Geek Love (10 page)

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 Chicks 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.

Educating the Chick

Acarnival 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 Worlds 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.”