“I could put you to sleep. Want me to?”
“No. Did you tell him?”
“He didn’t believe me. He thinks I’m just trying to smooth him down. And the Pin Kid is gone.”
• • •
I got up right away and went to the swallowers’ stage, dragging Chick along. We poked our heads in through the rear flap and watched the scuttling shadows on the backdrop as the swallowers went through their act. Their chatter was marked by silences as the swords went down. The swallowers’ oldest girl finished her turn and came rushing out, sweating. I snatched at her arm. “Where’d the Pin Kid go?”
She shrugged, reaching to scratch under her sequined vest.
“Gee, Oly, I don’t know. Daddy’s mad at him. They were supposed to do a turn together. They’ve been rehearsing. But he was gone this morning when we got up. He took his knapsack and bedroll but left his trunk.” She rolled her eyes, perplexed. “He’ll have to come back for the trunk. And he knows we’re breaking down tonight. Maybe he’ll be back before we leave. Maybe he’ll catch us in St. Joe?”
I could see the buckled trunk, drab in the dusty grass against the tent wall with swords and torches collapsing against it. The swallower’s girl tossed her hair back and waved as she made off to the other side of the stage for her second entrance.
Chick was staring at the trunk. I could feel him thinking. The trunk looked abandoned, like letters in an attic, to and from the dead.
“We better go see Arty,” I muttered. Chick nodded, still looking at the trunk.
“Tell them to come back tomorrow.” It was Arty’s voice seeping through the door crack. The bald novice who answered the bell left us waiting so he could see “if the Master has a moment for you.” The shaved head appeared again, smirking consolingly. “I’m afraid the Master …” he started. But I jumped forward, shoving the door wider, hollering, “Arty! You pig shit! Arty!,” bursting past the gasping novice with Chick behind me, trotting toward Arty’s desk while I watched his face set in anger and his voice boom, “Get her out! Out!” and the novice’s three-fingered hands closed on my arms, but it was really Chick who lifted me. I knew by the softness, the easiness as I sailed back out through the door and landed on the deck. Chick leaned out and looked at me. “I’ll talk to him. Wait,” he said. Arty’s door closed and I stood waiting. Angry myself, for a change. It was a relief from feeling sorry for myself.
As we moved that night in the dark toward St. Joe, Papa drove with Mama in his co-pilot’s seat. Chick and I huddled in the dining booth and he told me.
“O.K. Now he really does believe me, kind of, because he talked to Horst about the tiger being pregnant and Horst told him it couldn’t happen because she hadn’t been in with anybody. But he’s still pretending he doesn’t believe me. He won’t admit anything. Besides, he’s scared his juice isn’t good. He’s afraid he can’t plant babies. But he says he’s sick of the novices sliming around and he’ll let you come back to work for him.”
“But what about the Pin Kid?”
I couldn’t see Chick’s face in the dark. He waited a few seconds before he answered. A dozen heartbeats.
“He just says, ‘What Pin Kid?’ and then won’t listen. That’s another thing. You’re not to mention the Pin Kid or your baby or any of this to Arty. He wants you to act like always.”
I took Arty his breakfast in St. Joe. I cleaned and dusted and carried messages and shut the novices out of his van completely. I rode on the back of his golf cart to his show tent and waited behind the tank listening to the big St. Joe crowd roaring and sighing like the tide. I scrubbed Arty after the show and rubbed him down and painted him for the next show. I did all the usual things. He was sullen and moody at first but then he forgot and was just like always.
The Pin Kid never came back for his trunk. We never heard anything more about him. When I did think of him it was a pleasure—a fool’s pleasure—that Arty had got rid of him, run him off, scared him away, for fear of losing me. I don’t think Arty had him killed.
Elly was coming back. Iphy tried to hide the change but I sat for hours watching Mumpo twitch and Iphy crooning over him. I saw the differences. When Iphy used both hands to change Mumpo, or to turn him or wash him, Elly no longer collapsed like a spent balloon. She was holding herself upright without Iphy’s arm supporting her. There were also moments when I could have sworn that Elly’s eyes were focused, looking at Mumpo, looking at me, or following the movements of Iphy’s hands. Elly’s mouth stayed shut for longer periods. She drooled less. Once I saw her hand lift deliberately to her swollen, seeping breast.
