He wriggled to the weight bench and, hooking his hip flippers under the straps, leaned back, tensing his belly as the flippers alternated flexing and relaxing to lift the weights on each side. He started to chuckle out loud, watching the weights rise and fall at the end of his blue-veined, white-tendoned flippers.
“We’re lucky, you know,” he laughed, “that Papa has such a small-potato brain.” He laughed deliberately, timing his breathing with the lifts. I watched his corrugated belly do its seductive ripple, complicated by the added rhythm of the laugh.
“Papa’s a genius,” I said stoutly. This was Binewski doctrine.
“Heh heh heh,” went Arty’s belly. There was scorn in his eyes. It was familiar enough on his wide mug, but not toward Papa. He was trying to shock me.
“If Papa had discovered fire,” Arty sighed to the beat of his lifts, “he’d think it was for sticking in your mouth to amaze a crowd.… If Papa had invented the wheel … he’d have laid it flat … put a merry-go-round on it … and figured that was as far as it went.… If he’d discovered America … he would have gone home and forgot about it … because it didn’t have any hot-dog stands.”
I sat with my hump propped against the back of Arty’s big tank. The clean chlorine smell of the water drifted in and out of my lungs.
Al figured six to eight weeks was enough to get Chick started as a big-time gambler. The two of them spent hours every day with Horst — our resident encyclopedia of worldliness — and Rudy the Wheelman. Rudy’s experience supposedly encompassed a stint as a professional contract-bridge player that had ended when his wobbly ethics were revealed and he was informed that, if he ever picked up a deck of cards again, he would lose both his hands. Rudy had taken refuge in the obscurity of the Wheel Booth and the comfort of his small, cheerful wife. Mrs. Rudy was dedicated to folding sheets of paper into birds, fish, giraffes, and other intriguing forms. She could not work the midway because she modestly refused to dye her mousy hair red, but she helped around the lot in many ways.
Obviously Chick couldn’t crawl into a rental tux and sip his chocolate milk from highball glasses in the mirror-ceilinged casinos of the planet. This, like pocket picking, was supposed to be done long distance. I don’t know the procedure. Papa wasn’t secretive about it, he just never went into detail. Papa had a tiny lapel microphone hooked to a transmitter and Chick had a receiver so Papa could give him instructions.
Practice time for Chick and Papa was early, just after breakfast, which cut into my voice lesson, or eliminated it. I had a tape recorder to use when Papa couldn’t make it, but I knew the tapes were piling up in a cigar box in his desk and Papa never got around to listening to them.
Chick knew I was upset, and that Arty was thoroughly pissed. But he couldn’t help being happy at all the time Papa spent with him, and he did his best to make it up to us.
He discovered a new way to clean Arty’s tank. Instead of watching a pair of brushes and a sterilizer hose go over the drained tank, Chick stood in front of the full tank and took out every cell, probably every molecule, that wasn’t supposed to be there. The green on the glass disappeared in broad, straight swaths like wheat in front of a mower. When Chick was finished the tank was so clean it was almost invisible. A round greenish cloud hung above it. Chick blinked at the cloud and it sailed dreamily across the stage toward the open door of the toilet. There was a faint splash and then the toilet flushed.
Arty and I were sitting on the exercise bench to watch because Chick had come chirping about his “new way!” My mouth hung open as I thought about setting the Chick on my own cleaning chores. Arty looked steadfastly at Chick, whose proud grin began to weaken and slide off into doubt. “Show-off,” said Arty quietly.
Chick’s face crumpled. “I didn’t mean it, Arty. I’m sorry.” Arty dropped to the floor and crawled into his room, thumping the door shut behind him.
For obvious reasons “show-off” was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning “sweetheart” into a thumb in the eye.
I sat looking at Chick. I knew what he felt. The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating. Poor little stupe. He was just a baby. He hunkered down against the tank with the side of his soft face against the cool glass for comfort. He didn’t dare look at me for sympathy. He didn’t cry. He just crouched there and ached.
I squinted at Arty’s door. He had his radio turned up loud. I got up and walked over to the Chick. His eyes swiveled at me in fear. He thought I was going to pinch him or say something nasty. That proved he couldn’t really read minds. I put my arms around him. I rubbed my cheek against his curly ear. He slung an arm around my neck. I whispered, “It’s a great way to clean.”
“Truly?” he whispered. I could hear the tears in his throat.
The dumb little fuck was supposed to be so goddamn sensitive, how come he couldn’t figure it out? All he had to do to make me like him was need me. All he had to do to make Arty like him was drop dead.
Papa and Chick left with great fanfare. We all went along when Horst drove them to the airport. I can’t remember where we were except that it was not Atlantic City, because that’s where Papa and Chick were going. They were planning to stay for five days — a long trip but Papa wanted to break Chick in to the game slowly and delicately. Chick had heard that there was a swimming pool in their hotel. Chick was sure he was going to learn to swim like Arty. Arty was utterly charmed to hear this, of course.
That night the show closed down peacefully, but when Lil went to give out the tills the next morning she discovered that the entire take from the two days before — around $20,000—was gone. The alarms had been cut at their source and the safe — a silly, tinny affair anyway — had been popped open like a melon on pavement. Old-fashioned plastique, Horst said, and crudely handled.
Horst went out to the airport for Papa and Chick early on the morning of the sixth day. Papa had looked bad the last time he’d come home from picking pockets. This time he looked like deaths rectum. He hugged us all fervently, which was awkward because he wouldn’t let go of Chick and carried him the whole time. Chick himself was white and still and didn’t smile.
Papa collapsed into his big chair with Chick in his lap. We children arranged ourselves discreetly while Mama fussed in the refrigerator and Horst lit his pipe.
“You both look worn to shreds,” Mama was clucking.
Papa gave a walleyed look around at our waiting faces and I was afraid he was going to send us out so he could talk to Mama and Horst. The clink of ice cubes distracted him, and then Mama handed him a tall glass of her famous lemonade.
“Al, I want Horst to explain about the safe,” Mama began. Horst actually reached to take the pipe out of his mouth but Papa cut them both off.
“Lily, I gotta tell you. Horst, I got to get this out. I don’t know what in creeping Jesus to think.”
Horst waved his pipe, but Mama twisted her hands, anxious. “Are you ill? Whatever happened?”
“I came within a gnat’s ass of losing Chick,” Papa said. “That’s what happened.” Chick whimpered on Papa’s chest and got a pat. “No. I wouldn’t really lose you, honey. It’s O.K.”
I grimaced at Arty but he was hunched over in his sofa-bunk, watching Papa, and didn’t notice.
It took a while for Papa to get it all out. He hadn’t got it organized as a story yet. At first, he said, they’d taken it slow and easy.
“I didn’t lay any bets at all the first night. Just watched and had him practice. Gave wins to the good faces and grief to the apes and assholes. It was fun, sending some poor hack driver on the roll of his life with his skinny wife hanging on his arm in a faint, thinking ‘Shoes for Junior.’ Then watching their eyes as they stood under the chandelier and I say ‘Red 26’ into my button and pay off their mortgage, and whisper ‘Red 19’ and send their baby to college with twenty minutes at the wheel.