“Well, I don’t really. It moves itself. I just let it.” He looked at me anxiously while I chewed on that and found it unsatisfying.
I shook my head. “Don’t get it.”
“Look,” he turned me toward the cats. The side of the van lifted and the prop poles slid into place so I could see the cats in the shade. They were all eating, standing over the meat, wrenching it, or lying with chunks between their paws, fondling it.
“You know the water tank at the back?” said Chick. As I watched, the small taps over the troughs in each cage opened slightly and trickles of water flowed. One of the Bengals leaped at its tap and began batting the stream with its paw. “Water always wants to move but it can’t unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction.” The tap that the Bengal was playing with suddenly opened wide and a gush of water splatted into the big whiskers. The cat jerked back and then lunged forward, pressing his whole face into the heavy spray, twitching his ears ecstatically. “If you give it a big hole,” said Chick, “a lot comes out. If you give it a pinprick you get a slow leak.” He was struggling to make me understand. I watched the tiger play and felt a thickness between my ears. “I’m just the plumbing that lets it flow through. I can give it a big path or a small one, and I can make it go in any direction.” His anxious eyes needed me to understand. “But the wanting to move is in the thing itself.” We started off toward the big tent.
“Did I help?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said.
• • •
Arty, wheedling from the sofa, called, “Chick, I’ll bet there’s a lot of that roast beef left over from dinner. I sure would like a sandwich made out of that beef, with mayonnaise and horseradish. What do you say? Will you make me one?”
Chick, with a comic book under his arm, having worked for hours at other people’s jobs and looking now for just an apple and a visit with Superman — this vegetarian Chick, who will eat unfertilized eggs and milk but never (no, please don’t make him) fish or fowl or four-legged beasts or anything that notices when it’s alive and talks to him about it if he touches it — this Chick knows Arty is being mean, and will force him to move the meat rather than using his hands and a knife, and says, “Sure, Arty, white or whole wheat?”
He tries. He gets the plate of beef from the refrigerator and casually grabs a knife from the drawer.
“Chick!” snaps Arty indignantly. “You’re not gonna use a knife, are you?”
Caught, Chick admits, “I was gonna move the knife.”
But Arty roars, “Drop all that norm shit! Why did Papa give you that gift if you’re going to piss it away like a norm? Move the meat. Move the meat!”
And so precise leaf-thin pages of beef separate themselves from the pink roast and arrange themselves with a swoop of mayo and a flip of horseradish on a dancing pair of homestyle whites, and they all come together on a pretty blue plate that glides out of the dish rack to give them a ride over to where Arty is picking his teeth with a fin and watching.
“There you go,” says Chick.
“Thank you so much,” says Arty, who is perfectly capable of making his own sandwiches if there is nobody around to do it for him. Arty clamps a fin on the sandwich and takes an enormous bite, watching Chick’s face as he chews. “Dullicious!” he mouths around the mess.
“Good. I’m glad.” Chick smiles and steps out of the van and walks around behind the generator truck, where he vomits painfully and tries to think of something besides what the cow said to him as he sliced her.
They were fighting and their door was locked. The thumping woke me. I burst out of my cupboard thinking of elephants or earthquakes. The thin paneling of their cubicle room thonked toward me a fraction of an inch. I could hear them gasping. I ran to their door. The knob wouldn’t turn. The early sunlight slanted in through the window over the sink. A huge body slammed against the door on the other side. They’d wake up Al and Lil. I slid Chick’s door open and his huge eyes were waiting for me. He was afraid.
“Help me,” I whispered. “The twins are fighting.”
He rolled out of his blankets and grabbed my arm. His hand was wet.
“Unlock it.”
He looked at the doorknob. It turned. The door opened. They were rolled in a knot on the bed with spider elbows jerking out and in, a flailing leg whacking a heel into a thin, pajama-clad back. Their breathing was short and loud and a hand came out of the mess, pulling a long skein of black hair up into the light of their small window.
“Hold their hands.” I nudged Chick. Two hands spread out against the pillow and a fist landed with a smack and a squeak. “All the hands! All!” I snapped. Four arms splayed in the air away from the twisted bundle of pajamas. A leg swung back for a kick and then froze.
“Can you hold them?”
Chick nodded, looking at me. His eyes had crusts of sleep in them. Elly’s face lifted out of a mass of black hair — a red scratch across her forehead. She drew back on her long neck and shot forward, whooshing out a phtt of air as she spit into the tangled hair beneath her.
There was no hiding it from Al and Lil. The scratches and bruises were so visible that the twins couldn’t do their act for four days. They were sick and sore. They lay in bed with their faces turned away from each other all that day. Al and Lil were very upset.
“You must never do that again! You must never fight with each other!” The old incantation poured in shocked desperation from the parental mugs. The twins refused to explain what it was about.
Chick was helping me drain sewage tanks that afternoon. We were both glum. We stood and watched the gauge on the pump that emptied our van’s tank into the tanker truck. I kept thinking about what they’d looked like when Chick had opened the door. Like a thing that hated itself.
“They always bicker,” I said.
Chick nodded, watching the gauge dial. “But they were really trying to hurt each other.” Chick’s head fell forward, his chin nearly touching his chest. The back of his neck was so thin and golden, and his tawny head was so big above his skinny shoulders. Seeing him hit my lungs like an ice pick through the ribs. He was pretty.
“I wonder what it was about?” I murmured.
Chick sighed. His head wobbled. “Iphy said his name in her sleep,” he said.
Lil made Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Chicken for dinner. She was rubbing lemon juice over her hands to get rid of the garlic smell while we all sat around the table waiting for the oven bell to sound.
The twins were excited about something, whispering to each other. Al was talking about an old road manager he’d run off the midway twenty years before. The guy had shown up again that day looking for a job.
“Vicious god, Lil! He looked eighty years old! He looked like the grave had spit him back up, disgusted!”
Lil tsked over her lemon-juice hands. Arty watched the twins. Chick and I leaned on Papa from opposite sides, leeching his warmth.
Lily was dishing out the chicken when Iphy finally spoke up.
“We have a new turn for our show!” Iphy glowed. It had to be tricky. Iphy always did the talking if a “No” was possible. It was hard for anybody to say “No” to Iphy.
“We do a standing vertical jump onto the piano top and spring off into a synchronized-swim dance number in the air. We fly out over the audience and back while the piano goes on playing the ‘Corporal Bogwartz Overture’! Doesn’t that sound great? We practiced this morning! We’ll use pink floods and three pink spots to follow us over the crowd. Do let us, Papa! Chick can handle the whole thing so easily. He knows the music already. He learned it in two sessions! It takes exactly one and a half minutes and it’ll be our finale. He can just run in during the last five minutes of each show, stand behind the screen, and be finished when we touch the stage for the bow! Please, Papa, Mama? Come and see it after dinner; you’ll love it!”