“I use this little pump on Elly and put the milk into the bottle,” Iphy was explaining. Mumpo lay beside her on the bed sucking noisily at the rubber teat on the bottle. The pale blue milk sloshed and bubbled in the glass as the pull from his mouth drew the level down fast.
“He’s so hungry all the time. It takes both of us to feed him but it’s so awkward holding him and Elly so he can nurse straight from her titties …”
Iphy stole a look to see if I believed that she still had to hold Elly. Elly’s mouth opened and she said, “Greedy, greedy, greedy.”
It was as clear as pizzicato. “Ha ha,” said Iphy, staring at me intently. “She’s been making more sounds lately. Ha ha. Sometimes they’re almost words.”
Perched at the foot of the bed with my feet over the edge so my shoes wouldn’t dirty the sheets, I nodded and said nothing. The bottle ran dry and the deep voice of Mumpo rocked out an echoing belch. The lips of Elly closed primly and her eyes wandered again, soft, not looking while Iphy looked at us all so fast that her eyes must have ached with the whip of their nerve stalks.
Papa ordered signs painted for “Mumpo, the World’s Fattest Baby” and tried to talk Iphy into arranging a schedule so the baby could nap in a show booth and tickets could be sold. Iphy insisted on waiting until his first birthday. Papa was indignant. “This is a working outfit! No moochers! No parasites! And what about yourself, young lady?” he demanded. “How about a turn in the variety tent? You can work around Elly. There must be some way!”
Iphy bristled and reminded him of all the money she’d made for him the years she worked with Elly. She told him to wait. Papa left her alone. Iphy wasn’t worried about it.
“Papa’s just trying out old reflexes. He’s not the boss anymore.”
My belly grew. It hung at an odd angle and gave me a lot of back pain. The veins in my legs threatened to rupture until Chick took care of them.
I spent time with Iphy and became convinced that Elly was almost all there, almost all the time.
“She’s lying doggo, Iphy, don’t lie to me.”
Elly’s face was frozen on Iphy’s shoulder but her arms were coming back. Their dead flabbiness was turning to muscle again, and I could see it rolling thinly beneath the white skin, filling out the sleeves of her blouses.
“Elly? You’ve been exercising in secret, haven’t you?” I’d ask, coming up close and staring into the unfocused eyes. She never reacted.
“Buzz off, Oly,” Iphy would snap, and I’d wander away, speculating about Iphy too, and how much more like Elly she was now. Stronger. Meaner. She never cried anymore. Never sang. She cleaned. She fed Mumpo, lying down beside him because she couldn’t lift him. She gave up on bottles and turned so he could reach Elly’s breast when he had flattened her own. She urged him toward solid food and he gobbled that, too, spilling nothing, sucking it all in, then demanding tit.
In Santa Rosa a Twins Fan Club came to the door. They were sixteen-year-old girls who had started dressing the “Twin Way” when they were twelve or so and were still wrapping two waists in one big skirt like potato-sack racers. They dyed each other’s California hair to the blue-black gloss of the twins.
I went to the door. The pair in front tried to look past me into the trailer. “We just love them! Is it true they had a baby? We wanted to give them a present.”
The bouquet came in, passed from mock pair to m
ock pair and finally to me. I said Elly and Iphy were sleeping or maybe working. I took the green paper cone of flowers and thanked them and shut the door. Iphy watched through the curtains as the troop hobbled and giggled away, four pairs of twins with their arms around each other. Iphy absent-mindedly hugged Elly, who flopped from the squeezing.
“We used to have a lot of fans in this part of the country,” said Iphy. She put the flowers in a big jug of water and they sat on the table for days.
It was easy for me and it could have been much harder for the twins. We had a small world, peculiarly unalarmed by nature. We had no worries about food or shelter, the opinions of the family, or the hardships of lone child rearing. There were Mama and Papa and Chick. There was an inexhaustible reservoir of obliging redheads.
