As I cried he pointed out the discrepancies. When I did the talking for his show the tickets were 15 to 50 percent less than when Al did it. We both knew that Al only let me do it when we were in Podunk burnt-out towns for a quick stopover and that the sales were down all through the midway in those places. Still, there was some ghastly truth in Arty’s needling. Some probing of my guilt that was right no matter how he lied about it.
Then he would threaten me with the “institution,” which was the place that I would be sent to if I didn’t shape up. “No matter how generous and kind Papa and Lil are — they wouldn’t have any choice,” he would say. His sympathy and understanding washed around me with razors caught in the flow. Arty’s depiction of the “institution” scared me more than death or snakes. The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. The word alone would set my chin trembling. I would beg and grieve and he would allow that I deserved another chance.
“We don’t have to keep new kids,” Arty sneered. “Sometimes we don’t keep ’em and sometimes they don’t last.” He was in his mean lecturing mood, twisting his head to look at me over the back of his chair as I pushed him through the grey dawn to visit the dog act. “You don’t know about the ones before you,” he warned. “The ones that died. Papa and Mama don’t talk about them, but I remember.”
“I help Mama with the jars in the Chute.” I grunted, shoving hard to force the chair wheels through the sawdust. Arty snorted and shook his head. “There were three before me and two more before the twins. There was another one just before you. That’s why Papa let her keep you, because the other one died just before. It gets her down. You wouldn’t have been a keeper if the other one had lived. She gets low when she loses one and it bothers Papa to see her like that.”
He was trying to make me cry but I didn’t care. I was happy to have him talking to me. He’d been cranky and sullen for a long time. He went about his work, did his shows, ate, slept, read books, and didn’t talk much except when he was laying weasel trails for Mama and Papa.
“Which one was it? Just before me?”
Arty rolled his eyes and dropped his voice. “Leona.” He drew it out like a moan, watching me. I ducked my head and pushed his chair. Leona with the alligator tail would definitely have been a keeper. Leona would have had her own show tent and glow-in-the-dark posters in silver and green. Arty mused wistfully, “Papa was very excited about Leona. He thought about showing her in a tank. He was hoping she’d stay hairless but he could have depilated her if she’d started sprouting. He even thought about putting her in with me. Papa saw the billing as tadpoles. Different stages of tadpoles.”
He was light and airy about it. I stopped pushing and walked around to face him for a minute. He was nodding and blinking, pretending nostalgia for poor Leona.
“That must have scared you, Arty.” I grinned.
A slow smile spread gradually across his rubbery mug. He wriggled his forehead at me, for all the world like Papa dancing his eyebrows. “Poor Leona. She just went to sleep one night and never woke up. Mama was just about crazy when she found her the next morning.” Arty’s round, wide head did its snake dance, turning on his neck in mock grief, and I knew the taut slide of his skin over tendon and meat, and loved the shadow dip of his bones underneath and the wide smooth roll of his lips.
What I felt was fear. Arty saw it in my face and slid into his whip-master act fast. “Onward, Jeeves,” he snapped. “To the dogs!” I scuttled back to push, wading through the sawdust and keeping my butt muscles clenched to avoid filling my pants.
“Is it O.K. if me and Arty play with Skeet?” I asked. The dog reek from the trailer door might have been Mrs. Minuti’s breath. She swallowed and tried to focus through her hangover. Her hair was short and spiky with a clot of last night’s supper caught above her ear. She pulled her nightgown out from her chest and belched softly. “Sure,” she nodded. She didn’t complain about the hour or the fact that Skeet was her star poodle because we were the boss’s kids and dog trainers are easy to come by. She disappeared inside the trailer and Arty stared tensely at the open door. The dog came scratching around the doorway and jumped down beside me, with his long leash trailing up to Mrs. Minuti’s shaking hand. She gave me the leash and told me not to let him wander loose.
I hooked the leash on a back post of Arty’s chair and wheeled him toward a hard-packed grassless stretch behind the booths. The dog bounced along nosing everything, pissing ten times in two minutes.
By the time we got to the clear spot the dog seemed to have calmed down a little. “You just stay close and be quiet,” Arty told me. I sat down to watch. Arty called the poodle to him and the silly dog put a paw up on Arty’s chair and cocked its ears at him, wagging the pompom on the end of its skinny tail.
Arty hadn’t explained what he had in mind. I sneered, “Arty the wild-beast trainer,” to myself. On the other side of the booths the camp was just beginning to wake up. An occasional trailer door slammed. A voice or two sounded faintly. A mechanic turned over one of the ride engines and let it sputter to death.
Arty looked the dog in the eye. The dog sat, obediently alert, directly in front of Arty, watching his face. Arty froze with his eyes open, focused on the dog, but his face sleep-smooth, expressionless. At first the dog was happy as an idiot — short confidential flips of tail against ground, a swiveling of sharp ears, tongue-dripping grin. Gradually the dog lost confidence, licking its chops and closing its mouth, tilting those ears questioningly forward at Arty. An anxious burst of tail rapping. Then Skeet shoved his nose forward, sniffing worriedly at Arty, letting a thin, high whine out through his nose, skootching his ass nervously against the dirt. Arty sat with his fins curled and still, his face thrust slightly forward and down. The poodle didn’t dare look away from Arty’s face but began to lick his own nose repeatedly, stand up, then sit down fast with his tail under him, letting his ears droop. Finally, whining, ears flattened, head down and wobbling moron eyes wincing at Arty, the dog slid to the side with a yelp as though he’d been kicked.
Arty threw himself against the back of his chair, breathing deeply with his eyes closed. Skeet backed to the end of his leash and did his best to slink out of his collar. Arty sat back up and looked around for the dog.
“Skeet! Come here!” he ordered. The dog bolted to the end of the leash, snapping himself into the air. He flopped onto his back and lay there, belly up, and began to yowl. Arty laughed a little to himself and said we could take him back. “I can practice my hate thoughts on the norms in the midway, too,” he said.
Arty never bad-mouthed Chick openly. Anything that obvious would have shocked Papa and Mama into the blue zone. But I knew. I was the one who did the most for Arty. I spent a lot of time with him and a lot of time thinking about him. I loved him.
Privately I thought that Mama and Papa loved him only because they didn’t know him. Iphy loved him because he wanted her to and she couldn’t help it. Elly knew him and didn’t love him at all. She was afraid of him and hated him because she could see what he was like. I was the only one who knew his dark, bitter meanness and his jagged, rippling jealousy, and his sour yearnings, and still loved him. I also knew how breakable he was. He didn’t care if I knew. He didn’t care if I loved him. He knew I’d serve him absolutely even if he hurt me. And I was not a rival to him. I didn’t have an act of my own. I drew the crowds to him rather than to myself.