The shadow stayed in Chick’s eyes, and a dimness, a kind of fog, settled on him. I think he never quite got over having hurt the frat goon. Chick was crazy like that. Something in his chemistry mixed up with the way the family trained him. He got twisted so that he was more afraid of hurting someone else than of being hurt himself, more scared of killing than of dying. In the numb, dumb way that he knew things, Chick understood Papa’s disappointment and felt guilty for it.
Papa took to having depressed spells during which he was inclined to sit alone in odd spots with a bottle. High on a two-day binge, he ordered posters for a “World’s Strongest Child” act, but he shelved the idea during the hangover. Sometimes Horst, or the twins or I, would make a suggestion to try to cheer him up.
“What about sports?” I’d ask. “What if a pole vaulter got just a tiny boost from Chick at the right moment and you happened to have a bet on the guy? What if a ball got a little nudge toward a goal line?”
But Papa would shake his head and pat my hump. “Oly, my dove, your grandpa told me long ago, and I should have remembered. He used to say, ‘If you don’t mess with the monkey, the monkey won’t mess with you.’ ”
Al and Horst were going off on business for the day. Al told Chick to feed the cats and Chick, as usual, bit his tongue, turned pale, and nodded without saying anything.
Chick bit his tongue more than any kid I ever heard of. Sometimes Al had to use fire-eater’s salve on the inside of Chick’s mouth.
After Al left, Chick slid up to me at the sink where I was doing the breakfast dishes. “Come with me, Oly, please?” The dishes flew out of the sink in a silent, clatterless flock. They dipped through the rinse water and dried in the air as they jumped, ten at a time, to their places in the cupboard. I laughed and wiped my hands. Arty was holed up with a book and the twins were practicing piano with Lily.
“Sure,” I said, “but how come? You’ve fed them lots of times.”
His soft face rumpled lightly in worry. “I know. But I don’t like it.” His eyebrows went up in a peak of resignation. “I like the cats. It’s the meat. I don’t like moving it. Just come along, O.K.?”
Horst always parked the cat van near the refrigerator truck where the meat was kept. When he fed the cats himself, Horst would toss a quarter of beef out onto the ground, jump down after it, slam the truck door, wrestle the beef around by its lone leg and whack chunks off it with a huge cleaver. Horst fed the cats through the cage doors, but nobody else on the lot felt comfortable doing that. Horst liked telling stories about how unpredictable cats are. I always suspected him of doing it deliberately to keep people from messing with them. If that was his reason it certainly worked.
The sides of the cat van were hinged at the top and could be cranked up like awnings, shading the cages. There was steel mesh outside the bars, and the walls separating the paired Bengals and lions and leopards were inch-thick plates of steel. Al tried to get Horst to put clear plate plastic up instead of bars and the steel screen but Horst said it would ruin the effect. “People think big cats should be behind bars. And the screen gives them the feeling that they could get their fingers clawed off if they stuck them through. Besides, the cat smell is important too, and if I put plastic up I’d have to air-condition the whole rig.”
When Chick fed the cats he dropped the meat through the ventilator slots in the roof. We stood outside the refrigerator truck and watched the big bolt lift and the door swing open. Chick reached over and took my hand. “Is this O.K.? I want to hold your hand while I’m moving the meat.” He was looking pinched. “Sure,” I said. A beef quarter floated off its hook inside the truck and wobbled out. It flopped onto the big chopping block. The cleaver came out of its slot in the truck’s tool rack. Chick worked fast. The blade flashed upward five times quickly and six chunks of meat sailed through the air with exposed fat gleaming. The cats were coughing and spitting as the trapdoors over the ventilator slots lifted simultaneously. The chunks dropped through with a single thunk to the floor. Another quarter jumped out on the block and the door shut while the cleaver was rising and falling. Chick was squeezing my hand gently. The cleaver dipped its square tip into the cutting block and stayed there while the chunks lifted, circled like cumbersome crows, and headed slowly for the flaps in the roof.
“You could do it without the cleaver, Chick,” I said.
“Yeah, but I’d feel the meat more. Can you feel it?”
He was taller than I was and he looked down at me with such a serious intensity that I felt a small quiver of fear. “Feel what?”
He frowned. Words never came all that easily to him. “Well, how … dead … the meat is.”
I stuck my tongue out at the corner of my mouth and squinted at him through my sunglasses. Anybody else in the family except Lily would be pulling something if they talked like that, trying to spook me so they could laugh at me later. Chick was so straight he was simple. He could never really understand the joke when the rest of us were telling whopping lies.
“No,” I said. “I don’t feel anything.” He pursed his mouth and I heard the meat land inside the cages and the snarling of the cats. Chick looked so sad I knew I’d failed him. “I’m sorry, Chick.”
He swung an arm over my shoulders and leaned his face down against my head. “It’s okay. I just thought you might feel it if I held your hand.”
“Shit,” said a clear voice behind us. We wheeled together as though we were the twins. It was one of the red-haired girls. She shrugged her round shoulders at us through her peacock shirt and laughed nervously. “I just never get over how you do that, Chick,” and she waved gaily and teetered away on her tall heels.
We watched her go, Chick’s arm still around my shoulders, my arm around his waist. For one instant my eye escaped and I could see us as we must have looked to the redhead. Two small figures, one bent and distorted, shielded by cap and glasses, and this slim, golden boy-child, several inches taller, holding the dwarf close while chunks of meat sailed over them in the air. I hugged Chick. His peach cheek rubbed my forehead and nose. I wondered how he did move things and, while that wondering was creeping into my skull, I realized that I had never wondered about it before. Had any of us really wondered? Even Al and Lil? Or had we all been so caught up in the necessity of training him and protecting him and protecting ourselves from him and figuring ways it would be safe to use him and finding out exactly what he could or couldn’t do that we never got around to wondering?
“Chick,” I said to his fine yellow hair, “how do you move stuff?”
His head came up slowly from my shoulder and he looked surprised. Then his face focused. I was thinking how ridiculous never to have asked him. He started to blush. He let go of me and passed his hands over his ears as though he knew I was making fun of him. “Oh, you know,” he said. The cleaver levered itself out of the chopping block, flew to the sterilizer hose hanging from the refrigerator truck, and danced in the white gush from the nozzle. The hose stopped and the cleaver leaped toward the truck door, which opened just enough to let it in. Then the door closed and I knew the cleaver would be settling into its slot. Chick was bright pink now.
“No, I don’t know, Chick. Tell me.”
A small rock by the truck wheel began to spin in place. It flipped over, still spinning, then hopped onto its side and began to roll in a tight circle. The equivalent, probably, of another kid scuffing his shoes or twiddling his own ear in embarrassment. He was my little brother, of course, so I got impatient. “I’ll pinch you, Chick! Tell me how you move stuff!” The rock lay down quietly.