Part of being pregnant is that you think about it so much that you’re seldom bored. Terrified often enough, but rarely bored. There was some disappointment in my mind occasionally. I’d sit in the sun next to Grandpa’s urn on the generator truck and drift into lip-sucking melancholy.
Life for me was not like the songs the redheads played. It wasn’t the electric clutch I had seen ten million times in the midway—the toreador girls pumping flags until those bulging-crotched tractor drivers were strung as tight as banjo wire, glinting in the sun. It wasn’t for me, the stammering hilarity of Papa and Lil, or even the helpless, dribbling lust of the Bag Man rocked by the sight of the twins. I have certainly mourned for myself. I have wallowed in grief for the lonesome, deliberate seep of my love into the air like the smell of uneaten popcorn greening to rubbery staleness. In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It’s feeble to be an object. What’s the point of being loved in return, I’d ask myself. To warm my spine in the dark? To change the face in my mirror every morning? It was none of Arty’s business that I loved him. It was my secret ace, like a bluebird tattooed under pubic hair or a ruby tucked up my ass.
Understand, daughter, that the only reason for your existing was as a tribute to your uncle-father. You were meant to love him. I planned to teach you how to serve him and adore him. You would be his monument and his fortress against mortality.
Forgive me. As soon as you arrived I realized that you were worth far more than that.
Lily collected Mumpo’s castoffs and washed them and folded them into the drawers next to my cupboard. She moved the dish towels and the knives and forks and her plastic-bag collection and sewing scraps as well as Papa’s junk tools. “These will be your little hope chest,” she said.
Lily was delighted to have me swelling close to her, not cut off and strange as the twins had been. She would hug me distractedly in the kitchen or as we did the laundry together. “Now hope hard!” she’d whisper, squeezing me, with her watery blue eyes blinking in filmed pleasure. An odd, warm scent of her favorite spray warmed by sweat and a faint bite of rot had begun to drift around her. I would lean against her, watching her hands, her crumpled-paper skin rustling as she stroked my face. “You won’t tell …” she whispered once, “don’t ever breathe it.… I don’t like Mumpo.… I love him.… I’d tear my heart out for him … but there’s something about him I just can’t like.”
Mumpo was eating the twins. “Mama, he only shits once every three days and then not much. Is it O.K.?” Iphy fretted and Elly had frozen into an intelligent frown that bobbled perpetually against Iphy’s shoulder. They grew frail and bony except for the four breasts that ballooned every three hours in time for Mumpo to wake. He bellowed before he even opened his eyes, roaring until the gap was crammed with raw tit. Then he vacuumed the bag until it draped flat over the protruding ribs of his mothers, and bellowed for the next tit until all four milk bags were drained and limp. He would sleep for three more hours before beginning again.
“Every baby is different,” Mama would say diplomatically. But later, in the home van, she’d shake her head at me and crackle, “Greedy! Takes it in. Won’t let it go. Keeps it!”
Mumpo grew, spreading around himself in looping, creased pools of pinkness that pulsated with his breathing.
Chick checked me over each morning before he ambled off to the Arturans for the day. He was ragged, growing out of his clothes. Mama was too distracted to notice. He missed Dr. Phyllis.
“It was easier when she was here,” he explained. “I’m scared a lot now. Almost all the time.”
He came in for meals with his hands bloated like a drowned corpse’s from the perpetual washing followed by the airtight gloves of surgery. He sank into a doze if he sat still for more than a few minutes. He worried about the ritual wrangling of Horst and Norval Sanderson.
“It’s fair, isn’t it?” he’d ask me. “That’s the way Doc P. set it up. Horst gets the legs and arms and Mr. Sanderson gets fingers, toes, and hands and feet. It’s because the little bones are bad for the cats. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Why does Mr. Sanderson keep trying to cheat? I had to ask a novice to guard the thighs in the refrigerator truck the other day because Mr. Sanderson kept sneaking them away in garbage bags. Horst threatened to let Lilith, the Bengal, loose in Mr. Sanderson’s trailer some night if he doesn’t stop. Horst is drinking all the time now. He might do it. And Papa goes over there to drink with him. They sit inside with the checkerboard and argue and drink and forget whose turn it is to move.”
Chick talked to me more all the time because he had no one else.
