My head did a slow interior waltz and swooped back to the same word. Twice. So it was Arty who stole the money from the safe, or arranged it. Where would he get explosives? Or learn to use them? I stared at him as he lay against the maroon pillow. He had changed without my noticing. He was thicker. His neck was heavily muscled and set solidly into his heavy chest. Beneath the thin, sleeveless shirt his muscle was as defined as ever but larger, bulkier. Even the wrist joints of his flippers seemed strong. Where the three long toes of his hip fins bent to clutch the bedspread, I saw a curling fuzz of hair clouding the top of each knuckle. I stared. It was the only hair I had ever seen on his glass-clean body. I knew than that he’d gone outside and away from me. For the past few months I’d scarcely seen him. All the hours of every day he had been on his own — not just escaping the irritations of Chick and the twins and their rival stardom, but befriending the geek, talking to people I didn’t know, talking talk I hadn’t heard, making phone calls without me to dial for him.
I complained, “Taking the money was against the family. Scaring Papa was against the family.”
His eyes stayed closed but his head rolled impatiently on the pillow, “Not in the long run.”
I couldn’t understand that. The angry, weak sounds of Papa’s story, the way those tinhorn brats had stampeded him, Papa the Brawl Buster, Al the Boss, the Ringmaster, Papa the Handsomest Man. I felt robbed. My champion was revealed as a scam and I was embarrassed at all the years I’d let myself feel that Papa was any protection at all. It was Arty’s fault.
I opened my mouth to blame Arty, to yell. But there was something odd about him. He was curling slowly onto his side, tighter and smaller. His face was stony except for a puckering twitch beside the long, pale ovals of his closed eyes. A tear squeezed out from under one lid and disappeared immediately into the creasing flesh. It was years since I’d seen Arty cry, not since he abandoned tantrums and went over to the cool, hard image he admired. But it might not have been a tear. His eyes opened and stared past me.
“Elly,” he said. “I’d kill her but the cunt would take Iphy with her out of spite. And Chick! Can’t anybody but me see what he is? What he’ll do to us? He’ll end up smashing this whole family like an egg if we’re not careful.” His eyes swiveled at me in a queer begging gesture.
“You’re jealous,” I sneered. “You want to be the only star!”
He threw himself back on the pillow. On any other face his expression would have said despair and resignation. “Yeah, you too, I know. He’s cute. Almost like a norm. And he’s innocent. As innocent as an earthquake.
“Papa gave all those solemn orders of secrecy when he was born but it’s Papa who brags and puts Chick on jobs outside where people can see him moving things. There’s nobody on the lot that doesn’t know! They come on in Pittsburgh, quit in Tallahassee, and tell all their friends and the lady next to them on the bus. How long, Oly? How long before the Feds are tucking us all behind barbed wire in the interests of national security?” He’s leaning over, glaring at me, shouting.
“Oh, Arty.” It came out soft from my throat. Tired. “You’re just making excuses.”
Now he grew angry, rigidly upright, balanced on his hip flippers and quivering. “Hey! Did you ever think maybe I deserve what I get? Hey? Elly is nothing. She couldn’t get a job in a B-bar playing that plinka-plinka crap. All she’s got is Iphy. Papa gave it to them on a platter.
“Me? You know what they do with people like me? Brick walls, six-bed wards, two diapers a day and a visit from a mothball Santa at Christmas! I’ve got nothing. The twins are true freaks. Chick is a miracle. Me? I’m just an industrial accident! But I made it into something — me! I have to work and think to do it. And don’t forget, I was the first keeper. I’m the oldest, the son, the Binewski! This whole show is mine, the whole family. Papa was the oldest and he got the show and Grandpa’s ashes. Before me the whole place was falling apart. I’m the one who got us back on the road. When Papa goes it’ll be me.
“The twins don’t care if I draw a bigger crowd than they do. They don’t have to play or dance or sing. They could sit on a bench and wave and they’d still get crowds. They can afford to be easygoing. Nobody’s going to upstage them. And Chick! Of course he’s amazing. That’s my curse. I’m a freak but not much of a freak. I’m like you, fucked up without being special. There’s nothing unique about me except my brains and the crowd can’t see that.
“You know what I hate? Iphy should have been mine. She should have been hooked onto me. Papa fucked up there. We don’t need Elly. If I had been twins with Iphy we would have had something. We could have done something. But my time’s coming.”
The flame energy of his anger and disgust flickered. He eased back onto the pillow and a peculiar childface replaced his sneer. He was afraid. His shoulder fins reached toward each other but could never touch, never meet. Falling short, they lay like a failed prayer across his chest.
He lay there staring at nothing, tired out by the draining of his own venom. I crawled up behind him and snuggled close, my belly to his back. This was my reward for endurance. He would never ask for my arms around him but times like this he would allow me to warm him, to warm myself against him. I nuzzled into the back of his neck, breathing carefully so as not to irritate him. I felt his fin stroking my arm. When he spoke again I could feel the low vibration of his voice all over my body. “You know, Oly, I’m surprised. I didn’t think Papa would be so easy to beat. Not this soon. It’s kind of scary.”
9. How We Fed the Cats
Al, the handsomest man, looks bewildered and groggy over his first cup of coffee. His mustache is sprung and wild to match his sleep-jagged eyebrows as he peers around the table at us, asking, “What’s this I hear about high jinks on the Mouse Rack with the wheelchair? Eh, dreamlets?”
We all grin dutifully and Elly does her “Oh, Papa!” routine to disarm him while Mama blearily hands around filled breakfast plates, and drags her kimono sleeves through the butter every time she reaches across the table.
I cut Arty’s meat slowly while my chest fills with a yearning that would like to spill out through my eyes and nose. It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, “Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we’ll make it right.” The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child’s need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear’s worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.