Papa expected to assume Doc P.’s supervision of the twins’ pregnancy but Arty slid Chick into the job. Papa sulked and spent more time drinking and playing checkers with Horst.
Iphy didn’t bother to look up from her book when we came in. Chick sat on the floor and wiggled his toes in the carpet. I went my rounds with the dust cloth and made the bed and sorted the twins’ laundry. Iphy read all the time. She liked mysteries. Every week’s mailbag brought her a new lot of paperbacks. She took her daily walks and did her exercises grudgingly, wanting to get back to the book of the moment.
I came out of the bedroom with the laundry basket and looked at Chick. He hopped up and waved goodbye to Iphy as he opened the door for me.
“You’re getting so used to doing things with your hands!” I said as we went down the ramp. He chirped, “Elly is coming back some.” I felt myself swerving an inch above the ground, giddy and happy.
“Put me down!” My feet touched and my stomach dropped into place. “Are you sure?”
“Iphy knows but she’s scared Arty will find out. Don’t tell, Oly. Promise?”
“Are you doing it?”
We were near the laundry truck by then and Chick stopped and looked at me, startled. His hair was hanging down around his ears, I noticed. Mama would be wrapping him in a towel soon, making him sit on a stool in front of the van, and stepping around him with scissors as she prattled and he squirmed.
“Are you doing it?” I repeated. He blinked and shook his head.
“I never thought of it. Do you think I could?”
“How do I know? I thought you could do anything.” I was impatient with him. It was one thing to be eleven years old when you were memorizing geography, but this was supposed to be the region of his gift, the terrain of his purpose.
“Well, I mainly take things apart. I can take anything apart,” he said. An amazed wideness settled on his eyes as he stared blankly at the door of the laundry truck.
Watching his possibilities dawn on Chick, I decided to ask the question that I’d been carrying for weeks. Ever since I’d realized how limited my own possibilities were.
“Chicky, listen. Remember how you used to pick pockets? Well, you know the sperm in Arty’s balls?” I had his attention at least. “Could you move that sperm — the wiggly little things — could you move them into me and get ’em into the egg thing in me so I could have a baby like Iphy?”
That, Miranda, was how I came to ask. Chick was hesitant, scared at first. He was afraid of botching the job. He insisted on trying it out on the cats first.
The next week he managed to impregnate an elderly and irritable tigress whom Horst had never successfully mated. She had such a nasty attitude that she sliced up any male who propositioned her. Chick accomplished the miracle of Lilith, the tigress, early one morning while sitting on an overturned bucket in front of the cat wagon. I paced and fidgeted, ready to warn him if any of the Arturans should come along to distract him. He took what seemed like a long time. His hands clenched in a knot at his knees, his face flushed and beaded with sweat.
The male, at one end of the row of cages, slept through the process. Lilith, who had been named after Mama, paced and coughed and glared and switched her tail at the other end.
There was nothing to see. I was getting bored when he finally let out a long, cautious breath and looked at me. He rubbed his eyes with his fists. “Wow,” he said, “I think it worked.”
I went hopping and celebrating around, patting him on the shoulders and rumpling his hair. I was as happy as if it were my own stunt he’d just pulled.
Chick agreed to be ready to do it whenever my time came around if he could be sure of having both Arty and me still and in the same room, preferably for some time.
“Maybe I could do it without seeing you both, but something might go wrong. It’s tricky.”
• • •
It happened one night in Arty’s front room with Norval Sanderson there. Arty and Sanderson were talking their endless talk, Arty drawn up to his desk in the wheelchair and Sanderson stretched out in a soft chair with his legs ending in the loose sandals he wore to accommodate the bandages on his feet.
Chick was lolling on his belly on the carpet, pretending to read a big picture magazine about foreign lands. I was curled in the corner on a built-in bench, listening.
My pulse filled my head as though the heart had punched its way up my throat and was stuck beating between my ears. I couldn’t take my eyes off Arty. He was in his wrangling mood. He loved to talk to Sanderson. He seemed to relax and enjoy the winding stalk of argument. Sanderson, the camouflaged hunter, pretended a casual indifference but secretly struggled to catch Arty unawares, skewer him on his own words.
Arty chuckled delightedly, “Such a sadist! You go unarmed because you’re sure you can make me turn my own weapons on myself! You don’t want to dirty your delicate paws with my blood! You want me to rip out my own guts so you can tsk and sigh and write prize-winning features on the tragic flaw. The self-destructive vortex at the core of greatness! You do see greatness in me. Admit it!”
Sanderson, with his head tipped in cartoon contemplation, would tap his lip slowly with his thumb and question, always question: “Is elephant gas great? Is it great in the pain that it causes the elephant? Or in the relief it affords when expressed? Or perhaps it is only great if it is ignited on farting and the resulting explosion is used to power a turbine? Is an elephant fart great in and of itself? Or only in its effect?”
“Ah! So now we’re down to fart jokes! But you’ll notice that I am sitting here with all I was born with, Norval, my lad, while you are being whittled away. How do you account for this?”
On and on they went, having such a good time. I loved Arty when he really laughed, and Sanderson made him roar. I watched, knowing this was my moment as Arty tipped back his smooth skull and rippled his belly in waves of pleasure that bounced out through his wide mouth and creased his grey eyes shut in the wild dance of his whole twitching, rocking body to the tune of the glitter inside his skull.
I sat very still. Chick had assured me that the thing in me was ripe and waiting.
There was Chick, on his belly with his bare feet kicking slowly in the air. His water-white hair hung in his eyes as he turned the pages slowly, revealing the mysteries of Tibet and the banner wall of the palace in Lhasa. His head turned slightly, one eye peeking at me. I grinned near convulsions. Do it. Do it now, while he’s laughing, I thought. And Chick nodded slightly, turning back to his book as Arty said, “Consider how protected our lives are. Never seen a movie, never set foot in a school.”
“But there’s no reason for not seeing movies and whatnot,” protested Sanderson. “The redheads have a portable set. It’s sheer cantankerousness and barbarism,” he drawled.
“Early training!” barked Arty. “Hatching habits!”
“Poor feller, try this …” and Sanderson pulled a flat steel bottle out of his tweed pocket and poured a golden dollop into the drained lemonade glass on Arty’s desk. Sanderson pulled a long swig from the bottle, capped it, and sighed, “Am-fucking-brosia!” while Arty cautiously nipped at his straw and made wry mouths at the taste.
“If that’s your idea of pleasure, it’s no wonder you need religion.”
Chick was flapping his magazine closed, pulling in his knees, getting to his feet with a stretch and a yawn, twisting to look at me. I stared anxiously at him. He winked.