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.