As we moved that night in the dark toward St. Joe, Papa drove with Mama in his co-pilot’s seat. Chick and I huddled in the dining booth and he told me.
“O.K. Now he really does believe me, kind of, because he talked to Horst about the tiger being pregnant and Horst told him it couldn’t happen because she hadn’t been in with anybody. But he’s still pretending he doesn’t believe me. He won’t admit anything. Besides, he’s scared his juice isn’t good. He’s afraid he can’t plant babies. But he says he’s sick of the novices sliming around and he’ll let you come back to work for him.”
“But what about the Pin Kid?”
I couldn’t see Chick’s face in the dark. He waited a few seconds before he answered. A dozen heartbeats.
“He just says, ‘What Pin Kid?’ and then won’t listen. That’s another thing. You’re not to mention the Pin Kid or your baby or any of this to Arty. He wants you to act like always.”
I took Arty his breakfast in St. Joe. I cleaned and dusted and carried messages and shut the novices out of his van completely. I rode on the back of his golf cart to his show tent and waited behind the tank listening to the big St. Joe crowd roaring and sighing like the tide. I scrubbed Arty after the show and rubbed him down and painted him for the next show. I did all the usual things. He was sullen and moody at first but then he forgot and was just like always.
The Pin Kid never came back for his trunk. We never heard anything more about him. When I did think of him it was a pleasure — a fool’s pleasure — that Arty had got rid of him, run him off, scared him away, for fear of losing me. I don’t think Arty had him killed.
Elly was coming back. Iphy tried to hide the change but I sat for hours watching Mumpo twitch and Iphy crooning over him. I saw the differences. When Iphy used both hands to change Mumpo, or to turn him or wash him, Elly no longer collapsed like a spent balloon. She was holding herself upright without Iphy’s arm supporting her. There were also moments when I could have sworn that Elly’s eyes were focused, looking at Mumpo, looking at me, or following the movements of Iphy’s hands. Elly’s mouth stayed shut for longer periods. She drooled less. Once I saw her hand lift deliberately to her swollen, seeping breast.
“I use this little pump on Elly and put the milk into the bottle,” Iphy was explaining. Mumpo lay beside her on the bed sucking noisily at the rubber teat on the bottle. The pale blue milk sloshed and bubbled in the glass as the pull from his mouth drew the level down fast.
“He’s so hungry all the time. It takes both of us to feed him but it’s so awkward holding him and Elly so he can nurse straight from her titties …”
Iphy stole a look to see if I believed that she still had to hold Elly. Elly’s mouth opened and she said, “Greedy, greedy, greedy.”
It was as clear as pizzicato. “Ha ha,” said Iphy, staring at me intently. “She’s been making more sounds lately. Ha ha. Sometimes they’re almost words.”
Perched at the foot of the bed with my feet over the edge so my shoes wouldn’t dirty the sheets, I nodded and said nothing. The bottle ran dry and the deep voice of Mumpo rocked out an echoing belch. The lips of Elly closed primly and her eyes wandered again, soft, not looking while Iphy looked at us all so fast that her eyes must have ached with the whip of their nerve stalks.
Papa ordered signs painted for “Mumpo, the World’s Fattest Baby” and tried to talk Iphy into arranging a schedule so the baby could nap in a show booth and tickets could be sold. Iphy insisted on waiting until his first birthday. Papa was indignant. “This is a working outfit! No moochers! No parasites! And what about yourself, young lady?” he demanded. “How about a turn in the variety tent? You can work around Elly. There must be some way!”
Iphy bristled and reminded him of all the money she’d made for him the years she worked with Elly. She told him to wait. Papa left her alone. Iphy wasn’t worried about it.
“Papa’s just trying out old reflexes. He’s not the boss anymore.”
My belly grew. It hung at an odd angle and gave me a lot of back pain. The veins in my legs threatened to rupture until Chick took care of them.
I spent time with Iphy and became convinced that Elly was almost all there, almost all the time.
“She’s lying doggo, Iphy, don’t lie to me.”
Elly’s face was frozen on Iphy’s shoulder but her arms were coming back. Their dead flabbiness was turning to muscle again, and I could see it rolling thinly beneath the white skin, filling out the sleeves of her blouses.
“Elly? You’ve been exercising in secret, haven’t you?” I’d ask, coming up close and staring into the unfocused eyes. She never reacted.
“Buzz off, Oly,” Iphy would snap, and I’d wander away, speculating about Iphy too, and how much more like Elly she was now. Stronger. Meaner. She never cried anymore. Never sang. She cleaned. She fed Mumpo, lying down beside him because she couldn’t lift him. She gave up on bottles and turned so he could reach Elly’s breast when he had flattened her own. She urged him toward solid food and he gobbled that, too, spilling nothing, sucking it all in, then demanding tit.
In Santa Rosa a Twins Fan Club came to the door. They were sixteen-year-old girls who had started dressing the “Twin Way” when they were twelve or so and were still wrapping two waists in one big skirt like potato-sack racers. They dyed each other’s California hair to the blue-black gloss of the twins.
I went to the door. The pair in front tried to look past me into the trailer. “We just love them! Is it true they had a baby? We wanted to give them a present.”
The bouquet came in, passed from mock pair to mock pair and finally to me. I said Elly and Iphy were sleeping or maybe working. I took the green paper cone of flowers and thanked them and shut the door. Iphy watched through the curtains as the troop hobbled and giggled away, four pairs of twins with their arms around each other. Iphy absent-mindedly hugged Elly, who flopped from the squeezing.
“We used to have a lot of fans in this part of the country,” said Iphy. She put the flowers in a big jug of water and they sat on the table for days.
It was easy for me and it could have been much harder for the twins. We had a small world, peculiarly unalarmed by nature. We had no worries about food or shelter, the opinions of the family, or the hardships of lone child rearing. There were Mama and Papa and Chick. There was an inexhaustible reservoir of obliging redheads.
Part of being pregnant is that you think about it so much that you’re seldom bored. Terrified often enough, but rarely bored. There was some disappointment in my mind occasionally. I’d sit in the sun next to Grandpa’s urn on the generator truck and drift into lip-sucking melancholy.
Life for me was not like the songs the redheads played. It wasn’t the electric clutch I had seen ten million times in the midway — the toreador girls pumping flags until those bulging-crotched tractor drivers were strung as tight as banjo wire, glinting in the sun. It wasn’t for me, the stammering hilarity of Papa and Lil, or even the helpless, dribbling lust of the Bag Man rocked by the sight of the twins. I have certainly mourned for myself. I have wallowed in grief for the lonesome, deliberate seep of my love into the air like the smell of uneaten popcorn greening to rubbery staleness. In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It’s feeble to be an object. What’s the point of being loved in return, I’d ask myself. To warm my spine in the dark? To change the face in my mirror every morning? It was none of Arty’s business that I loved him. It was my secret ace, like a bluebird tattooed under pubic hair or a ruby tucked up my ass.