“Papa will flip.”
“That’ll give him his carnival back the rest of the time.”
“Mama will think you’ve fallen to the vilest depths of leisure.”
“Oly … stick by me. How about it?”
His eyes were open again, looking straight at a fold of blanket in front of him. The big chain-link fence was below us on one side of the van. It stretched a long way and the Arturan camp sprawled out from it in a refugee confusion.
“I’m gonna stick a broom,” I muttered grimly, “up your ass, brother, and peddle you as an all-day sucker.”
Massaging the twins on the sea-green carpet of their front room, crawling around on my knees to reach the peculiar juncture of the split spine, the small of their backs that was actually much wider, nearly two backs wide.
“Sorry I can’t quite lie on my stomach.”
“It’s O.K., Iphy. Does that hurt?”
“Hurts good.”
Elly stretched limply away from Iphy, folded oddly across Iphy’s side.
“No wonder your back’s bitching, getting pulled in different directions by Elly and the belly.”
Iphy’s pale face softened in pleasure. “Elly belly, weak as jelly.”
“Arty thinks Elly’s coming back some,” I said.
“Does it make him feel better?”
“Do you think she is?”
“Sometimes. For a second. No more. That’s good. Now work on Elly.”
I inched slowly up Elly’s arms and shoulders, probing, stretching, lifting, rotating but feeling how much of her muscle was gone into soupy flab like the dismal mush in her skull.
“Iphy?”
She blinked awake.
“Having that baby inside …” I held Elly’s neck in my fingers and felt the strong hammer of her blood. “Is it bad or good?”
Iphy blinked again. “Good. Inside me is good. The bad is outside.”
“Arty’s not happy.”
“I know.” Her tone was peculiar. Something familiar made me look up. She was absolutely twinkling. She pulled her lips flat, widening her grin grotesquely. She tipped her head back, let her eyes droop to slits. The colored beads of her eyeballs slid from side to side and her voice rolled out in Arty’s pompous, patronizing bell of power: “Happiness! Happiness, I tell you! Are you listening? Happiness? You Poor Paralyzed and Constipated Dung Chutes! Happiness is Not the POINT!”
I fell down laughing and Iphy laughed and we rolled giggling and kicking on the thick softness of the carpet, tangling hilariously with the flopping, laughless Elly until I hurt all over from laughing and kind Iphy stretched away from her dragging belly trying to breathe but was caught by the laughter again and again.
“Whyever,” she gasped, hee-heeing. “However,” she ha-ha’d, “could we love??” which set her off again and me with her, chortling, “love him!!” and screaming with the sunburst air of laughter and pounding our heels on the carpet and kicking our heels toward the ceiling until we both collapsed, exhausted, into feeble titters. Only Iphy had the strength at last to shout, “He’s such a SIMP!” which set us off again.
I went to tell the Pin Kid that he and I were washed up. Kaput. Finito. He was lounging on his bed of nails while he worked some new spots around his belly button with the needles. I hunkered beside him, watching him lift a flap of skin and shove the big pin through, then hold the flap in one hand, twiddling the knob at the needle head idly as he waited for the thin trickle of blood to dry up.
“Ya know, Vinnie,” I said, “I decided to stay with my brother.” It was hard for me. A swallower girl was hanging freshly laundered curtains on the backdrop nearby. Some of the kids were throwing things into the air and not letting them hit the ground, juggling practice, with a scratchy tape blaring Mozart or something.
I watched the gem-sharp face of the Pin Kid absorbed in his own white skin. I looked hard to see if I’d hurt him. Maybe my whole life was set in that instant. I was a sixteen-year-old freak brat. If he’d said anything — a word might have been enough, “Don’t,” or a crease of the brow, a shadow of pain in his eyes could have seduced me. The pain I was looking for in him would have been my excuse, my motive, my escape tunnel to the world beyond the Binewskis.
But he half smiled in puzzlement. His eyes like the pebbled gut of a fast creek, bright and open and empty but willing to be full.
“Well … sure,” he said. As though he’d never imagined anything else for me.
“I mean,” I said, frowning until my glasses slipped and my bare pink eyes popped into the light at him, “I mean always.” I stopped because he was rolling off the nails and he’d forgotten to pull the big needle from his belly skin and the thin red blood was spattering his cut-off jeans. When he turned away from me, reaching for a shirt, I could see the rash of tiny pockmarks from the nail points reddening his lovely arched back, his curving graceful hump with the brightness of blood barely restrained at the surface of his white skin.
“Well, Oly … Well, sure … Hey, Arturo, he needs you.” This Vinnie, the Pin Kid, was a nice boy. Even half-choked with disgust he tried not to hurt me.
That’s when it clicked that the mechanics of my life were not going to run on the physics that ruled the twins or Mama in her day. If I bled it didn’t mean what Iphy’s blood meant. If I loved it wasn’t the same as Iphy’s love or the love of bouncy girls in the midway.
Arty had done his best to teach me this all along but I had seen him as a special case, not governed by the prosy gravity that held the rest of us. Vinnie, the Pin Kid, tried to keep me from knowing that he’d never thought of me the way I had thought of him. His kindness scalded me awake.
My new eyes saw the old things. He’d felt the needle in his belly as he’d pulled the shirt over his head. Now his big hands, cleverly knuckled, slid out the needle, dropped it into a tall jar of alcohol, dabbed antiseptic on the two small holes above his belly button. He pulled the shirt down and tucked it into his red-spattered jeans.
“You’re lucky, Oly,” looking gravely out from his deep eyeholes. “My ma cried a lot just looking at me. You’re right to stick by your family.”
He stacked his props in his trunk and slid the nail bed out of the way. His legs were longer than me. His narrow shoulders nipped up near his tiny ears with the swirl of hump arching behind him. He moved as though he were all legs, a smooth bobbing in his gait that poured in through my eyes and settled in my right lung like a pool of ice. I got up while his back was turned and crept away.
From the journal of Norval Sanderson:
Went with Arty this
P. M
. to watch the Pin Act. It’s one of his new days off and he showed up in disguise, dark green blanket up to his neck. Green stocking cap, dark glasses probably borrowed from Oly. The guard was in civvies and there wasn’t a novice to be seen. He rolled up to my booth and nodded and it was a full minute before I realized it was the Worm
.
It delighted him to fool me
.
I’d been raving about the Pin-Cushion but it was the first time Arty had seen him. We stood in the back of the swallowers’ tent and waited for the Pin
.
We were in time for the swallowers’ finale. A blustering logger in front of us explained to his wife how the whole thing was collapsible swords and tricks
.
“They always think the real thing is phony and that the tricks are the McCoy. Never stops amazing me,” whispered Arty
.
I told him the guy got his money’s worth feeling like he’d refused to be suckered. Feeling like he’d outwitted them. Showing off his worldly skepticism to his lady