“Arty doesn’t like the hometown surgeons getting in on the Arturans. He doesn’t like the rest-home doctors setting up. But I do. I can’t do it all. They can’t all travel with us. Arty wants it all where he can see it but it’s too big now. There are too many.”
Arty got a new folder of clippings every morning. The office novices would comb papers and magazines from all over the country for any mention of Arturism and for anything that might affect Arty. He subscribed to a broadcast-monitoring outfit that provided video or sound tapes of any news item, comment, discussion, or joke that mentioned Arturism on television or the radio.
“Here’s another imitator in California, the Reverend Raunch! That’s three in one state!” he snarled as I brought in his breakfast tray. “And there’s that brain-slice scam in Detroit, a takeoff on Doc P.’s trip. The silly cocksuckers are getting hauled in front of a grand jury. Ass lickers will screw us all!”
Arty didn’t need to worry about the tadpole competition but he did. His tent was the biggest ever made on this continent, and it was always full, with a crowd as live as a hurricane wailing for him. But Arty sulked over every ten-cent Baptist, sneered at the plastic surgeons, turned green at ads for weight-loss clinics and alcoholism programs.
He’d gloat sometimes. “I have the best tools. I talk to Doc P.’s keeper every week, you know. And my little brother did a much tidier job on Doc P. than Doc P. ever did in her life. Smartest thing I ever did was tuck Chick in her pocket.”
I didn’t pay much attention. I was caught up in the amazing contents of my belly. Everything else was insignificant. As the time got close, though, I got scared. I wasn’t afraid of dying. Chick wouldn’t let me die. I wasn’t afraid of the baby dying. Chick would make sure it stayed alive. Still, a sick grey fear sat in my chest, nameless. Chick kept offering to put me to sleep.
“Hey, it’s good. Doc P. is happy. I’d like it myself. I’d put myself to sleep only there’s nobody to do my job.”
When my labor started Mama gave me tea and Chick put me into one of the Arturan wheelchairs and took me to his surgery. It was late in the afternoon. The Ferris wheel lights were bright against the dusk and I could smell popcorn and hear the talkers hollering, “Show the little lady what you’re made of!”
It didn’t hurt. I sat up against pillows and slept for a minute at a time between squeezes. There was no pain but it was exhausting work. I remember looking at Chick and Mama and trying to tell them why it was called “labor.”
I remember seeing Miranda’s head for the first time between my legs. She looked so silly,
like a red turtle’s head stretching on its spindly neck and turning, blinking, wobbling, I nearly laughed. And I remember Chick’s smile as he reached for her. She slid out onto the white cloth he held for her, and he lifted her dripping, squirming little carcass and put it on my collapsing belly. “I like this!” he said. This was his second delivery, of course, and he told me later that Miranda was easy compared to Mumpo, that he’d worked much harder to suppress the twins’ pain.
Mama and I examined her amazing body and found only that ridiculous tail. My heart died. Arty would despise her. But Mama told me to go on hoping. “Go ahead and love her,” Mama said. I’ve wondered since whether those were Mama’s last sane words, the final sizzle of her synapses.
Then the real fear began. With the baby outside me and vulnerable, I suddenly saw the world as hostile and dangerous. Anything, including my own ignorance, could hurt her, kill her, snatch her from me. I wanted to cram her back inside where she’d be safe. I was too weak to protect her. I needed the family. Arty had to care about her. Iphy had to help me. Papa had to be sober and brave, and Mama had to lay off the pills and be wise. But there was really only Chick, and I was terrified whenever he was out of sight. I scared him with my clinging but I couldn’t trust the baby to anyone else.
She had Arty’s face and I named her Miranda because Miranda’s father loved her.
Arty did not love my baby. He never asked to see her. When I finally went to see him—took him his breakfast a few days after she was born—I left her with Chick. I was testing the water and I found it cold.
“How kind of you to call,” Arty sneered. “Good of you to take the time. I suppose you won’t be working anymore. Gone into retirement like Iphy.”
I felt my lungs ice over. I couldn’t snap back at him. I went back and hid in the cupboard, holding Miranda, careful not to press her bottom the wrong way for fear her tail would be twisted or pinched.