We stopped on an edgeless plateau that stretched to nothing on all sides, making the eye desperate, shriveling the brain to dry hopelessness between the dreary sheets of sky and ground. Papa climbed out of the driver’s seat, threw back the side door, and jumped down. Mama was in the bedroom with the door closed, still sleeping. Elly and Iphy were huddled on their neat bunk with a puzzle. I was trying to read over Arty’s shoulder as I turned pages for him. None of us looked out the windows. We all hated the bleak, flat stretches. Papa had left the door propped open and a rip of wind twisted into the van, missing our pages and carrying dust and the rough sting of sage with it. Papa was out there, walking in the desert.
He’d been silent all morning, and excited. He wouldn’t let any of us sit up front with him. We’d squared away our beds and the twins put out cold cereal for breakfast and handed a mug of coffee up to Papa. Arty had been quiet too.
Papa’s boots crunched on the gravel outside and his head came through the open door.
“Step out here, dreamlets,” he said, then disappeared. None of us wanted to get out into that wind but we went, silently. Arty came last and just slid down onto the step and lay there blinking at the grit in the air. The twins leaned on the van and I stood near them watching Papa. He paced in front of us. Just a few steps in each direction and then back. The wind thumped and whacked at his jacket flaps and lifted his black hair against the grain. He looked away most of the time, out over the plain at the waving stubs of brush and broom. When he glanced at us, between phrases, his eyes were dangerous. We listened gravely.
“Your mama and I have decided to keep the new baby.”
Each of us, he said, was special and unique and this baby looked like a norm but had something special too. He could move things with his mind.
“Telekinetic,” said Arty flatly.
Yes, telekinetic, Papa said. And he explained that it was a thing he didn’t know about, that none of us knew about, and that we’d have to be very careful for a while until we figured out how to deal with it and what it was good for.
“We’ll join up with the show by morning and discuss the situation with Horst. Horst is a trainer and training is what we need. Horst can also keep his trap shut. Now here’s the important thing.” And he said we were to act as though he were just a norm baby, even with people in the show who we liked and trusted.
“The army will want him,” said Arty.
“Well, they aren’t going to get him,” said Papa.
We all had to stick together like troopers, said Papa, and the baby’s name was to be Fortunato, which means Lucky.
Though his body did only the normal cherubic things, Fortunato’s effect on the environment at the age of three weeks was already far beyond that of a hyperactive and malicious ten-year-old. He had to be confined to the cubicle we called our parents’ bedroom. Mama moved everything breakable, shreddable, or toxic out of her room so the baby wouldn’t destroy it or himself. Our tidy van became a heaped bunker. Platoons of makeup bottles and boot-polish cans stuffed the cupboards. All the sequined clothing hung over the twins’ bunk. Lamps, clocks, and framed photos littered Arty’s unmade bed. Papa’s medical magazines and books were stacked everywhere. Mama’s sewing machine moved under the sink with me. I slept with my knees touching my chin.
Six of us could live comfortably in the thirty-eight-by-ten-foot van only by dint of religious housekeeping. The mess wore us down. We hated it. Obviously training had to begin immediately for this seventh member of the family.
With some well-placed hints from big brother Arturo, my ingenious father hit upon the expedient of glycerin and black tape for wiring Fortunato’s little buttocks to a miniature electric train transformer and a battery pack. Whenever Fortunato broke dishes or pulled hair or lifted Lil in the air and held her against the ceiling, Papa would gently turn on the power. In a matter of days, however, the precocious Chick, as we called him, learned to unplug the transformer and whip Papa’s curly pate with the cord.
Deprivation techniques were substituted, Clyde Beatty style, but Fortunato had to sleep in a heavy wire cage during that experiment because, when Lil refused to nurse him, he would simply yank her toward him and reenact his debut performance.
The raw potential of Fortunato’s abilities spurred my parents to research. By the time Chick was four months old. Al introduced the behavioral principles of B. F. Skinner and reinforcement theory successfully replaced deprivation.
Mama finally dared to bring him out of the Chick-proof bedroom. It was several weeks more before she could actually step out of the van with the baby in her arms and walk through the camp without his moving every bright-colored thing in sight.
7. Green — as in Arsenic, Tarnished Spoons, and Gas-Chamber Doors
The real trouble, as usual, was Arty. He’d always been jealous. He didn’t mind me so much because money was the gauge of his envy and I didn’t make any.
The twins, however, drove him wild. After every show he would hook his chin over the edge of his tank, spraying me with the overflow, to demand the number of tickets sold at the gate. “How many?” he’d holler. But it didn’t matter — thirty in Oak Grove, three hundred in Phoenix, a thousand in Kansas City. What he really wanted to know was how he had done compared to the twins. If they had as many or more in their audience he was furious.
Sometimes in those days he would flash to the bottom of the tank and sulk, holding his breath for incredible minutes, eyes bulging outside the sockets so they hid the lids entirely.
When I was five and first took over the duty of helping him after his shows, he terrified me with this tactic. He muttered, “I’ll die. I might as well,” and I wailed and hopped in agony as he sank, staring through the glass.
I ran shrieking to Papa. He clapped his cheek and bellowed at me not to humor Arty when he was “playing prima donna!”
I ran back dithering, chewing my hands in fright, until Arty finally allowed himself to roll slowly over and drift, belly up, toward the surface, where my short arms could reach him with the crook and tow him to the side. I patted and smoothed his water-swollen scalp and kissed his cheeks and nose and ears, weeping and begging him not to be dead because I, useless though I was, loved him. At last he blinked and sighed and let his breathing become visible and growled for his towel.
All this over a few tickets one way or another when he was ten years old. I knew he wouldn’t take to the Chick.
Nearly dawn. The show was closed down. Lil and Papa were asleep. The twins were snugged in their bunk snoring. Fortunato, the Chick, lay silent in his crib with the blanket twitching around him in his dreams. But at this end of the van twelve-year-old Arty sat propped against the table looking over the ticket-count sheets. I crouched on the floor with my back to the cupboard doors. If he was angry I would pop open one of the doors and creep inside bawling, shut myself into the blackness and pull my cap down over my eyes so I could cry into the wool, and pull Lil’s old sweaters over me. He shook his head. The yellow light gleamed on his skull and I began to sniffle a little. He threw a look at me — sharp — I gulped down my snot and grinned at him feebly. He turned back to the ticket sheets. His voice started slow and soft.
“Now, you know very well what I’m seeing here.” He wasn’t looking at me but I nodded, ready to cry. He was looking at the papers in a sad, doubtful way. His voice dripped regret. “Nobody expects you to bring in the kind of money that I do.” I shook my head. That would be absurd. “Or even,” he pursed his mouth, “what the twins manage.” I put my eyes down onto my knees and sighed, my whole worthless body quivering. “It isn’t your fault that you’re so ordinary. Papa accepts the responsibility for that.” The moment of silence told me that he was looking at me. I could feel his eyes on my hump.