.
The old swallower did his Ta-Da with five hilts coming out of his mouth in a glittering bouquet and the skinny son did his with the lit fluorescent tube going down his gullet as the lights dimmed and the whole tentful went
“aah”
seeing that pale blue glow shimmering through the jagged shadows of his ribs
.
“Clever bastards, ain’t they?” said the logger
.
When the Pin came on, nobody left. The logger looked a bit pale but stuck it out. Arty was fascinated. “Nice timing, nice,” he murmured once while the young Pin latched a big chrome hook into the permanent hole through his tongue and did a little ragtime step with a twenty-five-pound weight dangling on a chain from his tongue. The Pin walked up the blade ladder, danced on the bed of nails, then started with the pins and needles. Two of the kid swallowers were juggling fire steadily behind him and the Pin timed every move to build the heartbeat. He works with chrome knitting needles, ten and eighteen inches long. Impressive, through the thighs, through the skin of the chest. He’s working a new place on his belly, and the blood trickling out and running down his pale skin to the loincloth is effective. He was quite a sight by the time he started punching the needles through his cheeks and lips. We slipped out before the finale so Arty wouldn’t get caught with his chair in the crowd
.
“Not from a show family? Sure?” he asked as we picked our way back through the midway crowd
.
“Just the apple farmers.”
“He could use a good talker to lead them through. That pantomime stuff is O.K. but a good talker would add a lot.”
I didn’t answer. He was thinking about Oly, young Olympia. I was surprised at the note of pain in his voice. As though he were afraid to lose her
.
“I don’t care. It doesn’t do any good to care, so I won’t.” Chick was as dry and flat as a cow pie. Arty flicked his eyes at him suspiciously and then looked at me. We three were in the Chute for our secret meeting. The guards stood outside in the night mist while, in the deepest room, in the soft yellow glow of the lit jars that held our dead brothers and sisters, Arty told us what we had to do.
Chick slumped against a glass case. I leaned against him, watching Arty shift slightly in his chair, thinking. I tried to read the clenching of Arty’s jaws and the tilt of his gleaming head on his thick neck.
“I don’t usually mind what you think, Chick,” purred Arty. His chin jutted at us, intent, “As long as you do your job. But this time you’ve got to understand. It’s just us three in the pinch. Mama and Papa can’t deal with it. All the guards, all the simps, the Arturans, the show folks, even Horst — they could turn in a flash. They all have their own machines to ride.”
We listened. I could feel Chick’s child bones vibrating against me, shaking to the tune of Arty’s song. “It’s just us three now. The twins have other things to deal with.” Arty waited a beat to see if we’d react to that, complain or accuse. When we didn’t he went on.
“You’ll take three guards. I’ll use the rest. By the time you’re ready to start I’ll be up there watching. O.K.?”
We nodded. Arty hit the start switch on his chair motor with a flange of his right shoulder fin. “I need you bad, now. Don’t fuck me over.”
Chick held my hand as we walked through the dark camp. The big men moved silently behind us. Arty and his crew of fifteen guards had gone through the gate into the Arturan camp.
When we came to Doc P.’s van we stopped at the door. My mouth was dry and my hands were wet. Chick’s fingers gripped my palm hard. We stood staring at the white glow of the big van in the moonlight. I could just make out the twined snake emblem with the communication grid caught in the open mouths of the snakes.
Chick sighed. “She’s asleep,” he whispered. He moved to the door, tugging me along as he opened it and climbed into the dark stench of antiseptic. The light went on and I saw the inside of Doc P.’s van for the first time in the years she had traveled with us. White and stark. No cushions on the metal benches. Chrome on the outsize sink. A metal desk against the wall, the white doors of cabinets glaring in the hard white light.
Chick moved surely. He’d spent chunks of his life here. The bedroom took up the end and the sliding door opened as we soft-footed toward it.
“It’s O.K.,” Chick said. “Tell them to bring the stretcher.”
When I got back he was standing by her head, stroking her short grey-brown hair. I came close to look. Without her white wrappings and her glinting specs she looked soft and dissatisfied. Set grooves of disapproval curved down around her thin mouth. Her nose was shapeless, her skin thick.
“No wonder she wears a mask,” I whispered. Chick laid his hand on her cheek. I noticed that his hands were getting big and bony on his kid-spindly arms. He trailed a finger across her lips. “She’s always constipated,” he said. The guards set the stretcher down and I stepped back to make room. Her cot was narrow, not built in, and it had a thin pad instead of a mattress. I peeked into the white closet as they took her out. It was full of books. The shelves filled the closet from top to bottom and the books were each wrapped separately in a clear plastic bag. I used two fingers to flatten the plastic across a book spine so I could read the title. Some kind of surgical text. I checked a few more. All surgical texts. Chick looked in at me.
“That’s what she taught me from. That’s how she learned. The journals are in the cabinets up front.”
Chick showed me how to wash up while the guards moved her to the operating table.
“Are you gonna lose your dinner?” he was looking at me sharply.
I hung on to his eyes. They were as chilly and soothing as Grandpa’s urn. I giggled greenly, nodding. His mouth twisted in dry exasperation.
“Jeez. Arty just wants you here to make sure I do it. You can’t really help anyway. Go over there.”
He spun me with his mind and I knew it. I was moving into the latrine cubicle and falling to my knees. My stomach came all the way up and out, then snapped back like a frog’s tongue. Then I was back at the sink with liquid soap covering my arms to the elbow and a white mask tying itself over my face and an itchy cap sliding down over my eyes. I giggled, watching Chick’s hands under the rushing tap. “This is why you never have dirty elbows, hunh?”
His eyes grinned at me over his mask but he didn’t say anything.
“Mama thinks it’s weird that your fingernails stay so clean and you never get a crust behind your ears.”
He was busy with the gloves. “Just sit on that stool with the back. You won’t feel a thing.”
But I was terrified. I thought she would wake up. I thought she would rise off the table roaring and take us in her thick hands and break us, and I thought Arty was sitting up above, looking down through the mirror in the ceiling, and he would watch Doc P. eat us and he would chuckle and come down and make a deal with her because that was what he’d meant to have happen all along. I was hanging on to the seat of my stool with both gloved hands, being scared that way, when suddenly I started being scared that she wouldn’t wake up and that this other thing would actually happen. I opened my mouth to speak. “Arghi,” I said, and my little brother Chick looked up at me, frowning between his mask and his cap, and I went to sleep.
• • •
“Why did I have to be there? All I did was get in the way and have to be put to sleep and fall off onto the floor in the middle of everything. I didn’t help at all.”