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 Chick’s 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.
“Classics. That’s what people want. Stick to classics,” 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 lolloped 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 instant’s 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 pushing 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 Chick’s 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 chores. 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 embarrassed 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 butter 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 fucking 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 craps.”
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.