iphy took a breath and patted Arty’s shoulder. “But is he okay, Arty? Doesn’t he hurt?”

Chick interrupted quickly, “No, he doesn’t hurt at all.” And I, leaning on Arty’s chair arm, wondered if Chick was doing it all, holding the horse up and making him dance. Elly’s face turned toward us and she was old. She had sunk into some dark place behind her eyes, and whatever she was looking at wasn’t me or Arty.

“So this is what it’s going to be like,” she said. Her voice was as dry as the sand that stretched to the sad edge of the sky.

The twins stayed as far away from Frosty the horse as they could, despite Arty’s nagging them to “visit their pet.” Chick took care of the horse. He would probably have croaked when he first woke up and noticed that his feet were gone if it hadn’t been for Chick’s literal support. Whether Chick had actually kept the brute’s heart pumping against his will I don’t know. Every morning Chick spent a few minutes jollying the horse into facing another day.

I can’t be sure how much information or help Chick got from Dr. P. What is sure is that the tyke spent time with the doctor every day and he wasn’t always taking out her elaborate garbage. All he would say when I grilled him was, “She’s showing me how to stop things from hurting.”

Chick also spent time with Arty. Suddenly Arty’s nasty attitude had switched to fond big-brotherhood. He let Chick do a lot of work for him — the brand of charity Arty was most generous in dispensing. Arty also debriefed the kid every time he came away from Dr. Phyllis’s van. Chick was Arty’s mole in the doc’s previously impregnable camp. This was clever, considering that none of the rest of us had even got through her door, but I figured it for dangerous.

“What if she decided to dissect him to see how he works?” I asked. “What if she decides to make a big reputation by writing papers about him for scientific journals?”

“Naah. She won’t,” Arty assured me. “She wants to keep him to herself. She’s teaching him to be a painkiller. She says that old horse would have kicked off right away if she’d dosed it with drugs to knock it out. She told Chick about the pain dingus in the horse’s brain, drew pictures, and had him fool around inside until he figured out how it worked. She says Chick put the horse to sleep, kept it unconscious, and sat on the pain dingus so the horse didn’t have any shock reaction at all. She thinks Chick will help her be a great surgeon. She’s not gonna advertise him. She knows she’d lose him if she did.” Arty paused and thought for a second. He gave me an odd, worried roll of his eyes. “She might decide to take over the planet or something, but I’m trying to keep a tight rein on that kind of stuff. I think it’ll work.”

Arty was busy. It’s amazing to me even now how much privacy he had in his own van, how much time he spent seeming to lounge around, and how much he got done by giving orders. He was working. His show was changing. He hired his own advance man — a specialist named Peabody who popped in once a month for an hour and then drove out again in a perpetually gleaming sedan. Peabody wore bank-grey suits and an air of smug humility that clashed with the style of the racetrack types who did the job for Al. Every town we hit held a larger crowd waiting docilely for Arty. They weren’t always poor. They weren’t always old.

News cameras were common enough on the midway. We were often booked as a feature of some local crawdad festival or Miss Artificial Insemination pageant or whatever, that drew coverage for us. But the reporters also started doing more interviews with Arty in his tank.

Whatever he was telling them was what they wanted to hear. We were all running flat out to keep up with the crowds. Papa trucked in a portable chain-link fence to close off Arty’s stage exit from the people who wanted to touch him and talk to him after his shows.

Arty got a golf cart to toot back and forth in. Papa’s guard crew increased to fifty large men dressed in sky-blue uniforms with spangled Binewski badges and arm patches. They carried discreet, telescoping electro-shock sticks and stun-gas spray canisters.

Arty stopped coming to the family van for meals. Mama cooked his food and I carried it to him on trays.

The midway jingled with profits from Arty’s crowd. The twins, the geeks, the swallowers, and every act in the variety tent bubbled daily with cheerful audiences, but they were really just waiting for Arty.

Arty was absorbed. Mama treated it as another one of his growth phases. “He’s always been moody, sensitive,” she said.

Papa strode the line from early to late—“working harder than I ever have!”—jubilant at the gross and his own roaring of orders and arrangements. But he was fuzzy behind the eyes because he was no longer the actual King Cob of all the Corn. In his dire heart he felt the difference. He wasn’t working for himself anymore. He was working for Arty. Everything revolved around Arty, from our routes and sites to the syrup flavors in the soda fountains.

We were all nervy with an unspoken anticipation. We were accelerating toward something and we didn’t know what.