Geek Love (11 page)

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 Chicks 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 lollopped 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 instants 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 Chicks 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.

Chicks 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 death's 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.”