Geek Love Part 6

8.

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. .h.i.t 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 b.u.t.t 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 sc.r.a.ping the stool leg, then the hiss and a silence that produced a reek of green tobacco from his new cigar.

"h.e.l.l, 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 pus.h.i.+ng. "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.

"f.u.c.kin 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.h.i.+rt when I got back to the power truck. Horst was leaning on the front b.u.mper 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 s.h.i.+rt and no shoes and his arms and legs wrapped around Grandpa's s.h.i.+ny 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 champions.h.i.+p 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. n.o.body 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. "n.o.body 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-cla.s.s-enough entertainment for that set. There was a big poker tournament in the major hotel there and, in the same weekend, a champions.h.i.+p 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. "n.o.body is going to see us, and n.o.body 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, p.i.s.s brain."

"I feel like I've got hair, Arty."

"That's goose b.u.mps, a.s.s 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, a.n.u.s. 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 Sat.u.r.day and the midway was going full blast. Papa looked tired and angry. Chick sat in the twins' lap and ate peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly. Papa took only iced tea.

"Now, Al, whatever happened?" Mama pressed.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.dly 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 d.i.c.ks and an a.s.sistant 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 a.s.s 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-p.r.i.c.k 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 d.a.m.ned 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 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.

"Cla.s.sics. That's what people want. Stick to cla.s.sics," 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 ch.o.r.es. 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 embarra.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ter 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 f.u.c.king 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 c.r.a.ps."

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 encompa.s.sed 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 gla.s.ses 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.