I secretly swore to make Arty the king of the universe so he wouldn’t be jealous of Chick.
Arty’s big tent stayed folded on the trucks through a dozen moves. It cut into our take dramatically. Papa tried to keep Arty from knowing how much money we were losing with him out sick. When Papa sat late in the dining booth doing the books, Arty would ask, “How’s it going?” and Papa would sigh and say, “Fine, boychik. Don’t you worry your poor busted noggin about it.” This put Arty into a foul mood for several days. Finally one night, late, he called out from his bunk, “I guess the show doesn’t need me, Papa. You’d do fine with just the twins if I died.” Then Papa went and scooped him up and took him to the table and showed him how the gross had slipped. Arty was happy again and started going over the accounts with Papa.
It was more than a month before he tried going back into the tank at all. His first test trip into the water was a shock. Papa and I leaned on the tank to watch as he flipped down in his usual straight-to-the-bottom flow. He burst through the surface seconds later, gasping. “It hurts!” he puffed. “And I can’t hold my breath.”
Papa was grim and silent as he carried Arty back to our van. I knew he was wondering what would happen if Arty couldn’t dive anymore. That afternoon he got a set of weights and a bench from the storage truck, remnants of an old strongman act. He set up a gym on the stage behind Arty’s tank. Arty began working out and was back in the water within the week. Not long afterward, Arturo the Aqua Boy was back in lights and packing them in.
8. Educating the Chick
A carnival 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 hit 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 butt 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 scraping the stool leg, then the hiss and a silence that produced a reek of green tobacco from his new cigar.
“Hell, 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 pushing. “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.
“Fuckin 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 shirt. 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 shirt when I got back to the power truck. Horst was leaning on the front bumper 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 shirt and no shoes and his arms and legs wrapped around Grandpa’s shiny urn, absorbed in making breath fog on the mirror metal.